The Day of the Doctor

The Last Day (prequel): I was so excited to get on to today’s main feature that I forgot to watch the prequel beforehand. I watched it afterwards, so it was naturally a bit of an anti-climax to see the events leading up to the Fall of Arcadia after I’d seen the actual Fall of Arcadia. I’m sure it would have been fine the correct way round.

Quite simply, this is the best episode of Doctor Who of all time. Saturday 23rd November 2013 was the last time our big group of friends all got together to watch a new episode, and will probably remain so now that we’ve all got busy jobs and people have started moving away and getting married and having babies. But what a high to go out on. Everyone came round to mine at around lunchtime, and we watched An Unearthly Child (just the first ep, not the full thing), The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors, Dimensions in Time, Time Crash, The Name of the Doctor and The Night of the Doctor as a warm-up.

None of this information is pertinent, but I mention it because it was a very happy day that will forever be lodged in my memory. It’s what makes Doctor Who so special to me, the way it’s intrinsically linked to certain times and certain people. The Day of the Doctor gets that, and it’s the perfect celebration. You don’t need me to write a review telling you why, and I don’t feel capable of doing so. So let’s see if I can do something different. In no particular order, here are fifty things I love about the fiftieth anniversary special.

1. The original titles and music
2. I.M. Foreman
3. Coal Hill School – and having Clara work there is the first step in her transition from the mystery girl into a real person that we can begin to care about
4. Riding a motorcycle into the TARDIS
5. Kate Stewart – this is the first time she gets to take control in the same way that he dad used to, having been a bit of a passenger in her first story
6. Osgood – she’s mostly just a cute fan representative at this stage, but the moment with the inhaler hints at the depth that’s to come
7. “Codename: Cromer. 70s or 80s, depending on the dating protocol”
8. Finally seeing the Time War, and it not disappointing after such a build-up
9. It’s got Billie Piper in it
10. It doesn’t have Rose Tyler in it – how wonderful to give Billie the chance to do something different, rather than further chip away at Rose’s resolution
11. The design of The Moment itself is just gorgeous
12. The way the three main settings – modern London, the Time War and Elizabethan England – are each given their own establishing scenes, one after another, before the Doctors are united, like a more in-depth and expensive version of The Five Doctors
13. The trail of fezzes leaping from location to location, tying them all together
14. It made me like Tennant again, having become a bit sick of him by the time he’d left three years earlier
15. Specifically, I think it was the bit with the rabbit that did it
16. A silly gag four years ago implying that Tennant shagged Queen Elizabeth I is now a key element in the fiftieth anniversary episode
17. The fact that Smith and Tennant are quite matey with each other, which at this stage is a subversion of the norm for a multi-Doctor episode
18. Conversely, how grumpy the War Doctor gets with how young they are, how they use their screwdrivers, and their silly catchphrases
19. The War Doctor being so much more than just a substitute for Eccleston – he represents the classic era itself, and how despite the different approaches, it’s clear that the new regime owes it all to the original
20. Just the fact that John Hurt is a Doctor now. John Hurt!
21. The way that our introduction to him is so bad-ass – a machine-gunned message of defiance
22. Smith and Tennant’s delight at both having put their clever specs on
23. The War Doctor assuming they’re both the companions
24. Smith calling Tennant “Dick van Dyke”
25. The realisation of why the stone dust in the statue room was relevant
26. The Black Archive, with its many pictures of old companions in bizarre combinations
27. The choice of Zygons as the main baddy in only their second appearance – they must have the best average hit rate for any returning monster ever
28. The relative restraint in only bringing back them and the Daleks – unlike previous anniversary specials, this story is about the Doctor, not any of his friends or foes
29. Coming up with a brilliant plan to set the Sonic a 400-year task of disintegrating the cell door, only to discover it wasn’t locked
30. The code for the vortex manipulator being the time and date An Unearthly Child aired
31. John Hurt asking if there’ll be a lot of kissing in the future
32. The multiple TARDIS interiors, and the reference to “the round things”, and of course the inevitable “you’ve redecorated” line
33. The Space Time Telegraph turning up, of all things
34. That weird, sinister-sounding phone call the UNIT guy takes towards the start suddenly making sense towards the end
35. The various instances of people having to figure out which is the real person and which is the duplicate reminding me of Red Dwarf‘s Psirens
36. The tension of that Kate Stewart vs Kate Stewart scene, and the parallel between her threatening to nuke London and the War Doctor’s dilemma
37. The fact that it lead directly to The Zygon Invasion/Inversion, which is another of my all-time favourites
38. “Never cruel or cowardly. Never give up, never give in”
39. The fact that this episode doesn’t actually change anything about the Time War – this is what always happened, it’s just that the Doctor thought that it happened differently. Moffat-haters still can’t grasp this.
40. “Calling the War Council of Gallifrey. This is the Doctor.”
41. “No sir, all thirteen” and Capaldi’s eyebrows – I cannot describe how exciting this was at the time. That screenshot was my Facebook cover photo for years.
42. “Geronimo!” / “Allons-y!” / “Oh, for God’s sake.”
43. Hurt’s reaction to his regeneration – we’ve never seen the Doctor *happy* to change before
44. YOU KNOW I REALLY THINK YOU MIGHT
45. The whole idea of the Doctor reusing his previous faces – “but just the old favourites, eh?”
46. Tom Baker appearing in Doctor Who in 2013. I cried then, I cried tonight. A wonderful, wonderful surprise – the greatest the show has ever pulled.
47. For all its dodgy effects, the shot of the twelve Doctors all together was a beautiful thing to end on
48. The fact that it’s still very much Matt Smith’s story, as per Pertwee in 1972 and Davison in 1983
49. The faces in the closing titles, and the return of the middle eight
50. The fact that it wasn’t just me and my friends gathered together to witness Doctor Who celebrate 50 years with the finest piece of television it’s ever produced, but 12.8 million people watching on BBC One, and millions more watching at cinemas or on TV in 98 countries around the world simultaneously.

And then afterwards, we all watched Zoe Ball desperately trying to get One Direction’s thoughts on fifty years of Doctor Who, over a satellite connection with a delay of what felt like fifty years itself, while Moffat watched on with his head in his hands. What. A. Night.

In case you hadn’t guessed:

RATING: 10

The Shakespeare Code

* This is a cracking and possibly under-rated episode, and I’d forgotten how much I like it. It’s not one that you’d necessarily get a hankering to go back to, and there are certainly episodes later in this series that vastly overshadow it, but it’s a fun and thrilling forty five minutes, and it’s funny. Nothing too deep or heavy, but one of the better light-hearted episodes.

* I’m glad that the presence of a black woman in Elizabethan England was addressed. It’s obviously great that race isn’t an issue in modern Doctor Who for the vast majority of the time, but there’s also a responsibility to not ignore a character’s colour completely, especially when there’s an opportunity to address a specific issue. It also fits in with Martha’s habit of asking the kind of questions a genre-savvy audience would ask. This is another difference between her and Rose, who would ask the questions that a general audience would ask, further reflecting the show’s new status as an established fixture.

* When Martha suggests recording the performance of Love’s Labours Won, she asks The Doctor if he’s got “a MiniDisc or something”. A MiniDisc? This was 2007, not 1997.

* Shakespeare was great. It would have been so easy to portray the classic image of the old man with a skullet from the cheque guarantee cards hologram, but instead they made him Robbie Williams with wit. I enjoyed the running joke of Shakespeare nicking phrases from The Doctor, and “57 academics just punched the air” is a superb gag, even more so now I know that the oddly specific number is a reference to a homoerotic sonnet.

* Super Hans! He’s on a particularly bad trip here. Also, his jailer is Bear Strangler McGee from Red Dwarf‘s Gunmen of the Apocalypse, and the woman from the inn is Angie, the secretary from the first series of The Brittas Empire who was replaced by Julie and then never mentioned again. I recognised those two straight away, yet I’m pretty sure this is the only thing I’ve seen the much more famous Christina Cole in, and my reference point for Dean Lennox Kelly is his role as the Gazza equivalent in Mike Basset: England Manager. My cultural references are very specific.

* The Doctor talks about Back To The Future. A meeting of the two greatest works of time travel fiction of all time. Although, given that BTTF is now established as a movie (and a novelisation) in the Who universe, we’re now extremely unlikely to get a crossover episode, The Two Docs. With all the Harry Potter references, we can only assume that the books were never made into films in Martha’s world, or if they were, Barty Crouch Jr was played by someone else.

* Sod it, I’m adding Queen Elizabeth I to the list of recurring characters.

RATING: 8