The Eleventh Hour: Ranking - 4

 

The Eleventh Hour

(Series 5, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 3/4/2010, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Adam Smith)

Rank: 4

   'Favourite foods of the other post-regenerative Drs we never got to seeon screen: 

1st Dr: ate Vitalite with the Sensorites 

2nd Dr: Ice cream with the Ice Warriors 

3rd Dr: A time-scoop while reversing the polarity of his nutri-grain bar 

4th Dr: Jelly Babies and custard 

5th Dr: Kinda Egg 

6th Dr: French Toast on Varos 

7th Dr: The Curd of Fenric 

8th Dr: A Sarnie on Sarn 

9th Dr: A 'Rose' chocolate out a tin of quality street 

10th Dr: A spoon of tuna with the Judoona 

12th Dr: Angel Delight with the Weeping Angels 

13th Dr: Lemons Of The Punjab'

When Russell T Davies reluctantly stepped down from running the greatest show in the galaxy there was only one obvious successor: Steven Moffat knew what it was like to run highly successful TV series and had been involved with Dr Who in some form ever since the hiatus, combining the two by having his breakout star Julia Sawalha (from the superlative teenage journalists show ‘Press Gang’ about the redemptive power of the written word, which even featured Michael Jayston playing a Valeyard-like Dr Who character named ‘Colonel X’ – following the revelations in ‘The Timeless Children’ I’m claiming it as canon) appear as the companion in beloved Dr Who skit ‘A Curse Of Fatal Death’ in 1999. Other people laughing at Dr Who felt like bullying, but here was someone who clearly felt the same way that we did and filled his script with as lot of love in between the jokes about the Doctor and master nipping back in time to outdo each other while relaxing on the sofa of reasonable comfort). Moffat had gone on to write some of the most beloved stories of the comeback, with a highly distinctive timey wimey writing voice of his own that still slotted nicely into old friend Russell’s vision for the show as a more emotional, character-driven series than in days of old. He was as close to a second safe pair of hands as a show this big and this unwieldy could ever have. Yet I confess to feeling a huge deal of trepidation at his takeover: we weren’t just changing showrunner but the doctor and had a new bunch of companions to get to know too. The last time Who had tried to change so many things in one go, when John Nathan-Turner took over as producer, it had sort-of led to the 18 month suspension and then the cancellation a few years later and that was over a longer period of time (funny how ‘time’ always seems to turn up in conversations about Moffat); we didn’t yet know in the fickle age of modern television, if audiences would remain patient enough to keep watching without David Tennant in the main role and with such a different vision for the series. 

 The fact that Steven cast a relative unknown in such an important role, an actor younger even than Peter Davison had been in 1982, with an equally unknown actress in Karen Gillan alongside him, made us all incredibly jumpy too (her role in ‘Fires Of Pompeii’ helped calm the nerves a little, but it’s hard to judge somebody from a part that mostly asks them to wave their arms and talk about prophecy. I mean, until tiktok came along and made that sort of thing seem normal, it was just weird). Dr Who fans famously can’t agree on anything, yet every fan I know shared my nervousness in a rare moment of collective breath holding. Apparently every bit as nervous, given the titbits that have come out since, were the BBC: despite Dr Who being one of the most watched and celebrated shows they made in 2005-09 they were all prepared to cancel it after 2010 if this series flopped and had severe doubts about commissioning this one at all. Later stories in the run of series 5 will hint at Moffat’s own jitters, his fears that he can’t possibly do justice to a programme that’s been such a part of his life since childhood, and feature many a plot where he’ll second-guess himself and over-think what he’s doing. Sitting down to write this first story particularly, with the weight of so much history on his shoulders, must have been the single most daunting moment in the show since Russell sat down to write ‘Rose’. And yet there’s none of that self-doubt or angst in ‘The Eleventh Hour’ itself, a debut story which does absolutely everything it needed to do to keep all us fans happy, but from a genuinely inspired place rather than a bit of box-ticking. By the end, when Amy (our surrogate) says that the Doctor seems awfully sure she’ll run away with him he just grins and promises her all the wonderful things out there. Of course she’s going to say yes – and so are we. 

 Another thing Moffat got right from the get go was the casting. Matt Smith just is the Doctor from the first second we meet him: every bit as alien and mad and exciting and brilliant and energetic and puppyish as the 10th Dr but in a very different way, someone whose regressed from confident early adulthood to gawky teenager, with a big goofy grin and the feeling that he’d only just gained mastery over his own limbs. Karen Gillan’s Amy Pond is immediately warm and likeable and feisty, but in a very different way than Donna (it helps that we get to know her as playful child before seeing her as hardened adult – of all the people who’ve written for the series down the years Moffat is the best at keeping his inner child alive and for my money no depiction of childhood in Dr Who is better or more accurate than seven-year-old Amy, for all the deeply weird fairytale like circumstances she’s living in: she isn’t just cute, she isn’t just sweet, she’s tough and used to seeing through the lies told by adults while still secretly believing in magic). Every fan by now probably knows that Caitlin Blackwood, who plays the younger Amy so well, is Karen Gillan’s cousin in real life; amazingly though she was a bit of last minute casting when the producers were tearing out their hair trying to cast her (Moffat always seemed to find the casting process harder than other aspects of his showrunner job) and someone joked to Karen did she know any good actors who happened to look like her; she replied that her cousin was doing a bit of acting and might like to try out for the part, although the producers didn’t know which of the late run of little girls she was thanks to the different family name. Karen and Caitlin had never actually met before filming weirdly enough despite being so much alike – the former was Scottish and the latter Irish and they’d never got it together to go through the palaver of customs and visit their families; rather wonderfully they’re very close these days. So that’s three very lucky crucial bits of casting in the main parts, plus an extra lucky strike in Arthur Darvill as Rory, an old friend of Matt Smith’s whose the ‘Harry Sullivan’ style comedy relief but still has a warmth and inner courage that makes it easy to see why Amy would fall for him as a sort of Doctor-substitute all these years. It helps all the actors considerably making this story a few episodes into the recording block so everyone can work out where they’ll end up and hit the ground running (‘Time of the Angels’ was the first story recorded and you can tell everyone’s that little bit more unsure about what they’re doing by comparison), but that doesn’t always work when they tried it in the past either (they pulled the same trick with ‘Castrovalva’ in 1982 and we still didn’t really know who the 5th Dr was by the end of it; by contrast when the end credits roll around this lot already feel like old friends we’ve followed for years). 

 As for the plot, well. We were expecting many things given Moffat’s highly varied 9th and 10th Dr scripts for ‘The Empty Child’ ‘The Girl In the Fireplace’ ‘Blink’ and ‘Silence In the Library’: something complicated probably, something scary certainly, something imaginative definitely. One thing nobody was quite expecting was how childlike everything is. That’s not a bad thing. There’s a feel that’s very different to the way we ended on ‘The End Of Time’, as if a reboot switch has been thrown from the dark and gloomy and very grown up closure to the 10th Dr era to a new epoch again that could start afresh (what is it with Moffat stories that find me writing about time?) and a story that’s immediately light and fluffy and welcoming, where Dr Who seems fun again.It was a good move pitching Dr Who for a whole new younger audience again, using this story as a re-set button for any fans who want to jump on here, doing everything in its power to snare as many curious youngsters as possible who can grow up alongside Amy Pond (and let’s face it, Who had come a long way from the kiddie-friendly ‘Rose’ five years earlier, it couldn’t get much darker without putting newcomers off and leaving us back where we were with falling ratings and cancellations in the 1980s). Moffat was right to pitch this story slightly younger but at the same time, like Russell, he had experience of writing both children and adult dramas and combines both quite skilfully for a story that knows it can’t afford to talk down to its children’s audience, instead tapping into that sense of magic that got him hooked on the show in the first place. Moffat has always been good at understanding his inner seven year old and can tap into it easier than the showrunners either side of him to judge what ‘works’ and what’s too much or not enough (though even he has lapses). By contrast Russell’s job was slightly different - he had to grasp a family audience all in one go and Chibnall too had to grapple with falling ratings and win every demographic over at once, but Moffat’s smart enough to know most longterm fans will probably stick around if what he does isn’t awful – it’s the new audience he needs to grow if his era of DW is to thrive. 

That’s childlike though and definitely not childish: this is a seven year old’s view of how the world works (and should work) rather than an adult’s and I’m not the first reviewer to call the Moffat era ‘fairytale’ like. But it’s the good sort of fairytales from the brothers Grimm where nothing’s safe and the excitement comes from knowing that enjoying life can go down as well as up and things aren’t always going to be safe, rather than something sanitised. The world goes back to being a mysterious place again, as Moffat makes even the ordinary seem extraordinary as if seen through a child’s eyes, only in this case it will often be the Doctor’s new-born eyes that sees Earth like that. For the first time in a long time ‘The Eleventh Hour’ seems like amazing things can happen with every turn of the page, as Moffat goes back to basics and gets the idea that Dr Who is about extraordinary things impacting our ordinary world better than almost any write the show ever had. In many ways the Moffat era will be full of more psychological horror and darkness than the rest, as he puts his characters through the mill. Even here already the Doctor is shown to be more than just a benign imaginary friend come to life but someone slightly dangerous and scary to be around even when he himself is someone you’d trust with your life, a person who can’t help making promises he can’t deliver, offering up a brave new world to Amy that she just can’t possibly refuse, and then keeps her waiting for it for twelve long years. Perhaps picking up from Russell’s last Who scripts, I think this story has more to do with Moffat’s own relationship with his favourite series, the way Russell T did with ‘Rose’, rather than show off what he can do with the show that no one else can. The first half of ‘the Eleventh Hour’ feels as if it might be Moffat trying to plug into how he felt when he first discovered this mad series, in an attempt to get other people the age now he was then to watch it, and feeling a little hard done by that life didn’t end up being as magical and wonderful as Dr Who promised it would be (being born in 1961 he’d have been the perfect age for ‘Spearhead From Space’ in 1970, a story ‘The Eleventh Hour’ is closest to in many ways). 

 Being offered this job in middle age, after a youth spent writing for other shows because there was no Dr Who on telly to write for, having given that dream up for good, seems to have brought back that feeling to the writer that his inner child was right all along to believe in miracles, not the cynical adult he’d become – that feeling that magic does exist out there and can drop on you from out of the blue when you’re not looking and that sense that fairytales do come true if you’re prepared to wait for them is sprinkled throughout practically every line. It’s such a contrast. The Russell T era was rooted in the real world, with characters you could meet on any street corner (especially if you lived on run-down estates like Rose and her mum), people with aspirations and day jobs and hangovers and cravings for chips and with so much emotional baggage they’d need the extra weight allowance on any ship that wasn’t bigger on the inside than the outside. When the 9th or 10th Dr is dropped into these worlds he’s the ultimate explosion of the extraordinary making the mundane seem amazing, lifting their world and making people believe again. Moffat’s characters though live in a world already sprinkled with magic and fairydust and where anything can happen at any time, bad or good (but generally on the side of good on balance). The lives of Amy, Rory and Clara to come already seem amazing when we first meet them, even later when Moffat starts pinning down characters and giving them jobs and parents and motivations (I mean, Amy’s jobs across the series include working as a kiss-a-gram, then a model then a writer - try suggesting those to your school advisor and see how far that gets you as a career choice - while Rory’s a Dr-in-training complete with his own screwdriver and Clara’s background is so weird there’s a whole series of the Dr trying to unravel her back story). The older Amy though is as tough and cynical as any Moffat character we see, softening with every story (give or take what some of the future plots do to her), until by the end of her time in the Tardis she’s more like her eight year old self again believing in miracles. When the Doctopr boasts that he can ‘fix’ her growing up, he wasn’t kidding: like River Song Amy lives her life in reverse in a way, growing more and more comfortable and less cynical as she learns that she was right to believe in her imaginary friend and imaginary world and every adult who told her she was making up such dreams was wrong. 

 Here as an adult she’s immediately cynical in every way her younger self isn’t, assuming her intruder is a burglar or kidnapper rather than the imaginary friend of her childhood, but still recognisably like her hard-to-lease younger self, as if a little bit of the magic the Doctor imprints on people is there already. She’s a stickler for authority young Amy: as well as praying to Father Christmas she prays for a policeman, which is sort-of what she gets (well, a madman in a police box anyway). There’s a bit of a running theme here actually: the Doctor steps in to do the police Atraxi’s job for them, while Amy dresses as a policewoman in one of her kissagram outfits. However the Doctor is decidedly not your regular policeman; he’s lenient for one thing, acting to the spirit of the law not the letter of the law. He’s a natural rebel from the first, even stealing his clothes and keeping them by the end, because he figures after saving the earth he deserves something. He’s also much the same whoever he talks to, just like a policeman is at least taught to be even if few are in practice. Note that Amy’s relationship with the Doctor doesn’t change his response to her in the slightest: if this was Dr 10 meeting a kissagram who’d chained him to a radiator then you’d put odds on them snogging by the end of an episode, but to the Doctor Amy is forever this little girl. Which is not a put down either: like all the best funnest grown-ups the Doctor recognises that children are just adults without the experience and the knockbacks, people who aren’t quite fully formed yet just as he isn’t, yet every bit as bright and warm and funny as their elders and he treats her with exactly the same respect and admiration in both ages (that’s why his sudden reversion to ‘you stupid humans are all the same’ ranting in next story ‘The Beast Below’ – written for a number of different Doctors first – is so jarring, despite being a similarly fairytale story of huge whales and future Queens on a spaceship). The arc of the Russell T Davies years is that the Doctor gradually becomes more like ‘us’, with a guilt over his past actions and the revelation even a timelord can be ‘only human’, prone to errors and misjudgements, while his companions develop super-powers from simply being around him. William Hartnell used to declare that he saw the part as ‘a cross between The Wizard Of Oz and Father Christmas’ and after detours as a very alien alien and a very Earthly Dr in exile and Russell’s vision of him as someone that’s getting more human by the minute that’s what Moffat brings back here. 

The 11th Dr is magical all over again, the impossible imaginary friend Amy’s family, classmates and therapists all assume is made-up to get attention; it’s a clever tactic of getting the audience on Amy’s side immediately because we know what the people around her don’t, that he’s ‘real’. After a botched attempt to make Ace the Dorothy from the ‘Wizard of Oz’ books (down to her ‘real’ name and ice storm taking her to a magic realm) we get an actual re-creation of Frank L Baulm’s wonderland, but specifically the dark-edged fairytales of the under-rated ‘Return To Oz’ where after yearning to go home Dorothy realises she’s much happier in the Doctor’s mad world that at least has an internal logic better than her real world and refuses to let the psychotherapists burn out her brain trying to make her ‘normal’ (or to put it another way Amy is Wendy made to believe in fairies all over again while the Doctor is Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up and escaped his responsibilities and has somehow grown younger). Amy is, when we first meet her, a ten year old trying so hard to be grown up, an orphan without parents (apparently because of the results in this episode and the time-bending crack in her wall, another very ordinary mundane thing made extraordinary, not that we ever go back to it properly – the key difference between the Davies years is that getting the family back again would be more important than saving Earth) and living with an unbeloved maiden aunt we never see, struggling to be independent because she’s learnt the hard way not to rely on anyone else for anything. For her the Dr’s world is much safer than this one despite all the dangers, a magical place where she can’t get hurt and can go back home in time for tea thanks to time travel and where she gets to be free from her responsibilities (it’s interesting in retrospect that we’re introduced to Rory in this story without quite knowing who he is and what their relationship is, even though they’re clearly engaged already with a wedding on the way; later stories will show Amy to be madly in love but a restless soul at heart, unwilling to be tied down to anyone for the rest of her life, even her soulmate). The Doctor’s mad-cap arrival, in a Tardis that’s out of control and re-setting alongside him before crash-landing in her garden, is the stuff that dreams are made of. 

 Fittingly for the fairytale background, like Goldilocks and her forebears the 11th Dr’s polite unhinged madman is played exactly right: not too mad, not too scary, not too silly, not too dark but definitely not in any way boring. Matt Smith owed his TV breakthrough, rather aptly, to Wendy ‘Zoe’ Padbury, after she saw him in the very Who-sounding play ‘The Master and Margarita’ in 2004 and signed him on to her books during her time as an agent. Smith didn’t know Dr Who very well (he’s two months younger than me – something that felt very wrong at the time given all previous Doctors have been so much older - so grew up in the ‘wilderness years’) but grew to love it when borrowing DVDs during his preparation for the series (the 2nd Doctor was his favourite). Smith felt the Doctor was simultaneously the cleverest and the silliest person in the room and at different times different aspects of those two sides of his personality would show themselves. They’re both on display in this episode where he gets to do lots of what seem to us now like very obvious Doctory things without any of them actually having been in the series before, including showing the companion immediately that he can time travel rather than letting her work it out for herself (the apple with Amy’s name carved in it, not an hour older even though he’s been away eight years, is a brilliant way of explaining the concept of the series to a whole new audience who’ve never seen a series based around time travel before) and with new all new tastebuds that take some breaking in, from a scene Moffat confessed was stolen wholeheartedly from the Winnie the Pooh stories by AA Milne where they try to feed Tigger (there’s a reason the ‘fish fingers and custard’ gag took off with fans, with its brilliantly Dr Who juxtapositions of two things together that shouldn’t go – actually chocolate covered coconut teacakes dipped in custard in real life, the Doctor rejecting apples, yoghurt, bacon, beans on toast and bread and butter along the way while saving his biggest wrath for carrots, which he won’t even try – memories of Mel making him drink carrot juice in ‘The Ultimate Foe’ perhaps?) Rejecting food is a very un-grownup like thing to do; you wouldn’t catch this Doctor reminding you that eighteen planets in the solar system would be glad to have such delicacies or threatening to make you post the remains to the starving people on the Moon of Poosh (although I can see the 1st 3rd and 12th Doctors all doing that); this Doctor feels ‘on your side’ from the first, childish even amongst such sensible responsible regular things as food. The twist of having the Dr make his arrival in his companion’s life, three times because he gets the dates wrong, is very clever and original too, and it’s a surprise no one had thought of doing it before as, like the best Moffat inventions, it feels like something the Doctor should always have done. It’s as if Moffat is asking how we’d re-act if our imaginary friends from childhood came back to us in the adult world and reminded us of how we once viewed it: as a magical place where anything can happen, rather than a place to live, work and die (future Moffat stories have characters doing all of these, grumpily, but not necessarily in that order). For a draft of this story at least though (not up to the 11th Hour exactly but a fair way through drafting), written around the same time as ‘Waters Of Mars’, ‘Hour’ was designed for the 10th Doctor in the hope of getting him to stay on a final year (Tennant was really torn and went back and forth for months, as Moffat’s scripts were his favourites even while he felt loyalty to Russell and felt his arc had been told): the big difference was that the story would have opened with him dying as he first met Amy, the series cycling on a loop until ‘The Big Bang’ caused him to regenerate and he time-travelled back here. That would have been a whole different story though, with a whole different feel: Tennant’s Doctor would have been more naturally fatherly, while the 11th Doctor feels as if he stayed eight years old while Amy grew up. 

 Notably, too, we’re introduced to the rural village of Leadworth, a place that’s about as far away from the gritty kitchen sinks of the urban Powell estate as they come and which feels a little like a fairytale itself (there are very few villages like this around anymore – most of them that are like this are trying too hard to be towns and putting big shops and building estates on the outskirts) and apart from being rare, English villages are places that feel most linked to pre-time and pagan days. The only other time Dr Who itself tried this was in ‘The Daemons’, a story all about white witches and the devil and the only other Who related story was the ‘K9 and Company’ pilot, which is about black witches and the devil). This threat though, is less concerned with the church in the town square than the duck-pond, the hubbub of village life round which everything revolves and where everyone knows everyone else (something that’s a bit of a problem for Prisoner Zero, who relies on people not noticing that the people he takes over are all acting a bit oddly). The location filming picked Llandaff, a village near Cardiff, mostly because it was the nearest to where Who filmed anyway that happened to have the sort of duckpond specified in the script, but without knowing it this is a really apt choice. This is where Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks, spent his childhood dreaming up stories just like this one and Llandaff is exactly the sort of place that feels as if it hasn’t regenerated since pagan times. On screen it’s meant to be the bottom bit of England right by the start of South Wales, ‘about 30 miles from Gloucester’, so we’re talking Hardwicke or Tibberton, somewhere near Cheltenham perhaps, where there are lots of English villages that look just like this one scattered about (once again, though, it’s odd that for a series filmed in Wales we get English and Scottish companions but not, as yet a Welsh one; Ray from ‘Delta and The Bannermen’ is still the closest and that was when the series was still made in London). Notably nobody we ever meet from this village has an accent that comes from anywhere near Gloucester. 

 Having our first companion from the country in years, possibly ever given how ambiguous many companions’ backgrounds are in the old series, is all new. Moffat himself was born in Paisley, which might not be the biggest city in Scotland but isn’t exactly this small either (Leadworth was in Scotland for a few drafts in fact, before he worried that a Scottish companion and Scottish village would be too much for English fans and cause problems casting over actors to live there. The line about how the Doctor knows what it’s like to be ‘the only Scottish person in a English village’ is written with feeling at being the odd one out). He’s clearly spent a lot of time round people who do come from villages like this though: as one myself he really nails that sense of community spirit combined with jealousy and the sense that other people are off having more interesting adventures in bigger places. Giving Amy, someone whose been bursting at the seams to travel the world, a space-time machine makes sense: she’s used to limiting her horizons, from her imaginary friend on down. That puts Rory in an uncomfortable position; while it happens more in later stories as we get to know him better you can feel his fear that Amy only got together with him because he was a big-ish fish in a small duckpond; to the end he still worries that she’ll just run off and leave him and his narrow horizons once she gets a sense of how wonderful the world is. Just notice the offhand way Amy introduced him as a ;friend’ before Rory buts in ‘well, boyfriend’, which tells you a great deal about their relationship from the start. 

 Most of all, though, the big change here is that the Doctor gets to be the big kid and its younger Amy who gets to act the role of the parent, which is a lot closer to how most children daydream than lazier writers who just want to make everything involving children a big game. Especially when she’s younger – the older Amy tries hard to act more grown-up and adult, down to the point of dressing up as a kiss-a-gram but she’s slightly bamboozled by life; it’s the younger Amy that takes charge immediately, whose used to life-changing events happening every few minutes (what did happen to her parents? Did she ever know them? It’s interesting in retrospect that we don’t get a ‘Father’s Day’ type story where she at least tries to find out more about them) and getting on with it (most kids are more resilient than adults, still adjusting to a quadzillion new things every day so finding a few unexpected extras part of everyday life – its grown-ups who get set in their ways as the newness and magic slowly seeps out of life; it’s very Dr Who to want to put that element back in and all showrunners/ producers of this series do it, but in very different ways). This episode’s early scenes are such fun you immediately want to leap through the screen and join them, the dialogue in these scenes just sparkle, every line pushing the Dr further out into being a comedy character or scary-seriousness and flicking back again immediately, but so naturally you don’t see the join – a world away from the hard lessons and harsh reality of the 2009 Who specials. The fish custard is the bit everyone remembers but even without that this would be amongst the most beloved scenes, as the Doctor discovers all his tastebuds are new and starts flinging food away like a naughty child. Taste is another thing we think the Doctor changes every regenerations now but only starts here and immediately puts him on the side of children (adults seem to forget that the reason kids are such fussy eaters is because their tastebuds are so new everything tastes stronger than an adult can possibly remember, especially the ones for tasting sour food. Like I say, Moffat remembers well what I was like to be little and knows that if his adult self was put back in a child’s body he wouldn’t be able to last five minutes with so much confusing newness around). While Russell openly nicks from the Dicks/Letts and Hinchliffe years, this story at least feels more like the Douglas Adams/Graham Williams years with a healthy sense of the absurd in between the moralistic storytelling (although it’s a lot more like ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ than any actual story, especially the opening scenes where Arthur thinks he knows how the world works until he discovers there’s an alien about to blow it up and that his best friend is an alien and he’s left saving the world in his dressing gown, just as Amy ends this story in her nightie). 

And yet it isn’t just fun, there’s danger in this story too. The crack in Amy’s wall is this year’s big mystery and it’s there from pretty much the first scene, where all time has broken through, an early sign of just how good Moffat was at making mundane things feel scary. The one part of this script that wasn’t coming together was where Zero might be hiding and how he could fit Amy into the plot. Moffat took time out from banging his head against the typewriter to tuck his son Louis into bed and read him a bedtime story when he noticed a crack on his son’s bedroom wall that looked as if it was a crooked smile laughing at him. Not wanting to draw his son’s attention to it as it was creeping him out, he couldn’t get it out of his head and ended up writing it into the story instead, retrospectively creating the year long arc around it and adding it to the scripts he’d already finished. Moffat also drew, as he did with so many of his scripts, from a recurring nightmare about visiting his grandparents’ house in Wolverhampton and discovering a nonexistent room that was either nice or nasty depending on which dream it was (I have the same feeling on visiting Wolverhampton. Or did before I found a Dr Who group there anyway). The symbolism of hidden room in dreams, by the way, is all about the unknown and discovery of one’s self and points to your subconscious trying to work out how to integrate a new part of your personality you hadn’t discovered before, whether consciously or not it’s a good match for a story about a newly regenerated Doctor who isn’t quite sure who he is yet (Steven may well have had to behave more around his grandparents than his parents, possibly vice versa of course although the Bill Moffat who pitched ‘Press Gang’ and encouraged his son to write it sounds like a fun sort of dad to have). We won’t really know how the crack relates to the series for eleven stories yet but already it feels like something big and scary. 

 You would have forgiven Moffat for taking the soft option, of re-launching the new series with an old monster to keep fans watching, but instead he creates ‘Prisoner Zero’, a character that – like the Autons – we can understand really quickly in not a lot of screentime but who feels like a ‘real’ credible threat in just a few scenes too. This renegade is a neat mirror to the doctor’s circumstance in a story that’s all about identity. Like the Doctor he’s getting used to life in a new body, only the difference is he can take over lots of bodies and switch from one or the other. Interestingly Moffat then moves his regeneration story to a hospital, as if he’s plundering all the ideas from ‘Spearhead From Space’ Russell didn’t recycle for ‘Rose’ (truly that seems to have been the most influential ‘classic’ Who of them all for the new series writers) alongside recent and equally fairytale-like BBC hit ‘Being Human’. It’s a clever choice, a place that’s about as ‘real world’ and dark and scary and human a place, playing to its own different set of rules away from the ‘real’ world as you can get, and hopefully somewhere you don’t have to visit too often it becomes ‘normal’, rooting and grounding these characters more and yet at the same time somewhere you often visit while woozy and out of it, so your experiences of it feel like a bad dream. 

 Zero is a prisoner whose been hiding in Amy’s house, unseen thanks to that time crack, on the run from another new race The Atraxi who feel as if they’re going to be a lot more important to the script than they are. The story could easily have gone downhill at this point, when it reverts back to ‘default Dr Who story’ setting and a chase of monsters, but even here Moffat sprinkles a bit of extra pixie magic: the Doctor doesn’t just ring up the authorities and badger them into doing something the way the 3rd Dr would, he calls all the biggest and greatest minds of the day up on a zoom/skype call (back before a lot of us knew what they were) and gets their attention by doing something impossible and showing off. Well, actually something that always sued to be considered impossible but, after several centuries, was being accepted as scientific fact: Fermat’s theorem thought to ‘prove’ the existence, at least in theory, of faster than light travel of the sort the Tardis might use. First raised by the scientists in 1637, in a note scribbled in the margins of his copy of Greek text ‘Arithmatica’ (and a theory that ‘Star Trek: The next generation’ episode ‘The Royale’ claims still hasn’t been solved by the 24th century) ir porposes that no combination of two positive integers can equal the value of a third integer of the same power if it is of a value greater than two. So now you know if anyone claiming to be a time traveller starts trying to prove who they are to you. It’s very interesting in retrospect as Moffat never tries anything as openly brainy again – its kind of like Russell’s use of TV newscasters to provide information and make vents seem worldwide, but different The Doctor doesn’t just enter the hospital ward by the door, he enters it through the window in a fire engine! Patient Zero doesn’t just do the usual boring ‘body invasion’ thing where we can’t tell whose possessed – he gets things wrong, leaping into the bodies of adults with children and humans with pets and not quite knowing where one ends and the other begins (Watch out for Olivia Coleman, in the days before she was un-missable because she was in everything, being a third of Zero’s final victim – when Chris Chibnall announced the 13th Dr was a woman and someone he’d worked with on his own series ‘Broadchurch’ I was over the moon thinking they’d got Olivia to be the Doctor and more than a tad disappointed to find it was Jodie Whittaker, whose part I couldn’t even remember). The Doctor doesn’t simply hear the villain talk about what he’s up to, he deduces it in a wonderful scene that involved every spare member of the production team taking hundreds of snapshot photos and linking them altogether in stop-frame animation so that they move slightly. I’m particularly sorry we never saw this sort of thing again after this story as it works here really well I think: it ‘fits’ with what we’ve seen the Dr do before, without him ever having actually done it and gives the 11th Dr a gravitas beyond his playfulness that makes the 11th Dr feel even more like the regeneration he’s closest to, the 2nd Dr, the clown on the edges of the action that everyone always underestimates until it’s too late, and helps him peek out from under Dr 10’s shadow). Moffat’s other great literary love is Sherlock Holmes, a series he brought back to life with co-writer Mark Gatiss this very same year, having not realised he was about to get the Who job. There’s a lot of crossover between them (so much so Sherlock author Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle’ was written to be the star of ‘The Crimson Horror’ before re-writes, with no discernible difference to what the 11th Doctor does), this Doctor using his brain a lot to work things out at high speed, though sadly it was too costly and time-consuming to keep pulling this ‘trick’ of seeing the Doctor’s observations from his point of view, leaving this an under-rated scene too (his quick eye spotting that Rory is the only person looking away from the spaceship in the sky and staring at a patient he’s just seen upstairs in a coma instead). 

 Cleverly the story subverts all the usual tropes of ‘regeneration’ stories. This Doctor is manic and confused, but gets the worst of that out of his system bedding the Tardis in between visits to Leadworth. Instead of the ‘mirror’ routine where he gets to judge his new appearance he sees a monster disguised in his body (‘That’s rubbish whose that meant to be?!’) in a scene that again feels as if Dr Who has always done but which only started in 2010. There’s one thing the Doctor does the same though, locating his perfect out-of-time costume from the hospital, the exact same way the 3rd Doctor did in ‘Spearhead From Space’ (the tweedy jacket of an ageing geography teacher and the bowtie of the 19th century that would look silly on anyone else but is the perfect hint that, despite looking the youngest, this Dr is now the oldest we’ve seen him so far). The costume was a last minute substitute as Smith was unhappy with the action hero dress Moffat had envisioned and wasn’t too keen on the ‘pirate’ look they tried either. Smith chose the tweed jacket and bow tie himself, which Moffat hated at firstand thought a parody of how the Doctor dresses eccentrically, but with so little time before filming bedgrudgingly agreed to it. Dr Who is said to have single handedly saved the tweed jacket industry and nearly doubled sales of bow ties within the year. Very definitely cool. By the time he calls back the Atraxi for a stern warning about their very Hitch-Hiker’s threat to blow the Earth up, walking through their scanned holograms of his past lives and standing proudly at the end, fully formed at the end of a line of ten, you’re ready to punch the air. Dr Who is back with all the magic and mystery and laughs and drama and above all pixie-dust of the old days, but in a way that’s not like any of the other regenerations. This Doctor already feels like our best friend in a way none of the others ever were (they were kindly grandfathers, dashing heroes or dark and mysterious eccentrics and sometimes our friend but never quite our best friend), with super human abilities but a fallibility and vulnerability that already means he makes mistakes, the sort of best friend you’re always making excuses to cover up for.

 Remarkably, given how new at this everyone still is, very little goes wrong with this story: a couple of oddly ill-fitting lines (more on those below) and I’ve seen better CGI monster and spaceships than Prisoner Zero’s natural worm-like self and the Atraxi vessel with the big eye. That’s it though: every scene, every acting role, every bit of direction, every sub-plot, it all goes swimmingly and the effect of prisoner Zero taking over people is nicely scary (if I’d first seen this story as a seven year old I’d never be able to watch Olivia Coleman without being scared of her ever again!) To be honest, any worry that my favourite show might not survive had gone by the pre-credits sequence. That’s an amazing triumph for a story that had so much resting on it: new showrunner, new producer, new tone, new companion, new new doctor and yet the wonder with ‘The Eleventh Hour’ is that it takes so many risks it didn’t need to; every other showrunner/producer, from Russell on down, has made sure to give us something that feels like the ‘old’ days, even when the old days was John Wiles in 1965 looking back to Verity Lambert in 1963. This story doesn’t even do what we all expected it to and pick up on the ‘clues’ sprinkled in Moffat’s stories for Drs 9 and 10 (I totally thought the young Amy was going to turn out to be River Song instead of – spoilers – River Song’s mum). But ‘The Eleventh Hour’ changes everything and everything, for now, works better than ever. The only sad part is that Moffat never cones even close to matching this story again: he’s written many brilliant ones, with around a dozen 11th and 12th Dr stories inside my top 100 so it would be wrong to say his era was a disappointment. But this story was just so good, so dreamlike, so clever, so magical, so child-friendly, so different to anything that had come before it and yet so in keeping with the spirit of Dr Who, that I hoped we were going to have more stories like this one every week instead of it being just an anomaly. It has to be said the 11th Dr and Amy are a lot more interesting when a story revolves around them rather than having them revolve around a story (the other best ones tend to focus on their relationship, with or without Rory and River Song in there too). I don’t know whether this is true or not but it feels as if ‘The Eleventh Hour’ was a story Moffat crafted carefully and worked on for years, perhaps since his own childhood just in case he ever got the chance to write for Who, stuffed with all of his best ideas, characters and lines (there are lots of classy snappy bits of dialogue here too: I can’t believe no writer thought of the ‘Doctor will see you now’ gag before or had the Doctor call the alien threat back for a stern ticking off, a scene added at the last minute when it was thought the story ended too soon that’s one of the best); by using them all in this story though Moffat had nowhere left to go as interesting, good or clever (it’s worth remembering that the way Russell worked was that he farmed ideas out to other writers and only rarely did they pitch their thoughts to him, so other than the special last-minute case of ‘Blink’ this is the first time Moffat gets to write a Dr Who story that’s completely and utterly ‘his’). Much as the Doctor promises ‘this is just the beginning, there’s loads more’ the biggest problem with ‘The Eleventh Hour’ is that actually there isn’t: Moffat never writers an episode again quite as joyous, mad, inventive, creative or imaginative as this one. 

 The job as showrunner seems to have worn all three men who’ve taken the role so far out quite badly by the end of their time in control but none more so, perhaps, than Moffat whose running on fumes by the mid-Capaldi era (until the great return in series ten, freed by the fact he didn’t expect to be writing it yet and was filling in because Chibnall wasn’t quite ready yet, when once again Moffat taps into his inner child instead of trying juggle plates as a showrunner). As early as ‘The Beast Below’ next story there’s a sense that a bit of the sparkle has gone out of a job Moffat’s waited for his whole life for, one that’s suddenly filled with problems and hard work and late nights and deadlines and difficult complex decisions to be made all the time rather than just being allowed to let his imagination run wild and create imaginary worlds the way he craves. It’s a little like Amy’s character arc from this story in fact: she leaves her real world problems behind for something that seems so magical and fun but which gradually becomes scary and terrifying and full of responsibility. There’s no sign of that tiredness for now though in a story that’s maybe the most carefree of the entire modern run and by the end credits of ‘The Eleventh Hour’ (such a clever title too!) Dr Who is such a magical series again, a Dr Who story that doesn’t just regenerate this show alongside the Dr but rejuvenates it, makes it feel young and fresh and imaginative all over again. Perhaps the biggest achievement of all, though, is that by the end of it you’ve already half-forgotten David Tennant was the Doctor and Russell the showrunner, even though they’re two figures who, if this series gets to run another century uninterrupted, will always be seen as two of the most beloved and important people associated with it. More than anything else, out of all 328-ish Dr Who stories so far, it’s my pick as the perfect introduction to the series, delivering inside an extended 65 minutes every reason why I love this show so very very much and why there’s never ever been anything like it on television at all. You get so many of the concepts central to this show in a short space of time very clearly explained in a way that never seems like exposition or info-dumping but which all feels very natural and organic and the script has the feel of one of those stories that took a monumental effort to shape into feeling so natural as if no effort was going into it at all. This is a series in very new but very safe hands. Worried? Who me? Ha! Never! I always had faith magic would come back. I mean, Dr Who came back didn’t it? That’s the same thing – and no Dr Who story in its entire 60 year run has more magic in it than ‘The Eleventh Hour’. 

 POSITIVES + As brilliant as her two elders are there’s only one actor who steals every scene she’s in. Caitlin Blackwood is so very very very good as young Amy and the perfect casting (if anything the two look even more alike now Caitlin is the age Karen was in this story). I mean Karen Gillan’s superb as the older Amy as well and is instantly lovable and funny and brave in all the best ways, but it’s the younger Amy who gets all the best lines and acts everyone off the screen, a girl all too believably on the fence between a healthy dose of Scottish scepticism and believing in fairies. Most adults can’t write for children for toffee. They either can’t remember what it was like to be a child or hang around children pretending to be adults because they’re around grownups and write them like that when that’s not really who they are at all. But Steven Moffat understands children better than any writer since perhaps Richmal Crompton – the idea that childhood isn’t a terrible place where only dark things happen or a perfect paradise full of fun and sunny days but somewhere in between, that children have all the same insecurities, fears of the future and complexities as adults, together with the secret feeling that adults just like making a big drama out of nothing and that life would be simple really if only they didn’t insist on making it so difficult with the need to be so diplomatic and make such a fuss all the time. I’d love to have seen a whole series or more with eight year old Amy simultaneously embracing the most wild and unbelievable things the Dr can show her but with a cutting honesty that makes her the most cynical and hard to impress companions as well. I totally understand why they didn’t (there’s a limit on the hours children can work outside schooling and sadly most adults won’t watch anything with child leads for very long – and interestingly not many children’s shows have children at the core either – even The Sarah Jane Adventures revolved around, well Sarah Jane) but I’m still sad we didn’t see more of one of the best Tardis team-ups in the show’s history, the youngest Doctor and the youngest companion tackling the universe’s oldest problems. 

 NEGATIVES - If Moffat has a fault as a writer then it’s the fact he can’t write for multiple audiences simultaneously the way Russell can. His stories tend to be either very adult stories with suddenly very childish moments (‘Deep Breath’ swaps a deep, difficult story about the struggle to be good when the world is so bad in a world of killer automatons with a jokey scene with a dinosaur, while ‘Thin Ice’ is a polemic about racism and prejudice in Victorian London that includes a whacking great sea serpent under the ice and a capital city that lives off its poo) or child friendly ones like this with surprisingly adult jokes sneaked in that more usually adult writers would never dream of getting away with (the one about Clara being a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery in a skirt that’s entirely too short’ is the most notorious, as it’s such an un-11th Dr thing to say). The joke here about Jeff, your everyday sporty kid whose never thought about a fairytale world since he was six and plunged into the deep end conversing with the world’s greatest scientists because an alien has just asked him to, is very in keeping with this story and a ten year old child’s idea of a teenager, all bluster and pimples. I liked Jeff, I wish we’d seen more of him – this story kind of implies he’s going to be a regular given he gets more screen-time than Rory here, but he’s never even mentioned again. However the joke about how he should ‘clear his internet history’ and ‘get a girlfriend’ is totally the wrong gag for a story aimed at a whole new young audience and perhaps the most out of character quip we see the 11th Dr make his whole run. 

BEST QUOTE: Amy: ‘I grew up’ Doctor: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll soon fix that!’ 

 Previous ‘The End Of Time’ next ‘The Beast Below’

The Name Of The Doctor: Ranking - 35

 

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 50^th 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 11^th 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 8^th Doctor watching the 10^th 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 9^th 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 1^st Doctor – and it’s a plothole that the 11^th 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 8^th 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 1^st 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 50^th 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.

NEGATIVES - This was, for years, River Song’s farewell appearance – certainly that was what Steven Moffat thought when he wrote it and what Alex Kingston thought when she acted it, till a mixup over the handover to next showrunner Chris Chibnall led to a final goodbye in ‘Husbands’ a couple of years later. Thank goodness for that because ‘ghost’ River, the artificial version created at the end of her first appearance in ‘Silence In the Library/Forest Of the Dead’, feels very much like an after-thought slotted into the story rather than a key plot point. Mostly she’s there to whisper things to the Dr that no one else can hear and to give the password into the Tardis so the Dr doesn’t have to (after all, there’s no one else he’d entrust with that knowledge except his ‘wife’). River seems a character born for appearing in past stories given that we keep meeting her out of order, so in many ways its a shame that only Clara gets to rummage around in the Dr’s past s she’d be having much more fun with it (thankfully they’ve done the sensible thing at Big Finish and put her in audio adventures with the other Drs, though it’s never quite the same as doing it on screen). They could have done a lot more with the idea that the Dr is always listening to her just out of shot too, but that he’s never acknowledged her in any other story since her death because it would ‘break his hearts’ – this ought to be a huge revelation (after all, the Dr’s walking around with someone whose effectively the ghost of the person he’s closest to in the universe, who gave her life to save him when he didn’t even know who she was), but alas it ends up being just a couple of lines that’s never referred to again. And maybe she’s still there? After all, think how the 12th and 13th Drs might have benefited from having River’s holo-ghost leading them on!

BEST QUOTE: Great Intelligence: ‘The Doctor's life is a open wound. And an open wound can be entered’. Dr: ‘No, it would destroy you!’ Great Intelligence: ‘Not at all. It will kill me. It will destroy you. I can rewrite your every living moment. I can turn every one of you victories into defeats. Poison every friendship. Deliver pain to your every breath’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Brilliant as the plot of ‘Name’ is, it seemed familiar to regular readers of Dr Who Magazine where Paul Cornell’s 30^th anniversary comic strip ‘Time and Time Again’ (1993) saw pretty much exactly the same plot, only with Ace and ‘New Adventures’ companion Benny going back through the 7^th Doctor’s timelines and saving him at key points in his life by rescuing artefacts from his past. The big difference: it’s all the fault of the Black Guardian rather than the Great Intelligence and it all starts with the 1^st Doctor debating whether to leave Gallifrey rather than ends there. One of the best comic strips of them all, this one-issue special (#207)  also re-writes the stories ‘The Mind Robber’ ‘Day Of The Daleks’ and ‘Black orchid’, along with a scene immediately post ‘Nightmare Of Eden’ and an unseen story of the 6^th Doctor quietly fishing.

There were also a number of ‘extras’ broadcast in the interim between ‘Name’ and ‘Day’ (between May and November 2013) in different mediums to help keep Who in the public eye in its 50^th anniversary year, with most of them (but not all) collected on the series 7 box set. ‘Clara and The Tardis’ was never shown on TV,  instead ending up a fun DVD/blu-ray extra. We’ve seen across a few stories in series 7 that The Tardis considers Clara as something ‘wrong’ and here’s another, as Clara tries to go to the Tardis bathroom and is instead met with a (sadly off-screen) hologram leopard, while the Tardis has moved her bedroom - again. ‘I know what’s happened - is this the first time he’s brought a girl home?’ Clara jokes to the Tardis out loud (little does she know…) before the Tardis laughs in the way only a sentient organic time-machine can and shows her its companion database. ‘Dear God that woman is made of legs, that’s the most legs on any human!’ says Clara about Amy, before storming off and daring the Tardis to ‘do your worst!’ Which it does, with Clara walking into herself, an older version ‘from tomorrow night’ and two more from an unspecified time in the future forced to ‘share a bed’. Short as it may be, this two minute piece is one of Steven Moffat’s funniest and Jenna Coleman’s ruffled outrage is hilarious, well worth going out of your way to see. If only they’d included it in the episode proper (the one thing ‘Name’ is missing is the humour).

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.

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