Day of the Doctor

I expected it to be bad.  I expected River Song and “Sweetie!” and Rose and fez’s are cool and all of the badness that has become bad.  And the first third of it certainly fell to my expectations.  But then . . . despite myself, I found myself enjoying it.  And by the end, I actually thought it was a pretty good episode of the show.  So not only did the Doctor save Galiffrey, he also saved my enjoyment of the modern incarnation of the show.

I would imagine that if you’ve read my of my articles, you can picture my displeasure with the Stephen Moffatt helmed seasons of Dr. Who.  The first one started off fine, but after that they’ve just descended into self-indulgent wallows without any real substance.  Thus, I entered into the 50th Anniversary Special with a lot of trepidation, a lot of which ended up evaporating.  No River Song, thank you, God.  Rose Tyler wasn’t really Rose Tyler, thank you, God.  And no fucking Daleks or Cybermen, though they were involved in the background as set pieces.  (Yes, I know there were Daleks flying around blowing things up, but it wasn’t a Dalek plot.)

The special really only suffered in two ways.  First, Matt Smith set up against David Tennant and John Hurt made the flaws in the character and actor very apparent.  I think Smith has done an admirable job with the material he’s been given, but you just can’t stand up against the best Doctor since Tom Baker and John fucking Hurt.  That’s like filming a scene from the Lord of the Rings starring Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Sir Christopher Lee as Saruman, and Rob Schneider as Grima Wormtongue.  And second, the special just didn’t contain enough material from the old school show.  I wanted Peter Davidson and Colin Baker and some guy dressed up in a Moe from the Three Stooges wig pretending to be Patrick Troughton.  I started watching the show on PBS when I was about 5 with my dad, and I really wanted to see terrible rubber masks and remember how fucking awesome that was back then.  I understand why they chose to focus on the more modern aspects of the show, but I was still a bit disappointed with the nods they gave.  Also, god damnit Christopher Eccleston, just make your peace with being a sci-fi fan idol and come back to the fold.

But in the end, the good parts of the show outweighed the bad.  The Tom Baker cameo was sublime, as was seeing David Tennant in action again.  When I heard about the addition of a new Doctor in the timeline, I thought it was a huge bunch of bullshit, but John Hurt just snapped in effortlessly.  The way he portrayed the change the Doctor was about to undergo at once conveyed the gravity of it as well as his own innocence of what was to come.  God damn that guy’s a good actor, even though I spent the entire episode expecting him to collapse clutching his stomach.

But the biggest miracle of the special for me was that they managed to make the Smith Doctor’s inane idiocy actually make sense in the scope of the show.  The Eccleston Doctor is a Doctor in shock, unable to handle what he’s done, so he mostly ignores it to the best of his ability.  The Tennant Doctor is a Doctor who is finally trying to grapple with sacrificing his own people, and in the end fails.  In the specials, the Tennant Doctor finally snaps and basically declares himself God before being brought back down to Earth, so to speak.  The Smith Doctor is the result of that breaking of the Doctor’s psyche.  He is ridiculous and a fool, but unlike other Doctor’s, he is not in control when he acts the fool.  He forgets things, he makes terrible choices and endangers his companions.  He is a Doctor that is badly spiraling out of control.  And the Day of the Doctor manages to finish that plot completely and set the stage for something completely new.

The Doctor is no longer driven to retreat into youth and avoidant behavior.  Once again we can have a Doctor that possesses gravitas instead of whimsy, command instead of trickery.  And I, for one, am looking forward to it.  Though I’m still disappointed it’s not Helen Mirren.