Well, it’s now been two weeks since we had the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special “The Day of the Doctor”. Back in May, after the end of series 7, I had a go at predicting what this special was going to contain, and other than predicting who the John Hurt Doctor was going to be in regards to the Doctor’s timeline (which, to be fair, wasn’t exactly that hard to figure out), I pretty much got everything else wrong. Which, in a way, was what I wanted. I wanted to be surprised, and indeed I was. (Although I was right in saying that by the end of the episode the Time Lords wouldn’t have been wiped out after all...)
Overall, I thought the episode was OK, if a little slow in places. And we now a new direction for the Doctor to go in, as he knows that Gallifrey, and the Time Lords, haven’t been wiped out, as he goes off in search of them (which, I suspect, will take a while...).
However, I’ve spotted a little bit of a plot hole with this episode. Not a massive one. Not one you could drive a bus through. It’s certainly one that can be written around. But it still feels a little irritating having it there.
In “The Day of the Doctor”, Gallifrey doesn’t get destroyed, but gets hidden away somewhere. Since the start of the revived series, the Doctor believed that the Time Lords had all been wiped out, and he knew this because he would have been able to feel, telepathically, if there were any still alive (with the exception of the Master using the Chameleon Arch to masquerade as a human at the end of the Universe, and possibly any Time Lords going outside of the Universe, such as the Corsair). That would have meant that (apart from these exceptions) every single Time Lord in existence (or, at the very least, every single Time Lord in our Universe) would have had to have been on Gallifrey at that time at the end of the Time War, which feels a little unlikely given that the Time War was fought across time and space. But this situation is not impossible – if it is written around (perhaps all of the Time Lords were recalled to Gallifrey for some reason...).
Secondly, the Daleks were all wiped out after accidentally shooting at each other once Gallifrey disappears. Again, this means that (with a few exceptions) every single Dalek in existence would have had to been attacking Gallifrey at that time at the end of the Time War, without thinking to high-tail it out of there once the planet suddenly vanished. This I find a little harder to explain, although it is not completely impossible.
But, generally, I liked the episode, which will hopefully take the show in an exciting new direction. Of course, coming up at Christmas, we have Matt Smith’s last episode “The Time of the Doctor”, where we will see him regenerate into Peter Capaldi. Which raises another interesting point...
Way back in “The Deadly Assassin” it was established that Time Lords could only regenerate a maximum of twelve times (thus having thirteen incarnations). With John Hurt’s War Doctor, Matt Smith’s Doctor is now the twelfth incarnation of the Doctor. However, it has been argued that David Tennant’s Doctor used up one of his regenerations at the end of “The Stolen Earth” when he semi-regenerated, but didn’t change bodies. This would mean that the Doctor has already used up all of his lives...
But we know for a fact that Capaldi is coming. We’ve always known that Steven Moffat et al were going to eventually have to find a way to break this twelve-regeneration limit. It’s already been established as canon that there is a way around it – in “The Five Doctors”, despite having used all of his lives, the Master was offered a new cycle of regenerations by the Time Lords, and in “Utopia” we saw him regenerate from Derek Jacobi into John Simm, and so he must have got some more regenerations from somewhere. Therefore, in “The Time of the Doctor” I think we’ll get the official explanation as to how the Doctor will be breaking the twelve-regeneration limit.
But that’s as far as I’m going to go with regards to trying to predict the plot of the Christmas special. If I go any further, I’m only likely to get it wrong again! I’m sure Moffat will be surprising us all once more...
Next Week: A Zombie Story...
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