Doctor Who: Journey's End

So it happened. The last episode of the current series of Doctor Who. It came, it went, and consigned us to several Who-less months until the Christmas Special comes (with Cybermen, natch). But was it any good?

It was both stupendous and stupid. Awesome and awful. Clever and crass. Blockbuster entertainment on BBC1 on a Saturday evening that still managed to have a real heart.

On the downside, the story devalued the Daleks. It isolated the Torchwood team and seemed to struggle to find things for all the different characters to do. The Doctor spent a lot of the episode stood still, watching and commentating on the action with Davros - surely the most demented of DVD commentaries ever recorded. And the resolution from that cliffhanger was a cop out. Yes, I know it fueled so much of what happened in the rest of the story. But it was a cop out.

On the flipside, the episode managed to tie up all the loose ends caused by having so may characters in the story very effectively. It showed what Russell T. Davies is best at - the big sci-fi is a diversion; what he wants to tell is the small, character based stories. The tales with real emotion. The tales that hurt and damage, yet develop and grow, his characters.

And finally, Donna's fate was heartbreaking. It is difficult to imagine how her departure from the series could have been worse for the character. And it left the Doctor lost and alone, once again contemplating an empty TARDIS.

But enough already. Enough of these big, The Five Doctors style stories. Yes, The Stolen Earth and Journey's End worked. But they worked because they were big and gimmicky. They worked because they were like a band's greatest hits album. And that is what these episodes were - Russell T. Davies' greatest hits. His last, big hoorah. But the series will change over the next 18 months, and a new showrunner will come to the series. And that is what the series needs now - the smaller, scarier stories of Steven Moffatt. As grand as the season finale was, these sort of stories can only ever happen occasionally.

Journey's End was big, wonderful and stupid. But the future of the series is in being smaller scale, perhaps even less ambitious. But also less gimmicky and, crucially, scarier...