There are two episodes fighting inside this one. The first is a piece of housekeeping, a special that has to close the cracks in the wall, the silence that falls, the oldest question, the Papal Mainframe, the regeneration limit, and Trenzalore, all in an hour, most of them plot threads left lying around for three years. The second is a quiet story about an old man who stops running and spends the rest of his life defending a small town because nobody else will, which is about as far from the field of headstones promised in The Name of the Doctor as you could get. The housekeeping is a mess. The old man is one of the best things this programme has ever done.
Everything, all at once
The setup is genuinely absurd in summary. A signal is broadcasting across the universe from a planet nobody can identify, drawing every hostile species in creation into orbit. The planet is Trenzalore, the town is called Christmas, and the signal is coming through a crack in a wall, the same crack from Amy Pond’s bedroom, with the Time Lords on the other side of it asking the oldest question. If the Doctor answers, they come back, and the Time War starts again in the sky above a town of a few hundred people. So he doesn’t answer. And because leaving would let the fleets destroy the town anyway, he stays.
Getting to that premise takes a great deal of explaining, and the special delivers it in lumps. Tasha Lem and the Papal Mainframe arrive largely to set things out, the Silence are revealed to be confessional priests, genetically engineered so you forget your confession, which is a lovely idea introduced far too late to enjoy, and Kovarian’s splinter faction is retroactively blamed for the exploding TARDIS in a couple of lines. A season’s worth of answers gets about eleven minutes. Some of it is genuinely satisfying. The regeneration limit is the big one: the Doctor is out. The War Doctor counts, and the aborted regeneration into a hand back in Journey’s End counts, which quietly makes the Eleventh the thirteenth and final incarnation. That’s a real problem, established in 1976, that the show has been walking towards for years, and the special is right to treat it as a wall rather than a technicality.
The framing device is the special’s oddest misjudgement. It opens on Clara’s family Christmas dinner, with her having invited the Doctor along as a fake boyfriend, and a running gag about both of them being accidentally naked because of the Papal Mainframe’s dress code. It’s broad, it’s fine, and it is sitting directly next to an elegy about a man dying of old age in a besieged town. The special keeps cutting back to the turkey, and every time it does the temperature drops. I suspect the reasoning is that a Christmas special has obligations, and that an hour of unbroken siege would have been unbearable on the day. It’s still a strange thing to put in the same episode.
Nine hundred years
The middle is where it becomes something else. He can’t leave. So he stays, and he ages, and the special does the thing television almost never has the nerve to do: it lets the passage of time actually happen. Clara is sent home, comes back, and centuries have gone. She’s sent home again, comes back, and he’s an old man with a stick. The town, meanwhile, just carries on. He mends toys. He fixes the clock tower. He becomes, over a few hundred years, a fixture, the man who lives up the road and keeps the monsters off, whose job is not saving the universe but keeping one small place going through an endless siege. Matt Smith is superb under the prosthetics, playing a version of this character with all the bounce worn off, and the show is unsentimental about what it costs him: he isn’t noble about it, he’s just too stubborn to go.
The best small thing in the special is Handles, a decapitated Cyberman head he keeps as a companion, who answers questions and reports the weather and eventually stops working, having been repaired past the point of repair. The Doctor talks to it for centuries, and its death is played completely straight, and it’s the moment where you understand exactly how alone he has been. Clara is served better here than the plot suggests, too. Sent away twice and clinging to the outside of the TARDIS to get back, she’s the one who keeps choosing to return to a siege she has no obligation to, and the special is clear that she isn’t there to help him win, because he can’t. She’s there so that he isn’t alone at the end of it. After a season and a half of being a mystery to be solved, it’s a relief to see her written as a person who simply refuses to leave.
The ask
The resolution is the special’s biggest cheat and it is also, I think, defensible. Clara talks to the crack. She doesn’t bargain or threaten, she simply tells the Time Lords, through a hole in a wall, that if they love him they’ll help him. And they do, with a new regeneration cycle poured through the crack as light, which he immediately uses to blow the Dalek fleet out of the sky. As plotting it’s a Time Lord ex machina, and I won’t pretend otherwise. What makes it land is who does the asking. This is the same move that saved him in The Day of the Doctor: the Doctor has spent his life declining to be rescued, and both times the thing that saves him is an ordinary woman making an argument on his behalf that he would never have made himself.
The goodbye
And then four minutes that are as good as this show gets. He’s young again, and confused, and pottering about the TARDIS eating a bowl of custard. He tells Clara that everybody changes, and that the trick is not to mourn the person who’s leaving, because he will always remember when the Doctor was him. The bow tie comes off and falls to the floor. He looks up, and Amy Pond is standing at the top of the steps, because of course she is, because that’s who this Doctor has been since a garden and a crack in a wall and a little girl waiting for a raggedy man who was twelve years late. Raggedy man, goodnight. Then it’s over in a snap rather than a blaze, with no golden light and no drawn-out collapse, just a hard cut to Peter Capaldi with wild eyes shouting about his kidneys. It’s a shockingly abrupt handover after such a slow farewell, and I suspect that’s deliberate: the Eleventh Doctor got his ending, and the Twelfth is not going to be a man who lets you have a moment.
What it leaves behind is a siege instead of an adventure, since he can’t win and can’t leave, so he stays for nine hundred years and mends toys, which is the most unusual thing the show has ever asked of this character. It leaves the regeneration limit honoured, because the War Doctor counts and the hand counts and he’s the thirteenth, and the show treats a rule from 1976 as a real wall. It leaves Handles, a Cyberman head kept as a friend for centuries and repaired until it couldn’t be, the saddest two minutes in the special. It leaves the Silence explained as confessional priests you’re built to forget, a genuinely good idea arriving about two years after it would have been useful. And it leaves “raggedy man, goodnight”, with Amy at the top of the stairs and a bow tie on the floor, the right ending for the right Doctor.
Rating: 3.5/5. A shambles for its first half, cramming three years of loose plot into a corner and resolving the siege with a gift from offstage. But the central idea is bold, the ageing is genuinely moving, Smith’s final scenes are among the best farewell material this programme has ever written, and Handles deserved better than any of us. He stopped running, stayed in one town for nine hundred years, and mended their clocks. Then he took the bow tie off and let a girl he’d waited for say goodnight.