The day of the doctor (50th anniversary special)

(Amazon UK link)

We finished re-watching Doctor Who series 7 around a week ago. It ends with Matt Smith as the 11th doctor seeing the place where he will eventually die, but with no sign of regenerating. That happens before series 8, but in between the two series were a couple of ‘special’ episodes. We saw them in 2016 on a relative’s streaming system in 2016, but I decided to acquire the DVDs after that, as we enjoyed them both and I was pretty sure we would eventually want to re-watch them.

A decade later, we allowed longer than usual and watched ‘The day of the Doctor’, which was broadcast as the 50th anniversary ‘special’. I had forgotten, until we started watching, that it featured not just Matt Smith, but David Tennant who returned specially, as well as Billie Piper.  I had forgotten everything else about it, too…

The episode begins with the Doctor and Clara (Jenna Coleman) having rather an undignified ride over London when the tardis is requisitioned by UNIT, in particular by Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave). She wants them to investigate some 3d paintings which have apparently been vandalised… from inside. 

Then the action switches to Elizabethan England. David Tennant as the 10th doctor is reclining amidst food and flowers with a young Queen Elizabeth… except that he is pretty sure she is a shape-shifting zygon. 

And then we see another doctor, one not seen before, as the ‘war’ doctor (John Hurt). He is about to trigger a terrible weapon which will destroy not just the daleks but the time lords and their planet, Gallifrey, as well. We’ve seen both the 10th and 11th doctors heartbroken at what they did, and now we see the moment when it hasn’t quite happened. Rather bizarrely, Rose Tyler appears as the interface to the weapon, though of course the war doctor, who precedes the 9th doctor, has no idea who she might be.

Then a fission in time allows all three doctors to be together in Elizabethan England, trying to figure out which people are real and which are zygons.  And then they’re back in 2013, in UNIT… the ‘timey-wimey’ aspect of this is all quite confusing, and I’m not sure I entirely made sense of it - if one is supposed to. But although it now bewilders me somewhat, it felt all too real while we were watching.

Alongside the attempt to deal with zygons, and Kate’s determination to blow up the whole of London, there’s the ongoing question about what the war doctor is going to do about destroying Gallifrey. Is it possible to rewrite history…? What is history, anyway, to a time-traveller…?  And if the war doctor decided on a different option, what would happen to the later doctors’ memories….?

These questions are not answered, or even really addressed, and the episode is so well done that they didn’t really occur to me until afterwards. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing three doctors working together, with some banter and debate, and some brilliant ideas that they were able to come up with together. 

Among the many subplots and threads of this episode, there are nods to previous series - including the 20th century earlier ones - and shots of the earlier doctors, too. All of them are shown in the climax to this episode, one that I found surprisingly moving.  And one of them reappears right at the end in a cameo role that tells the 11th doctor something of where his future lies.

There are quite a few extras, and we watched three or four of them. One involves the eighth doctor regenerating into the ‘war’ doctor, so we get to see how his character appears so different from the others. One of the extras went behind the scenes, and we found that quite interesting. I was quite keen, then, to see an extra entitled ‘Doctor Who explained’, but it didn’t actually explain any of the complex time issues. Instead it gave a potted history of the many doctors and their companions, and other details which we were already aware of, presumably for people unfamiliar with the show. We didn’t watch the whole thing as it was quite long.

But overall, we thought it an excellent episode, certainly worthy of the 50th anniversary. Rated PG, unlikely to be of much interest to anyone under the age of at least nine or ten. No 'strong' language or 'adult' content, but there's plenty of tension and stress which might disturb a sensitive child.  

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