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Time Can Be Rewritten: Night of the Doctor

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“Man, this is the second-worst episode of Doctor Who I’ve been in.”

Because my Patrons are just so gosh-darned nice.

It was, of course, one of the highlights of the Fiftieth Anniversary. A tremendously sentimental and cool moment for fans, a fantastic way of officially revealing what the Hurt Doctor was, and a lovely gift to Paul McGann, who will pretty much never have the TV Movie be someone’s introduction to his Doctor again. And we have a full set of regenerations now, if you care about that sort of thing. Just about the only thing it isn’t, really, is a satisfying ending to the Eighth Doctor Era.
It tries, and that is a real part of its charm. I mean, one is pretty much sure Moffat included the litany of Big Finish companions as an acknowledgment of the Eighth Doctor Era – you know, that messy, historical thing that actually happened. The one with a giant bone thing in the sky, and he’s traveling with a fish, and there’s that girl from Jonathan Creek. Lego. They’re all made out of fucking Lego. Moffat probably even knew what would actually happen, which was that Big Finish fans immediately declared victory over the EDA fans, while the EDA fans sulkily pointed out that technically all this really disproved was the Vampire Science gap theory if those were the companions that first came to mind. 
But the fact that this even happened; that there were still, in 2013, people whose first reaction to this was to make a new move in a fifteen-year-old fandom spat or to somehow make it about Lawrence Miles, speaks volumes. And not even bad volumes. Honestly, the greatest tragedy for anyone who lived through the Eighth Doctor Era would have been if all the blood and pixels spilt had been in the name of a faith so fragile that it could be broke upon a seven minute YouTube video. We listened to Zagreus. We pretended to take Scream of the Shalka seriously. We even read Mad Dogs and Englishmen in public. Heal that, Sisterhood.
Actually, I think my favorite part was when anti-Moffat fans seized on the retcons this made to the Eighth Doctor era as evidence of Moffat’s malfeasance while openly admitting that they hadn’t read the books or listened to the audios. Not out of any sort of “fake geek” sentiment, but simply because I find the idea of blindly entering the Eighth Doctor era factionalizations just to find another front in the Moffat wars to be the most sublimely perfect execution of the Eighth Doctor Era ever. 
All of which is to say that the symbolic fate EIghth Doctor Era is a sublimely ridiculous thing to hang on an eight minute YouTube video. Even one that is, as this one is, intelligently and slyly constructed. The first half works by taking what is by this point a staple scene of the new series – the seduction of the new companion (and both Davies and Moffat always write it as a seduction) – and then twisting it into something altogether different as the usual “bigger on the inside” line becomes a source of utter horror and revulsion for Cass.
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A Mild Curiosity in a Junkyard (Silence in the Library/The Forest of the Dead)

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Credits
The end.
It’s June 7th, 2008. Rihanna is at number one with “Take a Bow,” having taken the slot the previous week. The Ting Tings, Coldplay, Usher, Madonna, and Justin Timberlake also chart. In news, Manchester United triumph in the first ever all-English European Cup final, defeating Chelsea on penalties. Construction begins in London on the Olympic Stadium, and Barack Obama finally puts the long fight for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination to rest when he defeats Hillary Clinton to, by that point, absolutely nobody’s surprise. 
 
On television, meanwhile, the Doctor is in a library, shouting at shadows. Seething, he tells them to look him up. They do so, and begin to read.
 
 
Like anything, it emerged from a number of influences, and its history can in one sense be traced back indefinitely. It does not have a clear and definitive moment of creation – a pristine and bespoke origin story. It is, however, generally agreed to have a creator: Sydney Newman. Newman was a Canadian television producer who caught the eye of Associated British Corporation, a weekend ITV franchise in the North and Midlands of England. Moving there in 1958, he quickly made a reputation for himself, birthing the reasonably successful sci-fi anthology Out of this World, a fairly straightforward knockoff of the American Twilight Zone, and The Avengers, at first a fairly generic crime show, but eventually an international hit. At the beginning of 1963, he was poached by the BBC to become Head of Drama.
 
Shortly before Newman’s arrival, the BBC commissioned a study to see how science fiction might  could work on television. Mainstream critics like Kingsley Amis were drawing attention to the genre, the earliest days of the New Wave, spearheaded by writers like J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, were playing out, and the BBC, committed to making various types of programming in the interest of the public, wanted to try it. The general conclusion was that sci-fi is a literary, adult genre that can’t really be done well for families because of the need for special effects. Time travel was suggested as a potentially strong subject for allowing a variety of low-cost dramas, and the report arrives six months before Newman. Three months after Newman started on the job, a Saturday evening timeslot between a sports program, Grandstand, and a pop music program, Juke Box Jury opened up. The slot called for an all-ages program, appealing to teenagers waiting for Juke Box Jury, adults holding over from Grandstand, and the existing children’s audience for that timeslot. Newman decided the sci-fi program would be perfect, and set to work designing it with C.E. Weber, a staff writer, and Donald Wilson, head of the Script department.
 
Curiously, the program’s development began with the sorts of characters who should be in it. The idea was a 30-something male protagonist and a younger female one, an older mentor figure, and an aesthetic that combined Victoriana with high-tech shininess.
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You Were Expecting Someone Else Final: The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who

, 23

There are several regards in which the IDW run of Doctor Who comics is an oddity. First and foremost, it is the only substantive body of Doctor Who material to receive no distribution in the UK. Panini, the Italian sticker company that bought Marvel UK’s operations in the mid-90s and, with it, Doctor Who Magazine, had the UK license for Doctor Who comics, and was disinclined to let an American upstart in. And so IDW ended up creating Doctor Who comics almost entirely for the American market.
Unrelatedly, IDW also ended up creating what was mostly a line of fairly crappy comics. They opened with a Tenth Doctor/Martha miniseries by longtime vanguard of mediocrity Gary Russell, continued with the damp and misguided squib of The Forgotten, and stopped off at their one UK-distributed series, and eventually did their Doctor Who/Star Trek crossover (distributed in the UK because they put Star Trek first in the title, meaning it was technically a Star Trek comic and thus not precluded by Panini’s license), skewered masterfully by Josh Marsfelder here, stopping off with various other mostly uninteresting comics along the way.
Of course, as we’ve seen over the years, Doctor Who comics are hardly the area of the series’ life where it has most regularly crowned itself in glory. There are moments of genuine charm, most often in the Doctor Who Magazine comics, and especially in those edited by Clayton Hickman. And there are moments that are interesting as objects of nostalgia – the weird alternate history of the John and Gillian period, the Frank Bellamy imitations of the Pertwee era, early career mediocrities from Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and Grant Morrison, the surreal John Ridgway dreamscapes of the Davison and Colin Baker years, and the criminally under-appreciated Steve Moore run. But for the most part Doctor Who comics have been historical curiosities. The IDW run is mostly the same, although, truth be told, most of it isn’t even that curious. 
But on Christmas Eve 2013, the day before the end of the Matt Smith era, IDW released a one-shot that served as their farewell to the license before it passed on to Titan Comics. It’s been the norm for a few years for one of the Wednesdays around Christmas to get a heavily reduced slate of new release comics, quietly shipped to comic shops a week in advance, with all of the books being fairly high profile, major books. So in 2013, there were a total of eight new releases, with one of them being this – a $7.99 double-length issue to close out the run. Picked for the high profile assignment, in a notable departure from IDW’s usual somewhat uninspiring creators, was Paul Cornell, making what was, by 2013, a rare return to Doctor Who. The premise is a comics classic, and an homage to the “Earth Prime” days of the DC Multiverse – the Doctor falls through universes as he does sometimes, and finds himself in the real world, where his adventures are regularly chronicled in a TV show on the BBC. 
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Outside the Government Final: The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot

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Given that The Day of the Doctor was massively successful and immediately catapulted to the top of the “best Doctor Who stories ever” list, it is perhaps no small thing that it was not actually the most beloved piece of the fiftieth anniversary. That honor, of course, goes to the spectacle of Steven Moffat visibly wishing he was sitting in the chair from Terror of the Autons during the botched satellite link-up with One Direction during the BBC Three “afterparty.” But second to the single most sublime moment of television that Steven Moffat has ever provided the world was Peter Davison’s The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot. 
It is worth stating, up front, that this is a genuinely sweet and delightful piece of television. It is routinely hilarious, from the brilliant use of the Shada clip to cover Tom Baker’s lack of involvement to the Peter Jackson/Ian McKellen cameo to Sylvester McCoy’s beautiful delivery of “I’d like to go home now” to Steven Moffat playing with action figures in his office to… I mean, this paragraph could go on for quite a bit, couldn’t it? This is a joyous thing chock full of charming moments. 
In some ways, actually, that’s the headline. Colin Baker has said in at least one interview that he genuinely was hurt not to be included in Day of the Doctor, especially given that Tom Baker was. This is an old wound, of course – the same one that flared twenty years earlier over the disparity of emphasis in The Dark Dimension. But it’s honestly difficult to imagine that Davison and McCoy didn’t have similar emotions. Of course they were all jealous of Baker and McGann for getting involvement. Wouldn’t anyone be? 
And yet this exists, full of warmth and humor and good feelings. On, to be clear, all sides. Moffat is there to send himself up as a disdainful and cantankerous man who has it in for any part of the series he didn’t create. Because, of course, he’d have loved to do The Thirteen Doctors as much as Colin Baker would have loved to be in it. Nobody didn’t want to see all of the classic series Doctors. And perhaps more to the point, in skewering himself so thoroughly, Moffat is tacitly making it clear that he understands Davison, Baker, and McCoy’s disappointments, and, more to the point, is sympathizing with them.
One might, of course, fairly ask why he didn’t just give them parts in the special then. But the reason for that is straightforward: the special still had to, at the end of the day, work as an episode of television and as a narrative. And the available options for trying to craft a narrative featuring all of the Doctors were all, in their own ways, unappealing. Seventy-five minutes is not nearly enough to handle eight leads with their own plot threads – an ensemble of that size needs far more room to breathe. And a chain of cameo appearances would quickly grow dull.
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The Moment Has Been Prepared For (The Day of the Doctor)

97

Well, at least it’s just the one who committed genocide and not the one in that
awful coat.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. The hour, in this case, was actually about seventy-five minutes long, commencing at 7:50 PM on November 23rd, 2013. Martin Garrix was at number one with “Animals,” with Lily Allen, Lorde, One Direction, Lady Gaga, and Eminem also charting. In the six months since The Name of the Doctor had aired, Edward Snowden had created a major international stir when he leaked a significant trove of classified information about the extent of surveillance operations being routinely carried out by the US and UK governments, Mohamed Morsi was deposed as President of Egypt in a military coup, and Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines and Vietnam, killing more than six thousand people. The man, of course, was Steven Moffat. 
The Day of the Doctor did not quite win universal praise. It just won stellar ratings, an impressive 88% AI rating, the distinction of being only the second episode of Doctor Who ever to hit the number one slot in the weekly ratings, and Doctor Who Magazine’s 50th Anniversary poll for the greatest story of all time. Nothing is all things to everyone, but it is difficult to imagine something coming much closer than The Day of the Doctor did. And yet The Day of the Doctor arrived after an enormously troubled production season, and was hardly an uncomplicated production in its own right, with executive producer Caro Skinner quitting the series a few weeks before shooting began, on top of the entire mess of Eccleston initially expressing interest and subsequently declining to reprise the role. That it avoided being an outright disaster given these circumstances seems a lucky break. That it was an insta-classic seems a small miracle.
At the heart of its success is a script by Moffat that is unapologetically committed to the episode’s grandeur. The episode deploys big set piece after big set piece, rarely waiting long between them. The TARDIS helicopter lift starts at the two minute mark. At seven minutes, we jump into the Time War. Billie Piper shows up six minutes later, David Tennant six minutes after that, at around the twenty minute mark. At twenty-seven minutes, Smith and Tennant share the screen for the first time. The big Zygon awakening/invasion breaks out at thirty-five minutes. Six minutes later is the big “did you ever count the children” three-way confrontation among the Doctors, which, while lacking the immediate grandeur of some of the other instances, is nevertheless a huge moment. The biggest slow period of the episode is the subsequent ten minutes building to the Doctors blasting their way out of Gallifrey Falls No More, bringing us to the fifty-two minute mark. By fifty-eight minutes, all three Doctors are agreeing to commit double genocide. And seven minutes later the thirteen-Doctor montage has kicked off. And six minutes thereafter the Curator shows. 
But for all the accelerated pace involved in jumping from set piece to set piece, what’s also striking is the way in which the individual set pieces are generally given room to breathe.
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Dear Santa: The Doctors Revisited (Matt Smith)

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You can tell that we’ve reached the present day quite early on, not least because Matt Smith suddenly shows up to have opinions on the show, having not been interviewed about any of his predecessors. But the real giveaway is the choices of episodes in the first segment, when introducing the character of the Eleventh Doctor. Every previous episode displayed a strong bias towards the earliest episodes for a Doctor. Whereas this pulls almost entirely from Season 7B, unabashedly positioning this as the present day of Doctor Who.

Yes, we eventually look back a few years and do the Ponds, which is somewhat historicized, but there’s no added insight to be had. These are the same talking points from Doctor Who Confidential and endless publicity interviews, dutifully trotted out again. Their context is only altered by the preceding ten episodes of this, which serve to make all of this look like the telos of Doctor Who itself.

With the historical perspective that a year allows us, this is not quite true. The focus on how Matt Smith, while the youngest actor ever to play the part, makes the Doctor seem old is a common talking point, and indeed was brought up in relation to the Capaldi casting, by this time long since announced. More interesting is the segment on Clara, which came at a point where she was widely viewed as a frightfully generic companion. There’s not a lot, but it’s acutely clear that Coleman in particular sees more depth in the character, and has ideas for what to do with her. The argument that Deep Breath doesn’t constitute a soft reboot of Clara but rather the moment when everybody started seeing what was always there has some solid support here.

Elsewhere, we can also see how this is quietly setting up the immediate future. There’s not much that directly tees up The Day of the Doctor, but the features on Madame Kovarian, the Silence, and the Weeping Angels quietly serve as a primer for Time of the Doctor. And, of course, there’s the fact that when this aired, Smith was a lame duck Doctor. His successor had been announced, and indeed, was either a week off from his debut or had debuted yesterday (depending on whether you watched this in the US or the UK – this was the only one to debut first in the UK).

And so there’s an odd dualism here. On the one hand, this does what one always suspected it would: presents the Moffat era as the ultimate in Doctor Who. Of course it does. The point of all of these sorts of specials is promotion of the show, and has been since Confidential. But on the other, it leads the show right up to the brink of a known transition. There’s a triumph as we reach the present, but also, and in some ways more importantly, a sort of “right, on to the next half-century” attitude. Which is a good place to be after fifty years.…

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Hey, Turn That Down: The Doctors Revisited (David Tennant)

, 16

At last, we reach the end of history, with an episode that is set up to, basically, repeat the same talking points about the Tenth Doctor that were being used when he was still on screen. This is as straightforward as it is possible to be – an unabashed display case for an era of Doctor Who that everybody knows is a classic.

Which, fair enough. There’s really no getting around the fact that the Tennant era was wildly popular, and that Tennant is always going to be one of the iconic portrayals of the Doctor. There are no apologias to make, and as of 2013, at least, the Tennant era hadn’t slipped into history, not least because Tennant was going to be making a return in less than a month anyway, with no explanation of why he looked older or anything like that necessary. There was, really, no other way to do this.

That said, the selection of what to focus on is interesting. Noticeably absent is any standing in the rain. There’s a little bit of the Bad Wolf Bay scene from Doomsday, but for the most part the two iconic emotional scenes from Tennant’s era, the departures of Rose and Donna, are entirely skipped over. This is even more striking given that Martha’s departure is featured in detail. There’s no mention of Human Nature/Family of Blood either. In other words, all the moments of Tennant’s Doctor being pushed to extremes are skipped.

Instead we get a focus on Tennant in default mode. There are sizeable clips from The Sontaran Stratagem and The Idiot’s Lantern, both of which are fine scenes, but which would appear on almost nobody’s instinctive list of major David Tennant scenes. To some extent, this demonstrates the level of confidence that they clearly have in the material: nobody is trying to sell David Tennant. Indeed, it’s somewhat refreshing to look at him in these scenes. Tennant’s best scenes are indeed extraordinary, but it’s easy to forget that he was also extraordinarily good at just being a foundation for the show to build on.

This also gets at the closest thing to a problem with this episode, however. For all its confidence, it shares the Peter Davison episode’s strange failure to actually ever describe what this iteration of the Doctor is actually like. Loads of talking heads are ready to line up and, quite rightly, say how wonderful David Tennant is, but nobody can actually nail down what his Doctor was like and why he was so iconic. Perhaps it’s simply too soon, but either way, it’s a glaring omission.

The other strange thing is the story chosen. It’s not that it’s a poor choice – indeed, there may be no story quite so Tennanty as The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End. But the story notably, gets no coverage in the episode itself, unlike the previous few, which took pains to get the viewer up to speed on what they were going to watch. This works fine – really, who needs a substantial introduction to the most popular Doctor Who story ever?…

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Bye: The Doctors Revisited (Christopher Eccleston)

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It’s surprising how easily this era slips into history. On the one hand, there is nothing being said here that was not said in DVD commentaries and Doctor Who Confidential ten years ago, often by the same people. And yet there is none of the breathless self-promotion of Confidential, which is what this most obviously resembles. The imminent, thrilling need to celebrate the basic existence of Doctor Who is absent. Just as the tail end of the classic series was drained of all its conflict, this is drained of all its triumph.

For those who remember what the Eccleston series actually felt like as it happened – that is, classic series fans – this is slightly disorienting. Eccleston is basically explained as “he was a Doctor for the 21st century and not quite what anyone expected.” And yet the scenes shown are exactly the ones you’d expect, with no real oddities among them. In marked contrast to the McCoy era, where we spent bizarre amounts of time on Time and the Rani, here we get Eccleston’s Emmy reel.

The issue, one quickly realizes, is that this is essentially the first time these set pieces of the “Doctor Who Season One as vital text in television history” argument have been done without Russell T Davies, who continued his politely silent 2013. And, of course, Eccleston is absent as well. As with the McGann episode, there’s a hole in the middle of this narrative.

It is worth noting that there is actually some suspense at this point in time. This went out on September 29th, the day after it was announced that there would be a trailer soon for Day of the Doctor, but nearly two months after the announcement of Peter Capaldi. “What is Doctor Who these days” was an astonishingly relevant question, with, at that moment in time, essentially three Doctors besides the incumbent having some sort of active “what’s going on with” question, one who’d never appeared, and one who’d only had a minute of speaking time.

The result was a historical moment where there was a past/present line on what Doctor Who was that Eccleston was exactly on the wrong side of. Which was at the time useful. Doctor Who was not a young series – it was already into season numbers well higher than most shows get, and it was at the time highly visible that it was a half-century old. Finding ways to justify calling your “this is where you should start watching” point as recent as possible mattered. So declaring Eccleston to be history was an easy decision to make.

And he’s history by his own choosing, admittedly – we should remember that the entire landscape of Doctor Who would have looked different right now had Eccleston been in Day of the Doctor, or, at least, certainly this special would have. But no, right now the scale of Doctor Who is very much 2006-14. And all of this is bluntly literalized in the closing moments of Moffat’s introduction to Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways, when he mentions the fleeting appearance of David Tennant as a highlight.…

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I. Oh.: The Doctors Revisited (Peter Davison)

, 25

The entire Doctors Revisited series takes a fundamental turn here, and largely not for the better. Where the Tom Baker episode merely brought in the actor who played the Doctor as one of its primary talking heads, here the show has access to essentially all of the major stars of the era. Where the first four episodes were basically anchored by two Scottish fanboys, here Davison, Strickson, Fielding, Sutton, and Waterhouse are the stars, with Tennant and Moffat contributing only choice insights.

For this specific instance, at least, it is to the program’s detriment. The thing is, of course, that we know both Moffat and Tennant’s opinions of the Davison era, since they each, in their own ways, expressed it in “Time Crash.” Moffat, in particular, has been an outspoken defender of the Davison era for nearly twenty years now. There are hints of their impassioned defense of Davison throughout, but it’s easy to wish they’d spent a little less time spoiling all the twists of Earthshock right before they showed it and a little more time fleshing out the initial claim that Davison brought “believability” to the part.
And yet it’s equally worth noting what isn’t here. Nobody is being snarky. Davison and Fielding, in particular, have been positively withering about aspects of their time on the program elsewhere, but here both of them give thoroughly enthused performances. Nobody says anything nasty about Adric or the effects. The only thing anyone giggles at is the celery. As we turn the corner into 1980s Doctor Who, there’s not a hint that they’re entering a problem area. Indeed, people were generally more willing to laugh at the Troughton and Pertwee eras than they are this.
The result, though, is soulless. The era is presented as good, but without the clear case for what was good about it that the first four installments made. It feels like people mumbling bland platitudes and explaining the plots of thirty year old television episodes, which, of course, it is, just like the first four installments, but they did much better jobs of covering that. And we should, perhaps, wonder what bits of interview got left on the cutting room floor.
Which does rather bring us back to Earthshock. It was inevitable, of course, that we were going to get this or The Caves of Androzani, and while one might have hoped for the latter, you kind of knew it had to be this. And in some ways that’s good. We complained that Spearhead From Space made it too easy on the Pertwee era. The same could easily have been said about Caves of Androzani, and it really can’t of Earthshock, which strays into camp in more ways than just Beryl Reid. And while nobody introduces the episode that way, the fact that they hype its surprises while simultaneously spoiling both of them does, shall we say, set up a few other surprises for audiences for whom this is an introduction to history.
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Time Travel Is Always Possible In Dreams (The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang)

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TARDIS Erootitorum
It’s June 19th, 2010. Shout is at number one with “Shout,” which lasts both weeks of this story. Kylie Minogue, Eminem, David Guetta, Lady Gaga, and Baddiel, Skinner, and Lightning Seed also chart, the latter with a hilarious belief that England might not crash pathetically out of the World Cup. Spoiler: the day after this story wraps, they do. Also in news, David Cameron apologizes on behalf of the government for the Bloody Sunday Massacre, and George Osborne presents a budget statement full of austerity. Also, on June 26th, the entire universe ends. 
There is no point in pretending that my opinion here is anything other than what it is. I think this is decisively and thoroughly a good thing. I love the Davies era dearly, but the Moffat era is, for my money, the pinnacle of the show. Indeed, it’s basically this pair of episodes that’s why TARDIS Eruditorum exists: because I could not get them and their implications out of my head. I have been looking forward to this post since I started, and the observations I want to make about this story are, ultimately, the observations that I created the blog to make. Although, having now gotten to it, it seems like so much of what I could say is stuff I’ve made obvious, and that nobody reading this needs to have pointed out. In many ways, everything I’ve said in TARDIS Eruditorum and the entire critical apparatus for looking at Doctor Who that I’ve built exists so as to make this story the most self-evident and explicable thing imaginable. If you’ve any understanding of how the thought processes of TARDIS Eruditorum work, you can figure out most of what I like about this story without effort. Its metafiction, its alchemy, everything about it is so thoroughly in line with the approach I take to Doctor Who that there’s almost nothing to say. By spending four years building to it, I’ve left such a clearly defined piece of negative space that filling it seems unnecessary.
Let’s, then, do the obvious thing and approach it in the context of Season Five. Much of Season Five, viewed through history’s lens, has felt, understandably, like an extended exercise in incremental change from the Russell T Davies era. Which is understandable – it’s easy to forget that the gap between The End of Time Part Two and The Eleventh Hour was only three months. To people who don’t pay attention to who the writer of an episode is, which is to say, to roughly 100% of the population, a period of bedding in was important. And so we had a season that retained numerous structural elements of the Davies era: a present/future/past triptych to start the season, a thirteen episode season consisting of seven single episode stories and three two-parters, et cetera. Yes, there were some changes – the first two-parter was, despite the presence of familiar monsters, the more adult and weird of them, while the second one filled the “for kids” brief.
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