Twice Upon A Time: Ranking - 227

 Twice Upon A Time

(Christmas Special, Dr 1 and 12 with Bill, 25/12/2017, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Rachel Talalay) 

'In which the Doctor talks to himself and his bodies wear a bit thin'

 

 It' the end #12 (*and #1. Again) - and the moment has been hanging in te ether for the best part of half a century. Steven Moffat wasn’t expecting to write this script, but when it became clear Chris Chibnall didn’t want to start with a Christmas story and it would break a run of twelve consecutive Christmas episodes he went back to write a ‘final’ final episode, as much to secure the slot for the future as anything else (in the end it was all for nothing as Chibnall moved his specials to New Year’s Day, making this the last Christmas DW to date). The problem was, he’d already scripted a goodbye, to both Peter Capaldi and to his era, to the point of ending ‘The Doctor Falls’ with a regeneration. Without re-writing everything, what could he possibly write to fill the gap? Well, we got a farewell to DW in general with a look at everything that first turned Moffat into a fan back in the early days. Though the story is set in 1986 it’s really a love song to Who as it was in 1966, when it was poised on the cusp of change and about to see the first crossover between Doctors, a time when nobody knew if it was going to work. Having Peter Capaldi accompany William Hartnell is a masterstroke, the regeneration who most resembles the first (elder, grumpy, grandfatherly) learning the same lessons, that change is part of life. The episode is made possible by David Bradley’s impression of Hartnell, following his sterling performance in the 2013 drama about the making of DW ‘An Adventure In Space and Time’ and while he’s not really all that much like the first Doctor he’s close enough to at least give this the feel of a multi-Doctor story. We never really fond out what happened to the first Doctor in ‘The Tenth Planet’, he just walks out of a recently Cybermen-cleared Antarctic base and walks back to the Tardis and while it seems like seconds for Ben and Polly there’s enough leeway to fit a while adventure in the gap. It helps that the last episode is one of the missing ones (thanks Blue Peter – it was last seen when someone ‘borrowed’ the tape to show the regeneration clip and didin’t put the tape back properly) so only those who saw it go out really know exactly what happened and the events leading up to the regeneration itself are eerily silent compared to the gnashing and thrashing that goes on in most regenerations noweadays, making the sequence feel as lost to fans as if we were watching it through a South Pole blizzard. This isn’t quite the story I’d imagined for the Hartnell Doctor to fill in that gap. It’s all a bit mystical and way out, more like a third Doctor plot than a 1^st.  Given that it was pulled out of the hat at the last minute, most of ‘Twice Upon A Time’ holds up really well – unless you’re a fan of the Hartnell era. For sadly there’s a fatal flaw that prevents this being the big celebration we wanted to have, that singlehandedly knocks this otherwise great episode down a couple of hundred notches. Moffat tries so hard to paint a difference between times then and now that he crams his script full of them. It’s meant to be smart and clever, as Capaldi raises those very big eyebrows every time the Doctor says something he’d never get away with. By making the first Doctor out to be rude, conceited or worst prejudiced so often they miss what the first Doctor was really like: protective, charming, endlessly curious and mostly surprisingly open-minded for a figure who looked like an OAP appearing on a children’s TV show of the 1960s, ready to help anybody of any species. While several decades of anecdotes later it’s easy enough to imagine William Hartnell the actor behaving in a misogynistic homophobic or racist way, it’s also a mistake to forget that he was much a product of his upbringing as, say Billie Piper was of the 1980s – most everyone male and white born in 1908 were brought up to think like that. Misunderstanding all this and being so impossibly smug about all that as if 2014 is the height of acceptance rather misses the point the script is otherwise making, that time doesn’t stand still. I hope there’s a sequel one day called ‘Thrice Upon Time’, say circa 2062 and starring the 23^rd Doctor meeting a bi-racial alien hybrid who gives Peter Capaldi’s Doctor as hard a time as he gives Hartnell’s here, so that viewers can laugh at how close-minded we early 21^st century dwellers were to make up for it. Worst of all, there’s no twinkle there – the First Doctor was in love with the universe all the time, if not always the people he met in it; this version is even more of a grump than the 12^th Doctor and boy is that saying something. If you can somehow look past that then the story itself is a lot stronger and quite touching, as two old men prepare to face mortality while wishing they could live their lives all over again – a pretty strong match for how the showrunner was feeling you suspect. Bill is sadly under-used in her last appearance, which rather takes away from her ending in ‘The Doctor Falls’; even though she’s a hologram and isn’t really there she ‘needs’ the finale and second chance that episode gives her whereas her she mostly stands around being insulted. I’m sad there wasn’t more Ben and Polly too, especially as they’d have made a great team with Bill (I can see it a mile away: he’d have been protective, she’d have got jealous and been a bit unsure of this modern working class but un-trendy newcomer with freedoms Polly could only dream of, then they’d have teamed up and teased poor Ben). You would have thought they’d have got the cybermen in there too, given that ‘The Tenth Planet’ was their debut.  The script works best when it shows up the similarities not the differences between these two doctors, both stubborn men who refuse the idea that their time might be up and who beneath their grumpy exteriors have hearts too gentle to cope with a universe at times so cruel. Though it’s a shame Bill has to get a second convoluted ending (her first was perfect, travelling the universe with her puddle girlfriend) it’s an even better goodbye for Capaldi’s doctor who finds a level of peace and closure in this episode he never had before. Though not my favourite of the doctors, i find his regeneration one of the most moving and the goodbye 'Doctor, I let you go' is one of Who’s most powerful farewells.

+Part of the plot revolves around the 1^st World War and the Christmas truce of 1914, a moment ripe for DW plundering with its light amongst the darkness and hope against the fear motif. The moment when Mark Gatiss in his last DW role to date, rather sweetly revealed to be the Brigadier’s ancestor, overhears the Doctor and Bill talking about ‘his’ war as WW1 and the horror that his wasn’t the ‘war to end all wars’ after all is one of the best lines Steen Moffat ever wrote. This part is also a rather cheeky metaphor for the ‘battles’ that were always going on in the writer’s room Moffat oversaw as show-runner. That’s fellow writer Toby Whithouse playing the German soldier when they meet back in the trenches.     

- Most of the rest of the rest of the plot centres from Rusty, the Dalek from Capaldi’s second story, and explains where he came from which seems to be here to fill in a continuity point nobody really care much for as much as anything else. It’s a waste of a good Dalek, in both meanings of the word.