The Day of the Doctor

So, I'm a massive Doctor Who fanboy; this is a known fact. If it weren't obvious, I probably gave it away by attending the cinema screening of The Day of the Doctor in a hand-knitted 4th Doctor scarf.

The last big 'event' episode of Doctor Who was The End of Time, which contained a number of good ideas surrounded by a pile of crap; I really wasn't wild on it. This time, I came out of the cinema squeeing. Having then rewatched the episode on iplayer, I can see the joins a bit more. So it goes.

The Day of the Doctor does big pretty well; perhaps too well. It's not exactly Hollywood special effects, but it does suffer on the smaller screen. It has a nice balance of humour and action, a few nods to the fans - but not as many as I was afraid they might have - and even the presence of Billie Piper doesn't completely annoy me.

Stuff I liked and, so you know, spoilers.

• The interaction between the three Doctors was, for me at least, the right mix of spikiness and total, mutual understanding.
• John Hurt as the War Doctor was wonderful; so tired, so full of the pain of trying to be the Doctor in a setting that had no use for the Doctor. I mean, it's John Hurt, he's a bit awesome, and the posh gravelly thing really was working for him.
• The use of some proper time hopping. I like to see some time hopping, as long as the show doesn't regularly pull a Bill and Ted.
• The Ride of Thirteen, as I am calling it, because I'm a sucker for that stuff.
• Osgood.
• Kate Stewart being a true successor to her father, in the bad ways as well as the good.
• The handling of the Elizabeth I stuff. It doesn't make the 10th Doctor's douchegabbery in the specials less douchebaggy, but I'm glad that having decided to explain it, they didn't perpetuate the douchebaggery.
• The rabbit.
• "Am I having a mid-life crisis?"
• I want to point up "Again with the pointing; they're screwdrivers," but that is, sadly, undercut by the fact that the three Doctors later use their sonics to blast a Dalek with some sort of concussion wave.
• Tom!
• Clara doing what Companions should do; providing a rock in the Doctor's turbulent world.

Stuff I liked less:

• The Moment turning out to be a big bomb. It's called 'the Moment', not the Explodinator; it's also called the Galaxy Eater. It can open fissures through time and space and has both sentience and a conscience, but apparently it can't selectively target the Daleks. For me, it should have been something far more conceptually terrifying and complex; something to not just destroy Gallifrey and the surrounding Dalek fleet, but to scorch the Time Wars from history. In particular, it didn't sit well with the 9th Doctor's certainty that the Daleks were all gone if he just blew up a planet they had a massive battle fleet around. They actually talk about the Daleks sending reinforcement, so apparently those ones would have been dandy.
• The Time War itself being depicted as a straight up shooting war. I'll write more on this in a separate article, but the one advantage of sticking the war and the destruction of the Time Lords in the limbo between series was that it should have been pretty well unfilmable.
• The horror of the Doctor's actions being about the children, rather than the fact that, children or no children, it was an act of massive genocide. I also found the original plan far more reprehensible when it involved blowing up a planet than when it was implied to be some catastrophic temporal shenanigans. I think it's because the Doctor is destroying all of the Time Lords and the Daleks to prevent future destruction, rather than carving out a piece of history to prevent past destruction.
  There's also the fact that he says he's serving notice on the Time Lords that he won't allow any more fighting, but at this stage that's a moot point; the war is all but over and the Time Lords clearly have nothing left but spit and bile. There's not even a sign of any remaining TT capsules, so what is it the Doctor wants them not to do?
• The fact that the 9th and 10th Doctors, having told Kate Stewart she would never be able to live with herself and sacrificing millions to save billions was never the right thing, went back to do it again. I can get that the War Doctor might still think he had to do it, but they should have been on the other options train by that point, even if they needed a companion to give them a push in the right direction.
• The lack of even a late cameo by Christopher Ecclestone, or from Paul McGann - who had obviously been in to film The Night of the Doctor - or new audio for Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy, for the Ride of Thirteen.

A lot of people are bothered by the fact that it doesn't follow directly from the end of the previous episode. I'm not, especially - the final scene was not an actual place, but an image of the Doctor's memory, after all, so nothing much was going to have happened - but I would have liked some specific mention, rather than just ignoring it.

I thought that the B plot would have made a pretty good episode on its own, although Zygon shapeshifters hiding in stasis paintings felt a bit belt and braces. The integration was okay, but again, the Zygonity was superfluous to the A plot and its primary purpose was just to introduce the idea of the suspended animation.

The resolution wasn't bad, and in particular managed to not mess with the new series continuity, while still being a point of great transition for the current Doctor, although in part by hand-waving the Doctors' amnesia. On the other hand, that's got to be established, as otherwise the current Doctor would always know what had happened in these stories.

As with The Light at the End, Big Finish's almost eight Doctors anniversary special, I might damn this with faint praise and say it was a good multi-Doctor story. I think it is a little more than that, but that its depiction of the Time War was ultimately - and perhaps inevitably - a let down.

Looking over my lists, I note that the good points are all brief, and perhaps superficial, while the disappointments run deeper; I also suspect that I will find more things that niggle at me as time progresses, and indeed the cons list has expanded as I typed. It makes me wonder sometimes if the show was ever as good as I thought it was, or if I was just much younger.

Overall, however, I think this was a broadly successful entry; imperfect, and in some ways deeply flawed, but hitting most of the right notes in the right order.