Doctor Who (2005): The Night of the Doctor

Writer:

Steven Moffat

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Director:

John Hayes

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Date:

14-Nov-2013

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm finally writing about The Night of the Doctor, the surprise seven-minute minisode prequel to The Day of the Doctor that just appeared on the internet out of nowhere a week before the 50th Anniversary.

2013 was a while ago now, and it's maybe hard to imagine what it was like to be a Doctor Who fan back then. It was the end of a Doctor's era, whose final run had been marred by long gaps between poorly received stories. But it was also an anniversary year and people were hyped for the return of familiar faces in a big anniversary special written by one of the series' most beloved writers. So it was basically nothing like 2023...

No one was hyped for The Night of the Doctor however, in fact they didn't know it was coming at all. But then a few people watched it and afterwards they told their friends to drop everything, stay off Twitter, and watch it themselves. Even knowing what it was about would be too much of a spoiler, all that fans needed to know is that they had to see it.

So I'll warn you now that there will be SPOILERS here, both for the episode and relevant stories leading up to it. I won't spoil anything that happens after this story however, even things that fans at the time would've already known.

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The minisode begins with a burning spaceship bobbing up and down on a collision course with a planet.

Inside, the pilot is arguing with the computer, which has misunderstood her distress call as a request for medical assistance. I have a feeling that if this was a regular episode they would've been able to film another take of her telling the computer to stop talking about doctors. There's just something about the line delivery that sounds off to me.

That said, they couldn't have been hurting for cash, as this cockpit is a pretty nice set. It's got actual screens, proper lighting, and actual proper cockpit window frames too. It might be a redress, but if so they either did a good job of hiding it or I'm doing a bad job of recognising it.

Huh, the TARDIS is chasing the spaceship? Uh, doesn't it usually disappear in one place and then appear in the other? I mean sure it can fly, but why is it flying?

I checked the novelisation (of The Day of the Doctor, this tiny episode didn't get its own novel), and it explains that the Doctor was considering the possibility of altering the ship's course or grabbing it with a tractor beam, though neither option was worth considering for long. It wouldn't be very heroic to cause the premature disintegration of the battered craft. Much better to make a personal appearance, perhaps with some dramatic sparks going off around him, and introduce himself with a quip.

"I'm a Doctor", says the Doctor, "but probably not the one you expected".

Cut to opening credits!

It's Paul McGann, the Eighth Doctor! The one that only got the one story but was left as the current Doctor for 9 years until the 2005 revival. The one that's apparently really good in the Big Finish audios that I haven't heard.

It was very cunning of them to include Paul McGann in The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot comedy special, as it was all about the Doctors who were left out of the 50th Anniversary episode. Anyone who knew about his appearance in that would've been doubly surprised by the Eighth Doctor making an appearance in the series as well.

7-13 - The Name of the Doctor

There were a couple of other likely choices for who was in the box, and this mysterious stranger was high on the list.

He'd only appeared once, at the end of the previous story, The Name of the Doctor, where it was revealed that he's a secret incarnation of the Doctor who "broke the promise" and did something terrible. So it would've made sense if this story had been written to shine a bit of a light on him and show us what his deal is.

Anyway, here's a good look at what the Eighth Doctor is wearing these days.

It's basically a scruffier and more practical version of what he was wearing in the TV movie. Less fancy and formal. And his hair is a lot shorter as well.

The guy had already gotten a new costume the previous year for the Big Finish audio drama Dark Eyes (audios have cover art, it's not that weird), but I suppose Doctors are allowed to have more than one look. It's not the 80s anymore.

The Doctor asks the pilot why she's alone here and she explains that she teleported the crew away... though not where she teleported them to. The planet below I'd hope, assuming it's inhabitable. Another thing she doesn't mention is why her ship is currently crashing. It looks damaged, but what damaged it?

When the Doctor hears that she stayed behind to save everyone else he welcomes her aboard straight away. He doesn't even know her name yet! The Doctor usually waits until the end of a full-length story before he invites a companion to join him, so I guess he really likes her.

The Doctor leads her to the back of the ship (because the front crashes first), and opens up a bulkhead with his old-school sonic screwdriver. The Fifth Doctor stopped using sonic screwdrivers after he lost his one in The Visitation and Six never touched them at all, but Seven returned to carrying one again by the TV movie and now Eight is using it.

He learns that her name is Cass and she was crewing this gunship because she wanted to see the universe. Man, at this point all that's left is for her to do is demonstrate an ability to spot and call out things that the Doctor hasn't noticed, and she'll have aced the companion exam in record time.

The door opens to reveal...

... a very scruffy TARDIS. Man, what the hell has he been doing with it? It was all pretty and pristine when the Seventh Doctor had it. And also pink that one time.

This is the point where things take a very sharp turn for the worse, as the Doctor sees Cass' apprehension about a strange box sitting in the hallway and reassures her that it's "bigger on the inside". He probably could've found a way to downplay the strange appearance and get her to step through the doors, but instead, he picked the exact wrong set of words to say to a woman who is well aware of what a TARDIS is and not keen on them at all.

Her reaction to learning he's a Time Lord is a surprise but the bigger surprise might be the Doctor telling her that he's not part of the war.

Surprise, this is taking place during the time of the Time War! Characters have been referring to the Time War since way back in the first episode of the 2005 revival, but up to this point all we've seen of it (that I can recall) is a glimpse of a Gallifreyan city on fire in The End of Time.

For years it seemed like the fun, romantic Eight had been the one to fight in the Time War, and that he'd been the one that ended it by using the Moment to wipe out both the Time Lords and the Daleks. But now there's this secret incarnation and Eight's saying he's not even involved.

Cass slams the bulkhead door back in place and uses the Time Lord-proof deadlock to keep it closed. She'd rather die than give him the satisfaction of saving her, and if he dies trying to save her well that's even better. But he's too stubborn to leave her, and maybe even a bit bewildered about how badly this rescue mission is going.

This can't be the first time that he's been confronted with how despised the Time Lords have become, it's probably not the first time that it's interfered with his heroics either, but this woman was going to be his new companion two minutes ago and now she's going to be his death.

There's the ship coming down over on the right.

It hurtles from the sky, crashes into this beautiful painted scenery and then explodes in an epic fireball. I'm starting to see why he started to just materialise the TARDIS around people he's rescuing in the modern series. It saves time and delays arguments until everyone involved is somewhere safer.

A woman watches the crash and knows exactly who was on the ship, somehow. She also knows that he's dead. Which sucks for modern Doctor Who fans if it's true. No Eighth Doctor means no Nine, Ten, Eleven, etc.

She also mentions to her sisters that this planet is called Karn, so that's a pretty efficient way to establish that these are the Sisterhood of Karn, making a return after 37 years!

The Brain of Morbius

The Sisterhood of Karn appeared in one Fourth Doctor serial, The Brain of Morbius, and honestly if they really had to bring something back from that story I'm glad it's this. Especially as they seem to have stopped chanting and left their spikey red flame sticks behind.

The Doctor wakes up yelling for Cass, but the woman (credited as Ohila) informs him that they haven't found another body yet. And if they do she'll likely be even deader than he is.

Ohila explains that they've brought him back temporarily, but he's got under four minutes of life left. Which is fine I guess, as the episode will be over before then.

The Doctor is a little freaked out however and starts wondering what he's going to do to cope with the tedium of having to sit in a cave for four whole minutes. I think he might be a little insincere, however, when he asks them to bring him knitting.

It's at this point that he figures out that they're the Sisterhood of Karn, keepers of the Flame of Utter Boredom. Ohila likely knows he means Eternal Life, but she can't help correcting him anyway. It seems like his feelings about immortality haven't changed at all since Brain of Morbius, even now that he's dying.

They can help him regenerate though and the change doesn't have to be random this time.

Young, old, man, woman, whatever he wants she's got someone standing behind her with the appropriate concoction pre-concocted. So that's another explicit mention that Time Lords can change sex even though it hasn't happened to anyone we know yet at this point in the series.

Damn, what are the chances that the Doctor would crash a spaceship and die within walking distance of a group of people with the power to save him? Bit of a coincidence that. Though, they haven't actually explained why the ship crashed yet, and in fact they never do.

The Brain of Morbius

Funnily enough Brain of Morbius also featured a crashed spaceship, in fact it had a whole pile of them. It turned out that the sisters of the Sisterhood of Karn were pulling them out of orbit in order to protect their immortality elixir from outsiders.

I'm not saying that the Sisters were the ones who killed Cass, we never find out one way or the other, but they are the only suspects. Though I guess it could've just been the Daleks; this does take place in the middle of the Time War after all.

The Doctor actually did the Sisterhood a solid in Brain of Morbius and fixed their eternal flame, so they've got a reason to be kind to him, but Ohila admits she's mostly motivated by not wanting to be annihilated in the Time War. She wants him to fight, to be the one who turns the tide of the battle and brings it to an end. It's what the Doctor does.

The Doctor tells Ohila that he helps where he can, that's what the Doctor does.

The Name of the Doctor ended with the Eleventh Doctor explaining that the name 'Doctor' is like a promise and his secret incarnation broke the promise. Here Ohila points out that he calls himself a good man, that's what the name 'Doctor' means to him. But it also has another meaning, and now that they've recovered Cass from the wreck he has a patient to attend to.

It turns out they were right about her condition. Cass is clearly on another level of dead to the Doctor, as they couldn't even give her four minutes. Still, her body's intact, so his advice about moving to the back of the ship because the front crashes first apparently had some merit to it!

The Doctor's still understandably a bit unhappy about the way things worked out for Cass, but Ohila points out that she found the only way to actually escape the Time War. He couldn't have saved her from it; he can't save anyone unless he ends it.

He claims that he'd rather die than fight, but in reality his resolve is weakening. Plus Ohila points out that he tried that already. Dying didn't help Cass or anyone else.

So the Doctor asks Ohila to hand over the chalice that'll turn him into a warrior, which she had just happened to have prepared herself earlier.

The novelisation claims that this chalice isn't what Ohila claims it to be. It's not a potion, it's a placebo, made of whatever she could put together in a hurry that would look the part, lemonade and dry ice or whatever. The only power it has over his regeneration is one of suggestion and it's the Doctor's choice to become a warrior that matters.

Personally, when it comes to movies and TV, what I see and hear on screen is all that's relevant, and I'm not keen on tie-in media trying to change a viewer's interpretation of a scene by giving new information. That said, I can totally buy that it's not a real potion and it doesn't matter either way. The choice is real and the consequences are the same whether they're a result of Karn alchemy or the Doctor's mind.

Up to this point, Paul McGann has only had one actor to act against in each scene, but he yells at Ohila to get out GET OUT to let him regenerate alone. So now he's acting against a cup, which is proper Shakespearean.

We've never had a bad Doctor, but we've had some bad final lines ("Carrot juice, carrot juice, carrot juice!") Fortunately, Eight is going out like a boss with a fantastic (and brief) final speech. I bet fans of his Big Finish audio dramas were leaping out of their chairs when he started listing all of his audio companions! Well, the ones introduced before 2013 anyway, Steven Moffat's not a time traveller.

Eight mentions Charley, C'rizz, Lucie, Tamsin and Molly by name, but also mentions "friends, companions I've known" which leaves room for other people. I mean you have to stop the list somewhere or it gets a bit ridiculous. I'd heard that the list is already a little ridiculous due to events that happen in later audio dramas, but honestly that's Big Finish's fault. Plus I've never listened to the audio dramas, so I remain blissfully ignorant.

He downs the goblet, says "Physician, heal thyself," and starts to sparkle.

Hey, it's a modern-style regeneration sequence. I guess now we know who's to blame for his super-bright regenerations in the revival era.

The music's spot on, by the way. There have been occasions in other stories where Murray Gold's score has been a bit much, but for me this is just right.

A Doctor's first story isn't complete until they choose their new outfit, and this ninth incarnation simply takes Cass's bandolier. No messing around. This isn't Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor though, the voice gives that away. It's unmistakably John Hurt.

Though I've read that it's Paul McGann who plays what we see of the War Doctor in this scene, which makes so much sense that I'm shocked it didn't occur to me. They just left the same actor in the same costume and avoided showing his face. We've already seen John Hurt in the role, but he looked like a 73 year old man and it's unlikely the incarnation started so elderly, so he couldn't appear in person. Though then again, Ohila did say that old was an option...

...nope, we get a reflection of a younger John Hurt, showing that he became a weathered old man the hard way. The poor guy lived a whole lifetime of war.

I'm not sure how this can fit the Ninth Doctor's claim of being just 900 years old, as Time Lords can live a long long time in each regeneration and this face clearly had a full span.

Oh, he's the War Doctor now?

This incarnation's name has always been a bit awkward, as he can't be the Ninth Doctor, that's been taken, and his first words are "Doctor, no more." The Doctor is a good man, and he can't be that any more. But he's got to be called something, I can't just refer to him as "?" or The Time Lord Formerly Known as The Doctor, so I suppose War Doctor will work.


CONCLUSION

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The funny thing is, they could've called this Night of the Living Dead and the title still would have worked.

For such a short story, Night of the Doctor doesn't mess around when it comes to expanding the mythos. It takes us into the Time War and shows us what the Eighth Doctor was up to! It brings back the Sisterhood of Karn! It gives us Eight's last adventure and the regeneration the series skipped in 2005! It even hints that his audio dramas are TV canon by listing his companions!

But I have to admit that I wasn't really giving it my full attention. I spent a lot of it looking down at my notepad, writing my thoughts, and that's because this minisode is absolutely bloody memorable. It's so short that I've got the whole thing already saved in my head. It features something like 800 words divided into 90 lines of dialogue, 45 in the first half, 45 in the second and I could describe them as being 'well chosen'. This is an efficient script, written by someone who's spent way too much time dwelling on who the Doctor is, but understands that brevity is the soul of wit. The Doctor may be undead, but underneath the wordplay this is all about his soul.

I could also describe those words as being 'well delivered', with Paul McGann and Clare Higgins dominating their scenes like they were the only actors there. McGann's experience playing the Doctor in Big Finish audio dramas for the last 12 years likely helped there, but this is a bit less static. It's very confined, basically taking place in just two or three small sets, but it's cinematic enough for what it is.

What it is, I suppose, is two conversations where one character tries to persuade another to do something they're really not keen on doing. The first chat ending in the Eighth Doctor's failure and the second ending with his end. The Eighth Doctor was a fairly unimpressive hero in the movie that introduced him, but here he's an absolute disaster! He fails to convince a woman to get into his lifeboat and save herself, then he dies, and then he gets talked into betraying his principles! But you don't generally expect the hero to have a lot of success in a tragedy, and the story left me in no doubt I was watching the legendary Doctor, the only one who can save the universe. The real tragedy is that we now have proof of how good McGann's Doctor would've been if he'd been given the chance... assuming he would've had more scripts of this quality.

This wasn't aired on TV with the regular episodes, it was an online bonus feature to be found by fans with an interest. People who'd consider the return of a character from a failed TV movie aired 17 years earlier to be a big deal. So I'm not surprised that only 6% of people on IMDb rated it less than good, as it's a gift created especially for its recipients. You can file this tiny story next to classics like The War Games, Genesis of the Daleks, and The Doctor's Wife as a crucial piece of Doctor Who's tapestry, and also a very entertaining one.

And it's somehow nice to know that Eight never fought in the Time War. Sure there's only one Doctor and Eight was just a phase of his life, it doesn't really matter what persona he was wearing when he became a bitter soldier and killed the Time Lords, but I like that this configuration of his personality kept his hands clean until the end.


Hey, now I can update this list!

My top three two Eighth Doctor serials:

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1. The Night of the Doctor (8)
2. Doctor Who (4)

I hope my ranking isn't too controversial.

Also, I guess I'll add it to the anniversary story list as well:

Anniversary story ranking so far:

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1. The Night of the Doctor (8)
   
2. The Three Doctors (6)
   
3. The Five Doctors (6)
   
4. Silver Nemesis (6)
   

The other stories may have great moments, some arguably even better than watching a sad Paul McGann in a cave, but The Night of the Doctor just doesn't last long enough to suffer from common complaints like padding, repetitive scenes, and... flaws.

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NEXT EPISODE

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special The Day of the Doctor! But only in 2D I'm afraid.

Leave a comment if you feel like it! Your words are welcome.