Commander Strax

Season finales in this era tend to be enormous, noisy and slightly hollow, a lot of running and a big reveal and a reset. “The Name of the Doctor” is enormous and noisy and it is not hollow at all, because for once the answer is something the show has genuinely been building rather than something it thought of recently. It solves the Impossible Girl question properly, it goes to the one place the Doctor cannot go, and it ends on the best final shot the programme has produced in years. It also delivers the title’s promise by refusing it, which is the correct call.

Stealing a TARDIS, and a conference call

The pre-credits sequence is the boldest thing in it: Clara, in monochrome, on Gallifrey, watching a young man and his wife about to steal a museum piece, and telling him he’s picked the wrong one. The navigation system’s knackered on that one, she says. But you’ll have much more fun. Dropping a companion into the First Doctor’s escape from Gallifrey, in archive footage, is exactly the kind of anniversary-adjacent flourish that could be unbearable, and it isn’t, because it’s doing real plot work. She’s been there. She’s been in all of it.

The structure that follows is a nice piece of business, a dream conference call linking Vastra, Jenny, Strax, Clara and River Song, all asleep in different centuries, sitting round a table that doesn’t exist. River appears as a data ghost, still saved in the Library’s computer since Forest of the Dead, which is a lovely way to get her into a finale without undoing her death. The news that brings them together is that somebody has found out where the Doctor’s grave is. Jenny is murdered mid-call, in her own house, by something she never sees, a properly shocking beat even given that the episode restores her later, and the Whispermen are a good, cheap monster: faceless figures in top hats who speak in rhyme and appear where they shouldn’t.

Trenzalore

The grave is on Trenzalore, the field the show has been pointing at since The Wedding of River Song, and what it looks like is superb: a battlefield full of headstones, and rising over it, vast and broken and half-buried, the TARDIS itself, grown enormous as its dimensions leak in death. That’s a genuinely great image, and the explanation is better. There’s no body in the tomb. What’s inside is his time stream, the whole of his life, every event, laid open as a scar of light. A wound in reality shaped like everything he ever did. The Great Intelligence, with Richard E. Grant back and playing it much colder than in The Snowmen, wants exactly that. Not to kill him. To walk into his own timeline and unpick it from the inside, turning every victory into a defeat, retroactively, everywhere at once. Across the universe, stars start going out as lives he saved stop being saved. It’s a genuinely nasty piece of villainy, and it costs the Intelligence its own existence to do, which the character accepts without hesitation. Hatred as a completed project.

Before that, there’s the moment the episode is built around: the Doctor being told where they’re going, and simply refusing. He knows what Trenzalore is. He has known since Dorium told him, he has spent a year not thinking about it, and when Clara asks why he won’t go he tells her that a time traveller must never visit his own grave, and then sits down on the TARDIS steps and cries. Matt Smith plays it small and wretched, and it’s the most frightened this incarnation has ever been. Vastra, Jenny and Strax have been captured and he goes anyway, which makes the whole finale an act performed under protest by a man walking towards the one thing he has arranged his life to avoid. Den of Geek noted how much of the hour runs on that dread rather than on incident, and it’s the right read.

The impossible girl, and the man at the end

So Clara does the only thing available and follows him in. Which is the answer. She splinters into a thousand versions of herself scattered the length of his life, every incarnation and every era, each one born to find him and save him and, almost always, to die doing it and never be remembered. The barmaid in Victorian London. The girl in the Dalek Asylum. Hundreds more nobody ever saw. It’s a satisfying solve because it works backwards rather than forwards: it doesn’t require Clara to have been secretly special all along, it makes her ordinary and then explains that her ordinariness was scattered through history by an act of deliberate sacrifice. She isn’t a trap or a trick. She’s a woman who jumped. The one soft spot is the rescue, since the Doctor goes in after her, which he has spent the whole episode being told is fatal, and it turns out to be survivable when the plot needs it to be. It works in the moment and doesn’t bear a second look. River’s goodbye lands better. She’s been standing there the whole episode as something only Clara can see, and when he finally admits he can see her too, that he always could and has been avoiding it because looking at her hurts, it’s the most honest he’s been about that relationship in four years.

Then the last ninety seconds. Inside his own timeline, among the shades of every previous face, there is someone standing with his back turned who shouldn’t be there. Clara doesn’t recognise him. The Doctor does, and he does not want to discuss it. He explains, tightly, that the name “Doctor” is a promise he made and that this man is the one who broke it, and that whatever he did, he did in the name of peace and sanity and not in the name of the Doctor. Then the figure turns round, and it’s John Hurt, and a caption arrives: Introducing John Hurt as the Doctor. It’s a magnificent cliffhanger, and it works because it reframes rather than contradicts. The show has spent eight years having this character insist on that name as a moral position, a word he chose, a standard he holds himself to, the thing he corrects people about. Discovering there is a life he refuses to count under it tells us something real about who he is, rather than merely turning the plot.

What it leaves behind is the wrong TARDIS, with Clara on Gallifrey telling a young man which museum piece to steal, fifty years of continuity folded into a single scene. It leaves a grave with no body, the tomb being his own time stream laid open under a TARDIS grown vast in death, which is the best image the show has produced this year. It leaves a life being unpicked, the Great Intelligence rewriting every victory into a defeat and paying with its own existence to do it. It leaves the Impossible Girl solved, an ordinary woman doing an extraordinary thing rather than a special woman explained, which is the right way round. And it leaves the man he calls his secret, a face he refuses to include in the count and a promise he says was broken, in the best closing shot in years.

Rating: 4.5/5. Big, confident and unusually disciplined for a finale of this era, with a genuine answer to a season-long question and an image of Trenzalore that more than justifies two years of build-up. The Doctor’s own survival inside the timeline is a convenience and the Whispermen are underused, but the last ninety seconds are as good a cliffhanger as this programme has ever engineered. A field of headstones, a dying ship the size of a hill, and a man standing with his back turned at the end of a life that doesn’t admit he happened.

Retired

Losing the Ponds in The Angels Take Manhattan has done more damage than any previous departure, and the episode is unsentimental about how that looks from outside. Not noble grief, just a man being rude to people who need help. Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint and Strax have been keeping an eye on him, and their exasperation is the funniest thing in the special. The Paternoster Gang were assembled as a one-off favour in A Good Man Goes to War and they work far better here as a standing arrangement, a Silurian detective, her wife, and a Sontaran butler who keeps offering to kill people and is repeatedly told no. Strax is broad, and occasionally too broad, but Dan Starkey’s timing is excellent and the memory worm sequence is the best sustained gag of the year. Vastra’s one-word test is the other standout: an interrogation conducted through a veil, in single words, in which Clara has to prove she’s worth the Doctor’s time. It’s a lovely piece of writing, and it ends by handing the Doctor a word that isn’t about the case at all. Clara says Pond, meaning the frozen one in the garden with a dead governess in it, and it lands on him like a slap.

This is also where the show quietly refits itself. There’s a new title sequence with the Doctor’s face restored to the vortex after decades away, a new arrangement of the theme, and a new console room, darker and more metallic, more machine and less coral, replacing an interior that had been in place since the Eleventh Hour. The Doctor gets a new costume too, a longer coat and a waistcoat, and the tweed goes. It’s a lot of housekeeping to do in one special, and the reason it doesn’t feel like housekeeping is that all of it is motivated. A man who has retired redecorates.

Snow that remembers

The threat is decent, if a little thin. Snow is falling that didn’t come from anywhere, and it learns, taking an impression from the people near it and reproducing it. Snowmen with teeth appear because a lonely boy imagined them that way, and a governess who drowned in a frozen pond is being reconstituted as the template for an ice army. Richard E. Grant is very good as Dr Simeon, a man who has been talking to a snow globe since childhood and has become something considerably colder than the thing he serves. The Great Intelligence, voiced by Ian McKellen as something patient, plummy and entirely without hurry, is a smart choice for a returning classic-series villain, mostly because the show declines to explain the reference and simply lets it be a very old thing that has been waiting. Den of Geek was right that the special looks tremendous doing it, all gaslight and frost.

The household Clara works in earns its space too. Captain Latimer is a widower who cannot speak to his own children, and the children, one of whom is having the nightmares the snow is feeding on, have effectively been raising themselves since their mother died. It’s sketched fast, but it gives the ice something real to work with: a house where nobody says anything, a governess drowned in the pond outside, and a small girl who wants her back. The special is smart enough to make the emotional weather and the actual weather the same problem. The resolution is the wobbly part, since the ice is defeated by a family crying, salt water en masse undoing the crystalline structure, and while the episode plants it fairly the execution amounts to grief melting it, which is exactly the Christmas-special logic you’d hope this particular episode was too grumpy to reach for.

Clara, twice

None of which is why anyone remembers this one. Jenna-Louise Coleman plays a barmaid in Victorian London who is also, on alternate days and in a different accent and dress, a governess in a wealthy household, a woman leading two lives for no reason she’s willing to explain and enjoying both enormously. She is quick, nosy, and completely undeterred by a man who does not want to be spoken to. Within a scene she has climbed an invisible staircase into a cloud, which is roughly the correct way to introduce a companion to this Doctor. And she dies. She falls from the cloud during the fight, and she dies on the ground in a Victorian street with the Doctor holding her hand, and her last words are the ones he’s heard before: run, you clever boy, and remember.

Then he reads the gravestone. Clara Oswin Oswald. Which means the girl in the Dalek Asylum, Oswin Oswald, who deleted him from the pathweb and made the same joke and said the same sentence in Asylum of the Daleks, was this woman, or a version of her, a thousand years in the other direction. The same face. The same name, rearranged. The same last words. Dead twice, in two centuries, in two entirely incompatible circumstances. It’s the best possible engine for a mystery box, because the Doctor’s reaction isn’t grief, it’s delight. The retirement evaporates in about four seconds and he’s off, because for the first time since a graveyard in New York there is something in the universe he doesn’t understand and wants to. That’s a smart, slightly ruthless piece of characterisation, and the AV Club picked up on it too: the thing that gets him out of mourning isn’t a person needing help, it’s a puzzle. Then comes the coda, in a modern graveyard, with a woman who looks exactly like her walking past her own headstone.

What it leaves behind is a Doctor who quit, not grieving nobly but actively unhelpful, living above the clouds and telling people to go away, which is a genuinely uncomfortable place to start a Christmas special. It leaves the Paternoster Gang promoted from a favour to a fixture, and considerably funnier for it. It leaves the one-word test, and the word “Pond” arriving like a punch he wasn’t braced for. It leaves the Great Intelligence, an old patient thing given Ian McKellen’s voice and no explanation whatsoever, which will be back. And it leaves the same woman twice, Oswin in the Asylum and Clara in the snow with the same last words in both, and a man who doesn’t mourn her so much as chase her, which tells you a great deal about him.

Rating: 4/5. Funny, cold, handsomely mounted and much sharper about its lead character than a Christmas special needs to be, with an introduction for Clara that does in fifty minutes what most companions get a season to establish. The snow plot is slight and the tears-defeat-the-ice resolution is soft, but the framing is excellent and the last five minutes reset the whole show. She said it in a Dalek and she said it in the snow, and both times she died saying it. Run, you clever boy. He’s running.

The Name of the Doctor: The One Who Broke the Promise