This weekend’s museum, the Museum of Packaging, Branding and Advertising, turned out to be a bit underwhelming: it was a small museum (where a student ticket is £3.50, fact fans) and packed with artefacts of consumer goods dating from the Victorian age, but it just fell a bit flat. One reason for this was that it was arranged chronologically, and so while I found the first half quite absorbing, up to about wartime, I felt the tipping point was reached around the late fifties when everything began to look much as it does now. However, once the exhibition had dealt with the Noughties, the final section did away with grouping by time period and instead went by brand, showing the evolution of the packaging of certain brands (Saxa and Atora haven’t changed in the slightest, though most long-lasting brands’ packaging nowadays bear some relation to older incarnations), which was far more up my alley. It was a curio rather than a gem, I felt.
However, what I lost in museums I made up for in markets – I trawled through most of Notting Hill’s Portobello market (and went to shake my fist at the Travel Bookshop) on Saturday afternoon, prior to going to a friend’s house to watch the Doctor Who finale as it happened (a real luxury over here when I’ve had to catch up on the iPlayer during the week) and then on Sunday I had a wander round my own area to discover that I’m in easy walking distance of Spitalfields and Brick Lane markets. Brick Lane itself is packed full of old tat and stuff that’s fallen off the back of a few lorries, but the UpMarket section, housed in a large warehouse, is much more promising, full of food and original and vintage clothes and accessories. Similar to this UpMarket is the far superior Spitalfields market, which is just beautiful but not cheap. It would appear that I live in a trendy area, so get me.
As for Doctor Who [geekery and plot spoilers ahoy], it was a good send-off episode for producer Russell T. Davies who will be succeeded by Stephen Moffatt in the forthcoming series. Despite all I always say against RTD, he was responsible for getting Who back on the air and has also been responsible for a lot of what I’ve enjoyed about the series, and so I felt he had earnt the right to include scenes in his last episode wherein “his” characters salute the Doctor, a trope which would otherwise make me want to claw my eyes out. I have to say I felt the Rose and Doctor 2.0 kiss to be both underwhelming and perplexing, seeing as Donna wasn’t allowed to be both human and Time Lord, but I was glad that the Rose business has been given a neat little finish as it was starting to drag on a bit.
Things I did enjoy were Davros, who I felt was stylishly underused if anything, in contrast to the last series finale which had the Master all over the bloody shop; Bernard Cribbins being just magnificent (and easily the best thing in this series, to my mind); and the end of Donna, which was far more devastating an end than simply bumping her off, far more hopeless despite allowing her to live, and all thoroughly supported by a grim-looking Doctor as the series’ final image – a beautiful encapsulation of the series’ willingness to go out on a limb every so often. That the Donna who has gone through all these adventures with the Doctor and come out as a more rounded, infinitely more experienced and self-confident woman should simply disappear back to her old ways, to a small and, most likely, an unchallenged life, is possibly one of the bleakest endings in new Who. As Cribbins said, she was better with the Doctor, and so to lose the memory of those experiences she had with him, to go back to square one, is a harrowing ending for her character. I, for one, think it an awful lot harder than a much easier (from RTD’s perspective) cop-out ending wherein she does something grand and dramatic and dies cradled in the Doctor’s arms – dying, but happy that her death will most likely be a heroic sacrifice for the benefit of others, happy that she has done something to prove herself at last, that she was worth something. The Donna the Doctor says goodbye to at the end of this episode will most likely never achieve anything like the self-knowledge that the Donna of this series did.
In all, it wasn’t brilliant (the thread at NOTBBC will outline any plot holes you didn’t spot yourself) but far better than previous finales have allowed me to look forward to.
