Time Of The Doctor: Ranking - 266

  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. The 1st and last episodes of a Dr's run are always the ones under the most pressure. Particularly the farewells: you have to come up with a story in its own right for casual viewers who dip in and out of a show's run, but also have that story build on something that came before so that it feels bigger, whilst tying up loose ends and also one that feels like a true reflection of its era. In short, its a wonder there aren't more finales at the bottom of this list. Matt Smith's last story ticks some of these boxes. It does, finally, go to Trenzalore (a planet that's been dangled in front of fans for a while) but in a script that doesn't behave how we expected it to. It doesn't really hang together as a story in its own right. Mostly though, rather than summing up an era, it adds a few thousand years to it that we don't see much on screen. Mostly though 'Time' fails because it's a bit...weird. Now, there are lots of reasons for this. 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, he was going to hang around for the party). That story had to be standalone so the general public could follow it so this one had to be standalone too - and being epic inside 50minutes is a very different prospect to being the climax of a full series. As viewers, too, we'd only just had a big party on Thanksgiving for the 50th; as a lot of Americans will tell you, having another big party on Xmas the same year can feel a bit much. One of them was always going to get less attention too and its probably for the best it was this one. Steven Moffat's come up with the very clever idea of having the youngest actor to play the Doctor leave so long he becomes the oldest, turning the generation who most felt like an old man in a young man's body into someone who, thanks to some quite alarming prosthetics, finally looked old on screen. Which is 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. That one leaves during the first few minutes, unbeknown to us. Rather than make Clara age a thousand years too she comes and goes in this story as the plot needs her, including some very convoluted ways of getting her out the way, which is a shame. 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. Though it feels 'right' somehow, having this incarnation spending so much of his life protecting just one town from monsters he's accidentally encourage, giving this Doctor adventures we don't see just cuts us off from him. 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 them. It's also incredibly sad. 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', the last of his 12 regeneration cycle (we'll leave why he's still the 11th Dr for another time!) - it's not the way any of the Drs would have wanted to go. While we're here I'm totally not buying how he gets to live on with a new regeneration cycle too: basically because Clara asks the timelords nicely for another one. Is that all? I mean if timelords have the power to do that then why do any of them die? After all, the idea's been around since a throwaway line in 'The Deadly Assassin' in 1976 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. Still, its 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.

Positives + Well, the Doctor does have one friend. handles is great, the companion who never was, a dying Cybermen head that becomes the Doctor's last link with the world outside Christmas. His 'death', oddly, seems more moving than Clara's will, even though he's only screen for a few minutes! I loved the increasingly desperate attempt of all the monsters to gain access to the town past the technology barrier too. Wooden cybermen! Genius!

Negatives - I still don't get the whole Trenzalore plot, which took up two whole years. 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. And why does he have to go at this point in his timeline? Surely it's not that big a deal if one town gets over-run by monsters? (I mean, they can't do worse damage than the Conservatives do to our towns). Especially as the ending turns out to be Clara pleading for a big old re-set button. If she'd done that 2 years earlier we would have been spared a lot of stories. Also, the build-up to the regeneration seems to be playing out those thousands years in real time, but the actual physical act 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.