{"id":43,"date":"2013-12-29T17:48:55","date_gmt":"2013-12-29T23:48:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/?p=43"},"modified":"2013-12-29T17:50:05","modified_gmt":"2013-12-29T23:50:05","slug":"day-and-time-of-the-doctor-spoilers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/?p=43","title":{"rendered":"Day and Time of the Doctor (SPOILERS!)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: MASSIVE SPOILERS.\u00a0 For both the 50th<\/sup> Anniversary Special (Day of the Doctor<\/i>) and the Time of the Doctor<\/i> where Smith regenerates.<\/p>\n

And so another era in Doctor Who<\/i> is over, as Matt Smith fezzes his way out of the TARDIS and in to whatever it is former Doctor\u2019s do after they are done\u2014apparently other BBC dramas.\u00a0 And yes, apparently fez now has a verb form, but that\u2019s just the kind of world we live in these days.\u00a0 Peter Capaldi takes the helm of the juggernaut Sci-Fi show now, presumably with less of a foul mouth than his most famous former gig on The Thick of It<\/i>.\u00a0 Although the Doctor dropping f-bombs would be hilarious.<\/p>\n

Looked at together, both the Day and the Time of the Doctor represent the whole of Steven Moffat\u2019s time as show-runner.\u00a0 They are high budget outings filled with brilliant moments of pure genius that really suffer when you\u2019re dealing with the connective tissue between them.\u00a0 Of course, since that connective tissue is known as the rest of the plot<\/i>, that can be an issue.<\/p>\n

And make no mistake, there are amazing moments in both Day<\/i> and Time<\/i>.\u00a0 In Day<\/i>, Matt Smith and David Tennant on screen together play really well; and despite his character being younger than either of them John Hurt brings a weary souled gravitas to his War Doctor that plays perfectly with the haunted Ninth and Tenth Doctors.\u00a0 And in Time<\/i> the scene where Matt Smith talks\u2014directly to the camera almost\u2014about how everyone changes and how the important part is remembering all the people you\u2019ve been is chillingly good television.\u00a0 I sniffled, and I\u2019ve always been of the opinion that there wasn\u2019t a scene Smith was in that Tenant couldn\u2019t have done better.\u00a0 Smith walking into battle spinning his cane and railing against the assembled evil of the universe is just a great image.<\/p>\n

But then you get to the parts between them, and the overall story-telling.\u00a0 Day of the Doctor<\/i> creates so many little nagging problems when you step back to think about it that you\u2019re left wondering what hasn\u2019t changed in retrospect.\u00a0 And changing what we knew is by itself not automatically bad, but how it works can<\/b> be bad.<\/p>\n

Undermining the Narrative: Time of the Doctor<\/b><\/p>\n

One of the problems I have with the arcs of the Moffet stories is that in striving for his explosive moments he undermines the narrative of those story arcs, and indeed of Doctor Who.<\/p>\n

In Time of the Doctor<\/i> this comes about because of how they address the issue of his regenerations.\u00a0 The Doctor is only supposed to have a limited number of regenerations\u2014he can be reborn 12 times, meaning that the 13th<\/sup> Doctor would have been the last.\u00a0 13 is a good number numerologically speaking, associated with bad luck and other things, as well as luck in many cultures.\u00a0 And in the Time of the Doctor, Matt Smith spends the episode believing he is the last regeneration because of the various horsing around with regeneration energy there had been in previous series.<\/p>\n

The episode spends a fair amount of time as a meditation on mortality.\u00a0 Smith reflects on time as a whole, as Tenant has previously done, and we get to see some great character moments.\u00a0 The Doctor with the child-like innocence spends his limited spare time repairing children\u2019s toys, beloved by the youth of the town called Christmas.\u00a0 The Doctor who was so devastated by losing the Ponds (at least to his timeline) views every life he saves as one more victory\u2014tying in to the Tenth Doctor\u2019s words about every human life being worthwhile, a philosophy that is tied into so many of the Doctor\u2019s actions and philosophies.<\/p>\n

But at the end of the episode, the Doctor is granted a whole new regeneration cycle in a bombastic sequence where he uses the excess energy to destroy Daleks left and right.\u00a0 He stands on a clock tower winning the day once again, the Time Lord victorious, even though he knows the cost is that his time as Doctor will end.<\/p>\n

Now I am not criticizing the fact that the Doctor didn\u2019t die.\u00a0 At the height of its popularity as a worldwide phenomenon no one actually expected Moffat to say \u201cSurprise, pack it in, we\u2019re leaving Wales!\u00a0 Shows over, on to Sherlock<\/i>!\u201d\u00a0 There was no way for the Doctor to really die here, even if we follow the interpretation that the previous quasi-regenerations were in fact real regenerations.\u00a0 But it is how the regenerations are granted that causes the problems.\u00a0 There is little build up to it, and no comment on it afterword.\u00a0 Essentially Clara asks the Time Lords really nicely, they open a big old crack and do it, and then everyone is on their way and the TARDIS is crashing again.<\/p>\n

Can you fill in details?\u00a0 Sure.\u00a0 The Time Lords were on Trenzalore looking to see if they could come back, presumably having a limited (300 years at least) window and a limited amount of energy to do so.\u00a0 Presumably it takes a significant amount of energy to open a giant hole in space and send the regeneration energy through, and this represents a sacrifice to them.\u00a0 Probably it is even a sacrifice that means they cannot use this method to re-enter our dimension, and their aid to the Doctor means they will have to wait and see if they can ever come back.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not in the episode; it\u2019s all things that we are reading into it.\u00a0 At best they are subtext, but after the miraculous event there is ZERO<\/b> commentary on it.\u00a0 Yes time was running out and there is only so much you can say and they wanted to get to the big scene with Smith saying goodbye.\u00a0 But that\u2019s the problem: Moffet rushes so much to get to the big emotional payoff that he skips scenes vital to the rest of the plot.\u00a0 Without knowing what it represents to the Time Lords or what it cost them, all it feels like is a Deus ex Machina.\u00a0 Without knowing that it means that the Doctor will have to search for more obscure and difficult means of finding his home, there is no emotional weight to the action.\u00a0 We get to see Smith say goodbye after his victory, but the victory is left weightless and meaningless.\u00a0 It has no cost and no sacrifice.<\/p>\n

That is the biggest issue of undercutting the narrative in the episode, but not the only one.\u00a0 As other reviewers have noted the episode is disjointed.\u00a0 At the beginning of it the Doctor has a decapitated Cyberman that we have no idea why he has, and the buildup to why he is in orbit is abrupt at best.\u00a0 We skip forward through his time in Christmas so much that the emotional connection to the town is severely lacking, and so much of the meaningful \u201caction\u201d scenes are back-loaded that it feels like a marathon sprint to the end.\u00a0 All of this further undercuts a meaningful discussion on the nature of mortality to an effective immortal, the emotional connection we have to the choices and people in the episode, and ultimately our buy in to the ending of the episode as anything but Matt Smith\u2019s goodbye (i.e. the episode qua the episode.)<\/p>\n

Undermining the Narrative: Day of the Doctor<\/b><\/p>\n

The Day of the Doctor<\/i> presents a different sort of narrative undermining: It undermines whole seasons of the show, and the narrative of the Doctor himself.<\/p>\n

The stories we need to tell about characters are the ones that challenge the core of their beings.\u00a0 The stories we need to tell about a character are the ones that force them to re-examine their beliefs and assumptions, and may shatter them.\u00a0 Those are the stories that, by striking at the core of a character, reveal the depth of the character.\u00a0 Do they bend, break, or shatter?\u00a0 Do they remake themselves with this new information, and are they completely different or does it shade them in a new and interesting way?<\/p>\n

A brief example.\u00a0 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan<\/i> is the story that needed to be told about Captain James Tiberius Kirk.\u00a0 Kirk as we see him in the series and in the first movie is a charming rogue, proud of his abilities and the things that he can inspire his people to do\u2014and this is reinforced because we see him and the Enterprise<\/i> do such amazing things.\u00a0 The very heart of that grinning arrogance is summed up directly in Wrath<\/i>: He doesn\u2019t believe in an unwinnable scenario.\u00a0 He believes that he can get his crew (at least the ones that matter, poor red shirts) through anything and have them meet for drinks afterword.\u00a0 Therefore the story that needs to be told about Captain Kirk is one where he faces an unwinnable scenario.\u00a0 Someone close to him (Spoilers! It\u2019s Spock) needs to die in order for him to achieve victory, and he has to face what it means to him that sometimes he can\u2019t take the whole pot.\u00a0 He has to face something that is so traumatic that if the stakes were any lower it would have been more of a defeat then a victory.\u00a0 And we, as viewers, have to see how that changes him.\u00a0 That\u2019s part of what makes Star Trek III <\/i>such a bad follow up.\u00a0 Not only is it not a great movie to begin with, but the triumphant return of Spock undermines the story of Kirk\u2019s unwinnable scenario.\u00a0 The fact that things aren\u2019t immediately hunky-dory again softens it, but in the end Kirk did get out of Wrath<\/i> with everything he cared about\u2014it just took time.<\/p>\n

This is telling the stories a character needs to grow.\u00a0 Han Solo, the attachment-less loveable rogue, needs to care for something deep enough that he\u2019ll get himself in trouble to help it (or her).\u00a0 Shinji Ikari needs to stop running and face what frightens him.\u00a0 Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.<\/p>\n

So who is the Doctor?\u00a0 At his heart, he is the clever boy.\u00a0 He is the fast talker, fast thinker, fast runner; the one who can snatch a victory out of a defeat so dark it almost covered the universe because he is that smart, clever, and inspiring.\u00a0 At least with Ten and Eleven he has an almost compulsive need to be smarter than everyone around him (which leads to a valid criticism of the show I just heard the other day from my good friend Robin of Ley Lines in my links bar: The writers\u2019 <\/b>need for him to be cleverer than anyone else is detrimental to the character evolution of his companions, who are arguably the actual viewpoint characters and the ones we should see grow and change), and he succeeds.<\/p>\n

So what is the challenge he needs to face? A situation he cannot clever his way out of.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s what the Time War used to be.\u00a0 It used to be the one thing the Doctor had to solve in the dirtiest, most awful, and most sickening way possible.\u00a0 To save the people of the Universe, whom he took the very name of \u201cthe Doctor\u201d to show he planned to help them, he had to kill his entire race and the entire Dalek race for good measure.\u00a0 He couldn\u2019t be clever or witty and make them be friends, he couldn\u2019t run fast enough to save 2.47 billion children, and in the end he had to make the hard choice.\u00a0 He had to face his unwinnable scenario.\u00a0 And it broke<\/b> him.\u00a0 The Ninth and Tenth doctors were so different from their predecessors, so much bleaker, that it is clear that this genocide changed him to his very core\u2014as it should.<\/p>\n

Day of the Doctor <\/i>changed that.\u00a0 Instead of affirming that decision and holding the Doctor to the most soul challengingly moment of his life, it gave him a way out.\u00a0 And that way out was to be more clever, to be smarter, then anyone else in the galaxy\u2014even more clever than his previous lives.\u00a0 The story changed from one where the clever boy had to face the sobering reality that he could in fact lose, and changed it to one where he scored so brilliant a victory even the rest of the universe was fooled.\u00a0 He saved his whole planet and won the day because he was brilliant.\u00a0 And it undermined brilliant stories from two previous doctors and six years of television.\u00a0 It took the 50th<\/sup> Anniversary and instead of using it to tell the most important story the Doctor would ever experience, it changed the story to another piece of brilliant fast-thinking for the Universe\u2019s most brilliant fast-thinker.<\/p>\n

Now yes, oh ye of the internet tribe who are even now sharpening your spears to rise up against me, those previous doctors still thought<\/b> they had done it and so their stories and choices are still valid.\u00a0 And yes, every choice the Ninth and Tenth Doctors made is still valid because from their perspective nothing changed\u2014but the narrative that those choices represented has been fundamentally altered.\u00a0 The choice is still valid, but the story is now wrong in retrospect.<\/p>\n

Conclusions<\/b><\/p>\n

I did like the episodes, and those great moments are justly named: They are great moments.\u00a0 But I have a love\/hate relationship with both these two episodes (I love them and hate them all at once, like I have a heart for loving and a heart for hating) and with Moffat\u2019s time as show-runner so far.\u00a0 Which is ironic, since if you look at his episodic work under the previous show-runner they really work narratively.\u00a0 Blink<\/i> is brilliantly done, and the \u201cwibbly-wobbly\u201d explanation and Sally setting up the episode at the end working beautifully.\u00a0 The Girl in the Fireplace<\/i> is phenomenal, and Silence in the Library<\/i> is haunting.\u00a0 But on a season or even show long run, the desire for the set-piece emotional moments that made him famous is causing the rest of the story to get muddled or overlooked. \u00a0I don’t just want a story to have these big moments where the soundtrack scores and the Doctor grins, I want the moments in between that make me\u00a0care<\/strong> about the big ones. \u00a0I want the story to work as a narrative, and be cohesively maintained. \u00a0Sacrificing narrative cohesion and brilliant narrative moments for big explosive moments of drama doesn’t work, because it is the connective tissue that makes the body of the story\u00a0work<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

So there it is, why I love and hate the\u00a0Day<\/em> and\u00a0Time of the Doctor<\/em>. \u00a0Love!\u00a0 Hate!\u00a0 Don\u2019t hunt me, internet, I want to live!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Note: MASSIVE SPOILERS.\u00a0 For both the 50th Anniversary Special (Day of the Doctor) and the Time of the Doctor where Smith regenerates. And so another era in Doctor Who is over, as Matt Smith fezzes his way out of the TARDIS and in to whatever it is former Doctor\u2019s do after they are done\u2014apparently other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[19,20,21],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-doctor-who","tag-litcrit","tag-narrative"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions\/45"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}