The New Who Review for the Day of the Doctor
Posted By Kathleen David on November 24, 2013
With a short review for the short The Night of the Doctor.
I haven’t done one of these in a while but then we haven’t had a new episode in a while so I am going to repeat my requests. No future spoilers. This is for discussion from the episodes that have aired for the past 50 years. There will be spoilers in the comment section. I will have my spoiler free review above the cut and my spoiler filled review below the cut.
There have been, I believe three occasions where the story is that the Doctor meets the Doctor(s) on the TV show. That being the Three Doctors, The Five Doctors and The Two Doctors. Each was celebrating a milestone in the show being the 10th anniversary, the 20th anniversary, and I honestly don’t know why the last one exists although it is fun.
My short review of the Night of the Doctor, well he should have had a long run on screen as the Doctor. I am glad that the BBC have owned up to him as being cannon rather than being coy about it for which I am most grateful. My more spoilery thoughts will be behind the cut.
My review for The Day of the Doctor.
That’s how to do a story for a special occasion. I walked away happy and smiling. There was enough for the original Whovians to be grinning about along with the Newhovians. It was a love letter to fans young and old. It also cleaned up a bit of continuity mess along with creating some possibilities for the future. They were very careful about mixing up the past and the present of Doctor Who but I didn’t feel like it was hammering me over the head.
The acting was aces all the way around. Good chemistry with the Doctors by both the other Doctors and the companion(s).
I didn’t notice how fast the time went which is a good sign for me when watching a show. I was engaged and entertained and in the end isn’t that what we want from our TV shows?
Would it be a show that you could sit someone down with no knowledge of the show? To my mind, not really, there is series knowledge that you need to understand what is going on. They might enjoy it but also be horribly confused by it. This is not a knock on the writing. The writer knew his audience and catered to them.
I am grateful that I got to see this episode with the rest of the world.
Geronimo!!!!
Allons-y!!!!!
Oh for God Sake. …Gallifrey Stands!
Night of the Doctor first. In less than six minutes Paul McGann showed us how much we missed by not having him as the Doctor. Yes I know we had the radio plays and yes I would listen to him read the phone book however it was amazing to see him as the Doctor again. It was all there in a short. There are rumors flying about concerning McGann and a special or some retro episodes with him. I hold no truck with any of it until an official announcement or if I hear something from certain individuals that I know. I give Mr. McGann serious props for changing the minds of so many Whovians who dismiss the film as non-canonical. Also he got his regeneration scene.
Onto the Day of the Doctor
I laughed, I cried, I was moved. Especially the end. The minute, no, the microsecond I heard that voice I knew that this was going to be a magical moment. Not that the rest hadn’t satisfied my inner Whovian because it did but this was just perfection. Tom Baker, even with all his health and memory problems, still has IT. And did you see the ear-to-ear grin on Matt Smith’s face the whole scene? If he was a dog he would have been vibrating with happiness and the tail would have been going at full speed. I loved seeing Mr. Baker as the Curator it was the icing and the cherry on the cake for me.
So Moffat had a go at sorting out the Time War and what happened to get us from 8 to 9. Over all I give him almost full marks for it. He didn’t quite stick the landing for me. Considering how River was handled, I was a little concerned about his pulling back the curtain on this mysterious point in time that has been referenced back to since Rose considering the high council shenanigans with the Master. With a line he solved that timey whimey conundrum so good on him for that.
And yes I loved John Hurt as Doctor 8.5. Honestly I consider him Nine now so Smith is 12 and the next bloke is 13. I know this is going to be an on going discussion in Who fandom for the next 50 years. Mr. Hurt was the right mix for this War Doctor.
That Billie Piper was playing the interface didn’t bother me at all. In fact it kind of makes sense that Nine(10)/Ten(11) would react to her that strongly as they did. And I thought she did a lovely job of it given what she had to do.
I have read some people complaining that the Zygons felt like another episode shoehorned in to this one. Well yes it was and brilliantly. Consider that this was a Smith Doctor story (or Hurt Doctor if you like) and Tennant Doctor was brought into the mix while in the middle of one his stories. So we saw the other story on top of the other with a third story sandwiched in there. Three stories told in one show. Also each piece of each story was needed for the solution of the problem for the Doctor.
For me it was just right. Not too much of any Doctor. Clara was there but she didn’t feel like she was just being added it. The nods to the other characters and companions of the 50 year history of this show were on the mark. The beckon back to the original design of the TARDIS was touching as was the reaction of the Doctor.
So I am a very happy Whovian who is looking forward to both the Christmas Special and to the next 50 years of Doctor Who.
So what did you think?
John Hurt could’ve read the phone book and I’d be enthralled, so I went in prepared to enjoy myself.
My only real qualm, I guess, is that the Time War felt very … ordinary. It always had the impression of being this universe-shattering event, giving the sense that time itself was both weaponized and malleable. Here … we saw a bunch of soldiers being blown up and families screaming. That part fell short for me. (On the other hand, I’m not sure how my original perception of it would’ve been filmable.)
The character interplay was marvelous pretty much straight through. And the Tom Baker cameo … didn’t make a ton of sense to me when I started thinking about it, so I decided to stop thinking about it and just enjoy it. I was grinning nearly as much as Matt Smith. (And I was very intrigued by the two-second-and-just-a-few-square-inches cameo of Peter Capaldi.)
Great fun; now to wait until Christmas!
I’ve noticed people writing about their confusion regarding Baker’s presence. They seem to think that the Fourth Doctor has somehow gotten old and is curating the museum. It seemed perfectly clear to me based on the dialogue that at some future point the Doctor is going to retire and regenerate and his nostalgia is going to cause him to take the same form he had as the Fourth Doctor, or maybe an older version of him as he feels older. He’ll then curate the museum in his retirement, apparently leaving behind the name of the Doctor and becoming the Curator. Whether this means that he’s no longer going to die and be buried on Trensalor…well we may know that come Christmas.
I liked the special a lot. I go into more detail in my blog, which can be read here: http://wp.me/p43X7o-1e
David, I agree with you about the Curator. His comments to the Eleventh Doctor strongly imply that he is a future incarnation, who has “revisited a few (faces).” And, of course, he responded to the Doctor’s musings that he could be a curator with, “I really think you might.”
As to Trenzalore, we know from the ads for the Christmas special, that he finds himself there in that story, but while the Eleventh Doctor might regenerate there (I’ve no idea), that doesn’t mean he’d be going to his final death on that particular date. Not unless some future incarnation were, unknown to him, also somewhere about.
A Civil War soldier who was told he was fated to die at Bull Run could survive the first battle of Bull Run and think he’s escaped that fate, only to be killed at the second battle. A time traveling soldier could survive the first battle only to come back later and be killed somewhere else on that battlefield the same day.
Given that the Doctor’s time stream is there, in lieu of a body, it seems clear that at some point in his personal future he’ll be “buried” at Trenzalore. That doesn’t necessarily mean he fought in a battle there, the Great Intelligence’s… um… intelligence about the matter notwithstanding.
Or maybe he retired for a time to work as a curator and found himself becoming active in the universe again. We only know bits and pieces; we’re not seeing the whole jigsaw puzzle. And we might be imagining a wholly different puzzle from those pieces.
Case in point, I was talking with a friend about the special a few weeks ago and I told him that David Tennant and Billie Piper would be playing the Tenth Doctor and Rose from some point prior to “Doomsday”, that it wouldn’t be the Meta-Crisis Tenth and Rose, since that would mean stretching credulity by having the gulf between universes pierced yet again.
I assumed that Piper would be playing Rose (which is probably a logical conclusion; and I’d been avoiding spoilers). It never occurred to me that she might be playing some other character. And yet, in the past two seasons alone, we’ve seen several actors, including two of the series’ regulars, portray the Tesselecta; and both Matt Smith and Caitlin Blackwood portraying the TARDIS voice interface in “Let’s Kill Hitler.” Likewise, Jenna Coleman portrayed it in “Hide.”
So, the Eleventh Doctor may regenerate at Trenzalore and the Nth Doctor may ultimately be “buried” there, but his final death might have nothing to do with battle. Maybe the Doctor will arrange to have his future grave situated there as part of his “the Doctor lies” machinations. Maybe, though it would seem to go counter to his current efforts to keep a low profile, he decides at some point in the future that it best people assume he is (or will be) an important warrior. While, in actuality, he was a museum curator who’d revisited the visage of a prior incarnation.
I’d still like there to be a line about him being Merlin. Something like this (Merlin having somehow come up in conversation), “you know, Clara, I was Merlin once. Or rather, I will be. In one of my future incarnations. My Seventh self had to go get myself out of a rather nasty predicament. Seems my future self didn’t even bother to say ‘thank you.'”
“Here’s a thought, Doctor. Avoid that upcoming predicament.”
“Can’t. Fixed timelines and all that. Universe could explode. Or worse, we’d end up with two Mondays per week. Can’t have that.”
Tim,
About the Time War feeling ordinary, don’t forget this was just one particular moment (no pun intended) of the war. It had been going on for a very long time, given that we saw (through camera trickery) McGann regenerate into a young John Hurt in “Night of the Doctor.” In terms of human aging, the War Doctor seized control of the Moment decades after he became involved in the war, but what is the Time Lord aging process like? It might take centuries for a Time Lord to go from looking like a 40ish John Hurt to a 73-year-old one. And that’d be under normal circumstances.
I’m glad the Time War remained mostly in the background, with the focus on (so far as the war itself was concerned), essentially, one soldier’s decision. I think the Time War works best as something that’s 99 percent left to the imagination.
When the Hurt incarnation regenerated, I seemed to notice the slightest hint of Eccleston. Or did I just imagine it?
It’s too bad Eccleston chose not to participate, but I gather he doesn’t tend to return to projects after he’s left them. If he had chosen to take part, a brief cameo at the end of the regeneration sequence would have been the perfect place.
Again, good episode. It both paid respect to the past and set the Doctor on a course for the future.
Rick
I really enjoyed the episode but as a relatively new convert I probably didn’t catch all the in and outs of the episode. I have watched every episode from the Christopher Eccleston onwards and when I was younger I used to watch it when it was on but don’t remember much of it.
It was very enjoyable and I loved the bit where Clara simply walked into the cell the Doctors were trying so hard to get out of. In fact that part was almost like something Peter David would write.
My only slight issue was a very small ‘logic let me introduce you to this window’ moment when the Tennant Doctor was talking to the rabbit. The rabbit was as cute as a button but what was a very cute lop eared rabbit doing in Elizabethan England. We have plenty of rabbits here in good old England but we certainly don’t have any like that in the wild. The only problem for the writers I suppose is that our native wild rabbits are so skittish there is no way they would stay still long enough for them to film. I thought ‘hang on a minute it would make perfect sense that the rabbit is a Zygon because that is not a native rabbit.’
My explanation for this is that at the time we were doing a lot of trade with various places. This rabbit either stowed away a ship or was a gift for a child of a merchant or maybe even the Queen herself which then escaped or was set free.
I am glad so many people got watch it the same time we did in England. It really felt like a great World wide experience with so many people in different countries getting to watch it at the same time proving that there is still a place in this world of catch up/on demand TV for shared cultural events.
I am really glad my Nephew got me into watching the new Doctor Who episodes all those years ago.