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

·      I love this episode, it's up there with "Bad Wolf/ Parting of the Ways", "The Caves of Androzani", and "The War Games" as one of the best regeneration stories. It's not quite as well crafted as "Day" before it (the nudity jokes stand out as one the rare times Moffat's humour doesn't work for me), but I think it's a more interesting story. I love that, for all the epic stakes, the moments it takes time to dwell on are the small scenes, like Handles' death, Clara listening to her Gran's story, Or Clara helping the Doctor pull a Christmas cracker - that last one's properly tear jerking, and works just as well when it's reprised with the roles reversed in the next Christmas special. The premise is laid out from the start, in the pre credits sequence: “CLARA: I need you. I'm cooking Christmas dinner!/ DOCTOR: I'm being shot at by Cybermen!/ CLARA: Well, can't we do both?/ DOCTOR: Argh! Yeah, why not?” The epic and the intimate, side by side. Let's do both, because why not? And the story's smart enough to know that while the epic scale allows for some fun set pieces, that stuff can be dealt with in a montage and a voice over. An old man facing up to his mortality with dignity and measured calm, before being surprised with a joyous new lease of life? That's what this story's really about, that's what (correctly, in my opinion), gets the attention.

·      Carrying on my “Noting neat Clara moments” thing that this bullet point review structure allows me to do, I really like the scene where the Daleks’ conversion of Tasha and the Papal mainframe is revealed: when her life is threatened, Clara calls the Daleks’ bluff by pointing out that the Daleks will kill her whether the Doctor surrenders or not, so trying to bargain for her life is useless. It’s a nice precursor to her scene opposite the half face man scene in “Deep Breath”, where she turns the interrogation on him by using the same logic. There is a difference: here, she knows the Doctor is with her, whereas in Deep Breath, she’s still not sure if she can trust the Twelfth Doctor, and thinks he might have abandoned her, giving the latter sequence higher emotional stakes which is why the “Deep Breath” scene is more often cited as a great Clara moment. However, this is nice set up for further Clara character development.

·      The real read of the episode that I want to explore in detail starts with the poem “Extract from thoughts on a clock”. It’s a shamelessly meta-fictional moment, highlighting the fact that as the Eleventh Doctor faces up to his inevitable, absolutely final, death, the audience all knows that Peter Capaldi will be joining us in ten minutes. Particularly telling is the Doctor’s response of “I don’t get it”. The universe is telling the Doctor there’s a way out, but he can’t see it: he has fatalistically accepted his death on Trenzalore, and will not see any potential way out.

·      Actually, let’s also explore the delightful scene with Clara and her Gran a bit more: gran insists on her version of the story of meeting her husband, even as Clara’s Dad tries to get her to tell a different one. Similarly, Clara refuses to accept a version of this story where the Doctor dies, and insists on a different one being told.

·      And so it falls to Clara to save him, as she figures out the real nature of this story. “You’re asking the wrong question” she tells the Time Lords, because the real point of the “Doctor Who” arc has never been learning the Doctor’s name, but learning about the promise of his chosen name. “Day of the Doctor” explored what that promise means to the Doctor (“never be cruel, and never be cowardly”), and showed the effect failing to live to that promise has had on him, before giving him another chance to live up to it. This episode explores the effect the promise has on the people around him: “if you love him, and you should, then help him”, says Clara, and the Time Lords listen.

·      This exploration of the Doctor’s identity culminates in the “I will always remember when the Doctor was me” speech, as we address memory and its ties to personal identity, a running theme in the Moffat era. We really are “different people all through our lives”: there’s not a single part of me that’s the same as I was aged five, but I remember being the person I was when I was five, and perhaps that’s as much of a link to that past self as I can manage. For now, it’s enough for the Doctor.

·      Perhaps the most brilliant cap to the speech, and the themes of the episode as a whole, is the fact that Matt Smith’s actual final line isn’t that speech, but “Hey” as he comforts Clara. It’s a final subversion of the epic as we see the randomness of a person’s final moments: even though this story is about the Doctor avoiding his final death, it still deals with the reality of mortality in a deep thematic sense.

·      Then, in a flash, the guy with with the chin and a bowtie, who we’ve known and loved for four years, is gone, and man with wild boggling eyes and a face made of eyebrows appears, and starts complaining about the colour of his kidneys. And that also marks the end of this blog’s journey through the Matt Smith Era. Next time, a dinosaur in Victorian London.