Doctor Who (2005): The Day of the Doctor - Part 1

Episode:

799

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Serial:

240

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Writer:

Steven Moffat

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Director:

Nick Hurran

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Air Date:

23-Nov-2013

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing a bit about The Day of the Doctor, the 799th episode of Doctor Who! It got so close to being a milestone in the show's history. People could've still been talking about this story even now. But nope, it missed out by just one episode.

However, the story turned 10 years old last month, so I figured that this would be a good time to write something about it. Speaking of anniversaries, I've been writing about a lot of anniversary specials lately. The Three Doctors was Doctor Who's 10th, The Five Doctors was the 20th, Silver Nemesis was the 25th and Trials and Tribble-ations was Deep Space Nine's 30th.

Doctor Who did have a 30th Anniversary special, the Doctor Who/EastEnders crossover Dimensions in Time, made for Children in Need, but I'll be skipping that. I've seen it before and once was enough. In fact, it was the first Doctor Who story I ever saw from start to finish. I had no idea what the series was back then, but after watching Dimensions in Time I knew I didn't like it, and then the TV movie confirmed it. To be fair, if my first exposure to Star Wars had been the Holiday Special I probably would've avoided the rest of that for 20 years as well.

Anyway, the 40th got nothing new on television at all, but for the 50th Anniversary the BBC treated fans very well. There was An Adventure in Space and Time, dramatising William Hartnell's time on the series, The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot spoof, starring the classic Doctors, and then there was The Day of the Doctor, the 50th Anniversary special itself, simultaneously released both on TV and in actual cinemas. In 3D!

These screencaps aren't going to be in 3D, but I'll try to add some depth to my commentary as I go through the whole damn story scene by scene. Well, the first third of it a least. Either way, there will be SPOILERS below.

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Doctor Who was getting a lot of minisodes at the time, and The Day of the Doctor came with two of them. The first was The Night of the Doctor, released nine days earlier. But I've already written about that. It was all about the Eighth Doctor's regeneration into the War Doctor, the secret incarnation that came before Christopher Eccleston, after he realised that he needed to fight in the Time War.

The second minisode was the The Last Day, which came three days before Day of the Doctor. This one was a tiny horror story filmed in first person, about a Gallifreyan soldier getting terrifying hallucinations from his new headcam. Unfortunately, the Daleks he sees in the sky are absolutely real and the story ends with Arcadia, Gallifrey's second-largest city, about to fall.

If someone had told me this video was a cutscene from a cancelled Doctor Who video game I would've gone "Huh, that makes sense", as the first-person perspective and rendered backgrounds definitely fit the style. I guess it's supposed to be found footage from the headcam, but that raises the question of who found it, as the only Time Lord to make it out of Arcadia was the Doctor.

People who made the trip to watch The Day of the Doctor in cinemas also got a couple of comedy skits. One features Strax showing up to discourage the use of phones and talk about how he likes to hear his popcorn's tiny screams as he eats it alive. I'm sure lots of people dislike Strax for all kinds of good reasons, but I've always been happy to see him show up and he's entirely unrestrained here. Though apparently not entirely uncensored, as the recordings I've seen online are missing his best punchline.

"Attempting to clone a cultural broadcast with recording equipment is the greatest of all war crimes... but that's still no excuse!"

The other skit has a few Doctors turn up to demonstrate the 3D and make a few cracks about each other's appearance. That's going to happen a lot. Funny thing is, when writer Steven Moffat started working on the special he didn't have a single Doctor signed up, only Jenna Coleman, so there was the possibility that this was going to be a Clara-only story. And now they've gone and spoiled that it's not!

Previously on Doctor Who:

The Great Intelligence came up with a scheme to visit the Doctor's final resting place on Trenzalore and leap into his timeline, attacking him at all points in his history. But the Doctor's companion Clara jumped in after and was splintered into multiple lives, each saving the Doctor in their own way. The Doctor went in to save her, but ran into an old incarnation of himself he didn't want to remember: The War Doctor... and that's pretty much how the episode ended. The last time we saw the Doctor and Clara they were still in his timeline, she was passed out, and he was carrying her somewhere.

And now, the continuation:

The episode starts with a distorted widescreen version of the original 1963 opening sequence, with the title fixed so it doesn't say OHO for a couple of seconds. It also ends 15 seconds earlier, as I guess the episode's in a hurry.

Doctor Who began with an episode called An Unearthly Child, and that began with a policeman walking down a misty street, investigating a gate with "I.M.Foreman, Scrap Merchant" written on it, and then walking away.

It looked a lot like that sign, in fact!

Attack of the Cybermen (left), Remembrance of the Daleks (right)

They've done a good job of replicating the look of the text this time, plus it's even spelled correctly, unlike in Remembrance of the Daleks.

Coal Hill school also played a big role in An Unearthly Child, as it's where teachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright taught the Doctor's granddaughter Susan before becoming the series' first companions. It's nice to see that Ian's still around and he's Chairman of the Governors now. His actor, William Russell, is about to hit an anniversary of his own, as he was born in 1924.

The school (and scrapyard) are apparently in Shoreditch, which backs up what the school sign said in Remembrance of the Daleks. Shoreditch is 1 mile directly north of the Tower of London... which is completely irrelevant information that you'll never need to know.

Speaking of companions teaching at Cole Hill, it turns out that Clara Oswald has escaped the Doctor's timeline after The Name of the Doctor forgot to have an ending and she's got a new job! We only get to hear one line of what she's teaching though:

"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one - Marcus Aurelius."

A bit of ironic choice of quotes perhaps, considering the topic of what a good man should be tends to come up a lot in Steven Moffat's Doctor Who.

After school, she gets a message with an address and heads off on her bike. She rides way out of London to some place grassy and empty and finds the TARDIS parked by the side of the road, for some reason.

She sounds the horn and the doors open up, meaning that we finally get to see a visual effects shot that has been teased for years! Well, okay they already did a seamless shot of someone walking into the TARDIS with the camera following them inside in The Snowmen, but this time she's on a bike! I'm giving them full marks for execution... even though there's no sign of the bike going up the step on the outside.

That's a familiar bike by the way, as it's the Triumph Bonneville that the Doctor's doppelgänger rode up the Shard in The Bells of Saint John.

And the Eleventh Doctor is still wearing Amy Pond's glasses. I wish he wouldn't stare right at the camera like that, it's unnerving.

You know, I think this is the first time I've written about an episode featuring this version of the console room. I remember being impressed at the time, but after seeing the Twelfth Doctor's TARDIS it seems unfinished and unfurnished. And very blue.

Their happy reunion is interrupted by the TARDIS taking off... but the engines aren't running. Turns out that it's been picked up by a UNIT helicopter! It's not the first time this has happened, UNIT also picked up his TARDIS in Planet of the Dead... though that may have been partly due to him parking it in Buckingham Palace.

Hey, it's Kate Stewart from The Power of Three! She's outside the Tower of London, UNIT's HQ, having her lunch and criticising the ravens. She tells her assistant in the Fourth Doctor scarf to tell Malcolm (UNIT's scientific advisor from Planet of the Dead) to change the batteries.

I was curious about these battery-powered birds, so I did some research and discovered that they keep some captive ravens at the Tower of London as a tourist attraction. Also, there's a superstition that if they're ever lost Britain will fall. The superstition doesn't mention anything about them being robot ravens though and I guess that's a loophole that UNIT is exploiting. Why they can't just have real ravens here is never explained. Maybe they can't be trusted, I don't know.

Now I'm wondering if these are the 'ravens of death' that Kate mentioned in The Power of Three...

That's Osgood, by the way; the latest character to have a last name starting with 'Os-', following all the Clara Oswalds. Osgood is a weirdly common name for UNIT scientists, as another Osgood was their science expert in The Daemons way back in 1971. He wasn't the first Osgood in the series, as there was another one managing a moonbase two years earlier in The Seeds of Death.
 

I'm sure that this must have been a really impressive and convincing shot back in 2013... because I'm impressed by it right now.

It's a bit of an inconvenient place for a telephone maybe, on the outside of the door, but to be fair it was originally just part of the disguise. The Doctor set it up to be a real phone fairly recently, because he's a crazy whimsical kind of guy. A madman in a box. Well, a madman hanging from the bottom of a box at the moment.

Oh, so that's where the credits got to! The episode doesn't have the normal time vortex title sequence so there was no place for the 3D cast names to swoop in.

It's arguably a bit much to open an episode with a flashy stunt like this, but then it's not a regular episode. Plus the Eleventh Doctor started his run by hanging out of his TARDIS over London, so I'm sure it's nostalgic for him. The producers might have been hoping it would distract people from the big shiny letters saying things like "David Tennant" and "Billie Piper", though I think the cat was firmly out of the bag at this point.

They really did have Matt Smith hanging from a crane for this, which explains why there are now holes under the TARDIS for him to hold onto. It also explains why a huge crowd came out to watch the filming. It's less explicable why UNIT decided to make a huge public spectacle out of this, but at least they've got a good cover story (it's a Derren Brown stunt).

By the way, the National Gallery back there is bloody huge. I know that's not an original observation, I just felt like it should be said.

1-01 - Rose

The National Gallery also made an appearance at the start of Rose, so I'm counting this as an anniversary reference. Even though it's a bit of a stretch.

Also, you can really tell the difference in picture quality between 2013 and 2005 in this shot. They've put so much glow onto the image that I feel like I'm playing Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. I guess they were trying to make it look more like film instead of low-resolution digital video. Nice try.

I'm sure there are lots of words being said in this scene, but I can't focus on anything while the TARDIS door is open. Just go over and pull it shut, please! It's the Doctor's home, his sanctuary, and it's filled with Gallifreyan technology that UNIT shouldn't be trusted with, never mind their enemies. Plus it's raining a bit. C'mon Clara, walk to the box and pull the handle until it's closed. Or snap your fingers at least!

It could've been worse I suppose. At least it's within UNIT's fence, surrounded by people with guns.
 
Anyway, Kate explains that she's acting on instructions from Queen Elizabeth I. She died 410 years ago, but I suppose UNIT has good reasons to take her orders seriously. Like the Gallifreyan painting she had in storage.
 

Back in the 80s, 3D movies would show off the effect by throwing objects close to the camera or by having a terrible-looking shark swim up, but here they've decided to go with a 3D painting.

The Doctor was joking around up to this point, trying to convince Clara that he actually does work for UNIT, but he suddenly becomes very serious. He even holds her hand. This is a painting of the fall of Arcadia at the end of the Time War, and we learned back in season 2 that he was actually there at the time and hadn't come to terms with it yet.

One thing this episode likes to do is edit in short flashes of something else and we get a bit of that here. There's a shot of the Eleventh Doctor in the darkness saying "No more," another shot with his eyes morphing into John Hurt, and so on. The camera swoops through the 3D painting to show the War Doctor, but Eleven can imagine that it was him there at Arcadia... because it was.

Then we get to see this!

The series has given us a few glimpses of the universe during the Time War already. A shattered city surrounded by saucers, a traumatised pilot who hated Time Lords, Daleks swooping from the sky, but now we're finally getting to see a proper war!

The Daleks have gotten past the sky trenches and are just flying around Arcadia, blasting anyone they don't like.

It's always nice when Doctor Who's given enough money to cut loose and really show off. There are lots of people running around and screaming as explosions go off, and the soundtrack is suitably dramatic. It really feels like the last day of the Time War.

The End of Time showed that the Gallifrey High Council had a fondness for wearing red and it turns out that's true of the general public too. This wasn't true in the classic series, so I suppose at some point other colours went out of fashion and now they're impossible to find in shops. Doubly so now that the shops have exploded.

A soldier gets off the Dalek-infested street and spots an unusual sight on Gallifrey: a blue police box. Then someone who isn't wearing red walks over and asks for his gun. I suppose it makes sense that the War Doctor's first line in the story would be something extremely un-Doctorlike.

That's some very neat writing, I can tell the War Doctor has had practice with gun calligraphy. There are arguably better uses for his time right now, seeing as civilians are about to be exterminated in the street, but sometimes you just have to shoot "NO MORE" into a wall. In English. (It's fine, Time Lords are good with languages).

The Daleks are about to open fire when they detect the Doctor and move to surround him instead. So I suppose this was a pretty good use of his time after all!

Surprise! He drives the TARDIS straight through the wall, smashing through the Daleks on the other side. The Doctor doesn't typically use the TARDIS as a weapon, before or after the war, so this is new! It's effective though; he wrecked those little tentacle monsters.

There's even some proper Doctor Who pyrotechnics.

The Dalek lives just long enough to question the War Doctor's graffiti, wondering what "No more," means. We've heard him say it before, right after regenerating, and back then it meant that he wasn't the Doctor anymore. Not a good man. And he wasn't putting up with the Time War anymore either.

We haven't seen Arcadia before this episode, but the series did show Gallifrey's capital city a few times. The one that looks like a snow globe.

The End of Time, Part 2

This particular shot was produced for David Tennant's final episode, so it wasn't that long ago, four years. That can be ages in visual effects though. In fact, it was long enough for Doctor Who's favourite VFX studio, The Mill, to shut down their TV department. The series had to switch to a new visual effects studio for this story, Milk VFX. Though I'm sure the change wasn't too dramatic for them as Milk was formed by six people from The Mill.

I wonder if they got any better at rendering shattered glass in the meantime.

Yeah, okay, that looks a bit more awesome. It may look twice as good in 3D as they had to render it from two different angles. Though the city itself isn't doing any better than Arcadia.

Okay, now that I've shown off the expensive eye candy, do you want to see the worst looking thing in this whole episode? The most 'it doesn't matter, it'll be on screen for 3 seconds and no one will even be looking at it' bit of set decoration in the modern era of Doctor Who?

It's this ceiling fan at the top of the frame. It looks like it was cut out of cardboard and it wobbles like it as well.

These two mention that the High Council is in an emergency session, which is something else that we got to see in The End of Time.

The End of Time, Part 2

The reawakened Lord President Rassilon and his buddies are busy working on a scheme to bring Gallifrey to Earth. Not to escape the Time War, just to have a chance to ascend into beings of pure consciousness before time itself is torn apart by their actions.

But they'll be defeated by the Tenth Doctor, so this episode can happily ignore them.

Instead, we're checking in with these folks in the War Room, who are a bit more grounded, a bit less omnicidal, and currently a bit concerned about the message the Doctor left on the wall.

So far all we've seen of the Time War is explosions and lasers, all very conventional warfare. It's a bit disappointing actually if you've been really looking forward to seeing the Skaro Degradations, the Horde of Travesties, the Nightmare Child, the Could-have-been King with his army of Meanwhiles and Never-weres, and all the other unimaginable atrocities that were supposed to be here in the final days of the war.

But here we learn about the Omega Arsenal and its forbidden weapons... and we learn that they're all gone already. They've fired off all their craziest toys already and now all they have are the boring lasers. However that's not entirely true, as the Doctor has broken in and stolen the last one, the one they didn't dare use: the Moment (as mentioned in The End of Time). A sentient weapon that can stand in judgement of its user.

It may not be the first time the Doctor's swiped a superweapon as I can think of two other Gallifreyan artefacts he kept stashed around Earth: the Hand of Omega and Nemesis. It's nice to see Omega keeps getting mentioned, by the way, seeing as he was a big deal among the Time Lords. And a huge threat, until the Doctor sorted him out in the first anniversary special... and then did it again in Amsterdam 10 years later.

Anyway, the War Doctor stole the Moment and hiked across a desert with it to a barn, where he discovered to his horror that it doesn't come with an instruction manual. Also, he keeps getting distracted by a mysterious woman, so that's a bit annoying. It's also annoying how she starts mocking him, going "No more, no more!" She's really stripping away the gravitas of his defiant statement!

Steven Moffat's sitcom writer side is really on display in this scene, with the mysterious woman being all observations and quips. Also, she's the Moment's interface taking on the image of someone important to the War Doctor. I suppose the idea was that she'd be someone he'd recognise and trust, but she inadvertently picked someone he hasn't actually met yet.

It's Rose Tyler! Well, close enough. She's actually Bad Wolf, the ultra-powerful entity Rose became by looking into the time vortex. The Ninth Doctor sacrificed himself to cure her in a very dramatic and memorable moment for the series, so this was definitely a good choice by the Moment... for fans at least.

The reason that Billie Piper is back as a sentient superweapon instead of Rose is because the character already had an ending (two, in fact), and Moffat didn't really want to mess with Russell T Davies' character. But bringing Piper back was a great idea, as she's been a massively important part of the 2005 revival series. She was 50% of the main cast during the first two seasons, so she helped build the show's audience and kept it around through that first traumatic regeneration.

The War Doctor doesn't want her to call him the Doctor, as he's lost that right. He's already tormented by what he's done in the war and he hasn't even flicked the switch that kills everyone yet. The Moment tells him that there will be consequences for his choice here: he's going to survive and have to live with his actions here today.

The Moment's fairly godlike in her powers, so she opens up a portal to show him who he will become if he goes through with annihilating both Gallifrey and the Daleks in orbit. Who he will become if he counts how many children he's killed.

Then a fez comes flying out of it, which comes as a bit of a surprise to both of them.

Back in the present day (2013), the Eleventh Doctor opens his sealed message from the Queen. The episode doesn't show it very clearly, but I can fix that with the magic of Photoshop's rotate tool.

We also get a voiceover from Queen Elizabeth reading out the note... and what she says is totally different!

"My dearest love, I hope the painting known as Gallifrey Falls will serve as proof that it is your Elizabeth who writes to you now. You will recall that you pledged yourself to the safety of my kingdom. In this capacity, I have appointed you as curator of the Under Gallery, where deadly danger to England is locked away. Should any disturbance occur within its walls, it is my wish that you be summoned. Godspeed, gentle husband."

While she's talking there's a flashback to her writing the letter, with big close-ups that reveal that her fancy handwriting doesn't quite match the fancy handwriting we're looking at in this screencap. But the letter is on screen for like 3 seconds so it's a complete non-issue. If this is the biggest flaw I can find in the episode so far then it's doing bloody well.

As the team heads to the Under Gallery, one of the UNIT science blokes (McGillop) gets a mysterious phone call and it has to be important as the camera's sticking around with him.

We don't hear what's said, all we know is that he's confused and wondering why he should take something somewhere. But there's a big clue in the scene for fans who are good at memorising phone numbers. He looks at his phone for a moment and sees 07700900461 written on it, which was the Doctor's phone number in The Stolen Earth. So this leaves us with an even bigger mystery: why does the Doctor have McGillop's number?

Once the others are safely sealed inside the Under Gallery they get to see another painting, one that's equally personal to the Doctor:

It's of Queen Elizabeth I with the Tenth Doctor!

Sorry that the quality of this image isn't great, I stitched it together from multiple screencaps, or tried to at least. It's good enough to get the point across: the next flashback stars David Tennant!

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2

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NEXT TIME

Next time on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm still writing about The Day of the Doctor. It's a long episode, lots going on, can't be helped.

Comments are welcome!