Doctor Who: How The Doctor Got Her Darkness Back

The Poem

In the end, we see the aftermath of events as The Doctor gets ready to go after Ashad, and Byron reads a poem that the real-life person wrote and whose meaning has been debated for centuries. Coming from the end of his epic Darkness, we hear the following words over everything:

The world was void, the populous and powerful was a lump. Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless. A lump of death, a chaos of hard clay.Ships, sailorless, rotting on the sea and their masts fell down piecemeal. As they dropped they slept on the abyss without a surge. The waves were dead, the tides were in their grave.The moon, their mistress, had expired before the winds withered in the stagnant air and the clouds perished.Darkness had no need of aid from them.She was the universe.

Taken as written, it's obvious that this is equating the Doctor with the titular Darkness, creating an ephemeral being who needs nothing from anyone.

But there is more there than that snippet allows us to see. The poem itself was inspired by finding things in nature that challenge belief in a flawless God, and the darkness in the poem slowly devours everything that ever was, taking from it and creating more of itself. Bit by bit it absorbs the universe itself until there is nothing left but it.

Just like The Doctor, darkness has no need for anything for she is all that ever remains in the end. She stands alongside those whose entire species she has seen the end of. She has seen the winds die and the planets crack until nothing remains.

Just her.

As dark and dangerous as Tennant ever was, at that moment, when there is nothing else left and she has seen everything fall, she is the universe.