Forum:The Day of the Doctor

Spoilers, obviously.

Geez, what a mess.

For one thing, it's pretty obvious that Moffatt wrote the script with Eccleston in mind, got shot down, and was so attached by what he'd written that he decided to come up with this workaround. The story would have been much, much better with Eccleston. We have an attachment to him; the excitement over Hurt created by the cliffhanger last spring really can't compare; also, words cannot express my annoyance that the Doctor called Hurt his secret only to have it turn out that the "secret" is something he's told every single person he's spent any length of time with over the past eight and a half years!!!

When Eccleston declined to reprise the role Moffatt should have gone back to the drawing board (or maybe rewritten the part for McGann, who was involved in the festivities anyway so was not likely to refuse). This story never really needed to be told; I feel the Time War is one of those things that makes an exception to the "show us don't tell us" rule; some story elements take on a much richer life in the imagination of the audience. So I guess now the Time War never happened, but in every episode from "Rose" to this one the Doctor believes it happened. But from now on he's going to know it didn't. And on the rare occasions when he interacts with other people who were also in the Time War, they're sharing in his delusion? Or humoring him? Rassilon's plot in "The End of Time" seems awfully elaborate just to help pull off a hoax.

Saving Gallifrey does not seem like a good idea, going to recover it even less so. The Time Lords were always pricks at best, and grew worse and worse as the war went on, as that girl Cass reminded us in the prequel that went up online last week (and don't get me started on that--witches coming out of nowhere to give the Doctor magic wine, oh my aching head, and if he took a potion designed to turn him into a warrior, shouldn't he have ended up closer to Vin Diesel or The Rock than to John Hurt?). Saving them on the first day of the conflict might have been acceptable, but on the last? The Daleks are all wiped out, though of course we know that won't last. Especially since one of the Doctors said something about "They'd have called for reinforcements," implying they weren't fully committed--though with Gallifrey as the prize, what else would they be doing? And then there's all those other bogeymen the Doctor mentioned in "The End of Time," I guess they're free to run loose now too.

I hate that Billie Piper didn't play Rose and interacted only with Hurt--the only one of the three to whom she meant nothing. And as a device generally, I despise movies and TV episodes which have an actor on screen to play a voice inside one character's head that the other characters aren't aware of, even though the actor is standing right next to them. Her chanting "No more" and "miles and miles" was especially irritating. Still, I do appreciate that she's recaptured some of her beauty in her maturity. She was a knockout when she first took on the role, steadily less so once Tennant took over as leading man, and downright horsey in her two special appearances in '08 and '10. Much better this time.

Clara had absolutely, positively nothing to contribute. There have been more than forty companions in the show's history, and her role could have been assigned to any one of them with hardly any rewrite at all. After "The Name of the Doctor" it's inconceivable to me that she can just get on with a normal life like that (teaching--well this is new--in Coal Hill School, no less, how cute). Hell, how did she get out of the time stream at all? Unless maybe she's another of those echoes, in which case how did the Doctor get out of the time stream, and what happened to the real Clara?

Angela Peasance did a good job as Elizabeth considering that she's a 72-year-old playing a 29-year-old. Seeing her connection to the Doctor finally revealed was amusing, and Tennant really hasn't lost a step. Call me pedantic, but saying "I have wars to plan" was anachronistic. Calais had fallen right before she took the throne in 1558. The first military conflict of her reign didn't come till 1569 when the Earl of Desmond rose up against English rule in Munster, and the big war for which she's remembered started in 1585. Historians list her resistance to military entanglements in the early years of her reign, when the conflicts of the 40s and 50s that always ended with a Tudor holding the short end of the stick had diminished England's military credibility, as one of her great achievements. The Doctor's also right that she'd never accept a marriage proposal on impulse given what was at stake for an unwed queen. It's hard to imagine a priest presiding over such a wedding even if she did; then again, the main point of the English Reformation was to give monarchs the ability to promote pliable priests willing to perform unorthodox marriage ceremonies as needed.

Jemma Redgrave was much less impressive as the Brig's daughter than she had been in her previous appearance. The fact that for much of that time she was actually a doppelganger can explain some of that; but between having secret nukes hidden away and hording alien tech like she's with Torchwood, she actually went a long way toward negating the rehabilitation of UNIT she'd brought about after Davies had made them all dark and corrupt. And her assistant, the irritating girl with the inhaler and the glasses and the scarf for God's sake--It's possible to imagine Moffett picking someone out of a crowd at a convention and saying "Show up on set wearing exactly what you're wearing now."

I was wondering of John Barrowman's very public umbrage at not being included in the episode was perhaps a red herring to conceal the fact that he would turn up after all (as a few other actors' cameos had been successfully concealed). Instead we learn that Jack left his wrist strap--his wrist strap!!--to UNIT in his will. Why would Jack leave a will at all? Unless maybe he'd done so during Miracle Day, but he was on the lam the whole time; and when he did die in that one, he immediately undied (I just saw that episode last week, now that BBCA has the rights to show it) so he would not have executed his will even if it did exist.

Things I did like, other than the fact that Billie Piper's horsey days are behind her:

The Zygon plot wasn't bad. I don't find them a particularly interesting monster, but that part of the story was. . . respectable, if perhaps not something worthy of such a huge production, even as a B plot. I do enjoy stories, like "Blink" and "The Big Bang" and "A Christmas Carol," where you have two particular chronologies going and need to figure out how the one can influence the other. That was well executed.

Tennant and Smith played wonderfully with each other. On one level Hurt matched their chemistry, but again, he really just didn't belong there. If it had been either Eccleston or McGann that would have been a different story. For all my problems with the poor continuity of the final act and my irritation at the Time War being shown at all, it really was pretty well done. The decision to push the big red button together was powerfully played, and all the TARDISes flying in was thrilling. Best of all was the Capaldi cameo, though why it had to be such an extreme close-up puzzled me. The farewell scene in the museum was pretty good, though again, why go most of the way to show the Hurt-to-Eccleston regeneration and without finishing the job? It clearly wasn't that they were afraid of using Eccleston's likeness without permission, as they'd done so when all the TARDISes poured in.

And Tom Baker's cameo was a nice touch. It did leave me scratching my head: Is he an ATL Doctor who chose to retire at some point before the Master destroyed Logopolis? A by-product of the paradox created by bringing multiple Doctors together? I'm sure I'm overthinking that one.

The Doctor believes that life, any life, is a pile of good things and a pile of bad things, and that the good thing don't always soften the bad things; but vice versa is also true, that the bad things don't always spoil the good things, or make them unimportant. (I'm somewhat inclined to agree, philosophically.) I believe that a story, any story, is a pile of good things and a pile of bad things, and that the good things don't always excuse the bad things; but that vice versa is also true, that the bad things don't always invalidate the good things, or make them unworthy of inclusion in a franchise's canon. Did I like "The Day of the Doctor?" The answer is a very big yes and a very big no. I'm going to have to sit with it for a while to decide which of those is bigger.

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