Twice Upon A Time
(Christmas Special, Dr 1 and 12 with Bill, 25/12/2017, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Rachel Talalay)
'I still refuse to regenerate, no matter how many of my future selves I meet and…What? No I do not want you to play me a jolly song on the recorder to help my troubles. Nor do I think a demonstration of Venusian Aikido is appropriate young man. I don’t approve of having sweets between meals either, so put those jelly babies away. Cricket? Never heard of it. And good grief who are you in the flash dress sense? And you, playing the spoons like a common music hall act. And you with all that kissing. And you with those ears! And you skinny. And you, you geography teacher with the fez and bowtie. Well thankyou for making my mind up for me, if this is what I’m going to turn into then I just won’t bother thankyou!’
It’s' the end #12 (and #1. Again) - and the moment has been hanging in the ether for the best part of half a century. Steven Moffat thought he’d left Dr Who after seven long years, during which time he’d overseen two Doctors, four companions and nearly a hundred episodes. But then he got a panicked call: Chris Chibnall, the news showrunner, wasn’t going to be ready in time to take over the show before the following year which meant that there would be no Christmas story for the first time since the show came back, after an unbroken run of twelve stories. This was a serious problem: the slot was a prestigious one which always had the highest viewing figures of the year and it was a useful fixture for the BBC in the ratings war too. Could Moffat possibly come out of retirement and write one ‘final’ final story? That way the slot would be safe for Chibnall to use in the future if he wants (spoiler alert: he didn’t, preferring the New Year’s slot instead. Meaning ‘Twice Upon A Time’ ends up being the last story on Christmas Day for six years until ‘The Church On Ruby Road’). 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 he didn’t want to change. Without re-writing everything, what could he possibly write to fill the gap?
But Moffat had been
thinking: there’s nothing like a regeneration story to take fans and writers alike
back to the time of the very first one, in ‘The
Tenth Planet’, when nobody was even sure the idea would work. It was an
unusual one too compared to all the others, with The Doctor slowly fading away over
time and breaking off from companions Ben and Polly to change in the Tardis,
alone. In fact the events leading up to the regeneration itself are eerily
silent compared to the gnashing and thrashing that goes on in most
regenerations nowadays, and, given that this last episode is lost right u until
the regeneration sequence, makes us feel removed from that last regeneration as
if we were watching it through a South Pole blizzard. Though that 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. One of the useful parts of being a
showrunner is that you have full access to the BBC archives so Moffat had a
look over the original draft script for the story and spotted something odd.
There was a cut line, planned for the 1st Doctor to speak in episode
three, where he was growing weak because he ‘refused’ to give in to the
impending sense of regeneration, not liking the idea that he would go to sleep
and wake up as somebody else (a line in a scene that, ironically, wasn’t filmed
because William Hartnell was so sick during the filming of that episode, so
instead he goes to sleep in the corner). This really fascinated Moffat, the
idea that the 1st Doctor who had faced so many monsters and foes so bravely had
finally met something he was scared of: no longer being himself. So when
someone asked Moffat who he would most like to bring back to the series, during
a Comic Con Q+A in New York with Capaldi and Pearl Mackie to promote the
streaming of season ten, he had no doubts: ‘William Hartnell, because I’d love
to see how the 1st Doctor would react, knowing what The Doctor will
go on to become and all the ways he’s changed. But of course’ he laughed
‘That’s sadly never going to happen’. It was Capaldi who leaned over and
smiled. ‘You could always get David Bradley to play him’. This was the actor
who had played Hartnell in the Mark Gatiss 50th anniversary
docu-drama ‘An Adventure In Space and Time’ and he’d captured the actor
perfectly: the stern gruff old man exterior, the childlike glee behind the
eyes, the insecurity and doubt behind the authoritarianism. But there was no
time to make good on this idea because Moffat had written his last episode and
was moving on. Well, so he thought. But when he needed another story in a hurry
the idea came back to him: what would The Doctor make of everything he’d
become?
There are lots of
parallels between the Hartnell and Capaldi Doctors and the papers and fans both
had enjoyed pointing out the similarities: they were the two oldest Doctors
(weirdly both actors were fifty-five when they filmed their first scenes), with
a shock of white hair (a wig In Hartnell’s case), were both grumpy and a bit
antisocial but with a twinkle behind the eyes. Moffat had leaned into the
similarities with the 12th Doctor ‘arc’ where he asked if he was a
good man or not with the jumble of memories inside him at the start of his
regeneration, worried at first that he wasn’t and then growing used to the idea
that he was (while the 1st Doctor was written to be the antagonist,
before script editor David Whittaker slowly re-wrote him to be the hero). So it
seemed only natural to have the 12th Doctor too refuse to
regenerate, to not want to give up being who he is (as it’s established in ‘The Sound Of Drums’ that timelords can do this
– The Master choosing death over watching The Doctor ‘win’), until someone
changes his mind. The only question was who: Clara was long gone (and Jenna
Coleman was busy in the ITV series ‘Victoria’ by now) while Bill had been fully
written out. But then Moffat had a masterstroke: what if the 12th
Doctor and the 1st Doctor comforted each other? That way they both
had someone with them. After all there’s a huge gap in episode four where The
Doctor walks to the Tardis parked at the South Pole alone where an adventure
could be slotted in – especially with a time machine. It’s also a theme that’s
run through practically everything Moffat’s written for the show: his desperate
need to have ‘everybody live’ at any cost. What better way to bow out than by
having his lead character change his mind and regenerate (twice!) so that even
he lives.
So we get that surprise
ending, one they actually managed to keep quiet and away from spoilers, where
the 12th Doctor goes for one last journey while regenerating and
instead of turning into Dr 13 as expected bumps into himself. It’s a very
clever emotional idea having The Doctor see everything he became and be
comforted that his good work goes on. Many of us have wished we could go back
and comfort our younger selves or give them information they didn’t have and
The Doctor is forever doing this for other people, so to have him do this and
comfort himself is really sweet. It’s basically the ending to ‘Vincent and The Doctor’ only its ‘The Doctor
and The Doctor’. Moffat, who liked to get in the mood for writing Christmas
episodes in the Spring by watching Christmas films and listening to carols,
also happened to choose ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ and figured that would be how
he’d do it: that by refusing to regenerate The Doctors are effectively
committing suicide before their other selves show them how much good they did
in the universe and why they’re still needed. By having Dr 12 comfort Dr 1 too,
in much the same way as in Moffat’s Chuldren In Need special ‘Timecrash’ (where
Dr 10 admired Dr 5) the writer also got one last chance to tell us everything
this series means to him and make this a love song to Dr Who in a similar way
to Russell T’s ‘Turn Left’. Returning
to The South Pole also makes good on a running joke that Russell used to have in all his Christmas stories
that Moffat had continued: the fact there was always snow in them somewhere,
even if it turned out to be something else, like fragments of a broken up
spaceship.
So far so good, but there
are…problems. One is that Moffat ignores the obvious story he should be
telling: they’ve gone to all that trouble to lovingly re-create the South Pole
from the end of ‘The Tenth Planet’ and the previous story has done all the
donkey work introducing fans to the original concept of the Mondasian Cybermen
from that story, back when they still had Human body parts. Having the Cybermen
travel from the space station of ‘World Enough and Time’ to help out their
‘Tenth Planet’ brethren would have been fabulous and might have helped explain
just why The 1st Doctor gets so feeble across the story out of the
blue (again another cut line in the original script for ‘The 10th
Planet’ has The Doctor being affected by the extra pull of gravity of having
Mondas hovering next to earth. An idea so ridiculous most fans pretend it never
happened and blame the increasingly close brushes with death from The Celestial
Toymaker, Wotan, The Dalek’s time destructor and maybe even the curse of ‘The
Smugglers’ all taking a toll on The Doctor’s health). Seeing Moffat tackle a
good old fashioned linear ‘base under siege’ story – especially one where the
Humans think they’ve won only to be attacked by a second wave while weakened –
would have been fascinating. But we don’t get that story. Instead we get a more
typical Moffat story where The Doctors are zapped out of time and end up on
board a spaceship run by ‘The Weapon Forges Of Villengard’ (another bit of
Moffat continuity – it’s mentioned in a line in ‘The Empty Child’ after having been
disbanded by The Doctor off-screen). The South Pole isn’t seen again until the
final scene and the impressively accurate base set not at all. It turns out The
Cybermen have nothing to do with this story it all. You spend the episode
waiting for them to arrive but they never do. After all, what could have been
more perfect for a story about cheating death and not wanting to die than a
cyber-race who also refuse to do just that? (Even if it means Humans do
instead).
Moffat also doesn’t
understand the 1st Doctor as well as he thinks he does and it’s
clearly been a while since he last saw a story properly. For Moffat got a bee
in his bonnet that a lot of what passed in 1960s Who would be ‘unacceptable’ in
2017 and that it was ful of misogyny, chauvinism and racism and he ought to
point out how times had changed for the character and society. But actually
there’s none of that in the 1st Doctor stories: compared to other
1960s television it really is amazing what a tolerant open-minded and equal
series Who was, with only ‘The Celestial
Toymaker’ causing a pause for breath for the modern viewer (and even that’s
nothing like as bad other shows in an era when ’The Black and White Minstrel
Show’ and ‘Til’ Death Us Do Part’ were the norm and Who the outsider. What’s
more, we can all see that: the VHS, DVD and blu-rays of all the surviving
Hartnell stories (and that’s about twenty) are on sale. It’s not as if we didn’t
know this version of the Doctor was wrong or at any rate heavily skewed. Admittedly
the ‘real’ Ben and Polly had plenty of stories of how racist and sexist William
Hartnell could be in private, being part of the ‘lost’ generation of the 1900s
when this sort of thing was normal, who’s attitudes rather shocked their baby
boomer selves born approximately half a century later. In other words Bill
Hartnell was as ‘normal’ for his generation as Billie Piper is for hers and
singling him out for attack in a series that’s about taking other times and
cultures at fade values seems far ruder than anything he actually did. 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.
Anyway that was in private and besides, he wasn’t that bad or there’s no way
he’d have signed up to a series that had a young female producer and started
with an Indian director. And anyway that’s the actor not the character: the
most the 1st Doctor ever does on screen is want to ‘protect’ his female
companions from the worst of harm and offer to give his disobedient
grand-daughter – a blood relative remember – a ‘jolly good smacked bottom’.
It’s hard to recognise the 1st Doctor Moffat gives us as the same
character when he’s telling Bill that he needs to dust and that he’s clearly
missing Polly to do it for him (who almost certainly wouldn’t have done if
asked anyway), that women are ‘all fragile and made of glass’, that ‘older men
can be put to work as nurses sometimes even though it’s women’s work’ and most
notoriously threatening to give Bill –a stranger – a smacked bottom for
understandable language use (‘I hope we never talk about this again’ says a
shocked 12th Dr to Bill. Me too Doc, me too). To recap: the Doctor
never cared much for the state of his Tardis and would have dusted it himself
if only out of fear of anyone else touching his precious ‘ship’, was protective
of his female companions but always let them do their own thing (it’s Barbara
who moans about him and Ian between them treating her and Susan like ‘Dresden China’),
would never said any such thing to a character he didn’t know in the whole of
his three years on screen and nobody ever used bad language in his presence so
we don’t know how he might have reacted (though that in itself might show that
nobody dared. It does seem odd that veteran astronaut Steven never swore for
one, but arguably less so the youngsters or the schoolteachers, while Ben would
be more worried about upsetting Polly with curse words).
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. In
reality the 1st Doctor would be telling the Dr 12 to be quiet and
hoping that Ben and Polly are alright, worried for their welfare (if only
they’d been back to chat to Bill about the differences in being companions too:
Polly is spot on the little we see of her, though Ben’s a bit out). 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 12th Doctor and boy is that saying something. It would be
like a returning Dr 10 only being the miserable sod we see in his last two
stories or Dr 2 being a comedy buffoon (actually he is in ‘The Three Doctors’ and ‘The Five Doctors’, though they both get
the 1st Doctor ‘right’, with allowances for the actor being so
poorly in the first and replaced by an actor who looks nothing like him in the
2nd). You’d think the banter between two such fiery regenerations would be
superb but Moffat seems to have used all his insults up in ‘Day Of The Doctor’
and this story often feels like a pale retread of that one. It’s nowhere near
as strong a performance from David Bradley as before either, though I suspect
that’s more the limitations of playing a character every fan with a DVD player
knows and can compare with as opposed to an actor only a handful of people
still alive ever met and Moffat giving him less emotion than Gatiss to get his
teeth into. The intended big reunion, then, is an anticlimax: if you like the 1st
Doctor then this man is a stranger, if you don’t like him you’ll hate him now
and if you don’t know his era at all then this story doesn’t exactly inspire
you to go out and fill in the gaps (but you should if you haven’t, his era is
brilliant and much more ‘modern’ than you might expect). Perhaps even more than
this Moffat seems to think that The Doctor seems to become a ‘hero’ fighting
for justice after her regenerates but that’s so not true: ‘The Tenth Planet’
alone gives The Doctor plenty of opportunities to run away in the Tardis but he
stays to fight and over advice to defeat The Cyberman, something he’s been
doing since at least ‘The Sensorites’
twenty years earlier. The 1st Doctor’s response to being told the
stars remain in the skies because he lives should have been ‘what, again? Did
you make a mess of my good work?’ Some fans have wondered if it was a
deliberate move because of a woman Doctor coming in, t remind a potentially
hostile audience how much the series has moved on, but actually Moffat didn’t
know when he handed his script over with the lines ‘Chris, it’s over to
you!’(not did Capaldi, despite Jodie Whittaker being his near-neighbour he
spoke to often). Paul Cornell’s novelisation, knowing how many fans reacted to
this, rewrites it to have the 1st Doctor deliberately playing up to this
stereotype to annoy the 12th Doctor, but that’s a nice try to repair
things after the fact and obviously isn’t what’s happening on screen.
So is the entire story a
disaster? Well, no. 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 . Given that this is a
farewell script from someone convinced they’ll never ever write for the show
again (though see ‘Boom’…) there are some lovely poignant reflections on
aging and making the most of your life that are some of Moffat’s best writing.
Had the two Doctors put their differences aside and realised how alike they are
earlier this might yet have been a fine episode, each with regrets and wishing
they had longer to be themselves, before mutually deciding it’s better to move
on and live life, even if it’s as someone else. Memories are a big deal for
Moffat (they often crop up as a form of time travel that’s the closest we
mortals without a Tardis get) and he talks a lot about them here, of
remembering Bill so well she’s practically still alive to him to all intents
and purposes. That part works, but then ‘she’ randomly restores Clara’s
memories too, undoing the impact of the end of ‘Heaven Sent’ (though it gives
Jenna Coleman the last classic line of the Moffat era: ‘Don’t go forgetting me
again because, quite frankly, that was offensive!’ It’s unusual and brave to
see The Doctor so vulnerable: we’ve so often seen him urging others to their
deaths because it’s the right thing to do and yet it never seems to have struck
him until this moment (either of them) how hard giving up your life, even in a
good cause, actually is. It’s a clever twist too having the 1st Doctor so
scared, as he would be: after all he’s probably seen other friends and family
go through a regeneration but he never has. You’d be full of questions: what is
it like? Does it hurt? Do I still remember me? It’s a shame Moffat doesn’t
answer a few more of those but the ones he does are well handled (as well as
the second best line of the episode ‘I always assumed I was going to be
younger’. ‘I am younger!’)
It turns out (spoilers)
that for once the ‘big bad’ is a computer glitch, not a monster with evil
plans. The Villengard is a walking talking museum with the honourable idea of
recording people from across history who died before their time so that their
voices live on in the future (I’ve called every museum I’ve been in since 2017
a ‘chamber of the dead’ as that really is all it is!) It’s the sort of thing
you can totally imagine happening in the future with the right time-travelling
technology and a plot that’s a bit like the ending to ‘The
Curse of The Black Spot’ but rather better handled. It’s a bit of a
coincidence it turns up in the middle of two Doctors arguing but we’ve had
worse in Who. It also allows one of Moffat’s best jokes, as a WW1 soldier walks
towards them both and asks if either of them are by chance a Doctor (response:
‘Are you trying to be funny?’) Of all the writers who’ve worked on the series
Moffat is perhaps closest to Mark Gatiss, the two having co-created the ‘Sherlock’
series together and wrote the part of ‘The Captain’ for him as one last leaving
present. Against all odds (and the OTT performance in ‘The Lazarus Experiment’) Gatiss is
fabulous, a bewildered man who thought he was about t die given a chance at a
reprieve. It’s just the contrast the story needs, a man stoically going to his
almost certain death quietly but who would do anything at a chance to live and
who makes the two Doctors, who have the chance to live on in another body, look
selfish. The poor chap is rather forgotten and doesn’t get much to do except
wander round the Tardis looking lost but he’s a poignant and very Moffat
reminder that life is sacred and given the chance everyone should survive if
they can. For a writer who’s spent so much of his time in the show avoiding
death it’s brave indeed to end with everything he’s been avoiding, a war, the
death of a companion and the sort-of death of the main character. Twice!
It also leads to two of
the most touching scenes Moffat ever wrote. One is the standout line of the
episode when the two Doctors are nattering to each other and Dr 12 accidentally
lets out the ‘spoiler’ that he’s come from World War One. The Captain, who
instantly accepts concepts of time travel, aliens and the fact he has to die
without a word, is shocked by this: ‘World War…One?’ he repeats, broken. For
him and his men it isn’t dying to save their King and country that breaks them,
it’s the thought that one day their children or their grandchildren might be
doing it all over again. It’s also the moment that’s most like a 1st
Doctor story the entire episode: so many of the 1960s stories are about the
generations watching and wondering what the future would be like for the child
viewers when they became adults and steered society. The majority of writers
think that the hippie kids will be far more sensible and avoid the traps of
warfare their parents and grandparents fell into (though one or two, like
Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, or on occasion even Terry Nation, think
they’ll get eaten alive by a foreign power unafraid of using guns). For that’s
what’s at the heart of so many 1960s stories: when will World War III break out
and can Dr Who do anything to stop it? because if there is one every thirty
years or so it’s due right about the time the series begins in 1963 (a series
long linked to JFK, the most obvious lead of this youthful revolt till The
Beatles take over his crown, who was assassinated the day before the first
episode’s broadcast). Moffat shows how far society has come, that the pattern
has been broken – but not soon enough for this poor soldier.
Moffat also cleverly
weaves in the Christmas Day truce of the First World War, when soldiers on both
sides of the trenches in Ypres put down their weapons long enough to play
football, swap stories and chat to their enemy, seeing them as ‘people’ away
from the propaganda of both countries. It’s such a Dr Whoy moment, peace in the
middle of a battle and a day of hope in the middle of such gloom, that it’s
amazing it had never been used before on screen (though according to the
spin-offs there are lots of Doctors running around, including another 1st
Doctor – see the ‘prequels’ column below). It’s lovingly re-created too,
accurate in every detail, the first battlefield in the series since, no not
‘Battlefield’ actually but ‘The War Games’
(it’s actually a field in Parc Llanaid) with hordes of extras (over a hundred!)
There’s another familiar face too as Toby Whithouse, more usually a writer on
the series, plays the German soldier Gatiss is about to shoot (in case you were
wondering his one line translates as ‘This is crazy – I don’t want to hurt you!’)
This is, though so Moffat revealed later, an injoke about what being showrunner
was really like, watching his friends fight hard in the writer’s room while he
tried to stay neutral in the middle in no man’s land, overseeing who could get
what budget and monsters and which position in the running order! Whithouse
doesn’t get as much to do as Gatiss but he’s impressively good too, especially
for someone who hadn’t done much acting before. Perhaps most moving of all is
the revelation of The Captain’s name at the end: he’s the Brigadier’s Grandad
and The Doctor has effectively secured his old timeline through the act of
being kind and saving a life (with Gatiss reportedly over the moon when he
found out he’d been given the honour of playing a relative of one of his
favourite characters). This story is also the source of one of the most quoted
Dr Who lines, that becoming a Doctor means ‘to never be cruel or be cowardly’,
though it’s actually a quote by 1970s script editor Terrance Dicks in his
factual book ‘The Making Of Dr Who’ (and so perfect for the series I’m amazed
it hadn’t made it into one of his own scripts).
I'm on the fence about
Bill’s comeback. She wasn’t in the original script, Moffat feeling that he’d
already given her the perfect character arc with the end to ‘The Doctor Falls’ and in many ways it’s a
shame that he undoes that here with yet another long goodbye. However Moffat
realised that he couldn’t exactly have Dr 12 confess without a witness and that
he needed someone for him to talk to from the present day that wasn’t just the
1st Doctor. So back she comes, in hologram form, their relationship
carrying on much where it left off. It’s nothing likes as good an end to her
story, but then she isn’t really there – as the rather confusing script keeps
reminding us every few minutes without actually telling us why (they should
have had the Villengard more like a museum and have The Doctor stumble on
Bill’s exhibit. After all, she fought alongside the rest in her last story even
when part Cyberman). Moffat also sees the story as an opportunity to show how
far the story has come by having a black lesbian character in the show, but in
reality of course the 1st Doctor wouldn’t have batted an eyelid and
Moffat’s attempt to shock don’t really come off (while having a WW1 soldier
laughing at his jokes evens up the score so the modern more tolerant day never
feels as if it ‘wins’ the way it should). However it’s great to have Pearl back
in any form and she gives one of her best performances, making room in her
schedule to come back specially for the part (this script being so last minute
there had been no sign of a comeback when she’d done her last filming at the
beginning of April 2017. This story was mostly filmed in July, at the peak of
Summer, like many a Christmas special). Nardole gets a brief cameo too and it
was Matt Lucas’ idea to have the trio end on their traditional pre-ritual
‘huddle’ that the actors did before most scenes. It’s the saddest part of the
episode when they disappear and leave The Doctor alone once more. As for Clara,
she feels shoe-horned in and in truth very much was (busy on ‘Victoria’; she
could only spare an hour, for which she came specially to TV Centre in London
(on the ‘Top Gear’ soundstage, the nearest part that was free!) as the only
person on set with Moffat and a cameraman, the last shot during Moffat’s time
as showrunner – he was quite moved that the show had come full circle back to
where it always used to be made though joked that he killed Clara off so many
times it was typical she was there right at the end again!)
The end result then is a
real mixture, an episode that feels as if the best and worst in Moffat’s
writing is at war with itself: there’s a technical gobbledegook middle that
doesn’t add much at all, needlessly over-complicated, slow in parts with a lot
of characters standing around not doing much, some woefully unfunny banter and
weird characterisations out of the blue and we never fully get into the minds
of these two Doctors and feel what they’re feeling the way Russell T Davies
would have done. At the same time though
the story is brave and bold, intelligent but still emotional and
heartfelt, with an imagination few others writers match, with a great central
message of the importance of keeping calm and carrying on but in a far deeper
way than that unused bit of WWII propaganda and there are some really clever
moments that work so well. For every really impressive detail they get spot on
(the 1st Doctor’s Tardis, still in existence after the docu-drama
and actually housed down the road in The Dr Who exhibition in Cardiff, but
filled with yet more props including two original 1963 Tardis columns loaned by
a collector; the meticulous sequence of buttons that Hartnell worked out for
the Tardis take off to add extra realism for viewers at home; the way he refers
to the Tardis as a ‘ship’); Pertwee’s actual smoking jacket from his days as
the 3rd Dr (which Gatiss owned and brought along to filming (with a
publicity shot of Capaldi wearing it), the hint being that the 12th
Doctor still owns it and still remembers and values all his old lives…yet they
mess up another really obvious one, with The Doctor’s language or his
mannerisms (plus he never fluffs his lines, once!) I hope there’s a sequel one
day called ‘Thrice Upon Time’, say circa 2062 and starring the 23rd 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 21st century dwellers were to make up for it. For every great effect,
like the re-creation of Ypres, there’s another one that’s clunky, like the
‘glass woman’ effect which is hard to see and rather too obviously fake (the
script describes it as ‘an ice Queen as if it had been made by Apple!’ It’s presumably
also here to link in with that weird comment about ‘women being made of glass’ –
in the future that’s taken literally, apparently, all part of this story’s take
on changing times). There are plotholes galore if you stop and think about them
too much: this is The South Pole. It was already borderline ridiculous that the
1st Dr, Ben and Polly could make the small walk from the Tardis to
the base without getting frostbite despite being prepared before leaving. This
time round the 12th Doctor isn’t expecting to be here and they stand
around nattering for a very long time without much protection (and yes the snowflakes
are frozen in the sky around them due to the Villengard technology up the
spout, but that doesn’t mean they don’t emit cold).
What’s more there’s a
soldier in a very threadbare WW1 tunic that used to make people frostbitten in
Belgium in the heat of Summer standing around without problem. You expect it’s
going to be explained but it never is. The Villengard has gone wrong and
doubles down on its job yet somehow allows Dr 12 to re-programme it so that The
Captain is returned during the truce, even though at no point has he mentioned
the day he was taken from (chances are he wouldn’t know anyway: all days at war
blur together). Then there’s the big one: presumably Dr 12 can remember
everything so why doesn’t he know what will happen? Why isn’t he there at the
end of the last story going ‘that’s weird, I haven’t met my first self yet’ or
knowing in advance that he’s dying in his past so he has to be more careful?
I’ll buy that the Villengard wipes people’s memories but they’ve spent time
outside it and their memories should be safe. It’s also weird in retrospect
that Patrick Troughton doesn’t sit up in ‘Power
Of The Daleks’ and go ‘that’s weird, I’m not Scottish’ (as the 1st Doctor
doesn’t pick up on the idea Capaldi’s a far future version). Frankly it’s weird
seeing The 1st Doctor stumbling around such a 21st
century idea as a futuristic scifi museum, especially in an adventure that
seemed to promise the 12th Doctor stumbling round a 1960s base under
siege one instead (something I suspect Capaldi for one would have loved to have
done). In the end the only thing this story shares with many 1st Doctor
ones is that it kind of goes to sleep in the middle and has to be started up
again for the big final. This despite the episode badly over-running even the
traditional longer Christmas slot (and honestly it doesn’t need be: there’s at
least a quarter hour that could have been trimmed from the middle without
losing anything at all, while the 12th Doctor’s epic long goodbye is
a bore fest, running round the Tardis and talking to no one and babbling about
the importance of being kind and never eating pears and the importance of his
name which ‘is un-pronounceable but children can hear when the stars are right’
(although this last one is actually taken from something Capaldi said at the
premier for ‘Deep Breath’ that stayed with the showrunner: doesn’t fit here
though). It’s a weird way for him and Moffat to bow out, with only the very
final line – ‘Doctor, I let you go’ – up to the emotion the rest of the story
has built up. Some of the lines in this story are awful (most things the 1st
Doctor says) – but occasionally there’s a gem (such as Dr 12 explaining away
the Tardis prop growing bigger by saying ‘you try sucking your tummy in for all
those years’ and Bill saying to Dr 12 ‘I
knew you couldn’t be dead, that would take far too much concentration!’ We also
rather neatly get almost the same last shot of Capaldi as his first, in ‘The Day Of The Doctor’ – a close up of his
eyes and eyebrows (always with the eyebrows).
Perhaps the best way to
sum this story is up is that it’s good for what it is, but disappointing given
all the ingredients were there to make it brilliant. Had the 12th
Doctor matched up with the ‘real’ 1st Doctor, spitting fireworks and
out-crotchetting each other with twinkling this could have been superb. Had the
original Cybermen hung around for another adventure and they’d have made the
most of those sets, as the 12th Doctor is aware that like him the
Cybermen will live to grow and adapt and change, it would have had that bit
more emotional impact. I wish we’d seen more of Ben and Polly than that all too
brief scene (she’s spot on, him not so much), 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 something rotten). Director Rachel Tallalay really
went the extra mile in re-creating the original but for some odd reason it was
changed to a montage of archive footage in the edit – unfairly given how
accurately the bits we got seem to be (though the move from the ‘old’ square
box and line resolution into the modern HD is pretty stunning it has to be
said). ‘Twice Upon A Time’ has lots to say about life and death and everything
else, but there’s a masterpiece here waiting to be told and it ends up being
just another Moffat Christmas special, good and bad and everywhere in between.
It also ends up being something of a downer for viewers after a bit of festive
fun (Moffat noted to his horror that this was the second Doctor he’d killed
over Christmas, something Russell had managed to avoid). ‘World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls’
was a worthier farewell you have to say, a big epic struggle of good versus
evil that was tougher and harsher and as dark as any story in this show’s
history.
This story simply can’t compete and if watched in order takes away from the power of that tale. But then that isn’t Moffat’s fault: considering that this is a story written at the absolute last minute, when he thought he’d already hung up his pen and the actors all though they had spoken their last lines it’s a measure of how much love they have this series that everyone still gives their all, rallying for the cause one last time. It’s not quite the perfect goodbye to either Doctor, but then both of them already had the perfect goodbyes. Moffat himself disliked his final script (one of the reasons he came back was to finish on a good one, though actually ‘Boom’ is arguably worse), his wife reportedly comforting him by saying ‘well, at least they can’t fire you now!’ It’s not that bad either though. Treat ‘Twice’ not as the big farewell but as an unexpected extra for both of them though and as a tribute to what Moffat still considered the best series in the universe (even after all the trials of making it) in an incredibly moving farewell speech at the episode’s premiere (easily the best thing he ever wrote) it’s a lovely extra indeed. Lightning might not quite strike twice but it nearly did and it’s nice to go back 709 episodes once and fill in a bit of continuity, with one last self-indulgent coda. Until the actual coda anyway: thirty seconds of screentime and already the Chris Chibnall era is off to a terrible start, the Tardis dropping The Doctor off randomly by opening doors in space for no reason and with just one very badly uttered line (oh brilliant!’), a whacking great continuity error (Dr 13’s shoes change style between shots) and camera angles that obscure what’s going on and make it hard to follow. Which after a story about the need to move on and grow come what may rather than look back is… unfortunate. Perhaps worst of all is that this effort was all for nothing when Chibnall decided to cancel having a Christmas story anyway, the brief clip of Dr 13 here the closest she ever comes to getting a full on festive tale of her own.
POSITIVES + Peter
Capaldi has really grown into the part
across this final year of work and he’s at near his peak here, finally nailing
all the contradictions at the heart of this character by making him rude to
individuals but caring about people as a whole – deliberately or not, the
opposite to how Russell T Davies seemed to see his time on the series. The 12th Doctor is indeed a good
man, but one that’s easily frustrated at how bad everyone else can be sometimes
(it’s perfectly in keeping that the actor admitted he was leaving partly
because he’d finally worked out how to play this part – and it scared him that
it was going to be ‘easy’ from now on rather than a challenge).
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: In
case you hadn’t already gathered, this story takes place in the middle of ‘The Tenth Planet’
episode four when the 1st Doctor has left the Antarctic base to go
outside and works best if you watch that story in tandem: as well as explaining
more about the 1st Doctor’s frailty it will show you that he wasn’t
the misogynist racist this story makes him out to be.
‘Never Seen Cairo’ (2004) is the unusual title of part
of the prose Short Trip anthology ‘A Christmas Treasury’ and features the
unique multi-Doctor pairing of the 7th Doctor travelling alone alongside
the 5th Doctor and Peri. Edward Woodbourne is a soldier in the
trenches in 1914 when an ‘officer’ comes in wounded and starts babbling about
his friend Peri. The pair talk and Edward mentions the ‘other’ life he should
have been having, travelling to Cairo with his wife. The 5th Doctor
offers him the chance in the Tardis but the soldier turns it down –his first
duty is to his men. You would have thought The Doctor would realise this after
his days with UNIT but instead The Doctor is appalled that he would rather stay
and fight. The football match then breaks out and The Doctor leaves. He later
learns that the soldier died on the battlefield so his 7th self
sends a message to his wife about how he died and that he was thinking of her.
A rather schmaltzy story this one, but then it is in rather a schmaltzy book,
one of the worst in the ‘Short Trips’ series.
The 1st Dr has already been at the front
alongside Steven and Sara Kingdom, in ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ (2010), a
festive ‘Short Trips’ from Big Finish set in the middle of ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’.
The Tardis has landed in London in 1885 and lands in front of a silent film set
where they’re watched by a young boy named Robert. The Doctor finds The Daleks
are on his tail so he keeps re-materialising to run away but somehow each time
the Tardis lands somewhere on Christmas Eve. One of these drop off points is
1914 and The Doctor and Steven head off to play football, while a tutting Sara
spots the same boy looking the exact same age. He shoots her – but she is
mysteriously unharmed. The Tardis next lands in 1956 in an orphanage on
Christmas Day where they meet the exact same boy, same age and everything. The
Doctor deduces (spoilers) that he’s not a time traveller as you’re meant to
think but an alien time machine that landed in 1966 then malfunctioned after a
curious Human boy wandered into it. The boy has been searching for his lost
twin ever since who died on Christmas Day, heading back to all the past Christmasses
in search of the person he could never find. The Doctor uses the taranium core
to reverse his age, then separates boy and machine, taking him back home so
that he can ‘be’ his twin (making up for the fact that he himself disappeared
from history in a timeline that can’t be changed) while the poorly boy is taken
off to see Mars and die in peace. Very Christmassy in all the best ways, being
a moving tale of the importance of family, with The Doctor able to give one
very special gift.
Previous ‘World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls’ next ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’
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