Time Of The Doctor
(Christmas Special, Dr 11 with Clara and Handles, 25/12/2013, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Jamie Payne)
Rank: 266
'Don't worry Doc. Good job Christmas just comes round once a year eh? Wait, you've been stick here for how long?!?'
It's the end #11 and the moment...does go on a bit I have to say. Usually in Dr Who we bid our final farewell to a lead actor at the end of a season. The best ones feel natural, organic, as if everything has been leading up to this point, but this one especially feels like an afterthought, on telly a mere month after the all-singing all-dancing all-zygonning 50th. By a quirk of fate and timey wimeyness Matt Smith chose to go in a DW anniversary year, something that had never happened before. Of course the 50th was going to get all the interest (and of course, after 3 years in the part, the actor was going to hang around for the party). Steven Moffat has set himself a particularly tough ask too: there are still more threads left dangling from across the Matt Smith run than round the back of the Bayou tapestry that have to be resolved, all in a Christmas special when casual audiences who don’t remember this stuff are far more likely to be watching. It also has to be a fittingly sad and emotional tear-jerking farewell, that somehow still has to be light and fluffy enough for a general audience. Most of all, it has to feel worthy of a Doctor who brought so much to the table and was the favourite of many fans. Oh and it has to be Christmassey, something rather forgotten in this story (and no, naming a town ‘Christmas’ doesn’t really cut it, not least because its very much an Earth words that only has significance to Humans). Oh and an extra problem: the main star, who’s been suffering from a longstanding football injury in his teens, has seen it flare up and been forced into last minute surgery which has left him unable to do much more than hobble. Oh and as if that wasn’t enough pressure someone noticed that this was the 800th ever episode of Dr Who and the publicity made a big thing of it. No pressure then! Moffat, usually so good at juggling plates, simply doesn’t have time to do anything that thoroughly this time around, so instead of a fully rounded story telling one gripping plot we get lots of little moments, two minutes each with the ‘proper’ Cybermen and Daleks, a mini invasion of ‘unproper’ monsters, the weirdest Christmas dinner ever and lots of dark muttering to timelords. Usually planning is Moffat’s strength and his season finales in other series (and indeed series five and six) are some of his best work, so we all thought we were going to get a terrific last story that explained everything, but we ended up with a jumble that’s clearly an afterthought to the 50th special. Instead we get a story best described as ‘uneven’. It’s not that this is a bad story exactly but it’s like cooking Clara’s Christmas turkey: some parts are very tasty but a lot of parts are undercooked and some parts so overdone they’re burned.
So we get a story where
‘Silence Will Fall’ (because the Silence turn out to be the ‘confessionals’ of
the ‘Church Of The Papal Mainframe’, the religious army seen in ‘Time Of The Angels’) set on Trenzalore (the
planet where The Doctor dies according to ‘The
Snowmen’ ) which hinges on him speaking his name (‘The
Name Of The Doctor’) and the crack in the universe as caused by the Tardis
exploding (in ‘The Big Bang/Pandorica
Opens’ but mentioned in the 11th Doctor’s first ever story ‘The Eleventh Hour’) comes into play as a
way the timelords can return to the universe. That’s less of a story and more
of a chess match, moving pieces into play that are then stuck back in the box
anyway when Matt turns into Peter. Basically anyone who’s even been mentioned
these past few years (and quite a few people who haven’t been mentioned in
longer) turn up again in this one. There’s even a Terrileptil ship waiting in
space (last seen thirty years earlier in ‘The
Visitation’) and a monoid puppet in a Punch and Judy show (from ‘The Ark’ fifty-seven years ago!) Every other
line seems to refer back to something else and yet all of it is just window dressing
really, most of it not related to the plot (even being on Trenzalore would make
more sense if the Doctor had been told something cryptic about it being related
to ‘Christmas’ – nobody here mentions the planet name once except The Doctor himself).
Around that is a loose plot about The Doctor finding a planet with a signal
that seems to be coming from Gallifrey, even though it doesn’t look anything
like it. Turns out it’s a message from the timelords (how?) which The Doctor
doesn’t recognise yet which every other alien race in the Whoniverse seems to
have done (how?) and now he’s in a quandary: let his own kind through and kick
off another time war or keep them where they are and defend a town on
Trenzalore conveniently called ‘Christmas’ from their attack. The Doctor
finally does what he’s been threatening to do since Douglas Adams was script
writer and ‘retire’, only it’s in a very Dr Whoy way where he gets to repair
toys for children (like ‘Closing Time’)
and fighting off the odd skirmish that gets through his technology barrier.
It’s a story heavily
‘borrowed’ from Moffat’s other series Sherlock and ‘The Adventure Of The Lion’s
Main’ where the great detective eventually retires and looks after bees, only
tempted out of retirement when things get too bad (and originally written by
Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle as a Biblical parable, the tale of strength through
patience as a ferocious lion is defeated by tiny treats of honey). A series
that Moffat has been running behind on, coming to this script straight from
‘His Last Vow’ which borrows from quite a few elements of this original script.
It’s an idea that a lot of fans of both series hold in high esteem, the idea
that our hero has an eccentric afterlife, but both are also stories that a lot of fans actually
struggle to get through because they feel so out of kilter with everything
else. The trouble Conan-Doyle had was that Watson is no longer around and
Holmes is writing the story himself, complete with cryptic asides and
high-falluting science that Watson takes out for public consumption. There’s no
space for the things that make those stories work so well: the friendship and
respect between the two leads despite their many differences and the chance to
see our heroes solving the problem. Moffat needs to give The Doctor someone to
talk to in order to prevent this happening, but he can’t stick Clara on this
planet for 900 years alongside him so instead she flits in and out, sent home
twice by a Doctor who doesn’t want her to grow old and die alongside him. It’s
a bit odd: compared to the 900 years The Doctor spends on this planet his time
with Clara must feel like a speck of dust, but Moffat knows the audience want
her there for a final farewell. It also robs him of this era’s best feature,
the dynamic between Doctor and companion – replacing the chemistry with Matt
Smith and Jenna Coleman bouncing off each other for The Doctor getting lonely
and grumpy is a bad move.
So is aging him for no
reason (well, not in plot terms: in reality they shot those bits first to allow
Matt to sit down as much as possible). The joke at the heart of this era is
that The Doctor’s as old as he’ll ever be, played by an actor with a young face
but the body (and dress sense) of an old man, so I can see why everyone thought
it would be funny to make this a story where the youngest actor to play the
lead now looks older than anyone else. It’s a great idea for all the publicity
it got and sounds a terrific idea on paper, but all those extra years mean that
the Doctor we spend an hour saying goodbye to isn't 'our' doctor. It’s also blatantly
not how regenerations work. Ever. Each
Doctor we’ve seen has been physically the same age as when we met: they don’t
grow old, they stay in one place (which is why they’ve had to invent all sorts
of excuses to get round the aging actors back for each anniversary special). The
two 11th Doctors we saw in ‘The
Impossible Astronaut’ were supposedly 200 years different in age, whilst in
the future the 12th Doctor will spend a thousand years trapped in a
confession dial without aging. You could argue, as some fans have, that The
Doctor’s technology barrier prevents the usual timelord wibbly wobbly ability
to stay as one age and that he loses it when the Tardis goes back home with
Clara in it. But that’s patently nonsense: it’s genetics, not technology. As
many times as not The Doctor is outside the Tardis when he regenerates (Drs
2,3,4,7,8,10) and The Meddling Monk, unable to get inside his own Tardis for
decades, ought to look ancient when he turns up again in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’, never mind
various Master stories. It feels as if there was meant to be an explanation
somewhere which never came. After all, the idea's been around since a throwaway
line in 'The Deadly Assassin' in
1976 (and it’s a sign of TV in the 1970s that nobody working on that story ever
expected Who to get there – most were amazed it had lasted four Doctors at the
time) so there's been rather a long time to work on a better idea than that. I
was hoping for something much...bigger than we got. Who would have thought back
then that such a big continuity point would be resolved by The Doctors friend
asking nicely? Also, according to ‘The Trial Of a Timelord’ shouldn't the
Doctor have turned into The Valeyard by now, a ‘shadowy’ incarnation that came
between ‘The End Of Time’ and ‘Eleventh Hour’? (Did that happen off
screen and we missed it?)
What is The Doctor’s plan
in any case? It’s not in this regeneration’s character to be indecisive but he
seems to be stalling for time – for some 900 years – then never makes a final
decision (he just runs off with Clara when he regenerates into Capaldi instead
in ‘Deep Breath’). Instead he seems to
be waiting for his foes to get bored and some of them have longer lives than he
does. Moffat also bites the bullet and decides that the old rule about
timelords only being able to regenerate twelve times and have thirteen lives in
total should be solved here: he’d already added ‘The War Doctor’ from the 50th
to make 12 and decides that the metacrisis Doctor in ‘The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End’
counts too (even though he was made out of an existing body part). So this
really is it, The Doctor’s last stand and nothing can save him now, except the
timelords in a desperate attempt to save themselves. While it’s not unheard of
them to do this (they offer a full set of lives to The Master in ‘The Five
Doctors’) it makes a mockery of there being a ‘rule’ at all if they can just
‘gift’ each other life and start over again (plus of course, the timeless child
arc means The Doctor has had many many more lives than this already). Why
doesn’t The Doctor work this out? It’s
weird it takes Clara to point this out to them: they’ve had several centuries
to work this out and yet it takes an Earthling (of whom they have a very low
opinion) to make the connection. The timelords are meant to be smart! Perhaps
what’s oddest of all is that The Doctor runs away, after waiting all that time,
leaving Christmas to the mercy of the waiting monsters after waiting all that
time and no timelord ever brings it up the next time they meet (in ‘Hell Bent’). For the first time ever,
too, the immediate pre-regeneration moment turns The Doctor young again,
restoring hi to where we first knew him and on those grounds the 1st
Doctor should look really young before he turns into Patrick Troughton and the
12th Doctor ditto before he turns into Jodie Whittaker). We all wondered
how Moffat would handle his first written regeneration, given his inability to
kill anyone off, but even here it’s delayed until it’s inevitable – and yet
when the actual regeneration takes place it’s way too brief, the shortest in
the series’ history, fifty-five minutes that taker far too long and then it’s
all over in five seconds before we’re fully ready. Usually in Dr Who the
ordinary everyday becoming extraordinary is what makes this series, but this
week that ‘ordinary’ is the inevitability of death and it’s usually much more
moving than this. Only the unfolding of the bow tie brings a lump to the
throat; I actually felt more sad about losing Handles than I did the Doctor,
even though it was one I really liked. What’s more, the aged prosthetics are
awful – one up on the wizened Doctor of ‘Last Of The Timelords’ perhaps but
still clearly fake (alas they dropped a subplot about The Doctor getting a
wooden leg, calcified during the random Weeping Angel attack). It’s as if Moffat, usually so good at playing
the long game, suddenly panicked and cobbled together any old thing whether it
fitted with established history or not. I still don't get the whole Trenzalore
plot, which took up two whole years in the series (and 900 for The Doctor). I
mean, I know what it is. I've re-watched the episodes, I've read up about it
(I've even had the rather good Big Finish collection 'Tales of Trenzalore' read
to me by David Troughton), I get how it works on paper but...Sorry, why is the
Doctor doomed to end up here exactly? He's avoided fate before. He can do so
again, surely? I mean, he basically spends all that time with his finger on the
receiver, not taking the timelord’s call but not hanging up either. There’s
nothing to actually trap him on Christmas except his morals and he’s run away
before – it’s kind of character trait. If Moffat had added a line about how the
crack will close up again unless The Doctor stays there waving his sonic screwdriver
at it then it would make more sense but, again, the speed with which this story
seems to have written means the writer has dropped the ball more times than he
usually does.
Which is a real shame
because there are individual parts of this story that remind you of all the
ways this era was such a golden one. The opening scenes of high comedy are a delight,
Matt Smith getting the chance to show the slapstick side of his nature as he
tries to explore what these ships are with the ‘help’ of his new friend, a
Cyberhead he christens ‘Handles’. It’s hard to imagine any other Doctor (except
possibly Matt’s beloved 2nd) being beamed directly on board a Dalek
ship with a broken eyestalk or a Cybership with a broken head. It’s very
lovely, too, to see The Doctor become the local hero, staying in one place
longer than anywhere he’s ever been in his life before and hearing the praise
firsthand about how much the people around him value him. It really is a very
clever twist on ‘The Pandorica Opens’
to have all these villains trying out tiny battles of their own, all with their
own variations to get past the tech barrier (the wooden Cybermen look
particularly amazing and surely inspired the similar baddy in ‘Knock Knock’, while their new catchphrase ‘Incinerate’
is so much better than the old ‘delete’). There’s a very funny scene where
Clara says that she needs The Doctor to be her boyfriend and of course he
misunderstands (‘Ding dong! I’m a bit out of practice but I could look it up in
a manual…’), a much better take on their sort-of vague relationship than The
Doctor wittering about her short skirts or turning up at her doorstep and
staying put. The little nuggets of The Doctor’s daily life in Christmas are brilliant:
the puppet versions of his past adventures (the script throws in Zarbi, Nimon,
Mandrels and The Myrka too, sadly not seen on screen!), the children’s drawings
that adorn his wall (Draconians, Racnoss, Pyrovale, Adipose, Peg Dolls,
Saturnine and The Dalek Paradigm) and the very Dr Whoy additions to all make it
feel like The Doctor has lived a very long and happy life telling multiple
generations about his adventures and becoming the local eccentric living in the
tower (an idea very like Tom Baker’s character in gameshow ‘Fort Boyard’). The
way the crack in the wall, which by now has become such a familiar image, turns
out to be the silhouette of this town and somehow passed back through time like
a memory is very clever and very Moffaty (I only wish the direction had more of
it and lingered properly). The Doctor’s hallucination of Amy (both young and
old, though they’ve obscured Caitlin Blackwoods face to avoid showing that
she’s a teenager now) is powerful stuff too, saying more in six seconds than
the rest of this story did in sixty. It’s also the source of the modern
Whovian’s favourite bit of trivia: both Matt Smith and Karen Gillan are bald
and wearing wigs in this scene (Karen’s made of her own hair). Not because
Moffat’s had a mad idea and taken it out on his actors either by the way: no, by
coincidence both actors had to shave their heads for the roles they’d played
since they’d last been in the series. Matt’s was filming Ryan Gosling’s
directing debut ‘Lost River’ (where he plays a nasty skinhead character
literally called ‘Bully’ in a story about a sensitive child finding escapism.
There’s a great cast all round but it’s very wooden), Karen’s was ‘Guardians Of
The Galaxy’ (a typically noisy shouty empty Marvel superhero film that makes ‘The Return Of Dr Mysterioso’ seem like great art.
Karen’s baddy Nebula is easily the best thing in it).
The problem is, we don’t
really feel anything in any other scene. We don’t spend nearly enough time with
the aged Doctor, alone with his thoughts or talking to the locals (Barnabas is
the only one who gets a name and even he’s much more of a character in the
original script, the best scene of which had The Doctor showing his new home
off to Cara. ‘Who’s the town’s badass then eh?’ The Doctor boasts to Barnabas
who stares at him blankly. ‘Me Mam?’ ‘Try again The Doctor snaps. ‘Me Gran?’ he
asks. Even after seeing him fight off monsters the people here still think of
The Doctor as a friendly Uncle, a long way from the soldier this Docdtor once
feared he would end up). We don’t learn how he’s feeling. That’s why this
regeneration falls flat compared to the one in ‘The
End Of Time’ and indeed most others: you felt Dr 10’s anger, frustration,
his denial. Here the 11th Doctor is more meekly accepting but we
don’t know if that’s because he’s had so
much longer to come to terms with his death (is this why the regeneration
itself is shorter, because he’s not fighting it?) We don’t learn how Clara
feels about it either – we get lots next story about her reaction to the
change, but here she doesn’t get to say how sorry she is or (more in character)
tick The Doctor off for dying on her. I mean they do fight then make up,
admitting how much they feel for each other which is why they’re so annoyed
about the other, but that’s not the same. Removing Clara for so much of the
plot was a bad idea: she gets a sad goodbye twice effectively but neither
really tells us much beyond the surface and it robs The Doctor of someone to
talk to.
What’s more, it’s a waste
of a really clever idea. Moffat writes in a ‘truth field’ around Christmas,
where people accidentally let out more than they mean to. It results in a
nicely comic scene where The Doctor turns ‘I’m wearing a wig!’ into a
catchphrase and Clara blurts out her feelings for him (he doesn’t seem to
notice). Given that it comes just a few minutes after the very silly and chaotic
Christmas Dinner scene where Clara introduces an apparently naked Doctor to her
family (when they promised us a chance to see more of Matt Smith than ever
before in the lead-up to broadcast I thought they meant because he spent so
much of the story on his own, not this!) it feels like a comment on Christmas
Day itself. Anyone who has a family like mine will know the sinking feeling
when too much alcohol is handed round and old grievances come out to hurt.
Christmas is meant to be a day for social niceties but so often becomes a day
for truth telling. Clara, who surely has the worst Christmas Day ever, seems to
have been struck by the karma of the series because she went telling lies,
pretending she had a boyfriend that she doesn’t have and getting The Doctor to
pretend. There’s a worrying sense, too, that she ends up with Danny Pink in the
next series to shut her family up more than because she genuinely loves him and
it’s her association with her that gets him killed (sort of). But they don’t do
enough with it. This ought to be a chance for The Doctor to pour his heart out,
to reflect on all the harm and hurt and danger he’s accidentally caused without
meaning to, the friends of his who didn’t get the chance to grow old because of
his behaviour, his frustration that even after fighting all these monsters they’re
still circling overhead waiting for him to die. Moffat doesn’t do any of that:
he gives Matt a lot of wrinkles and some grey whiskers and thinks that’ll do
for character development. This of all
Doctors should be muttering to himself in old age but no: he’s as quiet as we’ve
ever seen him.
Like a lot of the Dr
actors/actresses Matt Smith is at his best when bouncing off his companions and
doesn't suit long scenes of talking alone, while the 'replacement' supporting
cast aren't around long enough to get to know. To cover Clara’s absence Moffat
has to create characters at speed and comes up with two very different ones.
Handles is brilliant and deserves his own spin off show, a sort of thicker K9,
but Tasha Lem is a much more difficult prospect. Having someone The Doctor gets
to know and trust over the course of 900 years but the audience at home don’t
know is a hard pill for us to swallow. We just don’t know her and what we see we
don’t trust. In the original script she’s a very different character entirely:
she gets lots of backstory, such as the fact that she comes from a planet with
‘a particularly competitive ecosystem’ where murdering people from birth is
accepted as normal (she’s particularly keen to meet Clara as Humans are the
closest to her own kind in the universe). She’s a reformed character though,
turning space nun because she knows the importance and sanctity of life. That’s
why she’s so against The Doctor bringing the timelords back and causing another
time war: this story would have been much stronger if The Doctor was desperate
to bring his people back but she was the peace candidate leaning in his era and
telling him ‘no!’, a reverse after all these years of how he used to act with
The Brigadier. The original script also
has them as a couple, after she admits that she had a crush on the boyhood
Doctor (presumably Hartnell!) and he slowly falls in love with her – something
dropped when the actors mutually agreed that it got in the way of his feelings
for Clara and they were ‘just good friends’. Honestly though it would have
worked better like that, The Doctor torn between saving his own kind and
betraying the person he loves (the moments she reveals she’s part converted
Dalek because he let her down would have hit much harder too, even though it’s
a trick Moffat had already pulled off once, killing Jenny in the exact same way
in ‘The Crimson Horror’). Orla Brady
was one of those actresses who felt destined for Dr Who, being able to pull off
great drama and great comedy, but this role doesn’t give her much chance to do
either. Even Matt Smith is struggling in a good half of this story, not finding
it as easy to connect with the extreme range of this character, the slapstick
comedy, the silly one liners, the sheer rage, the compassion. It’s like his
Doctor has grown old he’s become numb to feelings, which honestly is a fate
worse than death through time war. Even his last farewell speech feels
undercooked and under-rehearsed, only coming together in its last sentence (‘I
will always remember when The Doctor was me’).
But the problem is, this
isn’t the Doctor – at least the way we remember. There are moments in the first
quarter hour where the 11th Doctor is everything we remember:
grumpy, bright, brave, funny, silly and everything between, but The Doctor who
(finally) dies at the end isn't the one we know and love and as much as
Matt Smith sells this new Dr to us we don't have enough time to get to know him.
Equally, while it’s aesthetically pleasing The Doctor should commit himself to
saving one tiny town from attack and make a last stand after all those years of
running, we don’t have enough time to get to know his new home for it to feel
like it matters. It's also an incredibly sad way to go. I'm all for emotional
finales that put you through the wringer, but this is a timelord whose universe
used to be so big and full of so many friends which has now become smaller and
smaller until he's pretty much alone. After all, he really does think this is
the 'end' - it's not the way any of the Doctors would have wanted to go. If
Moffat had spent a year here, perhaps made it The Doctor’s base the way he did
Victorian London in ‘The Snowmen’ it
could have been hugely powerful, but instead too much of this story assumes
that we’re going to be sad that a beloved actor is leaving the show and doesn’t
do enough to earn our tears on top. Had this been a standalone story it would
have been okay, a mid-tier one that has some good bits and some bad, but as the
end of an era it’s a bigger damp squid than Kroll. Rather than summing up
everything we loved about this era it added 900 years of extra largely uninteresting
material instead. Having two false endings and being prodded with a
particularly manipulative score by Murray Gold into feeling something we don’t means
that by the time you get to the end you’re shouting ‘get on with it already! 'It’s not The Doctor who’s looking old and tired
so much as the series – and the showrunner, who clearly needs a holiday.
The timing doesn’t help: the 50th was a celebration but this story felt like a wake that undid all the good of that one (Gallifrey still isn’t back and The Doctor gets a whole new timewar after remembering how he solved the last one) and as a lot of Americans will tell you, having another big party on Xmas a mere month after having a ‘thanksgiving’ one in November can feel a bit much. Despite the title (working idea ‘Twelfth Night’ was better) this really wasn’t The Time of The Doctor’ – the general public were a bit sick of the series if anything after all that extra publicity and an hour of watching someone grow old on a weird planet just didn’t cut it. There’s also the small fact that this was a terrific downer on Christmas Day, the saddest of all the festive specials (give or take ‘Last Christmas’). The moment when Moffat writes in Clara taking her ‘serious’ crackers in the Tardis with her, which feature serious poems rather than Christmas cracker jokes, is meant to be funny, but it just brings home what’s wrong with this story: it’s not the right timing at all, we need silly and frivolous not a long goodbye. At times it feels like a lot longer than a mere 900 years as things seem to play out in real time but then, after all the build-up, the actual physical regeneration is over before you quite realise what's going on. All that fuss then you blink and suddenly there are those huge Capaldi eyebrows staring back at you, almost mid-sentence. That's kind of the 'wrong' way round for regenerations compared to the ones that work best. It’s also either to short or too long depending on how you look at it: apparently Moffat had plans for a whole series set on Christmas till Matt decided to leave (though he’d said from the beginning he’d onl do three years and eventually stayed a fourth); in the end we get a regeneration story that covers more years than any other told in a shorter time (all previous new Who finales have been two parters. The longest is still the ten part four hour ‘War Games’ from 1969). They should in retrospect have got Matt to stay on for another story, keeping the silliness of this one for Christmas and allowing us to get to know this planet properly, then kicking off the next series with the sadder second half as an Easter special (the ‘rising from the dead’ aspect would have been perfect!) They could have dropped the entire middle section, of Clara being turfed off the planet once (and there’s no way Clara, of all people would be stupid to fall for the same ruse twice). It’s too much of a muddle, high comedy randomly inserted into what’s quite a dark and melancholic tale. For all that though it feels somehow right the raggedy man gets a raggedy story to go out on. There are nuggets of magic in here, little scenes and small lines that remind you just how brilliant this era is and it’s more a measure of this era's success than its failures that a story this strong and epic still feels like something of an anti-climax. Watch it out of context, on its own rather than after ‘Day Of the Doctor’ and definitely not at Christmas, and it makes far more sense than it did on first broadcast. No classic certainly, but better. Not quite a turkey like Clara’s then this story, but no way was it cooked at the time it went out on air. It was totally the wrong story to put on after the anniversary. There are more, even bigger mistakes to compound things on top in years to come – and having the debut of the new Doctor in ‘Deep Breath’ be similarly slow and unappealing doesn’t help at all - but I’d go so far as to put it that Dr Who never really covered from this anticlimax, particularly in the eyes of the general public who only tune in for the big occasions. The time of the Doctor, or at least such goodwill towards The Doctor, is running out…
POSITIVES + Handles is
superb, the companion who never was, a dying Cybermen head that becomes the
Doctor's last link with the world outside Christmas. It’s the modern type,
seemingly a prop left over from ‘Nightmare In Silver’ and it makes a great straightman
to Matt’s increasingly frustrated comedian. Fittingly for the regeneration that
once died with Laurel and Hardy it’s very much their relationship (he comes so
close to saying ‘another fine mess you got me into!’) Like K9 Handles has lots
of technology at his fingertips; unlike K9 he’s very stupid with it and keeps
getting the wrong end of the stick, making it far more unreliable and less of a
‘get out of jail free’ card. The Doctor says he bought him from the ‘Delirium
market’, which makes you wonder about what headless monks can possibly buy and
sell, but even that’s a neat reference back to an old friend. His ‘death’ from
battery loss also makes the point about how all things have their time and nothing lasts forever far
better than anything else in a story all about that theme. Kayvan Novok gives the
best performance in the story, despite only having his voice to work with. Moffat
reportedly got the idea after liking how the different parts of a Cybermen
working independently in ‘The Pandorica
Opens’ turned out.
BEST QUOTE: ‘We
all change, when you think about it, we're all different people; all through
our lives, and that's okay, that's good, you've gotta keep moving, so long as
you remember all the people that you used to be. I will not forget one line of
this, not one day, I swear. I will always remember when The Doctor was me’.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Given
that Matt Smith’s final story lasts around nine hundred years or so it seems
inevitable that something out there was going to fill in the missing time with
other adventures the good Doc got up to. That something is the anthology of
short stories ‘Tales Of Trenzalore: The 11th Doctor’s Last Stand’
published two months after the episode, in February 2014 and the very last bit
of Who merchandise with Matt Smith’s face on it. Like the TV episode itself
it’s a bit of an odd way to say goodbye, with all of the gravitas but not much
of the fun of the era and it’s a set that ends up feeling a bit anticlimactic, with
the sort of flimsy adventures more commonly found in Who annuals than the books
or indeed on TV. One thing to this book’s benefit though: because of
circumstances The Doctor doesn’t rely on his usual sonic screwdriver or K9 or
UNIT soldiers to get him out of trouble and uses his brains like never before.
A second is that, despite being published in February, it’s much better at
getting to grips with the festive feel of a town named Christmas than the
special. Justin Richards’ ‘Let It Snow’ for instance, follows an invading Ice
Warrior army and their sonic weapon as they try to invade the cosy little town.
The Doctor turns up the heat on them. No, seriously, that’s not a metaphor,
that’s the plot. George Mann’s ‘An Apple A Day’ features a Krynoid attack as
the Triffid-like plants infiltrate the Trenzalore orchard and take over a man
named Pieter. By contrast The Doctor solves this one by freezing them to the
spot! Paul Finch’s ‘Strangers In The Outland’ is the best of the quartet, an
army of Auton scavengers on the outskirts of Christmas using metal rather than
plastic for a change in a tense plot that owes a lot to the ‘Die Hard’ films
(well, they are always on at Christmas). Mark Morris’ ‘The Dreaming’ is perhaps
the most interesting: the first return of The Mara for a ‘modern’ Doctor, it
actually attacks him rather than a companion and makes him face his shadow side
just in time for his regeneration. As far as an aging Doctor’s concerned, of
course, this is his last battle ever, so it’s fitting it should effectively be
with himself. It’s a worthy idea that doesn’t quite work (the story doesn’t
have much to go beyond what we’ve already seen and indeed what we saw on TV in
‘Amy’s Choice’,
The Doctor’s horror at the enemies and friends both who consider him a warrior,
while he’s never been more heroic than giving up his wandering and freedom to
protect a single town). Still, if Matt Smith is your favourite Doctor and you
desperately want to prolong the final farewell it’s a set still worth getting
and for the most part captures this boyish yet sometimes scarily grownup of
Doctors well.
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Day Of The Doctor’ next ‘Deep Breath’
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