Moffat Era Rewatch: Notes on "The Name of the Doctor"

·      This is a solid finale, possibly a little empty, but wraps up the season well enough, with some good set pieces and wonderful inventive high concept stuff – there’s nothing it really does wrong, although killing and resurrecting Jenny twice is sloppy storytelling, and there’s an awful lot of characters standing around talking with next to no action. Overall, though, its a nice mood piece that ruminates on death, mortality, and grief (nice cheery subject matter) with some nice nostalgia kicks to lead into the 50^th, and I enjoy it well enough, but it does feel a little hollow, which sums up my thoughts on series seven – there’s little that’s bad in here, but little to make it stand out from other Doctor Who, or the television surrounding it. 

·      Most satisfying here is the impossible girl arc, which wraps up well, with the nicely played revelation that Clara isn’t a mysterious trick or trap, or a puzzle to be solved, but an ordinary girl who did a brave thing to save the Doctor. Clara’s line “I get to be soufflé girl after all” is the key line here: the mystery surrounding her splinters is discarded as the narrative Clara has been carving out for herself over the course of the half season takes centre stage, as she finally finds a way to live up to her idealized image of her mother, becoming “soufflé girl” by saving the Doctor.

·      Also interesting are the parallels between the Doctor and Clara, first highlighted in the prequel of the episode “He said, she said”, where the way the Doctor and Clara talk about one another and the things they learned about the other directly mirror the other’s speech: both learn secrets surrounding mysteries that have hung over the characters all season (Clara meets the War Doctor, the Doctor discovers the truth behind Clara’s splinters), but both also come to realise the more important truths underpinning their identities: Clara is soufflé girl, not the impossible girl, and the important thing is not the Doctor’s birth name, but his chosen name, and the promise that represents.

·      The Paternoster gang are on good form, as we get more of a sense of the interplay between them as a group, with some hints of the rougher edges to their initial formation creeping into the episode, and some sincere scenes to go alongside the usual comedy notes formed around an interspecies lesbian couple and a Sontaran Butler solving crimes in Victorian London. Vastra and Jenny relationship benefits the most from this treatment: we get a lovely, tender, domestic scene between them as they say good night to one another before going into the dream-scape, and if there’s one good thing about Jenny’s repeated resurrections in this episode, it’s the moment where Strax brings her back and declares the heart to be a simple thing, and Vastra replies that she has “not found it to be so”. Strax is also on good form, with the cut from Vastra saying “I wish he’d never discovered that place” to an establishing shot of Glasgow being a comedic highlight of the episode, and a hilarious example of Moffat’s self deprecating, very Scottish sense of humour.  

·      And of course, it’s hard to talk about this episode without addressing the final sequence: it’s a sequence through which one can analyze the hollowness of this season, being more of a tease for the 50^th anniversary than a resolution to series seven, but it’s one heck of a tease (guys, we got John Hurt!), and gains some deeper meaning by making the most explicit statement about the “Doctor Who” arc so far. The arc is not about learning some dark secret from the Doctor’s past, but is ultimately about the way the Doctor choses to define himself and his purpose in life, and his struggle to live up to that purpose.