Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.
Both "Waters of Mars" and "The End of Time" are complete reversals (for me, at least) of the usual RTD story, where the first 2/3rds are awesome and the last 1/3rd is a massive fairytale ending; the further you got in both WoM and TEoT, the better those stories got.
I'd read somewhere that the Time Lords were coming back. Then I completely forgot about it before I watched the episode. So that reveal at the end of Part One was incredible. Though I'm not sure the Doctor really needed a reason to be afraid of the Time Lords; over the course of the classic series, they exiled him (maybe), killed him and exiled him again (The War Games), made him their errand boy, (UNIT era through Genesis of the Daleks), tried to kill him again (The Deadly Assassin), tried to kill him again, (Arc of Infinity), and tried to kill him yet again (Trial of a Time Lord). Why exactly would this guy be happy to see them at all?
Still: Timothy Dalton as Rassillon. Awesome. The Doctor and the Master both saying "get out of the way" (watch it, you'll see what I mean). Awesome.
Bottom line: Part One seems to be a lot of the standard RTD shark-jumping that usually goes on at the end of his episodes, and everything falls brilliantly into place in Part Two. It's a really clever trick on his part, get all the nonsense out of the way first so the epic, epic ending is what sticks in viewers' minds.
One last complaint: Tennant going from "I don't wanna die like that!" to "Okay, maybe I've lived too long," while letting him turn on a dime one last time (again, something Nu Who "borrowed" from Buffy), seemed kind of forced.
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