There is barely a plot here, and I don’t think that’s a failure. “Twice Upon a Time” is a valediction with a bit of story attached, an hour spent letting a Doctor say goodbye, handing over to a new one, and closing out a writer’s seven-year run in the process. Judged as an adventure it’s thin. Judged as what it obviously is, it’s rather lovely. It also does something no other regeneration story has: it puts the first Doctor and the current one in the same predicament, and lets them talk about it.
Two refusals
The setup follows directly from the snow at the end of The Doctor Falls. The Twelfth Doctor, mortally wounded and refusing to change, meets the First Doctor at the South Pole in 1986, also mortally wounded and also refusing. David Bradley is very good. He isn’t doing an impression of William Hartnell so much as a performance in the same key, the imperiousness, the querulousness, the habit of addressing everyone as though they’ve interrupted him. Crucially he plays the First Doctor as a man who has not yet decided what he’s for. That’s the whole point of the pairing: one of them is at the start of working it out, the other is at the end of it, and neither wants to move. The one element that hasn’t aged well even by its own standards is the running gag about the First Doctor’s casual sexism, the remarks about dusting and smacked bottoms played as comic anachronism. It’s broader than it needs to be, it isn’t especially accurate to how the character was actually written in 1963, and it takes up time the special could have spent on the two of them talking properly. When they do talk properly, it’s excellent.
Testimony, and a captain out of a shell hole
The threat isn’t one, and that’s the special’s best trick. Testimony appear as glass figures who extract people from their timelines at the moment of death, and everything about them is shot as menace, the reconstructed bodies, the glowing forms, the abductions. The Doctor spends the episode assuming he’s found a villain. They aren’t. Testimony is an archive, a project from the far future that lifts the dying at the last instant, takes a copy of their memories, and returns them to die exactly as they always did. Nothing is changed. Nobody is saved. It’s a library of everybody who ever lived, built out of kindness, and the Doctor has spent the whole hour looking for the catch because he cannot conceive of a universe that doesn’t have one. That’s a gentle, generous idea for a Christmas special, and it rhymes neatly with the speech that closed the previous episode.
Mark Gatiss plays a British officer plucked out of a shell hole in 1914, moments before he and a German soldier shoot each other, and he’s the emotional spine of the thing. The Captain is written with real restraint, courteous and frightened and entirely resigned to dying, asking only that somebody look after his family, and Gatiss underplays it beautifully. The special’s one properly moving set piece is his return: dropped back into his timeline at a slightly different moment, so that instead of dying he stands up into the Christmas Truce of 1914, with both armies climbing out of their trenches to sing. It’s shameless, and it works, and the reveal that he’s Archibald Hamish Lethbridge-Stewart, the Brigadier’s ancestor, is a nice bit of housekeeping delivered without fuss. There’s one other returning face worth mentioning: Rusty, the Dalek from Series 8 who was reprogrammed to hate its own species and has been sitting on Villengard ever since. The Doctor goes to consult it, which is a good gag, since the only being in the universe he can ask about Testimony is a Dalek he broke, and the scene is over before it outstays itself.
It’s worth saying what else is ending here besides a Doctor. This is Steven Moffat’s last script after seven years as showrunner and a decade before that as the era’s best writer, and the special is visibly aware of it. The instructions in the final speech sound as much like a handover note to the next production team as to the next Doctor, and the decision to close on the First Doctor’s era, on the man who started it, refusing to change, being told it’ll be all right, is a writer arranging his own exit as a piece of continuity. Whether that’s graceful or self-conscious will depend on your tolerance for it. I found it graceful, and Den of Geek was generous about it too, while being clear-eyed that the plot barely exists.
The goodbye
The last fifteen minutes are the reason the special exists. Bill comes back as a Testimony avatar, and the Doctor’s refusal to accept she’s real is the closest the episode comes to conflict, because he’s spent so long losing people that he can’t take one back even as a memory. It’s her insistence that she’s still herself, memories and all, that finally settles him. He also gets Clara back, since the memories he had wiped are returned to him briefly, which is a quiet piece of repair for a departure that went badly, and Nardole reappears to say the goodbye he never got. Bill’s scenes are the ones that justify the whole exercise. The special asks a real question, which is that if a copy holds every memory a person had and behaves exactly as they did, in what sense is it not them, and it declines to answer, which is right. What it does instead is let the Doctor be wrong about it. He spends the episode insisting she’s a projection, and it’s clear that this is grief rather than reasoning: he has lost so many people that accepting a returned one feels like a trick he’ll be punished for falling for. When he finally does, it isn’t because he’s been persuaded. It’s because he’s tired. Pearl Mackie plays her half of it with enormous warmth and no pleading at all, and it’s a far better send-off than the one she got in the finale.
And then the regeneration, and Capaldi’s final speech, which is the best of the modern era’s send-offs because it isn’t about him at all. It’s a set of instructions, delivered to whoever comes next, and the AV Club was right that the whole hour is really building towards it: never be cruel, never be cowardly, never eat pears. Laugh hard. Run fast. Be kind. Doctor, I let you go. Then Jodie Whittaker, two words, and the TARDIS throws her out into the sky.
What it leaves behind is two Doctors with the same refusal, one who hasn’t worked out what he’s for and one who’s finished doing it, which is the best possible reason to pair them. It leaves a villain who isn’t, since Testimony saves nobody and changes nothing and is simply a library built out of kindness, with the Doctor unable to stop looking for the trap. It leaves the Christmas Truce, a soldier returned to his timeline a few minutes late and standing up into a ceasefire, shameless and effective. It leaves Bill and Clara returned, not as resurrections but as memories, honestly labelled, which is the only version this show could have got away with. And it leaves “be kind”, a regeneration speech that’s a set of instructions for the next one rather than an elegy for this one.
Rating: 3.5/5. Slight, sentimental and almost weightless as a story, with a comic thread about the First Doctor that misfires and a plot that dissolves the moment you examine it. But the Captain’s story is genuinely affecting, Bradley is excellent, and Capaldi’s farewell is the finest of the revived series. As an hour of television it’s minor. As a goodbye it’s just right. He’d been told to be kind, and he’d worked out why, and then he wrote it down for whoever came next. Oh, brilliant.
