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.