Warning: spoilers. Read no farther until you’ve seen the episode
It’s the fate of The Time of the Doctor to be overshadowed by the fact that it immediately follows the 50th Anniversary Special. In a way, it should be. While a Doctor’s departure is a major milestone in the series, it is still part of Dr Who’s ongoing business-as-usual. The 50th had to stand out from that, as a celebration of the whole history of the show. And it did— but that leaves Matt Smith’s final episode feeling just a tiny bit anticlimactic.
It does what the best departure episodes do: showcases the outgoing Doctor’s era, giving us a story that’s typical of his tenure, only even more so. The Eleventh Doctor’s era has been marked by stories with massive armies mobilized against him: at the Pandorica, at Demon’s Run, now at Trenzalore. And it’s been positively obsessed with “timey-wimey” stories— how many times now have we skipped ahead on a character’s time line, to learn how long he or she’s been waiting, or to see him/her grown old— or both at once? These kind of things are going to define this era of the program as much as UNIT defines the Third Doctor’s. (As an aside: they’re Steven Moffat’s obsessions, and he’s not going anywhere— will he make a break with this approach and find a new style for the Capaldi Doctor, or will this sort of thing continue? You can probably guess I’m hoping it changes.)
At the same time that gives it a bit of a been-there-done-that feel. At the end of the Third Doctor’s run, the production pulled out all the stops and staged the biggest 007-action-man chase scene the series had ever done, both showing off Jon Pertwee’s distinctive style and topping anything they’d done with it before. But at the end of Matt Smith’s first season every alien the Doctor ever fought ganged up on him, and the whole Universe was wiped from existence. You can’t top that— you can only repeat it, which the series has several times since. Matt Smith’s era suffers from too-big-too-early syndrome, making it hard for his finale to be properly bigger than what came before.
There are also some odd dramatic choices and one gaping plot hole that I can’t overlook. Having the Doctor send Clara away, and then have her get back, twice, is needlessly repetitive. Moffat did it so that Clara could see multiple stages along his centuries of protecting the town, but dramatically it drags things down. Separating the giant blast of regeneration energy that destroys the Daleks from the Doctor’s actual (and much simpler) regeneration allows the tearful farewell of the Eleventh Doctor and Clara but makes no sense (internal logic is far more necessary to science fiction than to “mainstream” fiction, but it’s something Steven Moffat doesn’t seem to care much about— although he’s stopped using “bonkers” as an all-purpose term of praise for Dr Who stories, he still, in the words of a Doctor Who Magazine reviewers, only grudgingly bothers to explain anything).
I also would have liked to see the story take us all the way to the giant TARDIS tombstone we saw in The Name of the Doctor, and have the Time Lords resurrect the Doctor (and the TARDIS) with a new regeneration cycle at that point. Instead this story negates that future, undermining the earlier episode. It would have been just as easy to respect it.
The big plot hole, though, comes when we learn that Clara was able to talk into the crack in time and be heard, and that the Time Lords can close the crack from the other side and reopen a different one apparently at will. This means the whole situation was avoidable from the start. The entire standoff takes place because if the Doctor says his name the Time Lords will interpret it as a sign it’s safe to emerge through the crack, but if he leaves the Daleks (& co.) will destroy the planet and the human settlers in order to make sure they never do. This made a bit of sense if we assumed that the Doctor’s name was some sort of unique code, the only thing that could be heard through the crack. But if Clara can just talk through it, then the Doctor could have said “Really bad place to come through, guys, close up this crack and try again later— preferably without sending a universal Daleks-look-here signal at the same time.”
The Doctor is clever enough to think of that, and the fact that I thought of it while watching took me out of the story right when it was supposed to be hitting its dramatic climax.
I’ve been giving the negative side— let me turn to the positive. Except for the facepalm moment I really did enjoy the episode. I liked the idea that the youngest Doctor to date should become the first one since the First One to “die” of old age (very clever twist, that). (I suppose you could say the War Doctor went the same way, but he’s a separate case.) I thought Matt Smith turned in an outstanding performance, and that the story did a really good job of showing us exactly who the Doctor— and his Doctor in particular— really is. We’ve seen this Doctor maddened by the idea of having to sit still even for a few hours— we know what it meant that he had to settle down for hundreds of years, but was still willing to do it rather than let the innocent town be destroyed.
I like that the whole “searching for Gallifrey” idea, introduced in The Day of the Doctor, has been resolved, and in the very next episode. Of course it’s possible that Steven Moffat still has it in mind, but it at least looks like it’s been resolved: we’ve definitely got a resolution on the question of whether the attempt to save Gallifrey succeeded, and we’ve got the Time Lords able to pop open cracks in time if they want a peek outside the pocket universe where they are safely installed. That really seems to take care of it, and though Moffat might prove me wrong I suspect that’s what he had in mind all along. In hindsight, the fact he kept calling the quest for Gallifrey a “new paradigm” for the series might have been a clue he didn’t really mean it. “New paradigm” was the term for the plastic Daleks which no one liked, so Moffat using the term again could have been a subtle hint that he didn’t mean it.
Still, he might prove me wrong on that. We’ll have to wait for the next season to find out.
To sum up: The Time of the Doctor was a vivid example of both the strengths and the weaknesses of Matt Smith’s time as the Doctor. Which, in many ways, is what a regeneration episode should be. It doesn’t measure up to the giddy heights of the 50th Anniversary Special, but then it shouldn’t have to. On balance, I call it a good— and appropriate— finale for the Eleventh Doctor.
Next:
Asked by an interviewer to describe Peter Capaldi’s Doctor in three words, Steven Moffat answered: “Different from Matt.” Stay tuned.
