This seems altogether more likely, and gets at something that is truly strange about The End of Time, which is that its not the last episode of Doctor Who. It is, after all, more than a little strange for such an auteur-identified program to continue after the departure of its auteurs. Doctor Who, for all its success, was still in effect a show created by Russell T Davies out of the ashes of a long-cancelled cult series. The idea that it would outlast him was in many regards unthinkable, save for his absolute determination that it do so. Certainly Gardner, his production partner, was not intrinsically enthused about it. For all that she put into the show, it was a job. Parting of the Ways used the recasting of its lead character as one last spectacular trick in a season of television that was all about showing the breadth of tricks available to it. But The End of Time is, by any reasonable measure, a series finale: the last bit of Doctor Who there should ever be.
This is, of course, necessary context for reading its most controversial part, the extended Doctors Reward at the end of the episode, in which the Doctor, fatally wounded and in the early stages of regeneration, proceeds to visit all of his companions at arguably tedious length. Certainly it is a bizarre sequence within the context of a show that is not being cancelled, and is wildly out of proportion to what any other Doctor has ever gotten for a regeneration. And yet when The End of Time is looked at as the series finale that, by all rights, it should have been the sequence at least makes some kind of sense. Were the Doctor actually to die, or were the series to simply shuffle off stage into the wilderness again it would be seen as a maudlin and sentimental but largely sane and understandable bit of wrapping things up. Plenty of shows go nostalgic in their final twenty minutes.
And more to the point, nothing like this had ever happened to Doctor Who, or indeed to any show: a massive hit continues with none of its cast or major creative team after a massive epic ending with the main characters death. The decision to structure The End of Time like a series finale that happens to go on for an extra minute with a strange young chap complaining that hes not ginger is understandable. It marks a precedent that is perhaps a mixed bag - we are left to understand eras in a much more auteur-based sense, with executive producers now seemingly given license to treat each iteration of the show as a discrete show with a series premiere and finale. But given the fact that The End of Time easily could have been a series finale, its conclusion is, in this regard, understandable.
