Along with his new friend Handles, a friendly severed Cyberman
head, The Doctor begins the special hour long episode flitting between
different ships orbiting an unknown planet, from which an, also unknown,
message is being continually broadcast. After visiting both the Cybermen and
Dalek ships, as unsuccessfully as would be expected when unwittingly carrying
broken parts of the occupants, The Doctor heads off to Earth to pick up best
pal Clara (Jenna Louise Coleman). She, meanwhile, this being a Christmas
special, is attempting to roast a turkey for the family she suddenly seems to
have. After a brief stint of pretending, badly, to be Clara’s boyfriend at her
behest, the two set off in the direction of the mysterious message. Handles
suggests that the planet is in fact Gallifrey, an idea The Doctor naturally and
passionately rejects having previously locked Gallifrey safely into a time pocket
outside of the Universe. Next, he and Clara are invited onto a church spaceship
run by cool space lady Tasha Lem (Orla Brady). Having somehow secured the unknown
planet, Tasha asks The Doctor if he fancies having a butchers before anybody
else does. Naturally, he does.
On arrival, he and Clara find themselves in a
snowy town called Christmas, again, it’s Christmas Day, people! It appears that
no one in this town can tell a lie, although this potential plotline is quickly
dropped. They follow the message to the town’s church tower, and find a crack
in reality through which, it transpires, the Time Lords of Gallifrey are asking
the question ‘Doctor who?’ over and over.
It is a request for him to speak his real name and thereby confirm his presence and location.
However, this confirmation would bring the lost Time Lords hurtling back into
the present Universe, causing all manner of timey-wimey chaos, not to mention
re-starting the Time War, especially with all those spaceships hovering just
above the planet. Alarmed, The Doctor asks Tasha to tell him what planet they’re
on. By now, of course, it can almost be nowhere but Trenzalore, the planet The Doctor is buried upon. Tricking Clara
in returning to Earth, The Doctor spends the next 300 hundred years of the
siege as a sort of stalemate sheriff, protecting the townspeople from attack,
whilst simultaneously refusing to answer Gallifrey’s message.
Keeping up?
Eventually, having grabbed on to the TARDIS like
Captain Jack Harkness before her (I miss him), Clara arrives back on
Trenzalore, to find a visibly aged Doctor who knows he has now used up all his
re-generations, and doesn’t, ironically enough, have much time left. Back on
the church ship, now ominously named The Church of the Silence, Tasha explains
that Madame Kovarian (eye patch lady, remember her?) broke away from the main
Papal Mainframe, and attempted to kill The Doctor to prevent the siege ever
happening – hence River Song and the original appearance of The Silence etc
etc. Tasha then turns into a Dalek having had her consciousness invaded by the
tricksy blighters. Eventually, after a little more to-ing and fro-ing which as
far I can see was wholly unnecessary, a frail and elderly Doctor faces his old
enemies in a sort of last stand. A distraught Clara pleads into the time crack,
asking the Time Lords to save their old countryman one last time. Fortunately,
they send a last bit of regeneration energy through the sky, allowing The
Doctor to defeat the Daleks and pop back up in the TARDIS as his younger self,
just in time to say goodbye to Clara, as well as a hallucination of Amy Pond
(Karen Gillan).
Finally, he regenerates into a bewildered and
slightly manic looking Peter Capaldi, who, worryingly, begins his tenure by
asking a terrified Clara if she knows how to fly the TARDIS. And so the thirteenth age begins.
Phew. For a moment or two there I didn’t think we
were going to make it through all that. Which, funnily enough, is almost
exactly how I felt when watching the episode. All plot
holes and references to prior events felt at best, shoe-horned in for the sake of wrapping them up. At worst,
they were damaging to the episode's plot, taking attention
away from Matt Smith’s exit and totally ballsing up his one chance to say
goodbye before the start of Capaldi’s reign. Smith has been a fine Doctor,
playing the part with a lovely mixture of playfulness, mischief, bravery and
brains. It's shame the episode appears to have been planned out without nearly half as much care and attention as Smith has put into his performance week after week. In fact if it wasn’t for the lynchpin of Clara Oswald, the whole
episode would have spun off into a vortex of confusion faster than an out of
control TARDIS. Thinking back to David Tennant’s final moments as our
Gallifreyan hero, I can help but think it’s a shame Matt Smith didn’t get the
same treatment. Sure, the re-appearance of Amy and young Amelia was
tear-jerking, but only for about ten seconds, that being the only breathing
space Moffat’s over-full episode was left with.
It was an exciting start to Capaldi’s career in
the TARDIS, true, but overall it was a badly paced, impossibly complex and
deeply unsatisfying ending to the storyline of Smith’s Doctor. And he deserved
better than that if you ask me, and I'm still a Tennant girl at heart.
Jen
Follow @AssortedBuffery on Twitter
Or like our Facebook page.
Or like our Facebook page.
No comments:
Post a Comment