Who Review: The Day of the Doctor

This is an anniversary special unlike no other. Let's start with the obvious: in The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors, and even, God help us, Dimensions in Time, efforts were made to represent all the Doctors.

No, no, please come back, this isn't another Classic Who rant about how Colin Baker should have been in it. When you have twelve Doctors, you will swamp the plot if you try to include them all. Hell, The Five Doctors is padded enough without an actual appearance by Tom Baker. And, well, look, between Baker's stock footage in that and Hartnell's cue-card-reading performance in The Three Doctors, it's fair to say that they've never, really, done a multi-Doctor story that adequately featured every incarnation of the Doctor, and oh well.

Speaking of padding the script, have you noticed that each of the previous anniversary specials just had the one plot? Some super-villain that requires the presence of all the Doctors, or else some super-villain who's deliberately drawn all the Doctors into his trap? Yeah, The Day of the Doctor doesn't even have a proper villain. Or a single plot. The latter is a staple of the show under Steven Moffat (a man who once said that Douglas Adams needed someone to stop him from including every wacky idea he had in the show). The former is... probably the first time this has happened since, oh, The Edge of Destruction.

Now you're going to needle me and say, "Look, the episode has Zygons and Daleks in it! How can you say it doesn't have a villain?" And my answer is that it doesn't have a villain. They're there, but... they're not.  The Zygon plot disappears, and the resolution to the story is basically the Doctors saving Gallifrey from themselves, rather than from the Daleks.

Okay, the plot, briefly. In the present day, Clara and the Doctor are taken to UNIT because there's a problem. The Doctor is shown a Gallifreyan painting - a moment frozen in time - that's either called "No More" or "Gallifrey Falls." It's called "Gallifrey Falls" because that's what's happening - begging the question of who made that painting - and it's called "No More" because that's what the Hurt Doctor carved on a wall with a laser-gun, for some reason. Then he went and stole the Moment, a weapon so sophisticated it grew a conscience.

Okay, remember when I did my review of "Asylum of the Daleks" in the (written) style of Chester A. Bum? Because I'm trying to picture Moffat pitching this script and not using that persona. "So there's this weapon that's so sophisticated that it actually grew a conscience - like Hactor from Life, the Universe and Everything, and it takes the form of Rose Tyler because, well, the fans just can't get enough of her.* And then Ten and Eleven are fighting the Zygons!"

*If Rose hadn't appeared since the end of Season 2, it would be perfectly fine by me. Just in case I never made that clear in any of my other reviews.

Anyway, Head!Rose (she calls herself the Bad Wolf, but, look, from the moment it's revealed that only the Hurt Doctor can see her, I've decided that Doctor Who and BSG take place in the same universe, or at least in universes that have the same God) tells the Hurt Doctor not to make everything go boom and then kind of does a reverse Christmas Carol. "Reverse" in both the sense that we only travel to the Doctor's future, and in the sense that it doesn't change him. After he witnesses Ten and Eleven sort out the whole Zygon thing (by having them negotiate for... what, exactly? Are the Doctors content to let Zygon shapeshifters live among us unsuspecting apes?), he decides that he has to go through with killing Gallifrey and the Daleks because... of... quantum.

10 and 11 go along with him, but then decide to take a third option by slotting Gallifrey into a pocket in time. They get the First Doctor to start the calculations (somehow) so that all the Doctors know what to do (somehow), but everyone except 11 and possibly 10 forget about their efforts because of the unstable timeline or some such. (Look, until "Time Crash," we never had a case of the Doctor remembering experiencing the events of a multi-Doctor episode from his younger self's perspective before. Now suddenly the show has to delve into fanwank to explain his amnesia . Joy.)

I think this is the part where certain fans whine about how saving Gallifrey undoes all the angst that Nine and Ten had. Piffle and Phooey.  1, raise your hand if you expected Gallifrey to stay dead forever. 2, raise your hand if you were sick and tired of hearing about the Time War.

I love how Hurt doesn't do the Espresso routine that everyone from Eccleston on has done, and that he is apprehensive at best about the prospect of turning into the excitable, overeager lads that are Ten and Eleven. I really hope that Peter Capaldi will be as laid-back as Hurt, but I'm a killjoy that way. (I'm overall torn on the whole concept of the Hurt Doctor. On the one hand, he throws the numbering out of whack, makes Matt Smith the twelfth regeneration, and forces the show to address the 13-life limit now rather than when Capaldi leaves. On the other hand, it's John Freaking Hurt, who, assuming we don't count the 60s Dalek films with Peter Cushing, is probably the most renowned actor ever to play the Doctor. And he frakking nails it.)

I also liked how the "use the same screwdriver to do the 400-year calculation" gimmick (even though 10 lost his on the moon and 11 certainly implied that his screwdriver was new) set up the resolution. Nice touch there. Moffat's getting better at this sort of thing.

As my recap might have hinted, it is not perfect. And it's not because of the lack of other Doctors - look, three are dead, four don't look like themselves anymore, and one probably won't touch this series again for anything short of the Crown Jewels.  I think we'd all rather our Doctors be represented by stock footage rather than by re-casting (though I'd love to know what the Hartnell fans thought of David Bradley in An Adventure in Space and Time), which means that stock footage is really what we're going to get.  ...And I'm not writing off the other Doctors just because I'm a Tom Baker fanboy and the man himself got a cameo at the end of this special. As I said in the AAiSaT review, I thought his cameo went on for a tad too long and wasn't vague enough as to who or what Tom's character was and what message he was giving Eleven. 

Now comes the part where I have to slap a number on this thing. It's hard to do this with the "special" episodes because they, even moreso than the normal episodes, are not aimed at me, a 25-year-old American. So if I had to nitpick, I'd say that this episode, being the fiftieth anniversary episode and all, is geared towards a broader audience, and it tells that broader audience that Doctor Who is silly, stuffed, and at times incoherent. Which is a pretty accurate description of the show right now, honestly. But it also tells them that Doctor Who is good fun, as it always was, and has decent effects nowadays too.

Well, with that in mind, I'd say that this is the second-best special the revival series has done, the best being, obviously, "A Christmas Carol." I gave that one... well, shoot, my review of "A Christmas Carol" was two sentences long. I hereby retroactively give that one a 9 and this one an 8 out of 10.