The Day Of The Doctor
(50th Anniversary Special, War Dr, Dr 10, Dr 11 with Clara, Drs 1-8 and 12 briefly, 23/11/2013, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Nick Hurran)
Rank: 78
In an emoji: 🎂
'Grandad, Sandshoes and Chinny can be friends
One of them is in distress
One of them in a state of perpetual undress
One of them is under a fez
And despite blowing up their home planet and suffering grief for hundreds of years here's no reason why they can't be friends'
Back in 1993 ‘Dimensions In Time’, the 30th anniversary of Dr Who, was a sham – a twelve minute long Eastenders crossover in 3D you could only watch with cardboard glasses that I swear my eyes still haven’t recovered from. For the 40th anniversary we got a half-hearted documentary and to be honest I was surprised we even got that. By the time of the 50th though Dr Who was back and bigger than ever, with a party that seemed to last the full anniversary year long and the best in cutting edge three-dimensional technology. It was amazing: this show whose flames had been kept alive by us pockets of fans scattered all over the world forced into hiding our love for this show through mockery and misunderstandings were suddenly in the middle of the biggest party in town. Forget the ‘Day Of The Doctor’, this was the era of Dr Who and the show had never felt more loved. It had never got this much attention before either, which made us all slightly nervous. I mean, everyone was watching, even people who’d gradually drifted away from the show after the Russell T Davies years and this episode wasn’t just on telly in Britain, it was the largest simulcast round the world, broadcast at the exact same time (to avoid spoilers) in no less than 94 countries and broadcast at the cinema no less.
The first anniversary story made since the successful 21st century revival is another of those episodes that must have been hell to write: how do you capture half a century of a series whose scope is this wide in an hour and a quarter without disappointing someone? Steven Moffat was under huge pressure to bring back the past without interrupting the arc of the 11th Dr and deliver a story that would make sense for the general public even if you’d never seen an episode of Dr Who in your life. And that was a bit of worry. Because showrunner Steven Moffat was simultaneously the single best and worst person for such a closely scrutinised job and this is simultaneously both his best and worst work. By his own account writing this story left the writer waking up in the middle of the night in a panic – and that was two years early, when he sat down to write the first draft, the responsibility hanging heavy on his shoulders. Moffat’s at his happiest when writing intricate continuity-driven plots for which you need to pay close attention from a story several years earlier: ‘The Eleventh Hour’ proves he can do ‘hey look at me!’ re-launches rather well, but it’s not a natural place for his writing style to go. He’s also one of those writers who has a tendency to get bored with what he’s writing so will make a u-turn to somewhere completely new and while that can be great in ‘normal’ episodes anniversary stories work best when they have an element of safety, of summing up what a series is all about rather than sending it spinning into new territories. For a moment there you think Moffat’s calmed down those tendencies and is giving us the story we expected. From the little nuggets we were dropped along the way it sounded as if Moffat was taking an uncharacteristically straightforward route: we heard the Zygons were returning and we know they’re shape-shifters so I expected a story that brought back as many elements of the past that way – perhaps with slightly damaged Zygons bringing back the Drs where the actors had died, Richard Hurndall style. How very clever you think: so that’s how they’re going to get all the other Doctors back looking a bit different – they’re Zygon replicas! Throw in the huge set-up in ‘The Name Of The Doctor’, with Clara going back through the Doctor’s past timelines (something repeated during the trailer) which even ended with John Hurt and aha you think, that’s more clever still. While the idea of things that were in paintings (that turn out to be ‘stasis chambers’) running amok in the UNIT ‘black archive’ full of odds and ends from different stories is a fabulous way to throw in as many heart-warming moments from past stories as possible. It really is a very neat idea for a multi-Doctor story with more grounds for a plot than either ‘The Three Doctors’ or ‘The Five Doctor’s (while ‘Dimensions In Time’ is just silly). So very many Dr Who stories riff on ideas from Rod Serling’s ‘The Twilight Zone’ but this one is unique in riffing off Rod Serling’s ‘Night Gallery’, of paintings that all relate to the plot in some way, instead. It’s also a neat homage, of sorts, to ‘City Of Death’, while if Russell T Davies’ plan to have the time war as a metaphor for the wilderness years when Dr Who was off the air is to be believed then having a world that we thought was dead turn out to be just on pause is the perfect metaphor for how this series came back again. The thought that the companions we know and love have passed through here, their memories wiped, as UNIT desperately try to keep tabs on the Doctor, is a great idea that has enough momentum to propel a whole series of spin-off adventures. And then, mid-sentence, a crack in the space-time continuum opens up with the 10th Doctor and even Matt Smith’s Doctor is angry: ‘no not now, I’m busy!’ he wails as the story takes a complete 180 twist into something else entirely. We know the feeling. This is a ridiculously disjointed episode, a bunch of setpieces tied together with a logic that doesn’t really stand up under scrutiny.
And yet, at the same time, Moffat is the perfect person to write this series. Terrance Dicks was nominally in charge of the first two anniversary stories and did a grand job, as he was the person who, more than anyone outside David Whittaker, created this series and what it was, proud of his long association with the show. But Steven Moffat is a fan, who became a writer in television precisely because his imagination was filled with the possibilities of Dr Who. He’s a man whose lived, dreamed and breathed this series from a young age and he knows it better than practically anyone. ‘Day Of The Doctor’ is the distilled essence of everything Dr Who is at its best. It’s a huge drama with high emotional stakes, full of poignant lines about shame and regret and guilt, of the baggage you accumulate growing older, of all the choices in life you took where you might, in retrospect, have taken the wrong one. This is the Doctor finally facing the trauma he’s carried around with him since his 9th self burst onto our screens eight years earlier, as we actually see a part of what happened during the years the show was off the air. It’s delicious scifi, full of scientific gobbledegook to explain impossible exciting things like aliens hiding in paintings and a nuclear button with an avatar that acts as your conscience. It’s a big action set piece, with the Dalek-timelord battle we’ve heard so much about but never seen. It’s a human interest story about what makes humans tick and our often complicated relationship with yourself – something that goes triple when three timelords are gathered together in one place. And it’s blisteringly funny, from the three Doctors bickering with themselves (just like the first three back in 1973) to David Tennant’s tour de force as he’s re-written to be the ‘Patrick Troughton’ of the reunion episodes, wheeled in to give his party pieces of joking and snogging while at the same time finding new ways to add nuance because he’s just so good. Most of all it feels like lots of other Dr Who stories put through a blender, with the age-old plots of when it’s right to fight and when it’s right to find peace that’s been running through this very 1960s show since they started sending troops into Vietnam and that feeling unique to Dr Who that our past present and future are all interconnected, so that our actions have consequences for ourselves and other people – as cleverly shown in the way the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver is still working out the same solution to the locked door in the Tower of London, centuries on, because it’s the same one (although this is also a reason I really don’t like the title. I mean, this is about how one day reverberates across the rest of the Doctor’s lives, as experienced three times over – it should be ‘Days Of The Doctor’ at least!) Though at the same time this is a story that continues to break new ground instead of just re-hashing old ideas, with new places to explore. It’s a lot more than three-dimensional, whatever the technology, with so many layers on top of each other for different levels of fandom.
For instance there’s a clever balance between newcomer viewers who can just see this as a standalone story with all (well, most) of the explanations you need to follow it along the way and the sort of fans who’ll be going ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at little nuggets sprinkled throughout the story, which might not impact the main plot but do add some delicious colour. For instance, the story starts with a policeman walking past Totter’s Lane, just like the very opening shot of opening episode ‘An Unearthly Child’, Clara has just started a new job as a teacher at Coal Hill School (where the same story is set, with former companion ‘I Chesterton’ listed on the board of governors sign) while the headmaster is ‘W Coburn’ (Warris Hussain being its first director and Anthony Coburn it’s first writer), the ‘base code’ the Doctors writes on the wall of their Tower of London cell is the exact time and date the first episode went out (17/16/23/11/63), there’s a neat joke about how the 3rd Doctor stories are ‘1970s or 80s dating depending on dating protocol’, references to past classic lines spoken by other Doctors (‘this body’s wearing a bit thin’ ‘you’ve redecorated! I don’t like it!’ the 10th Doctor’s final words still being ‘I don’t want to go!’) an entire ‘black archive’ notice-board full of past companions (with some interesting twists hinting at unseen adventures: how the heck did Sara Kingdom and Mike Yates end up photographed together?!) and a file on the Doctor codemnamed ‘Cromer’, an in-joke with the brigadier from ‘The Ten Doctors’. There are also two new characters who are the children of people we know and love - Kate Lethbridge Stewart (daughter of the Brigadier) and Pertronella Osgood (daughter of UNIT scientist Malcolm Osgood as seen in ‘The Daemons’ who is a huge Doctor fan and even wears a scarf just like the 4th Doctor). The action is also set round two events we heard a lot about in the modern series but have never seen till now: the 10th Doctor ‘accidentally’ getting married to Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen (whose, erm, not so virginal afterwards, as mentioned in ‘The Shakespeare Code’ ‘The End Of Time’ ‘Amy’s Choice’ and ‘The Wedding Of River Song’) and the ‘fall of Arcadia’ part of the time war mentioned in ‘Army Of Ghosts’. Best of all this story finally uses on screen the ‘hyopcratic oath’ the Doctor took on accepting his name, as first written by Terrance Dicks in the 1976 book ‘The making Of Dr Who’ where he is ‘never cruel or cowardly’, a genius quote I’d loved long before it ended up in the comeback (only proper there should be something of Terrance here too after having so much of a hand in the other anniversary stories). You could watch this story over and over for years and still find something in it. This story even ‘invents’ a joke, by having a preview of the 13th Doctor to come and only showing his eyebrows, the body feature he’ll refer to over and over (although practically he’s filmed that way because they still weren’t sure what the 12th Doctor’s costume would look like yet). This story can be summed up by the sequence of all thirteen Doctors flying together in unison to make the final decision in the time war jointly, so they can share the guilt, a hurrah yippe can’t-believe-this-is-happening moment that gives fans everything they could ever want. And then moves on to something else without making the most of the moment.
That disjontedness is, though, a side effect of the problems Moffat had writing this script because for the longest time he didn’t know who was actually going to be in it. David Tennant hadn’t been confirmed and Matt Smith’s contract was up for renewal at the end of 2012 so for a ‘back-up draft’ the only regular in the episode was Clara! The biggest sticking point was Christopher Eccleston: he’d left the show under something of a cloud in 2005, the BBC attributing fake press releases to why he’d left (a combination of behind the scenes work practises, a schedule so tight it wouldn’t let him off to visit his dying relatives and the fact that nobody was listening to his suggestions despite being the most experienced person in the room). For this plot set round the time war to work he had to be there and Moffat met up with Eccleston for lunch a few times, apparently making some headway, before Eccleston pulled out deciding the show wasn’t for him and his issues with how the show was being run were still unresolved (although they did make up: Eccleston called the final script ‘immaculate’ – sadly he didn’t use the word ‘fantastic’ – while Moffat said in an interview hat while the 9th Doctor ‘might not have turned up for the celebrations there could have been no party without him’). For me the solution would have been to get Paul McGann back, thrilling audiences who’d only got to see him on screen once. Moffat couldn’t see the cuddlier 8th Doctor in a war though (even though I can: the red button prequel ‘Night Of The Doctor’ shows that he’s actually a lot more comfortable with the ‘nice man pushed past his limits’ than the romantic poet type Doctor of the TV Movie)Then Moffat had a masterstroke: they’d never actually come out and said that Paul McGann had regenerated into Eccleston; everyone – including him – had just assumed it. What if there was a Doctor in between them e never got to see? This would be a great hook on which to hang the show and the chance to have a big star name involved for just a single episode. The Dr Who team rang John Hurt as their first choice, never expecting to get him.
Rather than just remembering old folklore this special expands upon it, creating a whole new era. What could have been a disaster becomes this story’s strongest suit and adding another gap for Dr Who spin-offs to fill (the last work John Hurt ever did was for a Big Finish range of ‘War Doctor’ adventures). Even for a show that’s based around time-travel it’s a clever idea and gets around the fact that this particular regeneration is never treated as ‘The Doctor’ in any flashback sequence or ever referred to because as far as everyone is concerned he isn’t a Doctor – that he gave up his right to all himself a healer when he brought harm to his Gallifreyan home world (meaning our numbering system is ‘right’ after all!) The story then becomes more than just a runaround plot but healing and closure, where the War Doctor finds redemption from his future selves, by having Drs 10 and 11 make that difficult decision to destroy his home world with him, allowing the Doctor to drop a lot of the guilt that’s followed him through three regenerations. It makes for a worthy end to the birthday celebrations by making this story important in a way that few others are, celebrating again everything this Dr stands for in helping people, even when it’s his past selves. The Doctor might be having a mid-lives crisis, but he’s a happier changed man by the end, feeling loved and understood, like all the best parties. It also makes this story feels important in a way that befits a 50th birthday story (‘this really is the polar opposite of ‘Dimensions In Time' in so many ways!)
So, probably not the simple Zygon tale we were expecting or the nostalgia fest of the other anniversary stories. However one thing is still the same: there’s plenty of room for the sort of Doctor on Doctor bitching we got in the other two specials though and some quick-witted dialogue as the Doctors all see through the facades of their other regenerations and know where to hurt even compared to the ‘Three’ and ‘Five’ Doctors. John Hurt is as excellent as you’d expect, with a gravitas and a grumpiness wrapped in a twinkle that makes him seem far more like the spirit of the 1st Dr than getting Richard Hurndall or David Bradley in to play him directly (particularly the ‘Dalek’s Masterplan’ version pushed to extremes by circumstances). He’d been associated with this series so long it’s a surprise he hadn’t been it before actually: his breakthrough came playing MP Quentin Crisp in ‘The Naked Civil Servant’ in 1975, a series produced by Who’s first producer Verity Lambert, become a star thanks to turns in ‘I, Claudius’ opposite Derek ‘Master’ Jaocbi, had an alien crawl out of his tummy in Ridley Scott’s films twenty years after the director was meant to be hired to design the Daleks but was double-booked and played the dragon in Merlin opposite a Dr who discovery in Colin ‘Jethro’ Morgan. Though The War Doctor is new to the Whoniverse he never feels out of place.
Dr 10 is especially well served, getting all the best lines and stealing all the scenes even though, like Patrick Troughton before him in the other two specials, David Tennant is really playing a simplified comedy folk memory version where he gets to look angsty in between doing lots of kissing and laughs with Queen Elizabeth. One of my favourite scenes in all of DW is Dr 10 accidentally getting engaged to the Virgin Queen and then insulting her for her bad breath because he thinks she’s a Zygon duplicate – then (spoilers) finding out it was actually her horse. And of course he has a machine that goes ‘ding!’, that feels so natural its a wonder he’d never had one before. Moffat always wrote well for Dr 10 (arguably even better than he wrote for his own creations Drs 11 and 12, episode on episode) and has great fun bringing a light touch to his writing again after so many dark tales. Matt Smith isn’t so lucky, getting the more straightforward part like the one Peter Davison had in the 20th special, there to point out things and mull them over, and that’s a shame given that he’s got just as good a feel at comedy and bows out in just a story’s time, though he does at least get one last and definitive action scene as he dangles upside down from the Tardis doors over Trafalgar Square where the first ‘proper’ bit of location filming for the series took place in ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ back 49 years earlier (you know a story is going to be good when it blows this much budget in the opening scene) and a lot of fez wearing to boot. Clara gets to save the day in a very Clara way, not by doing anything actiony or particularly brave but by being smart and observant, seeing what the Doctors between them are too blind to see and accepting the War Doctor without prejudice where the other Doctors can’t.
Moffat made an interesting comment in the run up to this story, that he hadn’t bothered writing for different styles because each regeneration was still the Doctor and it was the actors who filled in the diferences. He’s blatantly wrong. Perhaps the thing this story gets best is the idea of the three distinctive voices at the heart of this story which are all quite quite different. The war Doctor is the elderly patriarch who hasn’t got time to waste on speaking so he talks in short, clipped sentences that sound more like orders. The 10th Doctor gabbles away at speed the way he always does, in context of being ‘the man who regrets’ (are timelords really men?) someone desperately trying to keep his mind preoccupied with what’s in front of him so he doesn’t have to think about the bigger picture that still haunts him. And the 11th Doctor fluctuates between the two: at times Smith’s Doctor is as puppyish as Tennant’s but at others he’s as old and weary as Hurt, ‘the man who remembers’ the things that went wrong – but not all the time. You do, however, get the sense that they are very much the same person, just like in anniversary stories past – the same software in a different case, a the story puts it. The bugbear of many an anniversary story is giving everyone enough time to show off without any one Doctor taking over and this script gets that right better than any of them (even if the 11th Doctor still comes off worse). Joanna Page is a superb Elizabeth I too, as haughty as you’d expect yet far more playful and the scenes of the 10th Doctor getting himself deeper and deeper into trouble as he tries to prove she’s a Zygon duplicate and the 11th Doctor comment that he’s just kissed a Zygon and ‘what you get up to in the comfort of your own regeneration is your business’ is the best line in the episode. Even though The Queen’s mainly there as an excuse to fit UNIT into the tower of London in the present day her scenes are magic and the romance we heard so much about but never got to see on screen is well worth waiting for.
Alas Billie Piper doesn’t fare so well. Moffat wanted her to be there as Rose was such an important part of the comeback show and she was eager to take part, but as he began writing he began to have second doubts. Rose’s arc from Russell T Davies’ years were so perfect. He realised, he didn’t wasn’t to touch it (although why she couldn’t be taken from time and returned, her memory wiped, I don’t know). Instead he came up with the idea of ‘The Moment’, the talking box that takes on the form of Rose in her ‘Bad Wolf’ phase that acts as the last-gasp firewall asking ‘are you sure you want to sue that button? (only in this case it tapes into the Doctor’s sub- consciousness). So far so good – it’s a clever solution and better than just hitting as single button, even if the ‘Moment’ box itself is more than a bit naff (what with this and Tom Baker turning up sort-of in character as a dotty professor type I really thought I’d tuned into hapless game show Fort Boyard for a second there). In a sense making her an avatar (and skipping all the romance and parallel world business) is a smart move that allows Billie to both look and act different to how she used to (she couldn’t quite remember how to do it when she came back in series four either and worried about it, a lot) without having to bring new viewers who missed 2005 up to speed. However it also means Billie Piper doesn’t get to play the character we know and love but a mad starey woman with big eyes, making her part in the story strangely unsatisfying, while she doesn’t get to share any screen time with David Tennant except one scene where she’s invisible to him, which is a waste (their chemistry is a big 90% of the reason for bringing her back). It also means this great time war. That we’ve heard so much about, is still solved by pushing one single button, which seems a bit, well, easy. The budget won’t stretch to make her the being of light we saw in ‘Parting Of The Ways’ either so it just looks as if times have been hard since leaving Dr Who and Billie can only afford leggings with holes in them now. This plot twist also digs a deep hole and brings up the very big question of why the 9th Doctor didn’t meet Rose in her department store when they were running from Autons and go ‘ere I know you, why aren’t you glowing?!’ So Moffat solves this with a plot twist that the Doctor’s timelines are changed and the war Doctor won’t remember any of this. OK, but that undoes the entire part of the story: the War Doctor is only healed in that moment and his successors never learn – until this point in Matt Smith’s timeline – what the truth really was. So that nice neat finale gets undone again at the last moment. Oh well, it wouldn’t be the first party that was so perfect a hangover meant no one could remember it the next morning.
The Zygons, too, though, are under-used. The main plot would work just as well without them there – this is a story about the Doctor after all, they’re just opportunists hiding in Gallifreyan stasis paintings who don’t actually do much when they come out of hiding except terrorise UNIT. The idea of hiding anything in a painting – never mind a whole planet is bonkers even by DW standards, but the idea of Zygons and Humans in a reluctant peace deal, neither able to blow the other up and either side sure exactly who the other one is, seems a worthy summary of Dr Who’s principles. Te new costumes are some of the better revivals of classic monsters too, all big and blobby but less, well, spaghetti hoopsy than the 1975 version seen in ‘Terror Of the Zygons’ (their only earlier on-screen appearance). The one that attacks Osgood is a great scary moment and her fight back after being called ‘defective’ is an even better scene (although the scene of the Kate turning back into a Zygon, blob by blob, is just stupid and the one scene here that doesn’t quite work). The Zygons don’t have much personality in this version though, without the menace or casual cruelty of the past or that same fright that they don’t just takes your life in terms of being alive but your life as in living your life as your doppelganger, replacing you. You can’t help but feel that they’re here simply because you can’t have Dr Who without a monster, with the deeply nuanced plot about war and peace that Moffat was trying to write leftover for the sequel ‘The Zygon Invasion/Inversion). The same goes for the Daleks: I would have laid money that they’d get a starring role in this story, given how many times the modern series has brought them back and the fact this story is set round the time war where they fought Gallifrey, but a five minute battle scene at the start is all we get. This is their 50th birthday too after all. It’s a waste.
But then, just when we think we’ve opened all the birthday presents, in comes one last surprise with that final scene of Tom Baker as a past/future/biregenerational/or isn’t he? Curator-Doctor. This was a rare secret the production team really did manage to keep from us (apparently Tom Baker blew it talking to his local paper the week of transmission but I never heard it!) and its super special and very Dr Who to have our pasts and present collide like that, like seeing an old friend unexpectedly you haven’t seen in a long time. Even if a then-79-year-old Tom Baker is visibly struggling he still carries all the same charm, charisma and magic, making for a great double act with Matt Smith. Somehow this makes it all the more poignant though – this is, after all, an anniversary special in a show all about change where the first 3 actors to play the lead are no longer around to give their blessing; having the 4th do so adds a weight this special wouldn’t otherwise have. Typically for this story it’s an exposition scene that tells us something (that Gallifrey survived the time wars and ‘falls – no more’, although it’s not in the same place) in a very clumsy way instead of the Doctor finding out on screen. But it’s an exposition scene delivered with class and it’s oh so right that the Doctor learns this most monumental of plot twists from his former self, the one more people associate with being the Doctor than anyone else. It seems right that on his ‘birthday’ the Doctor effectively gets a big old present from the universe, just like when he got his Tardis dematerialisation circuit back after ‘The Three Drs’ (even if, even more typically, it’s a plot twist that’s then ignored for the most part: I fully expected the whole of Peter Capaldi’s arc to be about tracking Gallifrey down but, as ever with Moffat he got distracted by newer ideas before he got there). It’s a truly heartwarming moment, like your elderly relatives turning up for your birthday party for what you know might well be the last time (though, thankfully, Baker is still going strong at the age of ninety as I write this).
Is it really the best story ever made, as so many of the polls have it? Well, no. Like many anniversary
stories it doesn’t hold up as a story in it sown right away from the big day. In some ways its better than the story we were expecting and in others ways not, with maybe a scene too much bickering and bad Wolf Billie where more Zygons and Daleks and scenes of the Doctors all working together, with clips from past adventures, could have gone. That main plot really is awfully silly and running around with Zygons and art galleries doesn’t fit into the big concept stuff with Gallifrey and timewars as smoothly as it should. Even with limited space its a shame that the other Drs are relegated to their eyes in spaceships near the end. Other than UNIT there’s nothing here to represent the 20th century at all and even that doesn’t feel anything like the UNIT of ‘our’ day (I’m willing to bet Kate Stewart is either adopted or takes after her mother, not her Brigadier father). The UNIT aspect slows the whole plot right down in fact – its there purely to deliver us the painting, which is then forgotten about until the finale. To be honest prequel ‘Name Of The Doctor’ felt even more properly nostalgic and like Dr Who than this, with Clara wandering around key moments lovingly recreated from the show’s past. As good as it is to have Tennant and Piper back the Whoniverse is a lot bigger than just those two names. It seems odd now too that one of the things much ballyhooed for this special was that it was in ‘3D’ (at least at the cinema), part of a summer fad when such things were popular – it added nothing to the episode except greater complications making it and isn’t as improved on the technology from the 30th special ‘Dimensions In Time’ as you would think given the gain of twenty years’ worth of technology. It’s a needless gimmick in a story refreshingly free of them) unlike ‘Dimensions In Time’ in fact, which was all gimmicks). There are some truly terrific ideas in this story, but few of them are seen through to fruition: the paintings are a great idea (and perfect for the 3D, which I heard was terrific in the cinema, although it seems odd now that Dr Who was so desperate to throw itself in with something as of-the-moment as 3D, a fad which had died a death by 2014) but they’re just there not an intrinsic part of the plot. The War Doctor’s story is movingly told, but there’s still no sense of what he went through to reach that stage where he was prepared to blow people up. There’s some lovely multi-Doctor action, but too often the Doctors separate and have adventures of their own. There’s very little war and quite a lot of time. Fans of the 3rd, 4th, 10th and 11th Doctor eras are really well served, although the 2nd Doctor feels left out (after all, if any Doctor is going to take up the recorder again it as Matt Smith’s!) and it’s lucky indeed that the 5th, 6th and 7th Drs get a ‘celebration’ of their own the same night with ‘The Five (Ish) Doctors Reboot’.
All that said, let’s let bygones be bygones and Zygons be Zygons. This story had an impossible brief and must have been a seriously momentous task to write and make without upsetting somebody or even a lot of everybodies and even if it isn’t perfect ‘Day Of the Dr’ is still very very good indeed, a 50th anniversary that more than holds its head up with the 10th and 20th stories as a reminder of just how special this series is and as a rattlingly good tale in its own right. Given that this special only has 77 minutes to get everything done and has a lot of ideas to juggle its impressive just how good it is, fleshing the War Doctor out enough to make him seem like an established part of Dr Who folklore rather than a last minute substitute, reminding us of how great David Tennant was and being a story that very much feels like part of the Matt Smith run too. There are wonderful little bits scattered throughout this story, little lines of dialogue like the 11th Doctor talking about a cup-a-soups stirred with time and the scene of the 10th Doctor grilling a bunny and threatening it with the darkness of who he is while thinking it’s a Zygon (rather than a bemused rabbit: I like to think this is a homage to John Hurt’s greatest role, as hazel in the original animated film version of ‘Watership Down’ where Richard ‘Chief Caretaker’ Briers is his brother Fiver) that make up for the fact that not all of these scenes make sense jumbled up next to one another. And there’s been one heck of a lot of sticking plaster used to keep everything moving. If nothing else this special felt special and was the last time DW was the talk of the universe before something of a ten year slump, beloved by many fans because it sums up so much about Dr Who, especially new-Who, in one go. All that and it feels like a party too. Now that’s a celebration! Dr Who had never been this big – this is the most seen story round the world of the entire run – and even in the cinemas it was the third most thing watched that week, despite only being on once and being on TV for free! (And how perfect that the anniversary day fell on a Saturday, the perfect day for both cinema goers and Dr Who!) It was, despite all my nit-pickings, a triumph whatever way you look at it. Alas, after all that attention, none of the next batch of episodes will feel even close to being this special again and, like the Doctor dangling over Trafalgar Square, despite reaching such impossible heights the only way from here was down.
POSITIVES + One of the new parts of this story, who’ll go on to be a properly loved part of the series, is Osgood, the hapless scientific advisor at UNIt whose struggling in the Doctors’ scarf-tails. She’s like the 11th Doctor in so any ways though, despite wearing the scarf of the 4th: she’s plucky, courageous and intelligent, but also vulnerable and accident-prone, one of those people whose so impossibly clever that they somehow come out looking stupid at times too, their mind on other things. The asthma jokes do go on a bit, but otherwise Osgood feels like a rounded character. She’s also a Dr who fan as big as any of us – it makes sense she ought to be there. By the time she stands up to the Zygons and finds a shape-shifting solution to the war, you’ll be cheering her on like characters who’ve been in this series decades, played by Ingrid Oliver (nowadays Mrs Richard Osman) plays her with just the right mixture of endearing awkwardness.
NEGATIVES - We build up to the big moment of the many Doctors flying in to freeze Gallifrey at a moment in time so that everyone is saved, everyone starts nattering in clips and soundbites taken from old episodes all on top of one another and it’s wonderful, marvellous, stupendous, everything I live for as a fan, with all the old Tardises lovingly recreated and old footage of film and audio sourced, even going to the trouble of getting in a soundalike for Hartnell (John Guiller sounding far more like him than David Bradley or Richard Hurdnall, hired after his sterling job on the DVD reconstruction of the ‘cut’ episode of ‘Planet Of The Giants’) and filming Peter Capaldi on his first (unofficial) day at work and chucking it in at the absolute last minute post-prodctionwise. Then...nothing. Everyone just flies off again. We don’t linger or give every Doctor a full scene, they just natter over each other. know how good the CGI of the past Drs is from the great last moment of ‘Name Of The Doctor’ when they all stand together as one (a cut ending, which I so wish they’d used, had Matt Smith back on the cloud of ‘The Snowmen’ walking past the Doctors all together and turning the portrait of the war Doctor who’d been facing the wall in shame, back round) so we know they could have done more, much more, with this than merely raid the archives so briefly again. Although the video clips are well chosen frustratingly we don’t even get to see them properly as they’re hidden away at the back of the screen on Tardis roundels. Surely more could have been used? I mean, what sort of a special runs to 77 minutes anyway (they could easily have extended this to 90 minutes and given Matt Smith something fun to do into the bargain). What should have been one of the biggest, most emotional scenes of the special is just thrown away and the only shot we linger on is Capaldi’s eyebrows, which is no compensation at all now we’ve had three years of being entranced by them.
BEST QUOTE: ‘Great men are forged in fire. It is the privilege of lesser men to light the flame’.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Though the special only lasts 77 minutes we Whovians still got a full night of viewing in for anniversary with three whole spin-offs and extras that, if anything, were even better than the episode itself. First up is Strax’s cinema-only introduction: the special is a bit low on humour, Tennant’s Queen-kissing scene aside, but this is hilarious as we’re given instructions on wearing 3D glasses, using ‘cloning devices’ to transmit footage on bootleg and turning off phones in a Sontaron voice (best line ‘popcorn feels pain, which is why it squeals!’)
There was an additional brief 3D cinema introduction featuring the three main Doctors from this story too. Best gag is the 11th Doctor welcoming the audience to the show’s 100th anniversary special in 12D with all 57 Doctors before realising his mistake (‘3D? is there a budget cut?’) before warning viewers to check for Zygons by looking to the seat next to them and that if a lens turned black ‘that person’s a Zygon and at some point during the movie they’re going to eat you!’ The 10th Doctor, meanwhile, just makes more cracks about the 11th Dr’s chin before we get the old ‘Dr Who?’ gag as we turn to look at the war Doctor.
Then there’s ten minute prequel ‘Night Of the Doctor’ which gave Dr 8 only his second time on screen and Paul McGann makes a far better job of it than the TV Movie with a decent, darker script. He really makes the most of his short time in the spotlight and the return to Karn, unseen since ‘The Brain Of Morbius’ in 1976, is very welcome (a return trip is long overdue). The War Doctor was written in because no one could imagine it being the cuddlier 8th Dr who pressed the button to blow everyone up – but seeing this ragged and desperate version makes you realise that he very much could and maybe should, however good John Hurt was in the end. The 8th Doctor is in a crashing spaceship, tries to do what he always does and save people, but the timelord on board is incredibly scared of him and would rather commit suicide than be saved by him. She thinks he’s a traitor and the Doctor isn’t so sure she’s wrong. Crash-landing, hurt, the Sisterhood revive him with a potion and can even make it fit who he wants to be in his next regeneration, but he knows that he can’t be a ‘Doctor’ anymore so chooses to be a warrior, claiming to be pleased that the process ‘hurts’ ‘because it should. Watching this, in many ways the most bouncy and hopeful of Doctors, realise that he needs to change and taking the elixir that turns him into John Hurt is aesthetically so wrong and yet it feels so right and points to just how great the 8th Doctor might have been in some parallel world. Why this isn’t on the Whoniverse i-layer is anyone’s guess: I way prefer it to ‘Fay Of the Doctor’; I just wish it was longer and we’d had a whole episode of this, not just ten minutes.
Less substantial is ‘The Last Day’, released straight to BBC i-player and the Dr Who youtube channel before appearing as an extra on the DVD of the story, even though its set during ‘The Fall Of Arcadia’, the pivotal moment in the time wars. It’s a quirky idea, putting the viewer at the heart of events as if we’re fighting during the war and having us act as lookout as an army of Daleks turn up, but it feels a bit too much like one of those annoying computer game cut-scenes you skip because it’s all atmosphere and no plot. The set looks really fake and the effects badly CGI-d on too. There are some typically good Moffaty lines though which, like ‘Dalek’, stress the horror if just one Dalek breaks through the 400 sky-trench barriers…and then, like ‘Bad Wolf’ shows us a quadzillion of the things. The clip ends in a quick extermination as we get zapped for our troubles (but given that the Dalek only shoots once and I’m a timelord, does that mean I’m in my Patrick Troughton phase now?!)
Then there’s ‘The Five Doctors(ish) reboot, a gorgeous mockumentary directed by Peter Davison and featuring him alongside Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy (plus brief cameos by Paul McGann and David Tennant, hence the title) as they pester Steven Moffat trying to get a part in the new special, which is hilarious if you know your Who references and still pretty funny if you don’t. No one is safe from the barbs in this special, from Colin Baker’s family reacting in horror as he tries to make them watch his Dr Who DVDs to John Barrowman’s ‘closet straight’ family and perpetual singing, to Sylvester McCoy name dropping the fact he’s working with Peter Jackson on ‘Lord Of The Rings’ over and over (Jackson, himself a fan, gets a scene too!) to Georgia Moffat being pregnant (again) to Steven Moffat playing with his Dr Who toys when he should be trying to write to its killer finale of Russell T Davies, the man so powerful he brought back Dr Who in the first place, reduced to phoning up and begging for a scene in the special (‘Quel de mage, Davros!’ An actual line he tried to get into ‘Journey’s End’ but decided was a joke too far) Glorious. As well as ‘Day Of The Dr’ sums up a Dr Who story this special sums up being a Dr Who fan better than anything else around.
Best of all though was the drama ‘An Adventure In Space and Time’ which tells the story of Dr Who’s first three years inside an hour, a fine tribute to creator Sydney Newman, producer Verity Lambert and most of all William Hartnell and how so many people told something couldn’t be done went ahead and did it anyway to the point where it remains one of TV’s most loved series. Forget the rather warped idea of Dr 1 in ‘Twice Upon Time’, this is a real tribute that captures Hartnell in all his gruff but sweet glory and the finale, when he’s forced by health reasons and too many arguments with BBC bosses to leave the show he loves but protectively shows the newcomers how the Tardis works before seeing Matt Smith (and in the 2023 repeat Ncuti) nodding at him through his brain-fuddled haze, made me cry. Easily Mark Gatiss’ best work, inside Dr Who or out, it re-creates old scenes with love (‘The Tenth Planet’ looks positively gorgeous! No wonder these cloth Cybermen were brought back soon after), includes as many cameos as possible (practically all the surviving Hartnell companions are there) and sums up the magic of this series better than any of the actual episodes, while David Bradley is an excellent Hartnell (as opposed to a so-so 1st Dr, a subtle difference). It’s only fault is that it ought to have been longer – much much longer. Still, what a special night of viewing that was, a worthy tribute to a special fifty years.
Less worthy and going out a week before the special was a sketch in the show ‘A Night With The Stars’, a documentary with celebs by Brian Cox, the bossy egotistical 6th Doctor of the scientific world, which keeps going throughout the show (in a desperate attempt to get viewers to continue to watch). The 11th Doctor gives Brian a lift from his dressing room to the stage (the verdict ‘it’s complicated-ish’; the Doctor looks put out by that) only the Tardis breaks down. While the Doctor repairs it one of the Silence turns up on screen to wipe the scientists’ memory. Hoorah! Restored later in the episode, Brian accidentally knocks a control panel and causes a big explosion during flight in the time vortex. The Doctor promises to fix it using the power from a black hole, to which the scientists says it’s nonsense he should read Einstein’s theories (not to claim that I know more than an eminent scientists, but actually in theory if you could find a way of harnessing the power of a black hole you could – just because we can’t now doesn’t mean we can’t in the future and the Doctor comes from far in the future from a more advanced species than humanity, just saying). Against all odds this excruciating skit ends well, as the Doctor finally gets Brian onto the stage and tells him that a young girl with sad eyes will be watching who’ll change the world and it’s up to the scientist to inspire her. Quite why anyone would be inspired by the claptrap in Cox’s shows, which deserve to be sucked into a black hole, is beyond me but at least the ending is sweet.
‘The History Of the Doctor’ was a (very) short story broadcast as part of the ‘Ultimate Guide’ documentary broadcast five days before anniversary night, for some odd reason known only to the schedulers (wibbly wobbly BBC Three indeed). Clara wants a holiday, only the Doctor’s lost his memory and doesn’t know who he is. The pair flick through his 1200 year old diary for clues, inspiring all sorts of memories along the way. By the end of the documentary his memory is restored but he’s sad because of all the people he’ll never get to see again (something which shouldn’t apply really, to a time traveller). Clara cheers him up by reminding him of all the good he’s done so they set off for another adventure. Hopefully a more substantial one than this bit of fluffy nonsense.
We fans don’t talk about ‘Live: The Afterparty’ which went put the night of the special. Well, only in our therapy sessions anyway. For the sake of completism it featured Zoe Ball and Rick Edwards interviewing various alumni from all eras of the show what they thought about the special. Or at least that’s what it was meant to do. Most of the special was spent talking to wannabe boy band ‘One Direction’ (why?!) live over a faulty internet connection so most of the special was five muppet wannabes not saying much of interest thirty seconds after they were asked the dumbest questions going (it didn’t help that they were performing when the special was on so hadn’t actually seen it yet…you really think someone would have thought to check that bit first). Mini control freak Steven Moffat spends most of the time in hysterics, the one part of the anniversary night that hadn’t been planned years in advance ruining all his hard work and the thing that fans were talking about most online that night. Very few of the Who alumni get time to say anything and the few that do got to say no more than a word or two, while poor Katy Manning came out worst, Rick accidentally knocking her flying during one interview segment. Thankfully she was unhurt. I wish the rest of us were. Painful.
Over in the printed word ‘The Then and The Now’ is the only other appearance, to date, of ‘The Curator, revealed to be a future Doctor. Which is a shame as it now means he can’t be a ‘bi-regenerational Doctor’ as hinted in ‘The Giggle’. It’s nice to see the old boy again though and up against the 11th Doctor once more in a graphic novel that was – until the work dries up and Matt Smith ends up at Big Finish – pretty much the last 11th Doctor story of all, published a full year after Peter Capaldi took over on TV and a rare comic book appearance for the war Doctor. Weirdly Abslaam Daak – Dalek killer, the Arnold Schwarzenegger-style assassin from the early 1990s comic strips, is in there too. Honestly, though, it’s a bit of a letdown, following the Doctor being put on trial (again!) before escaping in the Tardis. The new ‘baddy’ The malignant is a worthy foe though, a very comic book villain that’s less a person and more a bubbling lump of hate.
There’s a whole range of War Doctor stories starring John Hurt if you’re so inclined. They’re a bit slow and talky, considering they concern a war, and are more like the political shenanigans of the ‘Gallifrey’ Big Finish series than anything else. They enver quite the spot for me, with plots that go round and round the one in ‘day Of the Doctor’ afraid of changing anything, but they do flesh out the background of the ‘wilderness’ years and if anything John Hurt’s portrayal is even better as he understands the character more, while Jacqueline Pearce (Blake’s 7’s Servalan as well as Chessene in ‘The two Doctors’) makes for a fine opponent. They’ve even carried on after Hurt’s death in 2017, with Jonathan Carley playing a younger version (with photos of an ‘I Claudius’ era John Hurt from the 1970s on the front of the boxes).
Previous ‘The Name Of The Doctor’ next ‘Time Of The Doctor’
Back in 1993 ‘Dimensions In Time’, the 30th anniversary of Dr Who, was a sham – a twelve minute long Eastenders crossover in 3D you could only watch with cardboard glasses that I swear my eyes still haven’t recovered from. For the 40th anniversary we got a half-hearted documentary and to be honest I was surprised we even got that. By the time of the 50th though Dr Who was back and bigger than ever, with a party that seemed to last the full anniversary year long and the best in cutting edge three-dimensional technology. It was amazing: this show whose flames had been kept alive by us pockets of fans scattered all over the world forced into hiding our love for this show through mockery and misunderstandings were suddenly in the middle of the biggest party in town. Forget the ‘Day Of The Doctor’, this was the era of Dr Who and the show had never felt more loved. It had never got this much attention before either, which made us all slightly nervous. I mean, everyone was watching, even people who’d gradually drifted away from the show after the Russell T Davies years and this episode wasn’t just on telly in Britain, it was the largest simulcast round the world, broadcast at the exact same time (to avoid spoilers) in no less than 94 countries and broadcast at the cinema no less.
The first anniversary story made since the successful 21st century revival is another of those episodes that must have been hell to write: how do you capture half a century of a series whose scope is this wide in an hour and a quarter without disappointing someone? Steven Moffat was under huge pressure to bring back the past without interrupting the arc of the 11th Dr and deliver a story that would make sense for the general public even if you’d never seen an episode of Dr Who in your life. And that was a bit of worry. Because showrunner Steven Moffat was simultaneously the single best and worst person for such a closely scrutinised job and this is simultaneously both his best and worst work. By his own account writing this story left the writer waking up in the middle of the night in a panic – and that was two years early, when he sat down to write the first draft, the responsibility hanging heavy on his shoulders. Moffat’s at his happiest when writing intricate continuity-driven plots for which you need to pay close attention from a story several years earlier: ‘The Eleventh Hour’ proves he can do ‘hey look at me!’ re-launches rather well, but it’s not a natural place for his writing style to go. He’s also one of those writers who has a tendency to get bored with what he’s writing so will make a u-turn to somewhere completely new and while that can be great in ‘normal’ episodes anniversary stories work best when they have an element of safety, of summing up what a series is all about rather than sending it spinning into new territories. For a moment there you think Moffat’s calmed down those tendencies and is giving us the story we expected. From the little nuggets we were dropped along the way it sounded as if Moffat was taking an uncharacteristically straightforward route: we heard the Zygons were returning and we know they’re shape-shifters so I expected a story that brought back as many elements of the past that way – perhaps with slightly damaged Zygons bringing back the Drs where the actors had died, Richard Hurndall style. How very clever you think: so that’s how they’re going to get all the other Doctors back looking a bit different – they’re Zygon replicas! Throw in the huge set-up in ‘The Name Of The Doctor’, with Clara going back through the Doctor’s past timelines (something repeated during the trailer) which even ended with John Hurt and aha you think, that’s more clever still. While the idea of things that were in paintings (that turn out to be ‘stasis chambers’) running amok in the UNIT ‘black archive’ full of odds and ends from different stories is a fabulous way to throw in as many heart-warming moments from past stories as possible. It really is a very neat idea for a multi-Doctor story with more grounds for a plot than either ‘The Three Doctors’ or ‘The Five Doctor’s (while ‘Dimensions In Time’ is just silly). So very many Dr Who stories riff on ideas from Rod Serling’s ‘The Twilight Zone’ but this one is unique in riffing off Rod Serling’s ‘Night Gallery’, of paintings that all relate to the plot in some way, instead. It’s also a neat homage, of sorts, to ‘City Of Death’, while if Russell T Davies’ plan to have the time war as a metaphor for the wilderness years when Dr Who was off the air is to be believed then having a world that we thought was dead turn out to be just on pause is the perfect metaphor for how this series came back again. The thought that the companions we know and love have passed through here, their memories wiped, as UNIT desperately try to keep tabs on the Doctor, is a great idea that has enough momentum to propel a whole series of spin-off adventures. And then, mid-sentence, a crack in the space-time continuum opens up with the 10th Doctor and even Matt Smith’s Doctor is angry: ‘no not now, I’m busy!’ he wails as the story takes a complete 180 twist into something else entirely. We know the feeling. This is a ridiculously disjointed episode, a bunch of setpieces tied together with a logic that doesn’t really stand up under scrutiny.
And yet, at the same time, Moffat is the perfect person to write this series. Terrance Dicks was nominally in charge of the first two anniversary stories and did a grand job, as he was the person who, more than anyone outside David Whittaker, created this series and what it was, proud of his long association with the show. But Steven Moffat is a fan, who became a writer in television precisely because his imagination was filled with the possibilities of Dr Who. He’s a man whose lived, dreamed and breathed this series from a young age and he knows it better than practically anyone. ‘Day Of The Doctor’ is the distilled essence of everything Dr Who is at its best. It’s a huge drama with high emotional stakes, full of poignant lines about shame and regret and guilt, of the baggage you accumulate growing older, of all the choices in life you took where you might, in retrospect, have taken the wrong one. This is the Doctor finally facing the trauma he’s carried around with him since his 9th self burst onto our screens eight years earlier, as we actually see a part of what happened during the years the show was off the air. It’s delicious scifi, full of scientific gobbledegook to explain impossible exciting things like aliens hiding in paintings and a nuclear button with an avatar that acts as your conscience. It’s a big action set piece, with the Dalek-timelord battle we’ve heard so much about but never seen. It’s a human interest story about what makes humans tick and our often complicated relationship with yourself – something that goes triple when three timelords are gathered together in one place. And it’s blisteringly funny, from the three Doctors bickering with themselves (just like the first three back in 1973) to David Tennant’s tour de force as he’s re-written to be the ‘Patrick Troughton’ of the reunion episodes, wheeled in to give his party pieces of joking and snogging while at the same time finding new ways to add nuance because he’s just so good. Most of all it feels like lots of other Dr Who stories put through a blender, with the age-old plots of when it’s right to fight and when it’s right to find peace that’s been running through this very 1960s show since they started sending troops into Vietnam and that feeling unique to Dr Who that our past present and future are all interconnected, so that our actions have consequences for ourselves and other people – as cleverly shown in the way the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver is still working out the same solution to the locked door in the Tower of London, centuries on, because it’s the same one (although this is also a reason I really don’t like the title. I mean, this is about how one day reverberates across the rest of the Doctor’s lives, as experienced three times over – it should be ‘Days Of The Doctor’ at least!) Though at the same time this is a story that continues to break new ground instead of just re-hashing old ideas, with new places to explore. It’s a lot more than three-dimensional, whatever the technology, with so many layers on top of each other for different levels of fandom.
For instance there’s a clever balance between newcomer viewers who can just see this as a standalone story with all (well, most) of the explanations you need to follow it along the way and the sort of fans who’ll be going ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at little nuggets sprinkled throughout the story, which might not impact the main plot but do add some delicious colour. For instance, the story starts with a policeman walking past Totter’s Lane, just like the very opening shot of opening episode ‘An Unearthly Child’, Clara has just started a new job as a teacher at Coal Hill School (where the same story is set, with former companion ‘I Chesterton’ listed on the board of governors sign) while the headmaster is ‘W Coburn’ (Warris Hussain being its first director and Anthony Coburn it’s first writer), the ‘base code’ the Doctors writes on the wall of their Tower of London cell is the exact time and date the first episode went out (17/16/23/11/63), there’s a neat joke about how the 3rd Doctor stories are ‘1970s or 80s dating depending on dating protocol’, references to past classic lines spoken by other Doctors (‘this body’s wearing a bit thin’ ‘you’ve redecorated! I don’t like it!’ the 10th Doctor’s final words still being ‘I don’t want to go!’) an entire ‘black archive’ notice-board full of past companions (with some interesting twists hinting at unseen adventures: how the heck did Sara Kingdom and Mike Yates end up photographed together?!) and a file on the Doctor codemnamed ‘Cromer’, an in-joke with the brigadier from ‘The Ten Doctors’. There are also two new characters who are the children of people we know and love - Kate Lethbridge Stewart (daughter of the Brigadier) and Pertronella Osgood (daughter of UNIT scientist Malcolm Osgood as seen in ‘The Daemons’ who is a huge Doctor fan and even wears a scarf just like the 4th Doctor). The action is also set round two events we heard a lot about in the modern series but have never seen till now: the 10th Doctor ‘accidentally’ getting married to Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen (whose, erm, not so virginal afterwards, as mentioned in ‘The Shakespeare Code’ ‘The End Of Time’ ‘Amy’s Choice’ and ‘The Wedding Of River Song’) and the ‘fall of Arcadia’ part of the time war mentioned in ‘Army Of Ghosts’. Best of all this story finally uses on screen the ‘hyopcratic oath’ the Doctor took on accepting his name, as first written by Terrance Dicks in the 1976 book ‘The making Of Dr Who’ where he is ‘never cruel or cowardly’, a genius quote I’d loved long before it ended up in the comeback (only proper there should be something of Terrance here too after having so much of a hand in the other anniversary stories). You could watch this story over and over for years and still find something in it. This story even ‘invents’ a joke, by having a preview of the 13th Doctor to come and only showing his eyebrows, the body feature he’ll refer to over and over (although practically he’s filmed that way because they still weren’t sure what the 12th Doctor’s costume would look like yet). This story can be summed up by the sequence of all thirteen Doctors flying together in unison to make the final decision in the time war jointly, so they can share the guilt, a hurrah yippe can’t-believe-this-is-happening moment that gives fans everything they could ever want. And then moves on to something else without making the most of the moment.
That disjontedness is, though, a side effect of the problems Moffat had writing this script because for the longest time he didn’t know who was actually going to be in it. David Tennant hadn’t been confirmed and Matt Smith’s contract was up for renewal at the end of 2012 so for a ‘back-up draft’ the only regular in the episode was Clara! The biggest sticking point was Christopher Eccleston: he’d left the show under something of a cloud in 2005, the BBC attributing fake press releases to why he’d left (a combination of behind the scenes work practises, a schedule so tight it wouldn’t let him off to visit his dying relatives and the fact that nobody was listening to his suggestions despite being the most experienced person in the room). For this plot set round the time war to work he had to be there and Moffat met up with Eccleston for lunch a few times, apparently making some headway, before Eccleston pulled out deciding the show wasn’t for him and his issues with how the show was being run were still unresolved (although they did make up: Eccleston called the final script ‘immaculate’ – sadly he didn’t use the word ‘fantastic’ – while Moffat said in an interview hat while the 9th Doctor ‘might not have turned up for the celebrations there could have been no party without him’). For me the solution would have been to get Paul McGann back, thrilling audiences who’d only got to see him on screen once. Moffat couldn’t see the cuddlier 8th Doctor in a war though (even though I can: the red button prequel ‘Night Of The Doctor’ shows that he’s actually a lot more comfortable with the ‘nice man pushed past his limits’ than the romantic poet type Doctor of the TV Movie)Then Moffat had a masterstroke: they’d never actually come out and said that Paul McGann had regenerated into Eccleston; everyone – including him – had just assumed it. What if there was a Doctor in between them e never got to see? This would be a great hook on which to hang the show and the chance to have a big star name involved for just a single episode. The Dr Who team rang John Hurt as their first choice, never expecting to get him.
Rather than just remembering old folklore this special expands upon it, creating a whole new era. What could have been a disaster becomes this story’s strongest suit and adding another gap for Dr Who spin-offs to fill (the last work John Hurt ever did was for a Big Finish range of ‘War Doctor’ adventures). Even for a show that’s based around time-travel it’s a clever idea and gets around the fact that this particular regeneration is never treated as ‘The Doctor’ in any flashback sequence or ever referred to because as far as everyone is concerned he isn’t a Doctor – that he gave up his right to all himself a healer when he brought harm to his Gallifreyan home world (meaning our numbering system is ‘right’ after all!) The story then becomes more than just a runaround plot but healing and closure, where the War Doctor finds redemption from his future selves, by having Drs 10 and 11 make that difficult decision to destroy his home world with him, allowing the Doctor to drop a lot of the guilt that’s followed him through three regenerations. It makes for a worthy end to the birthday celebrations by making this story important in a way that few others are, celebrating again everything this Dr stands for in helping people, even when it’s his past selves. The Doctor might be having a mid-lives crisis, but he’s a happier changed man by the end, feeling loved and understood, like all the best parties. It also makes this story feels important in a way that befits a 50th birthday story (‘this really is the polar opposite of ‘Dimensions In Time' in so many ways!)
So, probably not the simple Zygon tale we were expecting or the nostalgia fest of the other anniversary stories. However one thing is still the same: there’s plenty of room for the sort of Doctor on Doctor bitching we got in the other two specials though and some quick-witted dialogue as the Doctors all see through the facades of their other regenerations and know where to hurt even compared to the ‘Three’ and ‘Five’ Doctors. John Hurt is as excellent as you’d expect, with a gravitas and a grumpiness wrapped in a twinkle that makes him seem far more like the spirit of the 1st Dr than getting Richard Hurndall or David Bradley in to play him directly (particularly the ‘Dalek’s Masterplan’ version pushed to extremes by circumstances). He’d been associated with this series so long it’s a surprise he hadn’t been it before actually: his breakthrough came playing MP Quentin Crisp in ‘The Naked Civil Servant’ in 1975, a series produced by Who’s first producer Verity Lambert, become a star thanks to turns in ‘I, Claudius’ opposite Derek ‘Master’ Jaocbi, had an alien crawl out of his tummy in Ridley Scott’s films twenty years after the director was meant to be hired to design the Daleks but was double-booked and played the dragon in Merlin opposite a Dr who discovery in Colin ‘Jethro’ Morgan. Though The War Doctor is new to the Whoniverse he never feels out of place.
Dr 10 is especially well served, getting all the best lines and stealing all the scenes even though, like Patrick Troughton before him in the other two specials, David Tennant is really playing a simplified comedy folk memory version where he gets to look angsty in between doing lots of kissing and laughs with Queen Elizabeth. One of my favourite scenes in all of DW is Dr 10 accidentally getting engaged to the Virgin Queen and then insulting her for her bad breath because he thinks she’s a Zygon duplicate – then (spoilers) finding out it was actually her horse. And of course he has a machine that goes ‘ding!’, that feels so natural its a wonder he’d never had one before. Moffat always wrote well for Dr 10 (arguably even better than he wrote for his own creations Drs 11 and 12, episode on episode) and has great fun bringing a light touch to his writing again after so many dark tales. Matt Smith isn’t so lucky, getting the more straightforward part like the one Peter Davison had in the 20th special, there to point out things and mull them over, and that’s a shame given that he’s got just as good a feel at comedy and bows out in just a story’s time, though he does at least get one last and definitive action scene as he dangles upside down from the Tardis doors over Trafalgar Square where the first ‘proper’ bit of location filming for the series took place in ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ back 49 years earlier (you know a story is going to be good when it blows this much budget in the opening scene) and a lot of fez wearing to boot. Clara gets to save the day in a very Clara way, not by doing anything actiony or particularly brave but by being smart and observant, seeing what the Doctors between them are too blind to see and accepting the War Doctor without prejudice where the other Doctors can’t.
Moffat made an interesting comment in the run up to this story, that he hadn’t bothered writing for different styles because each regeneration was still the Doctor and it was the actors who filled in the diferences. He’s blatantly wrong. Perhaps the thing this story gets best is the idea of the three distinctive voices at the heart of this story which are all quite quite different. The war Doctor is the elderly patriarch who hasn’t got time to waste on speaking so he talks in short, clipped sentences that sound more like orders. The 10th Doctor gabbles away at speed the way he always does, in context of being ‘the man who regrets’ (are timelords really men?) someone desperately trying to keep his mind preoccupied with what’s in front of him so he doesn’t have to think about the bigger picture that still haunts him. And the 11th Doctor fluctuates between the two: at times Smith’s Doctor is as puppyish as Tennant’s but at others he’s as old and weary as Hurt, ‘the man who remembers’ the things that went wrong – but not all the time. You do, however, get the sense that they are very much the same person, just like in anniversary stories past – the same software in a different case, a the story puts it. The bugbear of many an anniversary story is giving everyone enough time to show off without any one Doctor taking over and this script gets that right better than any of them (even if the 11th Doctor still comes off worse). Joanna Page is a superb Elizabeth I too, as haughty as you’d expect yet far more playful and the scenes of the 10th Doctor getting himself deeper and deeper into trouble as he tries to prove she’s a Zygon duplicate and the 11th Doctor comment that he’s just kissed a Zygon and ‘what you get up to in the comfort of your own regeneration is your business’ is the best line in the episode. Even though The Queen’s mainly there as an excuse to fit UNIT into the tower of London in the present day her scenes are magic and the romance we heard so much about but never got to see on screen is well worth waiting for.
Alas Billie Piper doesn’t fare so well. Moffat wanted her to be there as Rose was such an important part of the comeback show and she was eager to take part, but as he began writing he began to have second doubts. Rose’s arc from Russell T Davies’ years were so perfect. He realised, he didn’t wasn’t to touch it (although why she couldn’t be taken from time and returned, her memory wiped, I don’t know). Instead he came up with the idea of ‘The Moment’, the talking box that takes on the form of Rose in her ‘Bad Wolf’ phase that acts as the last-gasp firewall asking ‘are you sure you want to sue that button? (only in this case it tapes into the Doctor’s sub- consciousness). So far so good – it’s a clever solution and better than just hitting as single button, even if the ‘Moment’ box itself is more than a bit naff (what with this and Tom Baker turning up sort-of in character as a dotty professor type I really thought I’d tuned into hapless game show Fort Boyard for a second there). In a sense making her an avatar (and skipping all the romance and parallel world business) is a smart move that allows Billie to both look and act different to how she used to (she couldn’t quite remember how to do it when she came back in series four either and worried about it, a lot) without having to bring new viewers who missed 2005 up to speed. However it also means Billie Piper doesn’t get to play the character we know and love but a mad starey woman with big eyes, making her part in the story strangely unsatisfying, while she doesn’t get to share any screen time with David Tennant except one scene where she’s invisible to him, which is a waste (their chemistry is a big 90% of the reason for bringing her back). It also means this great time war. That we’ve heard so much about, is still solved by pushing one single button, which seems a bit, well, easy. The budget won’t stretch to make her the being of light we saw in ‘Parting Of The Ways’ either so it just looks as if times have been hard since leaving Dr Who and Billie can only afford leggings with holes in them now. This plot twist also digs a deep hole and brings up the very big question of why the 9th Doctor didn’t meet Rose in her department store when they were running from Autons and go ‘ere I know you, why aren’t you glowing?!’ So Moffat solves this with a plot twist that the Doctor’s timelines are changed and the war Doctor won’t remember any of this. OK, but that undoes the entire part of the story: the War Doctor is only healed in that moment and his successors never learn – until this point in Matt Smith’s timeline – what the truth really was. So that nice neat finale gets undone again at the last moment. Oh well, it wouldn’t be the first party that was so perfect a hangover meant no one could remember it the next morning.
The Zygons, too, though, are under-used. The main plot would work just as well without them there – this is a story about the Doctor after all, they’re just opportunists hiding in Gallifreyan stasis paintings who don’t actually do much when they come out of hiding except terrorise UNIT. The idea of hiding anything in a painting – never mind a whole planet is bonkers even by DW standards, but the idea of Zygons and Humans in a reluctant peace deal, neither able to blow the other up and either side sure exactly who the other one is, seems a worthy summary of Dr Who’s principles. Te new costumes are some of the better revivals of classic monsters too, all big and blobby but less, well, spaghetti hoopsy than the 1975 version seen in ‘Terror Of the Zygons’ (their only earlier on-screen appearance). The one that attacks Osgood is a great scary moment and her fight back after being called ‘defective’ is an even better scene (although the scene of the Kate turning back into a Zygon, blob by blob, is just stupid and the one scene here that doesn’t quite work). The Zygons don’t have much personality in this version though, without the menace or casual cruelty of the past or that same fright that they don’t just takes your life in terms of being alive but your life as in living your life as your doppelganger, replacing you. You can’t help but feel that they’re here simply because you can’t have Dr Who without a monster, with the deeply nuanced plot about war and peace that Moffat was trying to write leftover for the sequel ‘The Zygon Invasion/Inversion). The same goes for the Daleks: I would have laid money that they’d get a starring role in this story, given how many times the modern series has brought them back and the fact this story is set round the time war where they fought Gallifrey, but a five minute battle scene at the start is all we get. This is their 50th birthday too after all. It’s a waste.
But then, just when we think we’ve opened all the birthday presents, in comes one last surprise with that final scene of Tom Baker as a past/future/biregenerational/or isn’t he? Curator-Doctor. This was a rare secret the production team really did manage to keep from us (apparently Tom Baker blew it talking to his local paper the week of transmission but I never heard it!) and its super special and very Dr Who to have our pasts and present collide like that, like seeing an old friend unexpectedly you haven’t seen in a long time. Even if a then-79-year-old Tom Baker is visibly struggling he still carries all the same charm, charisma and magic, making for a great double act with Matt Smith. Somehow this makes it all the more poignant though – this is, after all, an anniversary special in a show all about change where the first 3 actors to play the lead are no longer around to give their blessing; having the 4th do so adds a weight this special wouldn’t otherwise have. Typically for this story it’s an exposition scene that tells us something (that Gallifrey survived the time wars and ‘falls – no more’, although it’s not in the same place) in a very clumsy way instead of the Doctor finding out on screen. But it’s an exposition scene delivered with class and it’s oh so right that the Doctor learns this most monumental of plot twists from his former self, the one more people associate with being the Doctor than anyone else. It seems right that on his ‘birthday’ the Doctor effectively gets a big old present from the universe, just like when he got his Tardis dematerialisation circuit back after ‘The Three Drs’ (even if, even more typically, it’s a plot twist that’s then ignored for the most part: I fully expected the whole of Peter Capaldi’s arc to be about tracking Gallifrey down but, as ever with Moffat he got distracted by newer ideas before he got there). It’s a truly heartwarming moment, like your elderly relatives turning up for your birthday party for what you know might well be the last time (though, thankfully, Baker is still going strong at the age of ninety as I write this).
Is it really the best story ever made, as so many of the polls have it? Well, no. Like many anniversary
stories it doesn’t hold up as a story in it sown right away from the big day. In some ways its better than the story we were expecting and in others ways not, with maybe a scene too much bickering and bad Wolf Billie where more Zygons and Daleks and scenes of the Doctors all working together, with clips from past adventures, could have gone. That main plot really is awfully silly and running around with Zygons and art galleries doesn’t fit into the big concept stuff with Gallifrey and timewars as smoothly as it should. Even with limited space its a shame that the other Drs are relegated to their eyes in spaceships near the end. Other than UNIT there’s nothing here to represent the 20th century at all and even that doesn’t feel anything like the UNIT of ‘our’ day (I’m willing to bet Kate Stewart is either adopted or takes after her mother, not her Brigadier father). The UNIT aspect slows the whole plot right down in fact – its there purely to deliver us the painting, which is then forgotten about until the finale. To be honest prequel ‘Name Of The Doctor’ felt even more properly nostalgic and like Dr Who than this, with Clara wandering around key moments lovingly recreated from the show’s past. As good as it is to have Tennant and Piper back the Whoniverse is a lot bigger than just those two names. It seems odd now too that one of the things much ballyhooed for this special was that it was in ‘3D’ (at least at the cinema), part of a summer fad when such things were popular – it added nothing to the episode except greater complications making it and isn’t as improved on the technology from the 30th special ‘Dimensions In Time’ as you would think given the gain of twenty years’ worth of technology. It’s a needless gimmick in a story refreshingly free of them) unlike ‘Dimensions In Time’ in fact, which was all gimmicks). There are some truly terrific ideas in this story, but few of them are seen through to fruition: the paintings are a great idea (and perfect for the 3D, which I heard was terrific in the cinema, although it seems odd now that Dr Who was so desperate to throw itself in with something as of-the-moment as 3D, a fad which had died a death by 2014) but they’re just there not an intrinsic part of the plot. The War Doctor’s story is movingly told, but there’s still no sense of what he went through to reach that stage where he was prepared to blow people up. There’s some lovely multi-Doctor action, but too often the Doctors separate and have adventures of their own. There’s very little war and quite a lot of time. Fans of the 3rd, 4th, 10th and 11th Doctor eras are really well served, although the 2nd Doctor feels left out (after all, if any Doctor is going to take up the recorder again it as Matt Smith’s!) and it’s lucky indeed that the 5th, 6th and 7th Drs get a ‘celebration’ of their own the same night with ‘The Five (Ish) Doctors Reboot’.
All that said, let’s let bygones be bygones and Zygons be Zygons. This story had an impossible brief and must have been a seriously momentous task to write and make without upsetting somebody or even a lot of everybodies and even if it isn’t perfect ‘Day Of the Dr’ is still very very good indeed, a 50th anniversary that more than holds its head up with the 10th and 20th stories as a reminder of just how special this series is and as a rattlingly good tale in its own right. Given that this special only has 77 minutes to get everything done and has a lot of ideas to juggle its impressive just how good it is, fleshing the War Doctor out enough to make him seem like an established part of Dr Who folklore rather than a last minute substitute, reminding us of how great David Tennant was and being a story that very much feels like part of the Matt Smith run too. There are wonderful little bits scattered throughout this story, little lines of dialogue like the 11th Doctor talking about a cup-a-soups stirred with time and the scene of the 10th Doctor grilling a bunny and threatening it with the darkness of who he is while thinking it’s a Zygon (rather than a bemused rabbit: I like to think this is a homage to John Hurt’s greatest role, as hazel in the original animated film version of ‘Watership Down’ where Richard ‘Chief Caretaker’ Briers is his brother Fiver) that make up for the fact that not all of these scenes make sense jumbled up next to one another. And there’s been one heck of a lot of sticking plaster used to keep everything moving. If nothing else this special felt special and was the last time DW was the talk of the universe before something of a ten year slump, beloved by many fans because it sums up so much about Dr Who, especially new-Who, in one go. All that and it feels like a party too. Now that’s a celebration! Dr Who had never been this big – this is the most seen story round the world of the entire run – and even in the cinemas it was the third most thing watched that week, despite only being on once and being on TV for free! (And how perfect that the anniversary day fell on a Saturday, the perfect day for both cinema goers and Dr Who!) It was, despite all my nit-pickings, a triumph whatever way you look at it. Alas, after all that attention, none of the next batch of episodes will feel even close to being this special again and, like the Doctor dangling over Trafalgar Square, despite reaching such impossible heights the only way from here was down.
POSITIVES + One of the new parts of this story, who’ll go on to be a properly loved part of the series, is Osgood, the hapless scientific advisor at UNIt whose struggling in the Doctors’ scarf-tails. She’s like the 11th Doctor in so any ways though, despite wearing the scarf of the 4th: she’s plucky, courageous and intelligent, but also vulnerable and accident-prone, one of those people whose so impossibly clever that they somehow come out looking stupid at times too, their mind on other things. The asthma jokes do go on a bit, but otherwise Osgood feels like a rounded character. She’s also a Dr who fan as big as any of us – it makes sense she ought to be there. By the time she stands up to the Zygons and finds a shape-shifting solution to the war, you’ll be cheering her on like characters who’ve been in this series decades, played by Ingrid Oliver (nowadays Mrs Richard Osman) plays her with just the right mixture of endearing awkwardness.
NEGATIVES - We build up to the big moment of the many Doctors flying in to freeze Gallifrey at a moment in time so that everyone is saved, everyone starts nattering in clips and soundbites taken from old episodes all on top of one another and it’s wonderful, marvellous, stupendous, everything I live for as a fan, with all the old Tardises lovingly recreated and old footage of film and audio sourced, even going to the trouble of getting in a soundalike for Hartnell (John Guiller sounding far more like him than David Bradley or Richard Hurdnall, hired after his sterling job on the DVD reconstruction of the ‘cut’ episode of ‘Planet Of The Giants’) and filming Peter Capaldi on his first (unofficial) day at work and chucking it in at the absolute last minute post-prodctionwise. Then...nothing. Everyone just flies off again. We don’t linger or give every Doctor a full scene, they just natter over each other. know how good the CGI of the past Drs is from the great last moment of ‘Name Of The Doctor’ when they all stand together as one (a cut ending, which I so wish they’d used, had Matt Smith back on the cloud of ‘The Snowmen’ walking past the Doctors all together and turning the portrait of the war Doctor who’d been facing the wall in shame, back round) so we know they could have done more, much more, with this than merely raid the archives so briefly again. Although the video clips are well chosen frustratingly we don’t even get to see them properly as they’re hidden away at the back of the screen on Tardis roundels. Surely more could have been used? I mean, what sort of a special runs to 77 minutes anyway (they could easily have extended this to 90 minutes and given Matt Smith something fun to do into the bargain). What should have been one of the biggest, most emotional scenes of the special is just thrown away and the only shot we linger on is Capaldi’s eyebrows, which is no compensation at all now we’ve had three years of being entranced by them.
BEST QUOTE: ‘Great men are forged in fire. It is the privilege of lesser men to light the flame’.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Though the special only lasts 77 minutes we Whovians still got a full night of viewing in for anniversary with three whole spin-offs and extras that, if anything, were even better than the episode itself. First up is Strax’s cinema-only introduction: the special is a bit low on humour, Tennant’s Queen-kissing scene aside, but this is hilarious as we’re given instructions on wearing 3D glasses, using ‘cloning devices’ to transmit footage on bootleg and turning off phones in a Sontaron voice (best line ‘popcorn feels pain, which is why it squeals!’)
There was an additional brief 3D cinema introduction featuring the three main Doctors from this story too. Best gag is the 11th Doctor welcoming the audience to the show’s 100th anniversary special in 12D with all 57 Doctors before realising his mistake (‘3D? is there a budget cut?’) before warning viewers to check for Zygons by looking to the seat next to them and that if a lens turned black ‘that person’s a Zygon and at some point during the movie they’re going to eat you!’ The 10th Doctor, meanwhile, just makes more cracks about the 11th Dr’s chin before we get the old ‘Dr Who?’ gag as we turn to look at the war Doctor.
Then there’s ten minute prequel ‘Night Of the Doctor’ which gave Dr 8 only his second time on screen and Paul McGann makes a far better job of it than the TV Movie with a decent, darker script. He really makes the most of his short time in the spotlight and the return to Karn, unseen since ‘The Brain Of Morbius’ in 1976, is very welcome (a return trip is long overdue). The War Doctor was written in because no one could imagine it being the cuddlier 8th Dr who pressed the button to blow everyone up – but seeing this ragged and desperate version makes you realise that he very much could and maybe should, however good John Hurt was in the end. The 8th Doctor is in a crashing spaceship, tries to do what he always does and save people, but the timelord on board is incredibly scared of him and would rather commit suicide than be saved by him. She thinks he’s a traitor and the Doctor isn’t so sure she’s wrong. Crash-landing, hurt, the Sisterhood revive him with a potion and can even make it fit who he wants to be in his next regeneration, but he knows that he can’t be a ‘Doctor’ anymore so chooses to be a warrior, claiming to be pleased that the process ‘hurts’ ‘because it should. Watching this, in many ways the most bouncy and hopeful of Doctors, realise that he needs to change and taking the elixir that turns him into John Hurt is aesthetically so wrong and yet it feels so right and points to just how great the 8th Doctor might have been in some parallel world. Why this isn’t on the Whoniverse i-layer is anyone’s guess: I way prefer it to ‘Fay Of the Doctor’; I just wish it was longer and we’d had a whole episode of this, not just ten minutes.
Less substantial is ‘The Last Day’, released straight to BBC i-player and the Dr Who youtube channel before appearing as an extra on the DVD of the story, even though its set during ‘The Fall Of Arcadia’, the pivotal moment in the time wars. It’s a quirky idea, putting the viewer at the heart of events as if we’re fighting during the war and having us act as lookout as an army of Daleks turn up, but it feels a bit too much like one of those annoying computer game cut-scenes you skip because it’s all atmosphere and no plot. The set looks really fake and the effects badly CGI-d on too. There are some typically good Moffaty lines though which, like ‘Dalek’, stress the horror if just one Dalek breaks through the 400 sky-trench barriers…and then, like ‘Bad Wolf’ shows us a quadzillion of the things. The clip ends in a quick extermination as we get zapped for our troubles (but given that the Dalek only shoots once and I’m a timelord, does that mean I’m in my Patrick Troughton phase now?!)
Then there’s ‘The Five Doctors(ish) reboot, a gorgeous mockumentary directed by Peter Davison and featuring him alongside Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy (plus brief cameos by Paul McGann and David Tennant, hence the title) as they pester Steven Moffat trying to get a part in the new special, which is hilarious if you know your Who references and still pretty funny if you don’t. No one is safe from the barbs in this special, from Colin Baker’s family reacting in horror as he tries to make them watch his Dr Who DVDs to John Barrowman’s ‘closet straight’ family and perpetual singing, to Sylvester McCoy name dropping the fact he’s working with Peter Jackson on ‘Lord Of The Rings’ over and over (Jackson, himself a fan, gets a scene too!) to Georgia Moffat being pregnant (again) to Steven Moffat playing with his Dr Who toys when he should be trying to write to its killer finale of Russell T Davies, the man so powerful he brought back Dr Who in the first place, reduced to phoning up and begging for a scene in the special (‘Quel de mage, Davros!’ An actual line he tried to get into ‘Journey’s End’ but decided was a joke too far) Glorious. As well as ‘Day Of The Dr’ sums up a Dr Who story this special sums up being a Dr Who fan better than anything else around.
Best of all though was the drama ‘An Adventure In Space and Time’ which tells the story of Dr Who’s first three years inside an hour, a fine tribute to creator Sydney Newman, producer Verity Lambert and most of all William Hartnell and how so many people told something couldn’t be done went ahead and did it anyway to the point where it remains one of TV’s most loved series. Forget the rather warped idea of Dr 1 in ‘Twice Upon Time’, this is a real tribute that captures Hartnell in all his gruff but sweet glory and the finale, when he’s forced by health reasons and too many arguments with BBC bosses to leave the show he loves but protectively shows the newcomers how the Tardis works before seeing Matt Smith (and in the 2023 repeat Ncuti) nodding at him through his brain-fuddled haze, made me cry. Easily Mark Gatiss’ best work, inside Dr Who or out, it re-creates old scenes with love (‘The Tenth Planet’ looks positively gorgeous! No wonder these cloth Cybermen were brought back soon after), includes as many cameos as possible (practically all the surviving Hartnell companions are there) and sums up the magic of this series better than any of the actual episodes, while David Bradley is an excellent Hartnell (as opposed to a so-so 1st Dr, a subtle difference). It’s only fault is that it ought to have been longer – much much longer. Still, what a special night of viewing that was, a worthy tribute to a special fifty years.
Less worthy and going out a week before the special was a sketch in the show ‘A Night With The Stars’, a documentary with celebs by Brian Cox, the bossy egotistical 6th Doctor of the scientific world, which keeps going throughout the show (in a desperate attempt to get viewers to continue to watch). The 11th Doctor gives Brian a lift from his dressing room to the stage (the verdict ‘it’s complicated-ish’; the Doctor looks put out by that) only the Tardis breaks down. While the Doctor repairs it one of the Silence turns up on screen to wipe the scientists’ memory. Hoorah! Restored later in the episode, Brian accidentally knocks a control panel and causes a big explosion during flight in the time vortex. The Doctor promises to fix it using the power from a black hole, to which the scientists says it’s nonsense he should read Einstein’s theories (not to claim that I know more than an eminent scientists, but actually in theory if you could find a way of harnessing the power of a black hole you could – just because we can’t now doesn’t mean we can’t in the future and the Doctor comes from far in the future from a more advanced species than humanity, just saying). Against all odds this excruciating skit ends well, as the Doctor finally gets Brian onto the stage and tells him that a young girl with sad eyes will be watching who’ll change the world and it’s up to the scientist to inspire her. Quite why anyone would be inspired by the claptrap in Cox’s shows, which deserve to be sucked into a black hole, is beyond me but at least the ending is sweet.
‘The History Of the Doctor’ was a (very) short story broadcast as part of the ‘Ultimate Guide’ documentary broadcast five days before anniversary night, for some odd reason known only to the schedulers (wibbly wobbly BBC Three indeed). Clara wants a holiday, only the Doctor’s lost his memory and doesn’t know who he is. The pair flick through his 1200 year old diary for clues, inspiring all sorts of memories along the way. By the end of the documentary his memory is restored but he’s sad because of all the people he’ll never get to see again (something which shouldn’t apply really, to a time traveller). Clara cheers him up by reminding him of all the good he’s done so they set off for another adventure. Hopefully a more substantial one than this bit of fluffy nonsense.
We fans don’t talk about ‘Live: The Afterparty’ which went put the night of the special. Well, only in our therapy sessions anyway. For the sake of completism it featured Zoe Ball and Rick Edwards interviewing various alumni from all eras of the show what they thought about the special. Or at least that’s what it was meant to do. Most of the special was spent talking to wannabe boy band ‘One Direction’ (why?!) live over a faulty internet connection so most of the special was five muppet wannabes not saying much of interest thirty seconds after they were asked the dumbest questions going (it didn’t help that they were performing when the special was on so hadn’t actually seen it yet…you really think someone would have thought to check that bit first). Mini control freak Steven Moffat spends most of the time in hysterics, the one part of the anniversary night that hadn’t been planned years in advance ruining all his hard work and the thing that fans were talking about most online that night. Very few of the Who alumni get time to say anything and the few that do got to say no more than a word or two, while poor Katy Manning came out worst, Rick accidentally knocking her flying during one interview segment. Thankfully she was unhurt. I wish the rest of us were. Painful.
Over in the printed word ‘The Then and The Now’ is the only other appearance, to date, of ‘The Curator, revealed to be a future Doctor. Which is a shame as it now means he can’t be a ‘bi-regenerational Doctor’ as hinted in ‘The Giggle’. It’s nice to see the old boy again though and up against the 11th Doctor once more in a graphic novel that was – until the work dries up and Matt Smith ends up at Big Finish – pretty much the last 11th Doctor story of all, published a full year after Peter Capaldi took over on TV and a rare comic book appearance for the war Doctor. Weirdly Abslaam Daak – Dalek killer, the Arnold Schwarzenegger-style assassin from the early 1990s comic strips, is in there too. Honestly, though, it’s a bit of a letdown, following the Doctor being put on trial (again!) before escaping in the Tardis. The new ‘baddy’ The malignant is a worthy foe though, a very comic book villain that’s less a person and more a bubbling lump of hate.
There’s a whole range of War Doctor stories starring John Hurt if you’re so inclined. They’re a bit slow and talky, considering they concern a war, and are more like the political shenanigans of the ‘Gallifrey’ Big Finish series than anything else. They enver quite the spot for me, with plots that go round and round the one in ‘day Of the Doctor’ afraid of changing anything, but they do flesh out the background of the ‘wilderness’ years and if anything John Hurt’s portrayal is even better as he understands the character more, while Jacqueline Pearce (Blake’s 7’s Servalan as well as Chessene in ‘The two Doctors’) makes for a fine opponent. They’ve even carried on after Hurt’s death in 2017, with Jonathan Carley playing a younger version (with photos of an ‘I Claudius’ era John Hurt from the 1970s on the front of the boxes).
Previous ‘The Name Of The Doctor’ next ‘Time Of The Doctor’
