The Time of the Doctor

Yall know what I want! Hook a girl up?

I'll comment in more detail once I stop crying.

Wow! The Daleks become the Timelords. That's why The Doctor could never totally defeat them.






































I kid. I kid. Haven't seen it yet, can't wait to.

Meh. Quite a weak episode, especially coming after the absolutely amazing 50th anniversary special.

Not a great goodbye for Smith but I'm definitely looking forward to Capaldi!

Also... a better thread title would have been, "Do you happen to know how to fly this thing?"

That's what you get for not watching the episode.

Well, that ended rather abruptly.

Well...it's not like "oh yes, Barcelona", or "I'm crashing! Hahaa! Woohooo!", are gonna be carved onto a statue either.

at the time i asked, obviously I had not been able to - now i have.

it wasn't a really super episode, all in all, but I like how they went ahead and advanced "The Rule" and then wrote him out of it. That and Capaldi's appearance satisfies me

Well, in this case the Doctor didn't expect a change until it happened. He just expected to die, so he dealt with that.

The Daleks are never completely defeated, but at least these ones are in the very distant future. And they've got no reason to attack the planet now anyway, with the Time Lords no longer there.

As I understand it, the Silence weren't really bad guys in the first place. The ones the Doctor fought earlier were part of a breakaway sect that travelled into the past to try to prevent the battle in the first place.

Granted, but now there's actual confirmation they're alive, and apparently they're at least slightly less dickish than they used to be.

I assumed the Time Lords granted the Doctor an entire new regeneration cycle, just as they offered to give the Master back in The Five Doctors. I thought that was the whole point of referencing that story by bringing back the seal of the High Council.

I didn't hate it. But why do Moffat episodes in Moffat's run always have to outweigh the "wow" with the "wait a minute, why. .?"

In this case:

Why didn't the Time Lords come through the crack in the end?

And if that was supposed to tie up loose ends, I'm also still stuck on why the renegade Silents put River in a space suit, and how River survived at the end of the first Trenzalore adventure. And explaining River's contribution to blowing up the TARDIS by convenient relapse into psychosis is cheap.

I do like that we had another explicitly long-lived Doctor after Hartnell, though.

They'd still have been walking into an ambush they couldn't survive, I think was the reasoning.

It was remote controlled. River was just there as a hostage, so the Doctor couldn't risk harming her by disabling it.

It was just the copy in the Library projecting itself, right?

I think I missed that bit.

A valiant effort, but most of that is speculation -- and I don't mind fan speculation, but when you need it in order for the main plot to make any sense, it grates.

River did something with a large tube she disconnected from the main console. I thought that was either a direct attempt to blow up the ship, or an attempt to escape that ended up blowing up the ship.

No, she explicitly told the Doctor that she shouldn't appear any more while he was "dead" when the GI invaded his lifeline. And that the reason why she could still appear anyway were "spoilers". Perhaps we are meant to understand that being transferred to the Library left her in the best state to become the mainframe. Who knows?

Just what my best guess is at what Moffat thinks we should be thinking, telling us that the Silents sect blew up the TARDIS and reminding us that River/Tash had been fighting psychosis all her life.

It was fun, showcased why Smith made a great Doctor and has been let down by the quality of the tales, but the resolution...

Tasha Lem seemed to have been a River Song clone, so I assume either Alex Kingston wasn't available, or the Dalekification of the Church was deemed needed so new character required, so we got Tasha Lem instead.

The wooden Cyberman was nice, and the whole story showed a nice bit of thought, and I suspect fans will be freeze-framing the drawings in the "Sheriffs Office" for various characters.

Seeing the Doctor age was nice, fighting what he thought would be his last stand. Good to see the whole splody TARDIS destroying the Universe hasn't been swept under the carpet too.

But the resolution... Sorry, but I am utterly fucking bored with shiny light solutions. They were shit during the RTD's time, and they're still shit now. It's the laziest of writing, painting the hero into a corner where they can't get possibly get out of and then you pull out a crap rabbit. The best stories reveal the corner to be a con, the bad guys think the hero is right where they want him, but no, little do they know it is the other way around, and you, the viewer, goes "ahhhh! I see it! I see it!" as the con is explained. The good ones involve some form of external help that save the day, so the hero was in genuine trouble, but is such a damned hero their friends will help save the day.

But the shit ones? The ones wiped from the shitty arse of bad writers? That's where you get dehobbited via a big fucking kum-by-ya over a phone network. That's where you get to blow up all the Daleks on the planet with your All! New! Super! Gallifreyan! Sinestro! Power! Fuck off with that shit, just fuck the fuck off to fucking fucksville on a fuckhorse with it.

You look at the smaller stories, less disappearing-up-its-own-history-arse ones, and they're absolute crackers. Girl in the Fireplace? Blink? Wonderful tales. But start sticking the story in the straightjacket of the series' own mythos and roll in the Daleks, you just know at some point you'll be hiding behind the sofa - not out of fear, but to stop cringing so much you get a migraine.

I'm also getting a little tired of the sugary farewells too, Tennants regeneration managed to beat Rutger Hauers death in the Buffy movie for prolongment, and we had Amy Pond back as a memory in this one. Nothing wrong with tugging the heartstrings, but do it without it being a blatant shoehorn like a 'reset.' It's all a little too panto - surprise us rather than make every regeneration an expected trip down memory lane, try and make it different and unexpected.

But everything up to that moment was great, the start was good fun, although quite why he was wandering around with a bit of broken Dalek? Handles was a nice sidekick (took me back to the Galactica tale about what happened to Starbuck when he got himself a Cylon sidekick)

I just think Moffat needs someone to say "no. No. NO" to some stuff, he's not a bad writer, but he blatantly needs reigning in on some things, because we are getting bad stories and bad solutions at an alarming rate.

I have trouble buying that Mother Superior, or pretty much anyone, could suppress that nanoDalek stuff for any length of time and remain functional. Practice with self-control or not.

Other than that, it was pretty enjoyable and a respectable send-off. Caught me off-guard a few times. I did feel bad as the credits rolled, because I really enjoyed watching Matt Smith even in his lesser episodes, but I'm hopeful as to what they'll come up with for this Capaldi fellow (who was rocking his Matt Smith pretty well there at the end).


KJ: So, did they give him a whole twelve more regenerations, or just one . . . ?
Me: Yeah, they gave him twelve more, and he used ten or eleven of them on blowing stuff up. Wouldn't you?

Well, that does seem to be a pattern the last few years . . . but yes, I think it was definitively established that the Silence was behind the TARDIS exploding. You know, somehow.

I have to assume they were all blown up proper with that "light display".

Well, now we know where they were coming from when they decided to go after the Doctor. They're less evil villain now and more one-time antagonist.

And now we know they, or something pretending to be them, survived. (As if there were any out-of-universe doubt.) But yeah, that might be dealt with next season: is the Doctor going to let them out, and what will be the repercussions? Or will he return to gadding about on random adventures like when he set off to research the Silence while playing dead?

It doesn't have to be resolved. And I think this has been a popular fan theory for some time now, that the limitation is artificially imposed by the Gallifreyan powers that be, and thus it stands to reason that they could move the goalposts if they so chose.

I'm pretty sure he used the word "reset" in there. Will listen for it on re-watch. Until definitively proven otherwise, I'm going with the idea that it was a fresh dozen, not just a one-off.

oh, and a minor point but - when did Eleven adopt a Cyberman head for his sidekick?

(which, by the way, was a bit that i REALLY liked. I hate he "died")

Okay, he did but that wasn't the thing.

Transcribed from 57:00

Clara: "Doctor!"
Doctor: "Hello"
C: "You're young again. You're okay. You didn' even change your face."
D: "It's started. i can't stop it now. This is just the reset. Whole new regeneration cycle, ooo! Taking a bit longer. Just breaking it in."


I'm gonna argue that doesn't sound like a one-off event, but a reboot of the whole cycle.

And I have to say, that thing about the oldest question at the end of "A Good Man Goes To War" or whichever it was? I rolled my eyes at how self-important and self-indulgent it was to have that as an excuse to have Blue Head end the season repeating "Doctor Who?" over and over again . . . but now they've came up with reasonably logical reasons to fit it in with everything that had come before.

This mirrors what they did with the question of silence falling. There we assumed the first thing that came along (the end of the universe) was the silence being referred to, but it turned out to be something different. Here there was the question of the Doctor's name being the password to the TARDIS in the "Whoops, we ran out of season, let's just tell you what's up with Clara and move on" episode, but it turned out to be, well, the password to the universe.

Just for this episode. I couldn't make out the details of where or how.

Yeah, it was a pretty nice touch, well-executed.

IIRC, Clara DOES know the Doctor's real name, doesn't she?

If what we were told in the episode was correct, they wanted the Doctor to say his true name as proof that it was safe to come out. He didn't, so they wouldn't. But inspired by Clara's speech, they gave him a Christmas gift before scampering off. Why didn't the Doctor in 300 years of this think to communicate with Gallifrey (at least as far as we were shown), whereas it takes Clara 3 minutes to think the planet of super-beings might be of some use? Not much of a clue. I guess you could chalk it up to pride.

I've seen the theory floated that Tasha was in fact another incarnation of River as opposed to a stand-in for River, for what it's worth.

The episode said he picked up Handles (a Cyberman stripped of its organics) in a market somewhere.

According to the dialogue, his name was supposed to signal not that it was safe, but that it was the right universe. In order to send him a new cycle, presumably they must have decided it was the right universe after Clara's speech. Of course, if they also had realized it was unsafe to come through, that would explain why they didn't; for that to happen, I guess they would have to have communicated with the Doctor after all, which kind of makes sense.

But wouldn't it have been sweet if these aspects, each of which is absolutely essential to the main plot, had been addressed in the show?

When I first watched the episode, I throught it was clearly intended to be River. Even the line about "a new body" makes sense if her latest memory of the physical Doctor was the Library episode; she recognizes him in this body, after all, and the hint that she enjoys it might as well refer to her previous intimacy with it. It's only online that I found out some people doubted the connection.

Here, I'm sort of prepared to accept ambiguity, as it adds to the character and doesn't leave the plot hanging. Much like the Mother/Susan/Lady in White in Tennant's last story.

I, too, enjoyed Handles.

I don't doubt that it could be a new River-incarnation. I just didn't automatically go to that, and wouldn't have done if someone hadn't pointed out the possibility.

It's plausible that Tasha has nothing to do with River, that the Doctor has had physical intimacy with Tasha in a previous life, and that Tasha just somehow recognizes the Doctor in his new incarnation as some other characters do.

It's probably more plausible that Tasha is supposed to be a new River, based on some of the dialogue. The bit about having a psychopath inside her and with the Doctor giving River props seems to indicate it's River.

I have to say the episode is growing on me. I've watched it three times now, and that alone says a lot in its favour, I guess. I still wish it wouldn't skip across plot problems wiht a superficial mysterious attitude, but there are really a lot of nice things going on here. And the pacing is excellent; I can't look up a single scene without ending up watching the whole thing again.

I also quite liked this review in the AV club:

http://www.avclub.com/review/the-time-of-the-doctor-106556

"Yet the Raggedy Man was never who this Doctor really was; it was who he was trying to be."

The heart of the column in one sentence, and very well said. I love it when people can take a story like this and read deply into the context of the whole series and not just look at the surface.

One of the things that take Doctor Who from being indulgent cheese into actually compelling storytelling is the degree to which you can see so much of it with a deeper meaning. The whole business of what he thinks of himself after "The War Doctor" is one aspect, and the business refereed to in this piece is another layer to that.

It will be fascinating to see what underlying theme Twelve will be built upon.

To intimidate the occupants of the other ships he visited. "Proof of courage" is what he called it.

It's a paradox. River was created by a group that broke away from Tasha and travelled back in time. Seeing how the Doctor responded to Tasha, they likely programmed River to emulate her.

Something I just realized about Tasha Lem.... her hairstyle makes it look like she's wearing a fez.




So, take that as you will.

Not sure why anyone would think that there were a lot of unresolved plot strands from this... It makes it clear who the Silence are, what the ones we have previously seen were up to and ties in the TARDIS exploding and the cracks as a result. (I'm not entirely clear how they blew up a TARDIS but hey, this isn't exactly hard sci-fi - it isn't even Star Trek - so probably best not to be too bothered by that kind of thing)

It also resolves the Trenzalore issue - that timeline has been changed as a result of the new regeneration cycle - but keeps open the search for Gallifrey which will presumably be one of Capaldi's strands.

I both agree and disagree about the deus ex machine type endings. I agree in the snese that I KNOW that these type of resolutions are a bit lazy but I disagree because frankly, at least in this case it was combined with an excellently understated resolution to the regeneration cycle issue. I mean, people have been banging on about this for years and Moffat goes and resolves it in the blink of an eye when (if you didn't read spoilers) you wouldn't have been expecting it (the idea of the extra Tennant regneration being a full one was never established before).

I don't think it was quite the full send off that Tennant got - the bit with him and the Ood in the snow in his final episode is an excellent farewell scene - but it was pretty good and I was relieved that he got to come back looking like himself for a final bow.

One Doctor Who-lore, geek-fest query though... Valeyard?

I don't expect them to rattle off the kinds of particles involved, I'm just curious as to how they got at the TARDIS in a way that precluded them simply shooting the Doctor. Did someone have a TARDIS skeleton key and slip in while he was off saving Earth yet again? Did they beam wimey-timey waves at it through the time vortex?

Weeeell, not necessarily. His eventual final regeneration could still die in a huge battle on that planet.