The Power of Three: Why A Three Part Finale Is Brilliant

Guest contributor Nathan Lobo explains his reasons.

At the conclusion of ‘Face The Raven’, those three words we were all hoping for appeared: ‘To be continued’. This heralded the start of what is to be the first three-part finale since what I like to call ‘The Master Trilogy’ all the way back in Series 3. So in honour of this rarity, I’m going to go through the advantages of a three-part finale with specific references to the end of Series 3 and maybe see what that might hold for the next two Saturdays.

The most obvious advantage to a three-part story as a finale rather than a two-parter is that there’s a longer amount of time to develop both characters and storylines. In The Master trilogy, we see much development of many characters over the course of the two and a half hour running time. The Doctor’s relationship with the Master and the Time Lords in general is explored for the first time in the revived series. Martha’s development reaches a climax as her family get kidnapped by the Master. We get to know her family better and more about the Doctor’s relationship with one of his companion’s family. Hopefully after Clara’s death, the Doctor goes to break the news to Clara’s family, which would add to show how thoughtful the Doctor is about the aftercare of his companions and not revengeful at all. And in ‘The Master Trilogy’, we can’t forget the development of the lovely Captain Jack. Where would speculators be without the classic scene where we Jack mentions his Time Agent nickname was the Face of Boe? This could easily have been cut if the story was in two parts.

In ‘Heaven Sent’, we’re going to delve so much more into the Doctor’s psyche after losing a companion with Peter Capaldi being the only actor in the episode. The episode should be very character-driven without having to focus too much on the story. But the three-part nature allows this to be possible and very effective. This is because there is a greater length for a story to be developed. In The Master Trilogy, the major story was the return of the Master and the whole world invasion strand. But there was also smaller stories intertwined such as Professor Docherty’s son and the separation of Martha’s parents. But the longer length of story really does allow the main story to develop from the hiding of the Master as Professor Yana at the end of the world to the use of Archangel to get inside everyone’s head to the manipulation of his wife who ends up killing him. All that would not be suitable in one or even two episodes. Three episodes are definitely needed to get everything in: the future-human Toclafane to a gun in three parts (like the episode) to a doctor called Tom. Here we are dealing with the death of one of the best companions ever to grace Doctor Who. She deserves nothing less than a three story send-off.

Due to cast lists and spoilers, unfortunately we usually know about when a major character is leaving or reappearing in the show. When Martha’s end was near – with all the groundwork having been laid about her unrequited love for the Doctor – we knew and had time in that final episode as she travelled around the world to realise that Martha would be strong enough to leave the Doctor and stay, defending the Earth. With Clara we now have two whole episodes to deal with her death and we’ll be doing this alongside the Doctor who looks like he’s going to take a dark route down Grief Lane. We can simultaneously grieve Clara’s demise rather than just have the inter-series break and then start off with a new companion next series. We get space to breathe, let the news sink in and feel the emotions Moffat wants us to feel. What’s also interesting about this is that Moffat seems to be dragging out the emotional side of the fans for what seems like the maximum torture and his own enjoyment…

Doctor Who fans sometimes complain about episodes sometimes being too short to fit in everything the writer intends. The opposite can also happen. A two-part story can feel sometimes too long and fans might feel as if a single episode or even less could cover everything that a two-parter does. Take this outside Doctor Who and you get films like The Hobbit trilogy and the last Harry Potter book split into two, both very controversial moves because fans thought the films might unnecessarily elongate the story from the book. I feel that this won’t be a huge problem for this three-parter due to the amazing episode we’ve just had, the anticipated Capaldi-on-his-own episode and a feature length final episode of this already mind-blowing series.

Also, with the fifty-five minute penultimate episode and the hour-plus final episode, the running time of this whole trilogy is just short of a Classic Who story with six parts. Now most of these aren’t bad, in fact some of them are set into Doctor Who folklore. Hopefully, this three-parter, ‘The Clara Trilogy’ as it were, will also go down in history as being the greatest three hours of Doctor Who ever!