(This article has been modified so that its text will not appear on index pages)
- The Moment, the one weapon so forbidden that the time lords themselves would never use it even in their most desperate moment… Is just a very big bomb. I mean, it happens to be sentient and able to talk you out of using it, which is neat and all, but ultimately, it’s just a galaxy-smashing bomb.
- Sure is a good thing the plot went somewhere else, because there’s no way anyone could come up with the approximate details of a peace treaty between the Zygons and the Humans given that we’re not going to tune in next season and have the Zygons living peacefully on earth be just an ongoing part of the plot and all.
- Closure about the Silence? Who needs it?
- Closure about how the Doctor and Clara got out of his time scar? Who needs it?
- Apparently the Big Game-Changing Secret From the Doctor’s Past now revealed is… Why he married Queen Elizabeth.
- So now, at last, Doctor Who is no longer a show about an aimless wanderer in space in time, but is an ongoing quest to find his long-lost home. Great, because the former was all cliche and the latter has never been done before and totally has the potential to carry the show for another half century.
- I guess that whole “No, I’m not the Doctor any more” thing means “Sometimes I use a gun, though I still act pretty much <b>exactly like The Doctor</b> and everyone calls me “The Doctor” even if I don’t personally use the name.”
- I guess that whole “I’ve tried very hard to forget that life and I never speak of it” means “I treat that previous self with respect and sympathy, and also I pretty much talk about the things I did then all the time.”
- Plot? Who needs a plot. All we need is some high-energy barely-coherent set-pieces and a few minutes of really touching nostalgia.
- Yes, the eleventh doctor is totally the man to say that we absolutely always find another way out instead of sacrificing innocents. After all, he didn’t even pay lip service to even trying to look for another solution for the people trapped in The Intelligence’s cloud back in The Bells of St. John.
- Turns out that if the tenth Doctor were to hear the Warlock mention the Bad Wolf, react with urgent surprise then… Just let it drop and not say or do anything else about it.
- I always wondered if the Time War would be as compelling if we’d seen more of it, rather than just hearing occasional secondhand reports. Now I know.
- Was that really the Doctor? He seemed like such a nice old man.
But seriously. It was fine. Just fine. Okay. A bit better than the second half of season 7 in general.
It wasn’t good enough. This was the 50th anniversary special. This was what we got instead of season 8. It wasn’t good enough. An okay-to-fairly-good episode about the Zygons bolted on to a piece of fanwanky (But visually interesting and emotionally moving) retcon. This wasn’t an epic celebration of fifty years of TV history. This was… Okay I guess. Which is a pretty damning thing to say about it.
(And if it were me, I’d have added a scene of the 8-year-old Doctor looking into the untempered schism and seeing the Bad Wolf to set up the Remaining Nine showing up at the climax.)
That’s nice.
I have to agree about everything you’ve said here, except that I kind of did need just a little closure on the timescar thing. Not technobabble, not some long extended sequence of nonsense, just something to get us from A to B. I guess what’s happened is that she was in it long enough to splinter herself, but not long enough to be unable to be carried out of it completely intact? And, oh, that’s nice, meet my former self I don’t talk about whom you’ve never met for no obvious reason, and now let’s stroll on out? Why even set these things up if you’re just going to walk away from them?
I should maybe clarify that almost everything in that bulleted list was sarcastic. I wanted closure on it too.
DotD was very well-structured as a stand-alone piece of drama, but it had basically balls-all to do with the previous 50 years. Which would be fine for one episode out of a season, but as this is 50% of season 8, and also The Big 50th Anniversary Special, it’s not good enough. It’s, like the title of the next post, like getting a really nice pair of socks as your combined christmas-birthday-anniversary-valentine’s day present.