War Doctor

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.

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.

The Day of the Doctor: Gallifrey Falls No More