Anniversary specials are usually a parade. You wheel out the old faces, you have them insult each other’s coats, you gesture at the past, and everyone goes home pleased. “The Day of the Doctor” does some of that, and there’s a scene where three Doctors compare screwdriver sizes that is very funny, but underneath the celebration it is doing something far more serious. It goes back to the single decision the revived show was built on, the one it has spent eight years treating as immovable, and it takes it apart. It shouldn’t work. It absolutely does.
The man who wasn’t called the Doctor
The tease at the end of The Name of the Doctor, a face he refuses to count and a promise he says was broken, is cashed in here, and the answer is better than the setup. The War Doctor is not an evil incarnation, or a secret villain, or any of the things a lesser show would have made him. He is the one who fought the Time War. That’s all. He’s an exhausted old soldier who did what the others were too squeamish to do, and the reason his successors won’t include him in the count is not that he’s monstrous but that he’s inconvenient, the living record of a day they’d rather file under someone else’s name. John Hurt is magnificent, and crucially he plays it without any self-pity. His War Doctor is dry, tired, and openly contemptuous of the two men he meets: a pair of overgrown children with sonic screwdrivers and catchphrases who point things at problems and shout. When he asks whether they’re capable of being serious for four seconds together, it’s the funniest line in the special and also the sharpest criticism the programme has ever levelled at itself.
It’s also, finally, a look at the war itself. Eight years of this show have described the Time War in reverent, deliberately vague terms, the Nightmare Child and the Could-Have-Been King and horrors too large to put on screen, and there was always a risk that showing it would shrink it. What we get instead is narrower and smarter: the fall of Arcadia, a street, Daleks in the sky, and a soldier writing NO MORE on a wall with a gun because he’s run out of other things to say. The special declines to depict the cosmic end of it and shows us a city being lost instead, which is the only scale at which it could ever have worked. Den of Geek singled out Nick Hurran’s direction for exactly this, and the grit of those Arcadia scenes is a big part of why the whole thing holds together.
The weapon with a conscience
The Moment is the best idea in the script. It’s the Time Lords’ final weapon, powerful enough to end the war, and it has developed a conscience, so it refuses to be used without first making its user understand what they’re doing. It manifests as Rose Tyler, or rather as Bad Wolf, since the interface picks a face from the Doctor’s future and wears it. Billie Piper gets to play something that is emphatically not the character she’s associated with, an ancient, amused, slightly cruel thing that has decided this man requires supervision. It’s a smart way to bring her back without dragging the whole Bad Wolf Bay apparatus along with her, and Piper is genuinely eerie in it. The Moment’s punishment is elegant, because it doesn’t stop him. It shows him what he’ll become. It opens a window into his own future so he can watch the two men he turns into, and see exactly how they carry it.
Zygons, and a very good trick
The present-day plot is the weakest strand and it’s still perfectly decent: Zygons, hidden in Elizabethan paintings, thawing out in the twenty-first century to take England. Kate Stewart and UNIT return, Osgood arrives fully formed as the fan-in-a-scarf who turns out to be genuinely brave, and the Black Archive is a nice piece of world-building, a room UNIT has made TARDIS-proof, staffed by people whose memories are wiped at the end of every shift. The resolution is the bit that matters, because it’s the special’s argument in miniature. The Doctors scramble everyone’s memory of who is human and who is Zygon, so the two sides have to negotiate a settlement without knowing which side they’ll be on when it lifts. That’s genuinely clever writing, and it’s the same move the whole special is building towards: you cannot make a fair decision about a war until you can’t tell which side you’re on.
Tennant slides back into the part effortlessly, incidentally, and the Elizabeth I material, a Zygon duplicate and a marriage and the Tenth Doctor’s flustered horror at his own wedding, is broad but well played. The one absence worth noting is Christopher Eccleston, who declined to return, and the special handles it gracefully by simply not pretending otherwise. The Ninth Doctor appears only in archive form, and the gap is filled by inventing the War Doctor instead. Given that the invented incarnation turns out to be the best thing in the episode, it’s hard to file as a loss. Paul McGann, meanwhile, got his own send-off in a seven-minute minisode released alongside this, which is where the War Doctor actually comes from. Worth seeking out, since it does more for the Eighth Doctor in seven minutes than the 1996 film managed in ninety.
The decision
And then the three of them stand in a barn with their hands on a big red button, and the special does the thing. The Doctor has spent eight years defined by this, the man who burned his own people, children included, to end a war. It’s the wound under The End of Time, the reason for the guilt, the engine of the whole revival. Undoing it should be a betrayal. It isn’t, because the special doesn’t cheat. The War Doctor still makes the choice. He puts his hand on the button having decided, and the other two join him, not to talk him out of it but so that he doesn’t have to do it alone, which is the most affecting beat in the whole thing. What changes the outcome is Clara. She looks at three men about to commit genocide and simply asks what happened to the promise, and it’s the Moment’s whole argument arriving from a human being who has no stake in Time Lord politics.
So they find a third option: freeze Gallifrey in a single instant and shift it out of the universe into a pocket dimension, leaving the Daleks to destroy themselves in the crossfire. All thirteen Doctors turn up to do it, and yes, the thirteenth is a pair of eyes and an unfamiliar eyebrow, and yes, it’s a thrill. The line that lands is the quiet one. He isn’t sure it worked. He’ll never be sure, because the two older Doctors will forget, their timelines won’t hold it, and so the man who has carried this for centuries goes on carrying it. Nothing about his past changes. Only his future does. Gallifrey falls no more.
What it leaves behind is the War Doctor, not a villain but a tired soldier who did the thing, played by John Hurt with total unsentimentality and used to mock the two leads to their faces. It leaves a weapon that won’t be used blindly, picking Rose’s face to supervise its own deployment, which is the best single idea in the special. It leaves the Zygon settlement, two sides made to negotiate without knowing which one they belong to, a neat and portable piece of moral engineering. It leaves three men and one button, where they don’t stop him but stand with him, and then Clara asks about the promise and that’s what actually does it. And it leaves Gallifrey frozen and hidden, so he didn’t burn it, he’ll never know that for certain, the guilt stays, and the show now has a home to go looking for.
Rating: 5/5. Warm, funny, enormously confident and far braver than an anniversary special needed to be. It reaches into the darkest thing the revived series ever established and finds a way out that costs the character nothing he’d earned. Hurt, Smith and Tennant are a genuinely great triple act, the Zygon plot is thin but functional, and the closing shot of thirteen Doctors and a curator with a very familiar voice is about as good as fan service gets. He spent eight hundred years being the man who burned Gallifrey. He was never that man. He’s just the only one who doesn’t get to know it.