Who at 50: Day of the Doctor

[strange_complex]

So relieved, and so happy! So glad that I kept my hopes up, and kept the faith after all. I may have started watching the fiftieth anniversary episode feeling a little nervous about what exactly we were going to see, and I may have kept a sense of reservation about the main storyline for a good hour I think as I watched (in spite of all the squee fodder we got along the way). But once Clara worked her magic and turned it all around, it literally became the episode I have been waiting for ever since the reboot. I have always said that I want the Time Lords back. Always, always. And now that can happen - he just has to find them. As for the glorious, glorious Mr. Tom Baker there at the end as the Curator (oh, you know it has a capital letter, just like the Doctor)? That was honest-to-god the best thing I have seen on television this century.

OK, let's try to be a little more coherent.

Basically, and quite rightly, the name of the game for this episode was FUN. That's what you need to do anyway for the sort of story which thousands (millions?) of people who don't normally bother to watch Doctor Who are going to tune in to see. As it happens, I think it was also a very good thing for Moffat as a writer. It's almost like dropping his usual Big Serious Plot Arcs (That Inevitably Disappoint) actually liberated him enough to pull off something really format-redefining. Certainly, in the middle of all the quips and the knowing winks and the hat-tips, you can get away with an epic line-up of all thirteen Doctors hiding Gallifrey from the Daleks in a wibbly-wobbly technobabbly way that is never fully explained, in a way that you can't during a 'normal' episode. And Moffat deserves a lot of credit for pulling that off, and making it link right back to the full emotional weight of the First Doctor's desire to get home to his people, as well as pointing a new way forward into the future.

I can't quite resist the urge to write up a list of my favourite 'cool bits', even though I'm sure everyone on the internet is already doing that, and it is not analysis in any sense of the term - just geekish squee. I will at least try to keep it down to my five favourites (apart from the Tom Baker bit, which goes way beyond just sticking it on a list for me):

• Obviously, the original opening credits at the beginning. My heart skipped a little anticipatory beat at that moment, in spite of my worries, and then jumped another one for Totter's Lane and Coal Hill School.
• Clara riding a motorbike into the TARDIS, followed not much later by Ten riding a horse out. I liked that - it was neat, and also helped to tie together two story-threads which hadn't yet overlapped.
• Kate Lethbridge-Stewart asking for the 'Cromer file' with a comment I didn't write down verbatim, but boiled down to something like "70s or 80s, depending on the dating protocol". Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is a reference to The Three Doctors AND the UNIT dating controversy coming hot on one another's heels. Moffat, for that alone I salute you.
• Absolutely every single line of the multi-Doctor snark-fest. Marvellous in itself, and also a fine tribute to multi-Doctor stories of the past.
• Also obviously, the dream-team planet-saving multi-Doctor line-up - and especially Peter Capaldi being in it.

On the down side, it needs to be acknowledged that the only non-white characters I spotted in the entire story were a security guard on the way into UNIT HQ, and possibly one of the be-robed Time Lords. It really isn't hard to do better than that, and it's shaming for such a high-profile story as the 50th Anniversary Special to fall down so badly on it. I could perhaps also have done with Queen Elizabeth being a bit more genuinely queenly, rather than like a simpering girl who happens to have a knife tucked in her garters (really not the same as her actually being a meaningful female character). But I can chuck that one more of a pass, given that a) she is essentially there as a comic character and to tie up an old plot-thread from The Shakespeare Code and b) there are plenty of other properly decent female characters about the place, including in particular Clara who genuinely saves the entire day with a few heart-felt words spoken at the right moment. Well done Clara.

Meanwhile, we have some continuity re-adjusting to do. You know, I have been busy tagging all my livejournal entries about Doctor Who all this time with cardinal numbers like 'nine', 'ten', 'eleven' and even 'twelve'. And we have had songs like Vale Decem, too. Have we really got to unpick all that numbering, and bump everyone after Eight along one? It'll take some getting used to, and will doubtless keep on causing confusion from now right up to the 100th anniversary. But you know, for the sake of this story I think I am prepared to do it. (Though maybe not yet - I'll see how well the new system catches on first.) And not least because it should mean that at Christmas, when what we must now call the Twelfth Doctor regenerates into the Thirteenth, we ought to get to see whatever it is that goes wrong there and gives rise to the Valeyard. Exciting eh - and no wonder he was name-checked so prominently by the Great Intelligence during The Name of the Doctor.

Not only that, but it also means that at the end of Peter Capaldi's run we must finally be given an answer to the perpetual question of what will happen when the Doctor runs out of regenerations. The arc there is set, though, I think. His driving motivation will be finding Gallifrey again, and once he's done that (towards the end of his time in the role), it will be pretty easy for the (very grateful) Time Lords to fix him up with a few extra regenerations. Bingo, job done. The only difficulty to get round is reconciling what we've seen this evening with the events of The End of Time, when the Master brought the Time Lords back out of a frozen time-bubble (good, fits nicely with what we've seen this evening), but they were not at all pleased to see the Doctor, and were led by a Rassilon bent on killing him and ending time itself. I think that can be managed, though. We've certainly learnt this evening that there are many Time Lord cities, perhaps each with their own Councils, and not all need be loyal to Rassilon. Indeed, Clare Bloom's character in The End of Time was certainly working against him, and we can well imagine a change in the wider consensus once they all have a chance to realise what the Doctor has actually done. There's some good story-fodder right there, very much in line with Time Lord stories of the past, which more or less all were about most of them hating and distrusting the Doctor. Heck, that's why I like them so much - there is so much more scope for him to be properly Doctorish when he has them to rebel against.

First, though, it seems from the teaser trailer for the Christmas special that we must go back to Trenzalore and witness the battle there which led to the creation of that enormous graveyard - and perhaps even see the burial of the Doctor in his TARDIS at the end of it all. Whatever happens there, it is going to be epic.

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Comments

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

See, I never liked Pouting Amy very much, but I loved Rory because he did have that ordinary-but-up-for-it quality that I like in a companion (and which Donna also had). Plus, he became a Roman soldier! I never could understand what the hell he saw in Amy, though.

[ms-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I couldn't understand what she saw in him either. I must be honest though and say I don't watch it with the regularity or in depth-ness that you do but all Amy seemed to be doing to me when I saw an episode with her in was swishing her hair about and screeching Doctor!!! so I know I could be wrong - there could be an episode in which she did neither the hair swishing nor the screeching.