THIS.
Seriously. Who could have ever have seen that one coming?
The Name Of The Doctor can be described any number of ways. It's a pretty damn good episode. It's a fairly satisfying conclusion to the various goings on that have been happening in this half of the series, but above all of that it's pure, unmitigated blatant FANSERVICE.
Only instead of pantyshots we get references to, of all things, Delta And The Bannermen. Just think about that for a second. DELTA AND THE FUCKING BANNERMEN.
Yes. The One Where This Happened™
To be fair, one thing they have been doing with alarming regularity is slipping in these sly references to old episodes. There's basically something in every episode so far. But The Name Of The Doctor really does take things to the next level. Never has the modern incarnation of the show been so overt about referencing it's own history. It's like Attack Of The Cybermen, only GOOD. Trust me, that's actually a good analogy. I'm sure many of you would agree that the kindest thing you could do to Attack Of The Cybermen would be to feed it into a meat grinder, extract the good ideas from the remaining slurry and then sprinkle them liberally over some actually good stories.
And that is actually kind of what they've done. Not literally of course. But one thing they've been successfully seeding across this particular set of stories is the idea of Doctor Whos history. That it's all part of one great, glorious whole and that every Doctor counts. Well, except Peter Cushing and Richard E. Grant. But at least one of them gets to take revenge here. Indeed, it actually kind of makes even more sense if you think that, rather than the villain being The Great Intelligence it's actually the Scream Of The Shalka Doctor out to wreak his vengeance for being written out of continuity by Christopher Eccleston.
Yes, this also happened. Yes, it was awesome.
But then it's this whole concept of multiple incarnations that is so central to where things are going. I mean, when GT (as his friends called him) made reference to The Valeyard I was, of course, much pleased. I eat up sly references to old school Doctor Who like a Drashig eats... well, just about everything. But to then go and have the big cliffhanger for the anniversary special come along and BE THE FUCKING VALEYARD? HOLY SHIT. I have a fanboner so hard I'm going to need a Dalekanium fleshlight to deal with it.
Luckily I know a guy on Etsy...
Now, to be both clear and fair I don't realistically expect John Hurt to be the ACTUAL Valeyard. But he's a dark, dodgy future incarnation of the Doctor. So you're damn straight that both I and a fairly high percentage of fandom are going to be calling him that for the next six months. Besides which, how's that for a cliffhanger? I can only really think of one other that I've been quite this excited about. As in "finished watching the episode and then immediately called it back up to watch again because HOLY SHIT CAN YOU BELIEVE THEY DID THAT?!?!?!" fangasm type excitement. Curiously it was actually a fairly similar one, the big reveal of The Master at the end of Utopia. That was a shocking reveal of a dodgy Time Lord being played by a classic big name actor as well. Although this time at least he'll be doing it for more than five minutes.
For all my bitching and moaning I really have to take my hat off to Steven Moffat on this one. It's all really rather clever, and even a lot of the stuff I've been whinging about turns out to either be tied in nicely or actual artful misdirection. I mean, if there's one thing that's really gotten a bit annoying over the course of this whole series it's been his insistence on continually having characters ask "Doctor WHO?" To the point of having someone repeating the phrase over and over on more than one occasion. All building apprehension that someone might actually be foolish enough to try an answer it. That's what we're expecting to be addressed coming into this episode. And yet it's all turned around. The secret of the Doctors name is never on the table at all. The question in fact turns out to be "What could make the Doctor go that far?" And that's a FAR more interesting thing to be asking than what the Galifreyan equivalent of Norman might be.
It's Normanadvoratrelundar by the way.
Of course, all this is yet to come, and we've still got a lot to talk about in the present. Or is technically the past? That's the trouble with time travel.
Tenses ARE funny.
Of course if there's one other thing that you can have a lot of trouble with, it's Tribbles. So let's talk about Clara.
I'm fairly sure that floating somewhere near the top of everyones' big bag of unsolicited episode ideas is the phrase "Wouldn't it be cool if they did an episode like that one in DS9 where the cast is digitally inserted into an old episode? Only instead of Tribbles it's like the Krotons or something"
PHOTOSHOP WIZARDRY!
Well, they kinda did that. Only not perhaps quite in the way you'd expect. It is, I suppose, a testament to just how good at Doctor Who the current production team really are that they keep managing to do things I've only ever vaguely considered as episode ideas. Only they do them in ways I'd never think of. I mean, I'd always thought that one thing modern Doctor Who should do was an episode with Dinosaurs. But Dinosaurs ON A SPACESHIP?
Once again, THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED. You have no right to complain about anything ever again.
Madness. Brilliant madness. And so it is with Clara, digitally composited into old footage passing by out of focus extras, stretched across the full history of Doctor Who. It's fucking GREAT. Some might complain that some of the compositing is perhaps not as great as it could be. These people are of course welcome to bring back full color HD footage from 1963 to replace the existing source material. And whilst they're at it can we have The Daleks Master Plan as well? Of course, this is never going to happen. That they managed to do this AT ALL is frankly miraculous. Let alone that they've managed to do it as well as they have.
And it's a pretty neat idea as well. I suppose some might say that the idea of being scattered across time like that is a bit daft. But then those people forfeit their right to compulsively masturbate to City Of Death, and I'll take Lalla Ward in schoolgirl outfit over any amount of logic.
I think I just Jagarothed...
So, yes. The concept has pedigree, the realization is a joyous riot of fanservice and the conceit feels like a satisfying conclusion to the mystery of Clara. Not the whole being scattered across time time thing. I called the whole City Of Death thing ages ago. I mean the mystery of why she's been so bloody rubbish all series. It's not that she doesn't do anything to help, it's that she only does it OFF SCREEN. Maybe she's shy. Still, with the big reveal out of the way hopefully she'll be free to be actually useful. Better hope so anyway, someones going to have to compensate for bloody Rose coming back again.
Of course, what makes the idea so utterly brilliant is that it can always be revisited. Even after Clara leaves, you can always have her pop up randomly somewhere for a guest appearance. And can you imagine what would happen if Big Finish got their hands on her? I mean, never mind how you could just throw in a thousand little guest appearances and make all the fanboys wet their knickers. Do Clara Vs The Companion Chronicles.
Ms Coleman is on the Doctor Who gravy train in a way no other companion can boast. In the grand fullness of time someone is going to take advantage of that fact. Provided of course that they can actually give the poor girl something to DO. But let's not keep going on about that.
Of course, we also have the fun of the various returning characters to enjoy as well. Strax, quite naturally, steals the show again. But Vastra and Jenny are always nice to see around, although I would like to see Vastra herself get a bit more action. In addition to the terrible trio, we also have the return of River Song, who's actually used quite well. She can be a rather dominating character, and was perhaps a trifle overused to poorer effect in the previous series. But here she's played a lot more subtlety whist still retaining her sense of all knowing mischievousness. maybe I just prefer the more mature version. Although god knows what saying that will do to my FBI porn search history.
One other thing that's worth mentioning is the scale of the episode. I mentioned earlier how Steven Moffat is like a bizarro wish granting machine, continually pumping out episodes to my own personal specifications. Well, here we have it again. Previous series have suffered somewhat from threat inflation, with each years finale trying to outdo the past one in terms of grandiose bigness. But there's only so many times you can blow up literally everything everywhere ever before you've painted yourself into a corner. So me, being the sort to spend far to much time thinking about these sort of things, was of the mind they should try bringing everything all the way down, with a very close personal type story. Not saving the universe, not the galaxy, not even the planet. just saving someone. Someone important.
And who could be more important than the Doctor himself?
Just saying.
Even when the timelines are being rewritten and the stars are going out, the whole thing is still kept on an intimate, personal level. No big CGI explosions or swarms of hideous crawling things. Just a handful of characters we actually care about slowly getting picked off as their lives come undone. Great stuff. Although I can't help but wish that their return was effected in a similar way, rather than just happening suddenly in between shots. It does seem like a scene might have been cut there, hopefully we'll get it in the extras on the DVD.
All in all though this is about as good an episode as you can get, and undoubtedly one of the best end of season finales in the current version of the show. It's got a lot of great ideas, good performances, buckets of atmosphere, creepy monsters, surprises revelations, the whole bucket of stuff they always promise for this sort of thing but rarely deliver on. It is good, satisfying Who. And a strong conclusion to what has been overall a bit of an uneven chunk of series. But right now I feel supremely satisfied. The show is in a good place, with a great cliffhanger teasing the wonders that are yet to come.
And whilst I'm supremely excited to see what happens next, I'm not even wailing and gnashing my teeth at the wait. Yes, it's going to be six whole months before we get to find out what happens. But that's six months in which to guess, speculate, make shit up and argue over spurious and obviously false rumors. Six months of delicious anticipation. Six months in which visions of John Hurt galloping around on the Myrka can play delightfully in my head before being spoiled by a proper story actually happening.
It is a good time.
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