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For most of the second half of Series 7, I’ve been glad that I’m no longer duty-bound to review every single episode of Doctor Who for The History of the Doctor – largely because I’ve little favourable to say and I hate giving bad reviews. Whilst I’m duly enamoured with Jenna-Louise Coleman’s impossible Clara Oswald in all her iterations, and Matt Smith is still as good as ever he was, the stories just didn’t set me alight, particularly the first four. The Bells of Saint John was good and no more, which is pretty much what I’d say about Hide too; The Rings of Akhaten will have its fans, but I didn’t enjoy a single minute of it; and the Ice Warrior X-File homage, Cold War, was inspired in principle but sluggish in practice. Fortunately Stephen Thompson’s Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS seemed to stem the tide, and Mark Gatiss’s Crimson Horror proved to be an absolute classic, with Neil Gaiman’s clever Nightmare in Silver not a million miles behind it, shamelessly exhibiting a mercurial Matt Smith at the height of his powers. But then came The Name of the Doctor, an episode that seemed destined to disappoint, either by failing to make good on its preposterous promise or by utterly destroying the mystery of the Doctor. There are things that we must never know, fifty years old or otherwise. As the man himself says, “It’s not the point”.
In fact though, The Name of the Doctor was so relentlessly tense; so offensively emotional; so absurdly fannish and commemorative and murky and enthralling that were it the only on-screen celebration of the series’ fiftieth birthday, I would have been more than happy.
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Like many of the revived series’ finest and most monumental episodes, Steven Moffat’s series finale borrows much from the media that kept Doctor Who alive in the 1990s and early 2000s, taking ideas from seminal novels such as Marc Platt’s Lungbarrow and particularly Lawrence Miles’ Alien Bodies, trimming their fat and eschewing their impenetrability. Moffat’s skill for taking incredible, mind-boggling concepts – be they scientific or emotional – and boiling them down to sentences that a child will understand (“The name you choose, it’s like a promise you make. He’s the one that broke the promise…”) is never more evident than it is here. Don’t get me wrong, as proven by my wife’s “I don’t get it” reaction to its final scene, The Name of the Doctor is not aimed at a one-off watcher or even a seen-a-few channel-hopper (what episodic drama is these days, post-24?), but those that have watched the show consistently for the last eight years, who should understand every single beat.
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Had I more time on my hands, I would wax lyrical about the Doctor and River’s heartbreak of a final dance; the poignancy of the first ten Doctors’ full colour, convincing cameos (marred only by the chasm of a plot hole that is the absence of the Doctor’s future incarnations from his time stream. If it isn’t a glorious gaffe, things are looking very bleak indeed for the Oncoming Storm!); Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint and Strax, who would no doubt be the stars of their own audio spin-off series by now, if only Big Finish’s Doctor Who licence extended as far as the current series; the powerful imagery conjured on Trenzalore, epitomised by the dimensionally-inverted TARDIS wreck / headstone; the irony of the villain of the piece being played by an alternative ninth Doctor, whose Shalka existence is sort of explained by his final malevolent act; even the perfect payoff to the season’s obligatory companion arc, “Impossible Girl” (though right now I’d kill for a ordinary, straight-off-the-peg companion whose meeting with the Doctor hadn’t been predetermined). Chronic parental fatigue and overwork prevent me from so doing, however, and so I’ll cut straight to the chase – for once, the rumours were true!
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The reveal of the Doctor’s “secret” incarnation was so well done that I couldn’t sleep after watching it; for the first time since The Stolen Earth, if not The Parting of the Ways, the series had worked me into such a frenzy that I must have looked like I was on drugs, my mind whirring away into the early hours of the morning, my body fidgeting like a madman’s. All those years that we squandered speculating whether it was Paul McGann’s or Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor that fought in the Last Great Time War, and now it looks like it was neither of them, for it seems that the Doctor had a body in between – a ninth incarnation who, as Moffat so succinctly frames it, “broke the promise” of his name. That Other-like silhouette. That gravelly, anguished voice. Those words; those perfect words so painstakingly chosen:
HURT:
What I did, I did without choice…
SMITH:
I know…
HURT:
In the name of peace, and sanity.
SMITH:
But not in the name of the Doctor!
Cue global spleen-venting.
Some despair that it’s thrown the numbering out; many object on the basis that an incarnation has been “wasted” (as if the Beeb will be bound by Gallifreyan lore already flouted by the Master). Others will just ruddy bloody love the sheer earthshock of it – at least for now.
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If things are as they seem, I’m not sure how I’ll feel in the long term. On the one hand, I love the idea of the Doctor having a secret incarnation whose actions were so extreme that his subsequent selves stripped him of his carefully-chosen soubriquet (appeasing, at least to a certain extent, those who still want to call Smith the “Eleventh Doctor” and so on. To those fans though, I’d say that he’s just the Doctor – eleventh is no more than a fleeting adjective, like hobo or dandy); on the other hand, I’m not at all comfortable with divorcing the new series’ Doctors from the presumably-time warrior (but possibly pre-Hartnell or even quasi-Valeyard) Doctor’s implied genocide - the guilt that they carry is a fundamental part of them; the so-called “Ninth Doctor” and “Tenth Doctor” particularly so. Ultimately my views will turn on the content of the next celebratory episode, but however this angle plays out, at least we may now have an inkling as to why the Aliens of London Doctor claimed to have got younger since the classic series – locking secret incarnations away in the farthest recesses of your time stream is bound to throw your age out a bit.
The Name of the Doctor will be available to download from iTunes in 1080p HD for just £2.49 shortly. The second half of Series 7 can be purchased for £18.99.
Doctor Who, and indeed David Tennant, will return to BBC One for its fiftieth anniversary special on 23rd November 2013.
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