The Name Of the Doctor
(Series 7, Dr 11 with Clara, 18/5/2013, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Saul Metzstein)
Rank: 35
'So, err, Clara, about that trip through my past. Just do me a favour and forget that I was actually scared of The Quarks will you? And the Zarbi? And I won’t mention that unfortunate moment with The Abzorbaloff if you don’t. Or that I fancied someone who looked just like Kylie Minogue. And I'd be grateful if you could tell me what happened to your self that you sent back to Cambridge because I only have very bitty memories of that adventure as if it only half-happened. Most of all though Clara, please keep it quiet that my real name is Marjory Slopbucket, I would hate it if word of that got out - my enemies would never take me seriously again! Oh and what do you mean you met a version of me that lived in a lighthouse? And another whole bunch who looked just like a typical Dr Who production team of the 1970s in fancy dress? I think you’ve been on the wine gums there Clara, they definitely weren’t me!'
As brilliant as the official (TM) designated Dr Who 50th anniversary bonanza and ever-popular special ‘Day Of The Doctor’ was (it got released in cinemas and everything!) I always got the feeling that it was a story designed to hook in people who maybe weren’t that familiar with Dr Who or who maybe had a folk memory of the David Tennant stories and needed to catch up quick with everything that had happened since they’d stopped watching a few years earlier. It was, in so many ways, the sensible way to go, given that Dr Who’s ratings had just begun to tail off ever so slightly the last few years, giving fans just enough nostalgia to top up their Who-dopamine levels (particularly Tom Baker’s cameo at the end) but made more with a mind to all the people who might be jumping on the bus rather than the faithful who’d been onboard for decades, a party thrown for the powerful and influential rather than a ‘school reunion’ (in all senses of the phrase). That story’s prequel ‘The Name Of The Doctor’, though, that was the opposite: a huge indulgent treat for fans that was full of in-jokes and side-references and which through the wonders of modern technology breathed new life into old footage, recycled so that our latest ‘companion representative’ Clara could wander through the Doctor’s timelines keeping him safe. It’s a really sweet gesture from writer Steven Moffat as he pays tribute to our hero by having ‘us’ save ‘him’ for a change while giving us the chance to remember how far we’ve come in the gorgeous bits of old footage, lovingly updated, a sort of ‘thankyou’ from us to the character for half a century of keeping ‘us’ safe. For a series that’s mostly about change its odd how no other series makes you nostalgic in quite the same way that this one does. Had there been even more of this footage (as promised by the excellent trailer) this would have been a top ten story for sure.
Now ‘Name’ was billed as the sort of story that was going to break new ground for Who, a series finale that asked the big questions the series hadn’t got round to before, like The Doctor’s name. You see, The Great Intelligence has come to rather a wise conclusion that the biggest thing stopping him from taking over the universe is The Doctor (which seems a bit off after just three defeats, two of them forty off years apart, but hey despite the name he can be a bit thick sometimes) so he’s given The Doctor a stark and simple choice: reveal his real name and unlock the Tardis doors so his timelines can be re-written and have his friends forget him or watch his friends be destroyed out right. Either way he’s to be forced to watch while all the good he’s done around the universe is unravelled and we can already see signs of it when our friends from the Paternoster Gang turn on each other, having lost their memories of working together, the absence of the Doctor bringing out the worst in them (I like to think that The Intelligence has been stood at the entrance for years trying all manner of names. One wonders, too, if he ever tried ‘Theta Sigma’ which was presented to us as The Doctor’s name in a throwaway comment on ‘The Armageddon Factor’ in 1978. Was that really just a nickname then? Or are there simply no timelords left who might have heard The Doctor use it? Surely The Master scribbled it down somewhere though. Or is his name even sillier?) Only, as so often happens with Who, the Doctor ends up with a third option the villain didn’t see coming that changes everything we thought we knew about this series. It’s Moffat’s latest fairytale device since becoming showrunner, this time using ‘Rumplestiltskin’ as his template! Given that this is a 50th anniversary with promises of a huge revelation there’s a moment when you think we’re finally going to learn ‘what’s been hiding in plain sight’, the question at the heart of the series title (originally, of course, ‘Who’ itself was implied to be The Doctor’s name - see particularly ‘The War Machines’, although we can probably explain this away nowadays by saying that the computer WOTAN was clearly an early form of ai that just got stuff wrong). This is also the only Dr Who story to date inspired by a knock knock joke, often the first way unsuspecting children ever come across the series (You know the one: ‘Knock Knock’ ‘Who’s There?’ ‘Doctor’ ‘Doctor Who?’ ‘You just said it, Ahahahaha my sides). The Doctor is faced with an impossible choice as his friends are held to ransom if he doesn’t reveal it. Of course Moffat’s just a big tease and it’s all a ruse. In the end a hologram River whispers The Doctor’s name when everybody’s shouting at each other so we never get to hear it. However, despite the build-up and the episode title ‘Name Of The Doctor’ is not really about that mystery at all: it’s a story that doesn’t break new ground so much as go over old ground (often quite literally) in a very sweet and reverential way, hastily backing out of all those promised revelations at the finale and all the better for it: this is by a writer who was enough of fan to know that Who had tried to give the Doctor’s real name as long ago as 1978 and that the few fans who’d actually noticed hadn’t liked it, while also being a writer smart enough to know that the mystery is part of a reason why we keep watching.
After all, there’s a much
more interesting and newer mystery than the Doctor’s name at the heart of this
story and it concerns not the Doctor but his companion. Clara is unique in that
she was sold to us from the first as an ‘unknown’, where neither the Doctor nor
us knew where she quite fit into his life – they tried it a little bit with
Donna and Turlough in the past, making us unsure as to what they were doing and
what threat they might pose to our hero, but those mysteries were something
that grew across a series arc (namely ‘how come Donna keeps turning up in the
Doctor’s life?’ and ‘how did someone whose so obviously an alien and an adult end
up living in an English public school?’ A mystery never fully answered);
everyone else who meets her, including the Paternoster Gang, are intrigued by
Clara too - it’s only Clara herself whose convinced she’s ‘normal’. You see, for
those who somehow start their reviews here, Clara had three separate ‘debuts’,
each one with different names living in different time-streams and none of whom
know about the others, dying in two of them. The 11th Dr’s curiosity doesn’t
need much excuse to kick into gear and he’s spent a whole series now trying to
work out who she really is. Here we are, at the end of the year, fourteen
episodes after we first saw Jenna Coleman playing…someone and we still don’t
know who she is. It’s a carrot that’s been dangling since we met her under a
different name and she died, then the same name when she died, and the amount
of mysteries that have followed her around ever since. By now The Doctor’s
convinced that she’s either another timelord or a superhero or maybe a
super-villain and it’s been tough watching this most trusting and in many ways
naïve of Doctors struggle over whether to trust this girl who possesses all the
qualities he looks for in a companion: kind, brave, curious and up for
anything. He’s been so lonely for so long after losing Amy and Rory, though, that
the years have taken their toll, the light and darker sides of The Doctor’s
nature running through the second half of series five like a stick of rock
(incidentally the best scene in the entire story and the one that sums up The
11th Doctor better than anything is when we cut from The Great
Intelligence pulling out everything to stop this monster he hates so much and
cutting to the Doctor playing blind man’s buff with two children that have
defied his rules and run off to the pictures while he can’t see them: the
oncoming storm hoodwinked by a couple of pre-teens: That’s The Doctor right
there, especially this one). Is the
answer going to be good or bad? Is Clara just going to break his hearts again?
Or worse is he going to break hers by getting into something she can’t get out
of? After all, he’s seen her die twice on his watch already; for The Doctor
it’s the equivalent of meeting Adric in ‘Earthshock’ then bumping into him in
‘Full Circle’ with a dash of River Song all over again: how do you stay in the
moment and celebrate what you have when you know that at some point it’s all
going to end? More than any other showrunner in an anniversary year Moffat has
actually sat down and properly thought about how meeting his other selves, of
being reminded by his ever present past, would affect The Doctor. For how do
you write a nostalgic piece about a character who hates looking back and whose
far more interested in what’s ahead of him than what’s behind him? But, so
‘name. finally confirms, a sad ending doesn’t take away from a happy book,
merely enhances how strong the happy bits were when they’re taken away. It’s
all part of the same story intricately linked and can’t be separated. I love
the fact that, after all this time of worrying about who she might turn out to
be, Clara turns out to be what he wanted all along: a really good friend,
nothing more nothing less. And best friends sacrifice for each other, know all
our hidden secrets and all our many selves and past history (with The Doctor
having more than most) and loves us unconditionally, even though they know who
we used to be and all the people we nearly became.After a lifetime of helping other people in
other eras and making them better, through multiple lives himself, Moffat
switches things around so that the people around The Doctor sacrifice themselves
for him and make him a better person. Clara’s background also mirrors Rivers’ so
well: The Doctor’s wife gave up all her remaining generations to save The
Doctor in ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’; now his friend lives out remaining generations
to save him. It’s neat and very clever, very satisfying writing.
It’s been established
that the Tardis travelling in space unpicks the tiniest of holes in the fabric
of time and space (‘scar tissue’ the Doctor calls it) and being in one place
for so long means they’ve ‘leaked’. So Clara saves her friend by doing what
fans everywhere secretly long to do and throw herself into a Dr Who story, selflessly
hurling herself into the void, diving into the Doctor’s timelines to keep him
safe and splintering into a million different selves, each one tasked with
keeping a different Doctor alive at a different part of his timeline. At last,
after all those thousands of years of the Doctor becoming Earth’s unofficial
Guardian Angel, with the series playing up a lot lately how lonely he’s become
watching companions wither, marry or die without him, he finally gets one in return
as Clara offers his younger selves support, advice or love just when they need
it. This is a series that always spends so much time evolving and moving
forward that it’s always a thrill when stories refer back to past ones as part
of the plot – when the Doctor’s being mind probed for his memories, or warning
aliens off from invading the Earth with footage of what could happen to them,
or as part of his regeneration looking back nostalgically on the past. But ‘The
Name Of The Doctor’ makes the chance to use old footage a really integral part
of the plot and it does it with such reverence and care it feels special and
nostalgic in all the best ways without being self-indulgent. Of all the special
effects in Dr Who history none give me quite the same goosebumps as the way
they managed to fit Clara seamlessly into the old familiar footage we fans know
and love so well, most of it based around Gallifrey in some way as a sort of
foreshadow of the role the Dr’s home planet will play in the 50th special to
come: that’s Clara hinting to the 1st Dr which Tardis he should steal on
Gallifrey (in colour too, thanks to some hand-tinting to footage cleverly
recycled out of context from ‘The Aztecs’
and Hartnell’s lines taken from ‘The Web Planet’), the 2nd and 3rd Doctors
being picked up by the ‘timescoop’ in 20th anniversary special ‘The Five Doctors’ (with new greenscreen
footage using the actual Bessie model from the Lakeland Motor Museum), the 4th
Doctor fending off an invasion of Gallifrey in ‘The
Invasion Of Time’, the 5th Doctor caught in the matrix in ‘Arc Of Infinity’ and the 7th Dr dangling
from a cliff in ‘Dragonfire’ (though
sadly there’s still no real reason why he’s doing that in the first place!) As
a sign of just how much the writer loves this series each one was carefully
laid out in the original script: these aren’t just cases of using any old
footage in post-production.
Oddly there’s no actual footage
of the other Doctors used – we see a double in the 6th Dr’s costume striding
down a white corridor, perhaps from some unseen adventure never show on screen
during the ‘abandoned’ season 23, doubles stand in for the 8th Doctor
watching the 10th Doctor in a sort of library (what story was that?!
Come on ‘Big Finish’ do your stuff and fill in this continuity hole pronto!), and
only the briefest glimpse of the 9th Doctor due to Moffat’s
agreement not to use Christopher Eccleston’s image in a special he didn’t want
to be a part of (though Chris had been happy enough to use an image like this
be used), future Doctors tantalisingly just out of shot. We also don’t know exactly
how Clara got involved with The Doctor’s past: was it by stopping the Intelligence’s
plan without him noticing? Or did she
speak to The Doctor off camera 9as shown the only one who even knows she’s
there is the 1st Doctor – and it’s a plothole that the 11th
Doctor doesn’t recognise Clara as the girl who told him about the Tardis, which
admittedly was an awful long time ago but was an event that changed his entire
life). And then, as the Dr walks into his own timestream to rescue Clara when
she gets lost (that must give him a headache!), she bumps into a version of the
Dr that we’ve never heard about before, setting up the story of ‘The War
Doctor’ for the special. (still uncast when this story was written and indeed
filmed – the last scene was filmed as part of ‘Day
Of the Doctor’ – the script had a placeholder that read ‘The world’s most
famous actor turns around, revealed as The Doctor’).
The danger in the modern
internet age with setting a story up as a sort of huge mystery like this across
a whole year is the risk of a fan somewhere online guessing what you’re up to.
The Dr Who fan base is big and wide and often very very clever: I you’ve set up
an entire series arc around one mystery that was guessed in week one by a
cleaner from Hull that’s not going to keep people watching. Speculation was
rife too with such an ambiguous mystery: Clara had been cloned, she’s a robot,
she’s really a Dalek in all her personas (not just the first time we meet her in
‘Asylum’), she’s another timelord, she’s
Susan, she’s the Rani, she’s River Song regenerated again, she’s The Meddling
Monk (all that playing with time, see!), she’s the Valeyard; she’s a new
villain we haven’t even met yet; she’s the Doctor’s future self come back to
help him (not a past one we’ve never heard of though: that would be silly);
she’s a new enemy from the future sent back to stop him. Basically for anyone
watching at the time Clara was the Rosarch blot of Dr Who: every fan had a pet
theory and whatever your answer was said a lot about you (me, I thought she was
a female version of The Master and so was completely wrong but imagine my
surprise when Missy turned up the following year!) Most of the answers by fans
who’d been watching this series for decades and knew all the ins and outs had
her as an enemy or a ‘trap’ of some sort who’d been brainwashed, but the truth
is so much sweeter than that: she’s a friend, nothing more nothing less. For
‘Name’ is a story that’s primarily about friendship and how it works both ways.
When The Doctor was in grief and mourning first Amy and Rory then Victorian
Clara The Paternoster Gang took him in and in one of the story’s best speeches
‘never questioned me, never judged me, were always there for me, they were
just…kind’, the most anyone could ask for in a friendship. The downside is that
The Doctor’s friendship makes him easy to manipulate, with The Great
Intelligence kidnapping them and luring The Doctor somewhere he knows is a
trap. It’s by being kind to Clara though, of saving her life all those times
(erm, we won’t mention those times he didn’t!), that means she doesn’t think
twice about effectively killing herself to save him, over and over and over
again. All those times The Doctor’s put the universe right for other people and
here someone else is putting things right to save him for a change. It’s a
lovely sweet moment, as if the audience too (for the companion was always
created as a sort of ‘audience identification person’) is saving The Doctor now
too. Given that the story is about to lead into an adventure about the time war
(which Russell T Davies sort of wrote to be a metaphor for the show’s
cancellation and the ‘wilderness years’ when the show wasn’t on the air) it
also feels like a metaphor for the fanbase who loved this character so much
they kept his flame alive, refused to let his detractors unravel all the good
work of the series and kept writing about him. The moment when The Doctor
appears out of nowhere, through the fog and haze of the ‘missing years’ after
the 8th Doctor, to save Clara, feels like 2005 and The Doctor
returning to our screens. Well maybe: that’s the great thing about ‘Name’ –
it’s a story that we were promised was going to give us definitive quantative
answers but instead is much more about letting the viewer draw their own
conclusions, specific where it needs to be but ambiguous in all the best ways.
One of the things that’s
so clever about ‘Name’ is that it builds on ‘Turn Left’ by showing us just how
much the universe needs The Doctor, a story about the power of the Doctor told
mostly through his absence (as if to make up for this next time out we’ll be
getting three of him!) When The Great Intelligence unravels The Doctor’s
timelines his threaten isn’t merely to kill him but to undo all of the
timelord’s good work. All those victories are overturned, all those people
saved unsaved, all those characters who became better versions of themselves
simply through being around The Doctor. For those who’ve been here for the
journey, however long, we know all those stories that can be undone, all those
rights that will be wronged, what the universe might be like if evil wins over
good. It will be a universe swarming with Daleks for starters. They can’t show
that on screen (not on this slashed budget) but they can at least hint at it. The
most harrowing scenes come from Vastra, Strax and Jenny either disappearing
dead or turning on one another, their base instincts giving way and the added
threat that this is going on all over the universe as the healing stitches of
the universe so carefully sewn up by The Doctor are torn apart. It’s a very Moffat
solution to a very Moffat conundrum too: The Doctor becomes intrigued by Clara after
meeting her and watching her die twice so he tracks the real her down. Only it’s
because he tracked her down and she became friends with him that she went back
into his past at all, creating a paradox (ow which came first, the chicken or
the egg? The milk or the soufflé?)
As with so many of the
storylines since Steven Moffat took over really this is a story all about
grieving, one that makes you want to ask what on Earth happened to make him
come up with storylines like this? You could, if you wanted to look at it that
way, see ‘The Name Of The Doctor’ as something bad trying to take your past
away from you, turn all your happy memories into sad ones, over-write every
moment of joy with moments of pain and sadness, as happens when you lose someone
you really love and even your happy memories of them are too painful to think
about. This story is presented to us as The Doctor never properly taking the
time to heal all the awful things that have happened to him and all the people
he’s lost. He’s just got on with the job, moved on to the next people who need
saving in the next planet and been so busy healing other people that he’s never
taken time to heal himself. Suddenly The Great Intelligence, the source of
mourning when he killed Clara in ‘The Abominable Snowman’, has unpicked all his
healing strategies and undone all the good he ever did. Even the idea of our
past travels being like ‘scar tissue’ that’s slowly healed over simply by
‘getting on with life’ and ‘moving on’
and can be unpicked by something nasty (as The Great Intelligence surely
is) must surely be a metaphor for grief. By splintering herself in his
timelines Clara effectively becomes a ‘ghost, an echo’, not really here anymore
(because she’s no longer alive in the ‘present’ but basically just a ‘memory’,
albeit several billion of them, maybe one for each adventure he’s ever had –
including Big Finish and the comic strips maybe? I’d love to think there’s a
version of Clara who prevented The Trods becoming true intergalactic killers).
Even before that there’s the ‘astral plane’, the dream state of the
subconsciousness where you can still talk even in the process of being murdered
(poor Jenny!) and where old friends can still talk to you and give you advice
(River). It’s a new twist on Moffat’s tradition of ‘everybody lives’ that even
death can’t prevent them popping up in the series. The Doctor’s spent his life
moving forward and never looking back (except when a story makes him, usually
an anniversary one) There’s the sub-plot of River Song too, here in hologram
form from ‘Silence In The Library’, and The Doctor’s struggles to give her a
proper goodbye. ‘You know how it is when you lose someone’ The Doctor says ‘you
create a back-up’. He tells her that he
knows she is always there but doesn’t talk to her because ‘it would hurt too
much’. Talking to River directly means saying goodbye properly and he’s not
ready to let her go yet so he keeps her around as a ‘backup copy’ in his head,
there to talk to when he needs to, at least until Clara shows him that it’s
alright to confront his past. Anyone whose ever lost anyone close to them and
would rather sit with a version of them in their head ever than totally 100%
admit they’re gone will know where this story is coming from. Dr Who as grief
counselling: that’s new.
In fact this is all new
territory for Who which doesn’t usually spend this much time wondering what The
Doctor is thinking (indeed the first seven were pretty much impenetrable on
that score: it’s only with Paul McGann The Doctor began blurting his feelings
out). He’s delighted to have found Clara but terrified as well. We even see him
cry when Clara mentions that the threat is on Trenzalore, the story building on
‘Revelation Of The Daleks’ with the idea that somewhere, out there, The Doctor
knows where he’s buried and where his gravestone is (building on this quite
brilliantly by turning his grave into the Tardis, dying without its owner so
the dimensional circuits are melting away (Matt Smith’s weary ‘what else would
they bury me in?’ line dripping with centuries of irony is one of his best
moments in the series) – it’s a real
shame the original plan in the draft script to have this resembling Salvador
Dali’s melted clocks is barely seen on screen as it’s a great idea. Was there
no budget left or did the final design simply look stupid?) The Doctor never
cries. But then The Doctor’s never come this close to absolute death before:
this Doctor knows he’s the last one barring a miracle (which is what he gets
two stories down the road in ‘Time Of The Doctor’) and he’s always known he
would end up here one day. He really does face death in a way that he never
really has before (‘Logopolis’ comes closest, Moffat admitting to Dr Who
Magazine that he was aiming for the same sort of funeralaic doom-laden air, a
deliberate contrast after a run of episodes he considered ‘frothy’). In a vast majority
of Dr Who stories you absolutely know that The Doctor is going to save the day
at the last minute and for any fans who’ve jumped on board since ‘The End Of Time’ they’ve only ever seen The
Doctor win (eventually at least). It’s quite a shock to see him so weak, so
lost, so helpless. And after years of series where we see The Doctor rescue
people who would be lost without him we also see how lost he would be without
his friends. This lonely exiled wandering traveller who thought he was going to
be buried is instead saved by the people he saved in turn. Other Moffat stories
can often feel like chess pieces, the narration too far removed from the people
in it so that we learn to think like The Doctor and use our head in a story
rather than our heart. Not this one: even though it’s as intelligent a script
as any in the series it’s the emotions you remember this one for, the whacking
big heart where The Doctor thinks he’s going to his death and instead gets not
even regenerated but rejuvenated (the name The Doctor himself uses the first
time it happens in ‘Power Of The Daleks’). You really feel it especially in the great
scene where The Tardis crash-lands on Trenzalore, breaking its glass window
(presumably regenerated later), a big noisy flash-bang effects-heavy sequence
to interrupt all the talking that’s a delight and actually works furthering the
plot too (Knowing how clumsy he was Matt was warned not to swing on the Tardis
handrails amidst all the explosions because of how ricketty the set was but
forgot and did it anyway!) They saved
most of the money for this scene and it shows.
Despite being such a sad
and melancholy script ‘name’ fairly crackles with gags too though, being one of
Moffats funniest in places. As a kid from
paisley Moffat laughs at Scottish culture in the scene where Strax the squat
argumentative Sontaron is totally at home in a Glasgow pub, none of the people
around him finding him strange. I love the scene of Clara and River
accidentally insulting each other without meaning to, River hurt that The
Doctor has replaced her and Clara hurt that he had a ‘special relationship’
with River that he doesn’t have with her (Vastra too is horrified at the faux
pas she’s accidentally caused, given that she’s a respectable Victorian lady,
with the line that she’s ‘blushing a deeper shade of green’ one of the laugh
out lines of the series). There’s the neat injoke from ‘Sherlock’, Moffat’s ‘other’
series, about The Doctor figuring that one day he thought he would retire and
keep bees but he reached the end of his days too quick (it’s what the Detective
did in ‘His Last Bow’; incidentally that story too is delivered to fans as ‘the
final end’, meant to make you think the detective was being killed off, but
wasn’t. Conan-Doyle’s books are the one Moffat always points to when people
complain about him mucking around with people’s deaths because, ironically
enough, the very last Sherlock story is the only end of a series where the
detective isn’t thought dead or missing at least for part of it, given that
Conan Doyle wanted to kill the character off and write about something else
before the public had other ideas). There’s
another cute in-joke from our other old friend ‘Quatermass’ with the line ‘She’s
been dead for a very long time’, even though this is one of the handful of Who
scripts that isn’t based on Quatermass somewhere! I love Strax’s line rallying
his troops that ‘They’re unarmed’ to which Jenny admits ‘So are we’ causing Strax to add ‘Do not
divulge our military secrets!’ even though it’s obvious. The best lines though
are poignant as well as funny: Strax is lying to the enemy, pretending to be
healthier than he is and rallying his troops after the Intelligence has stopped
his heart temporarily. ‘I have always found the heart a relatively simple thing’
he cries. ‘I have not found it so’ sighs Vastra. Such a clever line, two very
different people talking about the same thing in two very different ways,
though both feel the same emotions its just that one is in denial and
pretending at the time. Plus of course the big joke: The Doctor is exactly the
sort of person who’d be late to his own funeral. Or indeed arriving there in
the wrong order! There’s another gag added by the set painter who sneaked his
own unlikely but real name ‘Clemency Bunn’, onto one of the gravestones – of
course a downside of all this cleverness is that people see things that you didn’t
mean; lots of people took that as a clue for the next story and were
disappointed it didn’t involve a bakery!
The result is a story
that plays to all of showrunner Steven Moffat’s strengths: the way he plays
with time in the natural way his predecessors played around with space, creating
mysteries and leaving clues, showing us things in the ‘wrong’ order. Usually we
see things from the companions’ point of view and it’s the Doctor that has all
the answers to what’s going on (‘The
Pandorica Opens’ for one) but here he’s as confused as everybody else. ‘The
Name Of the Doctor’ is, you see, presented to us mid re-write, with some of the
stories we’ve had so far this year coming from a pre-Name timeline and the rest
from after, when Clara is back in his past and holding it together with advice
and superglue. Ever since the beginning The Doctor has been adamant about his
companions not re-writing history ‘not one line’ as there are set points in
time that have to happen that way. What a perfect crime for The Great
Intelligence to be committing, then, as he pulls The Doctor’s timelines apart
at the seams and changes not just any history but The Doctor’s own. It’s a
clever idea that builds on Moffat’s semi-official not-quite-canon stories in the
past like the charity specials ‘Curse Of Fatal Death’ and ‘TimeCrash’ that play
around with time and the idea of going back to rewrite your history (in the
former The Doctor keeps nipping back in time to make all The Master’s plans
backfire on him while falling not into a pit of doom but a ‘sofa of reasonable
comfort’; in the latter Drs 5 and 10, father-in-law and son-in-law, collide
head on and get to laugh at each other mid-adventure), works that show that
Steven was a Who fan before he ever became a Who writer, someone who ‘gets’
this series the same as we do, gently poking fun at Dr Who’s sometimes wonky
internal logic but clearly with a lot of love behind the barbs. No to mention
thinking of this show as a sort of five-dimensional chess game where other writers
only use three or four (or sometimes one) and the daftness of a series that’s
forever re-writing its own history. In many ways ‘Name Of the Doctor’ is his
cleverest script, juggling the weight of all that history by showing how our
presents are shaped by our pasts all the time and how everything we did has
brought to where we are now. This story allows us to see Clara communicate with
past Doctors as if they’re all the same and the big reveal turns out to be not
The Doctor’s name (which was always a cheat!) but the fact that the series
started because of Clara and her suggestion to the 1st Doctor which
Tardis he should steal (‘the navigation system’s knackered but you’ll have much
more fun’ she says – it’s wonder the 1st
Doctor listened given how much he used to pull his companions up for using
slang words!) It also ties in nicely with the series arc, solving a mystery
that’s run since Christmas. And it points to the future by setting up the 50th
special when Clara comes across a ‘hidden’ Doctor that goes by a different name
and has never been mentioned until now, The War Doctor, neatly setting up yet
another mystery to come.
It’s a very clever, very
moving way of involving old Doctors in the sort-of anniversary special part one
as well, neatly joining the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ in a way that makes everything
seem like part of one long story arc that’s very Steven Moffat and built up
such a launchpad for the special that it couldn’t help but fly in a way that
warmed the hearts of many of us oldie fans. However ‘Day Of The Doctor’ only
had room to celebrate the ‘modern’ series; ‘Name’ celebrates it all and is all
the better for it. Traditionally centring a story round nostalgia and
continuity references is a bad move, as anyone whose sat through some of the
dialogue from the repetitive 5th Doctor stories especially will tell you.
However, if you can’t do that at a 50th birthday bash then when can you? And
it’s all done with such skill and panache, one of the cleverest ideas one of Who’s
cleverest writers ever came up with and a story that right up to near the
closing credits is near-perfect. I just hoped we were going to get even more
bits of old footage in the special they work so well here and the scenes are
sadly all too brief so even the most hardened fan misses bits unless they pay
close attention (‘Don’t even blink!’ indeed, another Moffat trademark; the
first draft did indeed start with Clara dreaming all her meetings with past
Doctors and wondering who or indeed ‘Who’ they were, which ran for longer and
with more interaction, which is also why this script has so many other
references to ‘dreams’ in it later).
Of course it’s not quite
perfect as few things ever are. The Whisper Men are atrocious, yet more Moffat
baddies who stand around not doing much (except raising their arms and stopping
hearts) and who look like they were made up from the leftovers in the jukebox.
We don’t get to learn about their background or where they get their powers or
whether they have any sentient life at all outside The Great Intelligence (they
might as well have been Yeti or the Snowmen again for all the difference it
makes to the plot). They look, in fact, like Sao Til, the ‘monster’ competition
winner created by Tim Ingham in the John barrowman series ‘where dreams come
true’ ‘Tonight’s The Night’ that ran between 2009-2011 and often featured
crossovers with his ‘other’ series. There are quite a few problems with the
plot that prevent it from being actually perfect and uniquely they all happen
because of what happens after the story ends: what happens to The Great Intelligence
after The War Doctor turns up? To date we’ve never seen him again. Why doesn’t
he simply wait and then undo all of Clara’s patches again when The Doctor saves
her? You’d think at the very least he’d be out for revenge. What happens to the
Paternoster gang who are left stranded on Trenzalore? Normally that sort of
thing wouldn’t matter as much but this is a story that’s gone out of its way to
show how good friends never stop thinking about each other, so why doesn’t he
at least think to go…’oops’? How come Clara only meets The War Doctor when the
story needs hers to? (He has quite the lifespan given the Big Finish range!) It
would have helped if there was just one scene that established what happened to
the Great Intelligence and how the Dr ended up leaving Trenzalore, not to
mention what happens when the Paternoster Gang find they’ve been trying to kill
each other – you suspect Strax won’t be too happy about that even if he was
killing the others too - but no, nothing. Also how bad a nanny is Clara if she
just abandons the two Maitland children to go off on this adventure – yes The
Doctor’s in trouble and all that jazz but they’re pre-teens alone at the
pictures. Who knows what else The Great Intelligence could do to them? (really
for someone who spends all her careers working with children Clara really isn’t
very sure how to act around them at all, aiming for Mary Poppins in her
interactions with them but coming off more, well, P L Travers and scaring them).
So many lose ends are left dangling needlessly: as much as ‘name’ shows off the
best of Moffat it also occasionally shows off the worst such as the moments
where the writer suddenly had a new idea that made him really excited and in
his haste to dive right into the new idea of the War Doctor he forgot to tidy
all his Dr Who toys away. The beginning of this special, with all the old
footage, made it feel as if the whole story was going to cleverly intertwine past
and present that way but it doesn’t, not quite, once again a truly amazing
drop-dead brilliant replaced by one that’s merely very good It looks from the end of this story as if the
special’s going to lead directly from this one, but all it really does is
introduce us to the concept of ‘The War Doctor’ without having to spend half
the special giving us his back-story. AS aesthetically pleasing as it is for
The Doctor to grab holo-River’s arm how does he do that exactly? He never
answers her when she asks (even The Doctor can’t interrupt the law of physics…well
not normally anyway).
Richard E Grant is also
annoyingly stiff and rigid in this story just as he was in ‘The Snowmen’, without
the gravitas to be the threat the plot needs him to be or as a match to Wolfe
Morris’ whispering in the bodiless sentient being’s original appearance in 1967
(he makes for a better Doctor than a villain in ‘Scream
Of The Shalka’). For a ‘Great Intelligence’ the script calls on him to be
pretty thick too a lot of the time: does he really not see the big twist coming?
Has it never occurred to him that if he can meddle with The Doctor’s timelines
then someone else could too? It’s also fair to say that, once the mystery of
Clara is resolved, she ends up being one of the blander companions around, a
mere human living an ordinary life: by rights it would have been the perfect
end to her story arc if she’d perished here saving her friends (although I can
see why they wouldn’t have wanted to start the anniversary special off on such
a downer: if nothing else keeping her on was a practical decision as for a
while Matt Smith’s contract had run out here and it was feared he might be off
doing other things; what with Tennant dithering and Eccleston out already they
needed some consistency for the big special and Clara was the only person
actually confirmed for it until late on in the day). This would have been an
even more clever story to with a bit of tweaking not to this script but the
ones before it, better threading in the mysteries of Clara sort-of knowing
other Doctors, or having Trenzalore mentioned in more stories than just ‘The
Snowmen’, or banging on about her mum’s soufflé recipe which is rather clumsily
dropped in here (the idea, I think, is that a part of our heritage follows us through
past lives such as a recipe handed down from a grandmother, with The Doctor’s
past selves like parents or grandparents in a family tree still affecting the
present and that it’s this thought that lingers in Clara’s brain as he makes
her jump, but that doesn’t really come across. Instead it just seems as if she’s
suddenly got the munchies).
Mostly though those are
problems in the future or past because the brilliant ideas raised in this story
are botched later on or not raised early enough – at the time taken on its own
merits this was one of the most thrilling and tense Dr Who stories of them all,
one that had the Doctor face a bigger threat than even he normally did and
which resolved it in a highly clever, inventive way. This story must have been pure
hell to write: it needs to work as a standalone story, as part of a series arc,
as a lead in to the special (that can still be understood by people who haven’t
seen this one) and offer enough for newcomers and old-timers alike to follow,
harking back to the very beginnings while firmly tying things up from this
particular year…phew! The fact it manages to do all that seamlessly while
offering us so much more than the basics is one of Moffat’s great triumphs,
even more than the special to come. It’s Moffat’s best episode. It’s not his
cleverest (that’s arguably the ‘Astronaut’ five parter in series six), not his most
emotional (‘Silence In The Library’), not his most dramatic or standalone (‘Blink’)
but it is the best example of him delivering a really clever intricate crossword
puzzle, cryptic in the extreme (just look at that tease: ‘the Doctor has a
secret he will take to his grave. It is discovered’. Well, yes The Doctor does
take it to his grave because he goes there. But its his grave that’s
discovered, not his secret) with all the clues there for us to solve, without
losing sight of the bigger picture that this is a drama about ‘real’ (or at
least real-seeming) people. In turn it allows everyone else to get on with the
job of what they do best, with a solid script that brings out the best in them.
Matt Smith gets to look intense and worried, in stark contrast to his physical
clowning around in previous story ‘Closing
Time’, while Jenna Coleman was never better than plucking up her courage to
face certain death to help save her friend in times past. Yes ‘The Day Of The
Doctor’ has more thrills and spills and is clearly the story better designed
for the spotlight but if you know your Who then ‘The name Of The Doctor’ is
even better, a story that better than any other sums up why this character and
what he does matters as much as it does. ‘Name’ might not have been an
‘official’ anniversary story but whatever the billing is still my favourite of
the ‘birthday treats’ across sixty years, a rare exercise in nostalgia that
still treads new ground and offers up something epic across time and space no
other show with their bitesize formats and narrow visions could ever have
delivered. This show is special for oh so many wonderful reasons, many of which
are set out right here, a story which leaves you punching the air after every
twist because you didn’t think any writer could be that clever. Sometimes it’s
great being a fan of a show this big and this wonderful and this ambitious, one
which still keeps finding new ways to surprise you. What other series would
still be teasing us with secrets fifty years in? And what other series would
then make the secrets the least important part of a new story that’s really
about trust, despite the secrets we keep from each other?
POSITIVES + The
Paternoster Gang sound like the punchline to a joke (a Silurian, a Human and a
Sontaron walk into a pub in Victorian London...) but over their handful of
appearances have become a real team of friends and misfits, their very
different skills complementing each other perfectly (Madame Vastra is the
brains, Jenny the arms and Strax the trigger finger). They’re exactly the brave
band of misfits the Doctor needs behind him in this story, a reminder of how he
manages to inspire the best out of everyone he meets and the scene where they
turn on each other as the natural enemies they are after so long as true allies
is gut-wrenching, a neat shorthand for all the other good things the Doctor
caused on other planets around the universe that would unravel if his
timestream was re-written. Sadly this is the Gang’s penultimate appearance and
they don’t quite seem themselves in the 12th Dr’s debut ‘Deep Breath’ – it’s a real shame the
show didn’t do more with them.
Another is horror:
talking of which another prequel released as a DVD/blu-ray exclusive is ‘Clara
and The Whispermen’, which feels even more like a cut scene. The backstory of
how The Great Intelligence’s underling
Clarence De Marco went mad, it makes the token monsters of the episode seems
far scarier than anything they did inside the 45minutes, saving Clarence’s life
from hanging but instead burning the Gallifreyan symbols of the Doctor’s name
into his brain. ‘What kind of men are you?’ a terrified Clarence asks. ‘We are
not men, we are the Intelligence’ is the reply. Nasty!
‘He Said She Said’ is a
more traditional prequel, broadcast in two parts on the BBC’s red button
channel in the week leading up to ‘Name’ and later included on the DVD and
blu-ray. Divided into two parts, Clara’s story and The Doctor’s story, it fills
viewers who maybe aren’t quite up to speed on the different feelings and mutual
confusion of the two main characters leading up to the big finale and acts as a
sort of ‘character bible’ of the type David Whittaker used to write for his
characters but actually spoken out loud not written. Clara on the Doctor: ‘He’s
brilliant and funny and mad and best of all he really needs you’ before
admitting that she’s stopped asking questions she really needs to know and asks
a n immobile Doctor ‘Where are you from, where are you going and what is your
name?’) before saying she finally got answers at Trenzalore (or did she?...)
The Doctor on Clara: ‘We’re running together and she’s perfect for me in every
way – except she can’t remember that we ever met’, but how did she possibly die
twice saving him and come back to life? Maybe she’s too perfect? Well written,
with all the Moffat trademarks you’d expect, but it feels at times more like a
press release in video form than anything vital and there are a few false notes
in there: Where exactly are we? (This is a room we’ve never seen before,
presumably in the Tardis but with props that shouldn’t be there – is this the
BBC props room or the Tardis shoe cupboard?), Who are these two talking to
(fans moan about the characters breaking the fourth wall in 2024 but that’s
nothing on this story – is it in their heads? In which ase why are they
speaking out loud?) and Clara talks at one stage about how ‘the trick’ is to
‘not fall in love’, a plot element that never really went anywhere (they very
much stay friends, despite the flirting going on in a few stories).
The odd one out on this
list, ‘A Hyperspace Bodyswap Ticket’ is the official title of that year’s Dr
Who prom minisode by Steven Moffat broadcast in August and the means by which
the Doctor and Clara stow into the Royal Albert Hall, replacing two of the
audience members (I hope they got a refund). The minisiode starts off outside,
with Clara as cross as we’ve ever seen her (apparently not getting tickets to
the proms is on a par with being chased by Tardis magma monsters and being
screamed at - with any other companion that might not work but Clara’s always
had odd priorities). Clara’s more worried about the audience being deleted than
he is, weirdly (though later we find out they just appear again a few streets
away, naked) to which the Doctor replies that it’s easier than ‘just sitting in
their lap’ (nd a risqué joke about how the audience probably wouldn’t mind in
Clara’s case). Their compensation: jammie dodgers, a billion billion pounds,
immortality, x-ray vision, a space bus, an electric camel, the legal right to
marry fifteen people and an apartment that’s bigger on the inside and the
outside (take mine Doctor: I mean, I like the proms but…)The Doctor makes it,
with a typically eccentric appearance on the middle of the stage, having
swapped the conductor’s baton for a sonic screwdriver (note Matt Smith’s killer
haircut, as he was filming a role for the rather disappointing ‘realist
fairytale’ film ‘Lost River’ at the time, covered in the dialogue by the
bodyswap ticket coming from a rip-off ticket tout!) Clara ends up in the
orchestra, playing the double bass. Very very silly and totally contradictory
of just about every Dr Who story ever, but great fun.
Previous ‘Nightmare In Silver’ next ‘The Day Of The Doctor’
