The Day Of The Doctor: 50 Doctor Who Things We Loved, And A Few Things We Didn’t
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11. The Moment may have ultimately just been a big, red-buttoned MacGuffin, but I do love the notion of a doomsday weapon that develops a conscience. Shades of The Iron Giant…
12. I liked the explanation that the Doctor parked the TARDIS so far away from where he was going to unleash the Moment because he knew the TARDIS — itself a living thing, if you recall — wouldn’t support his final solution. It would be the Chewie to his Han Solo and might talk him out of it.
13. It’s a shame we didn’t get to see Billie Piper as Rose Tyler proper, but then again her character already had a definitive wrap-up. Plus, the idea of portraying her as an aspect of Bad Wolf Rose, or possibly just The Moment borrowing that form, or possibly some combination of both — that’s classic Doctor Who.
John Hurt’s Doctor hadn’t yet met Rose, so why would the Moment choose an unfamiliar form, and remain unseen by the Doctors who would recognize her? I like the ambiguity of it all, and it gave Billie Piper a more interesting role to bring to life.
14. “Stuck between a girl and a box. Story of your life, eh Doctor?”
15. Since “The Night of the Doctor” showed that the Eighth regenerated into the form of a young John Hurt, the implication is that the so-called War Doctor has been fighting the Time War for decades at least, long enough for his physical body to age to the point where he is in Day of the Doctor. No wonder he’s fed up with the Time Lord and Dalek shenanigans.
16. The Day of the Doctor is essentially Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, except we only get ghosts of Christmas Past (David Tennant), Christmas Present (Matt Smith), and Christmas Further in the Past (John Hurt). But Hurt is also standing in for Scrooge since it’s his change of heart that’s in question.
The War Doctor is confronted with the legacy of not just the murder of all the Time Lords and Daleks but also how it will affect his future selves. I’ve got no idea who Tiny Tim is in this scenario, though. Maybe one of the screaming Gallifreyan kids?
17. The mysterious phone call to one of the UNIT employees that we see early on is a nice example of how this whole thing hews to Chekov’s rule that if you show a gun on the wall in Act One, it has to go off in Act Three.
In other words, don’t drop in irrelevant details unless they set something up later. Here, we get the phone call, the glass blown out of the paintings, the stone dust, the memory erasers, etc. The Zygon bit of the story isn’t nearly as interesting as the story of the three Doctors and the Time War, but at least it’s artfully constructed.
18. “It’s a machine that goes ‘ding.’ Made it myself, it lights up in the presence of shapeshifter DNA. Also it can microwave frozen dinners from up to 20 feet and download comics from the future. I don’t know when to stop.”
19. David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor isn’t exactly rivaling Steven Moffat’s other TV smartypants when it comes to investigative powers. He fails to keep track of who a Zygon shapeshifter is pretty much every single time. But at least that does give us…
20. The rabbit.
21. “Someday you could just walk past a fez.” “Never gonna happen.” The fez being tossed to each of Eleven’s younger selves made for a nice excuse to bring them together, but I can’t help but wonder: since the Undergallery is described as the place for storing art deemed too dangerous for public consumption, what the hell is the fez doing there? How dangerous could a fez possibly be? I demand an online minisode explaining the fez’s many atrocities!
22. “Is it important?” “In 500 years, I’ve never stepped in anything that wasn’t.” This was a nice little throwback to one of Matt Smith’s best lines in 2010’s Christmas special, “A Christmas Carol.”
The original line was, “You know that in nine hundred years of time and space I’ve never met anybody who wasn’t important before.” It’s one of many times the special tips earlier quotes or moments from the show’s history on their ear.
23. The bit where Ten and Eleven are both trying to “reverse the polarity” on the time rift, only to realize they’re canceling each other out, was both a funny bit of business and a jab at one of the most time-honored bits of technobabble in science fiction history.
24. The way the show used Hurt’s War Doctor to mock the show’s overuse of sonic screwdrivers as a get-out-of-jail-free card. What does a sonic screwdriver do exactly? Pretty much whatever the script calls for. It’s basically Batman’s utility belt. Best moment: when Ten and Eleven threaten a contingent of medieval troops with them, leading Hurt to reply, “They’re screwdrivers! What are you going to do, assemble a cabinet at them?”
25. The Three Doctors themselves: this is probably the most enjoyable element of the entire special, the back-and-forth interactions between these three incarnations of the same man.
Whether it’s Eleven mocking Ten’s “sand shoes” or ribbing him for making out with a Zygon, Ten critiquing Eleven’s interior decorating or the War Doctor’s constant frustration with both of his older selves’ general goofiness and predilection for phrases like “timey wimey,” the characterization is spot on.
Even more important than the funny moments is the way they interact when they finally start honestly discussing the way they ended the Time War. Smith, Tennant, and Hurt must all deliver regret and sadness and pain in varying degrees, and they don’t disappoint.
Without those moments, all the funny stuff wouldn’t matter because The Day of the Doctor wouldn’t have any weight to it.
26. Smith’s idea to leave a message for the future by scratching it into a dungeon wall is a very, very Doctor Who idea. Keen eyes may have noticed that the “coordinates” are 17-16-23-11-63. Those numbers weren’t random; they were the time and date Doctor Who first premiered: November 23, 1963, at 5:16 pm.
27. Torchwood may be stuck in limbo after the disappointing Miracle Day, but it was great to see Captain Jack Harkness present in spirit via the time vortex manipulator that saved Clara’s bacon and united her with the three Doctors.
29. “Do you have to talk like children? What is it that makes you so ashamed of being a grown up?” Hurt’s exasperation with the whimsical personalities of his later selves is funny as hell, but it also reminds us that those personality traits are, at least in part, a way the Doctor distances himself from the dark memories and guilt he’s accumulated over the centuries.
It also exemplifies how William Hartnell’s Doctor might have felt about his older but sillier incarnations.
30. The portrayal of Ten and Eleven as “the man who regrets” and “the man who forgets” was a very powerful idea. However, this is one of many moments where Christopher Eccleston’s involvement would have improved things.
The absence of the Doctor who was most close to Hurt’s War Doctor is felt frequently, and you can’t help but notice the moments — like this one — where he really should have been there. Whatever the reasons Eccleston didn’t want to participate, it’s a shame and a missed opportunity, and not just because it would have been great to see Hurt fully regenerate into Eccleston.
31. “It’s the same screwdriver.” The notion of each sonic screwdriver being the same one, only in a different case, is classic Who problem solving, not to mention a foreshadowing of the episode’s climax and a comment on the nature of the regenerating Doctor as well (“same software, different face).
However, what really sells the moment is that, after very cleverly coming up with the idea of having Hurt start the calculations so Smith’s screwdriver can open the door, Clara simply walks in through the unlocked door, which none of them bothered to check. There’s a reason the guy keeps companions around…
32. I’ll never look at a cup of soup the same way again. Of course, I almost never look at cup-of-soups, but the truth still stands.
33. Here comes the Queen, and yet again, Ten is completely wrong about who’s a Zygon. At this point, he should just assume that whoever he thinks is a Zygon, probably isn’t.
34. “Is there a lot of this in the future?” “It does start to happen, yeah.” Hurt’s comment on David Tennant getting one planted on him is a sly little jab at the notion of the “sexy Doctor” ushered in by Tennant. Not that the earlier Doctors weren’t dashing and heroic, but they didn’t seem to get snogged nearly as often as the latter-day blokes.
35. The three TARDISes. Simply getting to see the three side-by-side, as well as their different interiors, was a treat. And you have to love Smith dismissing Tennant’s TARDIS with the line, “It’s his grunge phase, he grows out of it.”
36. “Look, the round things!” “I love the round things!” “What are the round things?” “”No idea.” (The round things, of course, are a nod to the very first TARDIS set — seen above — the one that shepherded William Hartnell’s First Doctor around the universe.)
37. “This is not a decision you will ever be able to live with.” The choice the Doctor faces when it comes to ending the Time War is very much like the no-good-options challenge faced by another iconic science fiction hero — Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru test, the so-called no-win scenario.
And just as Kirk defeated it by changing the parameters of the scenario (i.e., cheating), the Doctors also refuse both solutions and create a third option. It’s outside the (phone) box thinking at its best.
38. The revelation of the three Doctors in the painting as they’re using it as a shortcut into the Undergallery — simply epic.
39. The quiet conversation between Clara and Hurt’s War Doctor lays out the fundamental question of the entire special. Did Hurt make the right choice? Even though his actions were terrible and left him scarred forever, they’ve spurred his later selves. “How many worlds has his regret saved?”
It’s Clara whose instinct helps her realize that Hurt hasn’t actually taken those steps yet, and that there is still time to sway him. Yet again, she is there to save the Doctor, and to remind him who he is, even when he tries to abandon that promise he made to the universe. “[Do] what you’ve always done. Be a Doctor.”
40. He finally gets a big red button.
45. Not sure if it was Moffat’s intent, but the idea of having Gallifrey vanish, leaving the Daleks to destroy themselves in a sudden crossfire, is very reminiscent of the end of “Blink,” where the TARDIS departs and leaves the Weeping Angels trapped by their own gaze.
42. The “great men are forged in fire” speech provides a keen insight into just how hopeless Hurt’s War Doctor feels, just how convinced he is that he must totally abandon the persona of the Doctor in order to do what must be done. But as Ten and Eleven point out, “You were the Doctor on the day it wasn’t possible to get it right.”
43. “That sound brings hope to anyone, however lost. Even you.”
44. And finally, we hear the promise that the Doctor made, the promise that defines the name he chose: Never cruel or cowardly. Never give up, never give in.
45. “Sorry, did you just say Bad Wolf?” Tennant finally gets to comment on the Bad Wolf in the room…but of course he’s soon distracted by other things. You have to wonder if he looks back on the moment later and puzzles over how those words found their way into that room. This is also another moment where Eccleston’s presence is much missed.
46. “I started a very long time ago.” And here we get one of the special’s best moments. You knew they had to honor all the Doctors that came before, we just weren’t sure how. Bringing them all back in that moment, all united to save Gallifrey might have raised questions of time paradoxes, but damned if it wasn’t emotionally satisfying.
And again, Eccleston’s appearance via repurposed footage was a nice touch, but still would have been so much better if he’d been a larger part of the special. Still, that absence is almost made up for by …
47. “No, sir! All thirteen!”
48. “We need a new destination, because…I don’t want to go.” “He always says that.”
49. Tom Baker! As much as I loved Baker’s surprise cameo, I wish it had remained a total surprise. The classic Who actor let the cat out of the bag a few days early, and I still don’t know why. It was a great moment that would have been even greater if I didn’t know it was coming in one form or another.
The notion that he was the Doctor at the end of his life, in retirement and trying out “a few of the old favorite” faces is another idea that twists the show’s canon in knots, but the payoff, I think, is worth it.
And let’s face it, we all know they’re going to find a way to keep the series going once Peter Capaldi is ready to move on, so who knows what the Time Lord Regeneration rules will look like in 10 years.
50. The notion of the Doctor having a new mission, saving his homeworld, is a nice mirroring of the way the Doctor’s journey began — stealing a TARDIS and running away from Gallifrey. What goes around, comes around, I suppose. And you’ve got to love that ending — all the Doctors finally lined up together, united in purpose, looking toward home.
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