Stream twice upon a time doctor who6/16/2023 ![]() ![]() The moment I decided yep, okay, he's the Doctor.Ĥ. He's fully given himself to the part and it's admirable. But he's had some incredibly fine moments, and his mellower self's dorky optimism never fails to get to me. I despised his first season, and he only partially won me over in series 9. It's mind-blowing that the man who composed this dorky sci-fi music also composed this Beethoven-esque virtuoso score.Īs for Capaldi, he was a rough sell for me. He's really grown immensely as a composer. ![]() Rumor is he won't be returning for series 11, which is sad. The show needs new ideas - the only new idea he's shown is what if.the Doctor.was a woman! And that won't carry the show. The final Jodie Whittaker scene, showing almost nothing of her character (unlike the best of these scenes) and recycling the Matt Smith exploding TARDIS sequence doesn't make me optimistic about Chris Chibnall. His failures as a showrunner have been numerous, but he also gave us Matt Smith's brilliant Doctor, and 7 out of my top 10 New Who episodes are Moffat episodes ( The Empty Child, Silence in the Library, Blink, The Eleventh Hour, A Christmas Carol, The Girl in the Fireplace, Heaven Sent.) He's a truly brilliant writer, and has been a gift to the series. He was consistently the best writer in the Davies era, and has delivered some of the show's most beautiful and compelling stories in his own era. Because, despite this trainwreck of an episode, Steven Moffat is one of the best writers the show has ever had. He needed an editor.īut you know what? It's the end of an era. It really needs an editor.Īnd doesn't that just sum it up? Poor Steven Moffat. It's like Moffat knew Capaldi had to have a final speech, so he pulled some stuff from the archives and perfunctorily stuck it in a blender. It's almost entirely recycled Capaldi Biggest Hits. Moffat's written damn good speeches for Doctor Who before. It's horrible and sad, because Capaldi deserved better. I'm puzzled to read all the reviews delighted with the story's emotion - it's nothing but emotion, which is the problem! Capaldi delivers a long string of inspiration-poster-quotes and then explodes in a scene almost identical to the ending of The Doctor Falls. The whole episode is a raving self-indulgent mess, with Capaldi soliloquizing to his heart's content. The story didn't have any momentum and deleting the villains removed any actual stakes, so the actual tension of the change, and the dread inevitability that permeated the final moments of Nine, Ten (if you skip that horrid 30-minute epilogue as I do), and Eleven's regenerations is missing. (I'm going to write more about that).ĭoctor Who hasn't done regeneration stories well in a long time (nothing matches the final 25 minutes of 1969's The War Games if you ask me), but I usually find the actual moment of regeneration emotional. He doesn't work, though, largely because you simply can't recast the Doctor with another actor. He's clearly having a great time, playing the straight man to Capaldi's goofiness and employing a little of the First Doctor's naughty sexism (it wasn't that ubiquitous, but yeah, it was that hilariously bad). (Now that is sexist.)ĭavid Bradley is enjoyable as the First Doctor. Bill brings her fun energy to the story, but it's still cheap to bring her back and not give her a character arc. Peter Capaldi is living his fanboy dream. That's strange for an episode which is generally very upbeat. It's valiant, but in a small, grim way - anti-climactic after the dramatic finale to series 10. He knows all of his companions are dead or Nardole, which is a pretty depressing reality. But it's a dull, half-hearted acceptance. In the end, the Twelfth Doctor, too, accepts his role in the universe. *Steven Moffat materializes in a time machine called the RETCON (Rewriting Every Thing Connecting Overarching Narrative)* While this trick worked in Day of the Doctor, saving just one human and spouting platitudes about music isn't powerful enough to really pull off the character development for either character. Bill's claim that the Doctor holds the universe together is a little overblown (that's a case of mistaken identity - Christmas isn't about the Doctor, y'know, but it is about someone). Ultimately, he finds that inspiration by seeing his future self save one life, messing with time a bit so an iconic Christmas moment can save the day. His case for this sounds a great deal like the death with dignity argument, and gives the story's aspirational glance at his future an It's a Wonderful Life vibe. The First Doctor doesn't want to continue because he wants to remain himself, to maintain control over his destiny. Much of the story's humor comes from the First Doctor's shock at seeing what he will become - an intergalactic superhero with a big mouth and a flashy TARDIS. The only real conflict in this episode is whether the Doctors will choose to regenerate.
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