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Friday, December 27, 2013

Doctor Who: Time of the Doctor Review (Spoiler-Free)


Just finished watching Time of the Doctor. I know how the Internet hates spoilers so I'm not going to bother providing spoilery details, just the bits that are already known to everyone:

First things first - it ties up all the loose ends that managed to crop up during Moffat's run, including ones that he accidentally brought up while addressing loose ends from previous showrunners. Off the top of my head, the issue with how many regenerations he's had so far (and yes, he's run out of regenerations by the time he turned into the 11th doctor, as for how he managed to regenerate one more time into Peter Capaldi's doctor - you'll just have to watch), who really blew up the TARDIS, what happened to the cracks, what the Silences really are, and how the doctor died on Trenzalore. There are others, but the resolutions happen so fast that you really need to just watch the special on your own while keeping an open eye.

The Time of the Doctor special actually plays out like your typical Christmas special at first, with the Doctor helping Clara cook Christmas Turkey and pretending to be her boyfriend while wearing hologram clothes that only Clara sees (so technically, clara brought home a naked doctor and presented him as her boyfriend to her parents and grandmum.)



And then there's a town called Christmas, which is surrounded by all the enemies that the doctor has encountered so far - from the Sontarans, to the Weeping Angels, to the Cybermen, the Silence, and of course the Daleks. The severed Cyberman head that the doctor keeps as his company deduces that the planet that Christmas is on, is Gallifrey. And then things start to turn grim.

The Christmas Special stands on its own, with minimal past viewing required but it will help if you're up to date on Moffat and Smith's run, because Time of the Doctor is basically a tying up of loose ends. The previous seasons was Moffat throwing a bunch of marbles on a table, making a beautiful mess out of things - Time of the Doctor is Moffat putting all of those marbles back into the jar, one at a time, all neat and tidy.

Towards the end, we also get a little bit of reunion between the 11th doctor and someone that he lost along the way. It's basically just a hallucination by the doctor, or maybe it's that someone coming back from beyond the veil. We never know.

Watch the episode if you haven't yet. And keep the kleenex handy if you loved the 11th doctor, especially that final bit at the end when the bowtie is finally discarded in favor of a new doctor, one who doesn't know how to pilot the TARDIS yet?

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