Doctor Who: Things Get Messy

October 1, 2014 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

A caretaker is someone that maintains a particular space and cleans up messes. The Doctor manages to almost spectacularly fail in both of these roles: at least for this episode. For a Time Lord who is excellent at running, he is dismal at hiding for extended periods of time without drawing a great deal of attention. For a Doctor Who episode that is called “The Caretaker,” the events that unfold are the antithesis of that word.

Doctor Caretaker

In fact, it seems as though The Doctor is not the only one good at making messes for the purposes of attempting to fix them. Even as The Doctor — and I use the term lightly — infiltrates Clara Oswald’s school in order to lure an alien weapon called the Skovox into neutralization, Clara herself is on a tight-rope balancing act between not telling The Doctor about her boyfriend Danny Pink and not telling Danny Pink about The Doctor. It’s in this episode in particular that we get to see the complexities of the relationships between these three characters and just how messed up they become, at least initially, when they finally reach a head.

Clara … does not handle this well. For someone who is a Companion to a two thousand year old Time Lord, who has reached the point of opening the TARDIS with a flick of her own fingers, who had her sense of self spread throughout space and time, she comes across as quite immature in dealing with and making sense of romantic and even platonic love relationships. However, I’d like to think that this can be forgiven to some extent as Clara has spent most of her life, with or without The Doctor (if the latter is at all possible) doing other things and not focusing on relationships. She might be an excellent Companion, but as a girlfriend she is still learning. And as a character outside and away from The Doctor she is still growing too.

But The Doctor has far less of an excuse: especially with his hostility towards Danny Pink. I think, however, that Danny Pink opens up another facet to the show and this is the episode, where everyone is stepping on each other’s toes, that he really starts to shine. It’s here, when he finally confronts The Doctor that we learn two things. First, that The War Doctor still exists inside of our favourite Time Lord in a lot of ways and, second, there may be something of a story behind Danny’s hesitancy in talking about his past as a soldier. This man is no Brigadier or Wilfred Mott and The Doctor is not the same being he was before he left Earth in his fateful Eighth incarnation. I will say that the words “soldier” and “officer” come into play and they explain a lot about those two characters.

In a way, the monster in this episode was almost quite incidental and just a plot point to get all three characters truly acquainted. I do find it ironic that The Doctor, who creates an invisibility watch, is really bad at hiding and the mechanism that he wears on his back to deal with the second coming of the creature looks like a Ghostbuster proton-pack. I also think the question, “What’s a policeman without a death-ray?” truly made my day.

It was also fascinating to see this Doctor deal with elements of his past: particularly his reference to River Song (the first time this incarnation ever refers to her), the adoption of his age-old moniker John Smith, and the red herring in the form of an excitable younger man in a bow-tie whom he believes that Clara is in love. Even the title of this episode is a misconception, “The Caretaker” being a word sounding awfully close to Tom Baker’s “Curator,” but The Doctor is a long way from becoming a kindly, sedentary old man. Right now, he can barely even deal with a small child throwing up in his TARDIS.

As a result “The Caretaker” ends up leaving more loose ends than resolutions. We have yet to see the further dynamic between Danny and The Doctor: or just what orders might have been too much for Danny to follow back in the day. And then there is Missy again, and someone else who is working for her in the Promised Land … dealing with the dead.

No matter what you think of this series, I think we can all agree that no matter what this is going to be messy indeed.

Doctor Who And The Misadventures of Team Not Dead

September 22, 2014 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

A team of four amnesiacs: a cantankerous Time Lord, a hapless human, a hacker cyborg, and a shape-shifter walk into the most dangerous bank in the universe …

This is the joke that begins this episode of Doctor Who.

However I would like to point out that while most jokes end with one punchline, “Time Heist” ends with at least two. Imagine some Mission Impossible combined with a bit of the creepiness (though not the gore) of Saw and some Memento for good measure. Then add this concoction to some Doctor Who zaniness that almost always borders a bit on camp or kitsch (the very strange tone that almost turned me off from the series altogether, at the very beginning of my watching experience until I recognized even weirder rhythms and human interactions of the Whoniverse as presented from Davies and onward).

Essentially The Doctor, Clara and their other two companions find themselves trying to rob the Bank of Karabraxos on behalf of a mysterious figure called The Architect after having been exposed to some memory worms. The convolutions and the reversals of fortune (and the re-reversals thereof) throughout the episode were extremely clever and tied back into the nice neat package of a Steve Moffat self-contained episode.

What I mean by that is that, once again, this could have branched out into the overall arc of the series (whatever it is that seems to be happening with Missy, the robots and the Promised Land we keep hearing about) but it doesn’t seem to be the case. In that sense, it’s a lot like “Listen”: in that it begins with something of great import. “Listen” begins with The Doctor becoming fixated on an idea that threatens to become a psychic meme, while “Time Heist” starts with someone actually phoning the TARDIS.

And just how many people are capable of doing that?

This episode definitely caught my interest in wondering who could have phoned The Doctor, who The Architect was, and just what could the only Time Lord in current existence possibly want in the Bank of Karabraxos. I will also say that “Time Heist” plays with the idea of just what a Whovian monster actually is, the various ways in which The Doctor deals with it, how self-hatred and regret can manifest, and the novel way that he handles a conflict that someone might solve differently with a gun.

I definitely appreciated seeing a lot more of The Doctor’s humanity and the fact that, unlike his other recent incarnations, he actually gets angry at people attempting to question him: and he is not above putting them in their place. Sometimes I really like this Doctor when I’m not somewhat cautious or outright want to slap him.

And I hope I don’t spoil too much when I state that, not only is this episode constructed immaculately like the trap that it is, but Team Not Dead succeeds in breaking through it: and definitely lives up to its name. I just hope that Moffat can something similar with the series overall story arc.

So tell me my fellow Whovian watchers, just how long did it take you to figure out this episode’s punchline or two?

Doctor Who: Listen

September 15, 2014 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…”

I find it simply amazing that a Doctor Who episode can begin with a similar creepy premise to Fredric Brown’s short story “Knock” and end with an incredibly heart warming sense of pathos. But what I truly find engaging is the fact that, for the first time in a while, Steven Moffat managed to create a Doctor Who episode whose monster, whose threat, was rather … ambiguous.

I have to admit that I found the last three Doctor Who episodes of this season to be rather heavy-handed at times. In fact, I didn’t think very much about “Listen” from its television preview. I thought it would follow the contrivance of “Robot of Sherwood”: with a new creature and some half-hearted horror resolved within an hour at best.

It should have been clear that something was up when the episode begins and The Doctor just can’t let go of the idea of some ultimate hidden creature. I mean, it could have easily been one of the Silents but that would have, by now, been a familiar, if somewhat forgettable, being. You already have the interplay of some subtle psychological elements: such as The Doctor seeing messages to himself in his own handwriting that he doesn’t remember making and coming to a strange conclusion that the reason people talk to themselves or “misplace things” is because of some hidden shadow that follows them.

This is not some forgettable terror or something at which you shouldn’t blink. You know it’s there and watching you. You also know that if you look at it, it will manifest and have power over you. And it seems to feed off of fear itself. It’s very tempting to say that Moffat follows an age-old rule of horror when he doesn’t, in fact, reveal what the monster looks like and lets us as the audience imagine the worst for ourselves.

But the dark magic involved here is even deeper than that.

The horror in “Listen” is about the things that the characters don’t want to acknowledge. I have to admit that it was refreshing to see Danny Pink finally call Clara out on some of the thoughtless “cheap shots” at his previous life as a soldier, while also having her find out more about his own fears and the motivations that shaped him into the man he is today. And this fear that plagues The Doctor, Pink, Clara and others is often associated with the dark. At the same time, this darkness is a fear of others and loneliness: both with a young Pink alone in his room, the Pink descendant time traveler at the End of the Universe (which was awesome to see again, this time without anyone), and … one other child.

This particular review has been referencing the horror genre quite a bit, but there are two more things that I’d like to add. H.P. Lovecraft liked to say that humanity’s oldest fear is that of the unknown. However Clive Barker, in his own horror writing, seems to posit that what we fear is also what we desire. I don’t want to give any further spoilers as to what The Doctor and his Companion find in this particular adventure, but it is notable that The Doctor, who is always running, tends to also run towards those things that are frightening — that he is ultimately afraid of — and that at when he faced down that hatch door opening at the End of the Universe he very much wanted to see what, if anything, lay beyond it.

It was immaculately done. At the end of the episode you wonder if the monster, if there ever was one, was just a figment of everyone’s imagination. Perhaps someone did pull a prank on the young boy who would become Danny Pink. Maybe The Doctor did write those messages to himself while still adjusting to who he is. Perhaps the stranded time traveler Pink was going insane from isolation and had to believe he wasn’t alone at the End of the Universe: those messages to himself to keep from suicide.

It might all just be coincidence?

Maybe all everyone in that episode needed to do was simply listen, to pay attention, to what was actually being said to them. The footsteps that never pass your own could be the decisions of your ancestor, the shadow of your past, or even the trepidation of a life not yet lived: or soon to be lived when you place time-traveling into the equation. And then there is the possibility that the monster, the fear, is just hope that you didn’t listen to properly the first time around.

It’s easy to forget, much in the way that you would encounter a Silent, that Steven Moffat — for all his other faults — is a master of the short episode. We get reminded that there’s so much about The Doctor we still don’t know. We get reminded just how dark Doctor Who can get. But at the same time not only do we see just how far Clara and the TARDIS will go to save their Doctor, but just how much more opportunity we have to learn something new about characters that we thought were long established: that the unknown is both terrifying and fascinating to that regard. I only hope that “Listen” is telling us that this will be the turning point to episodes and an arc of a similar nature.

Doctor Who: Robs From The Rich and Gives With A Spoon

September 15, 2014 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

At the end of “Deep Breath” The Doctor tells Clara that he’s made many mistakes and that it’s time for him to “do something about it.”

I’m just wondering when he’s figuring on doing that.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I understand that in “Deep Breath” he had to get something of his bearings back from his recent Regeneration and forgetting how to pilot the TARDIS. And while I do wonder what he was up to before encountering the Dalek “Rusty” in “Into the Dalek,” to me the episode made sense as it gave him, and the rest of us, some potential further insight into the arch-nemeses of The Doctor.

But then we have “Robot of Sherwood.”

In my last two reviews I mentioned how Doctor Who seemed to be distancing itself from the fairy-tale atmosphere of the latter stages of the Eleventh Doctor’s run and going right back into horror, folklore, and dark science-fiction. Even so, there are aspects of this episode that are really fascinating to look at when you compare Robin Hood to The Doctor. For a Time Lord who has some mistakes to do something about, he sure has time to go on some “side-quests”, or rather “requests”, from his Companion Clara Oswin Oswald. I also find it as hilarious as Clara does that The Doctor believed Robin Hood to be merely a legend: especially when you consider that this sentiment is coming from the Oncoming Storm himself.

There was something really lampoonish and almost satirical about how Robin Hood and, as Clara calls them, his band of “Merry Men.” Here are these swashbuckling and larger than life outlaw heroes that, as the old story goes, “rob from the rich and give to the poor.” But the way that they’re portrayed in the episode — as flat and almost two-dimensional caricatures — makes them out to be people that are “too good to be true” all the way to the point where you can almost believe, like The Doctor, that this is going to go to the “actually a robot” trope: something that does tend to happen a lot in science-fiction and, really, Doctor Who itself.

Still, it is interesting to contrast Robin Hood with The Doctor as he is now. Whereas previously The Doctor himself is a swashbuckling larger than life character himself — especially in latter years as the Tenth Doctor — the Twelfth Doctor seems to be far more cynical. He likes to poke and prod at phenomenon that he has never seen before, and is far less trusting of the process. In fact, it seems as though his discomfort with soldiers is even more amplified when it comes to those that seem to be heroes. Of course, it’s pretty clear that the main reason The Doctor is particularly uncomfortable with heroes (who may or may not exist) is because of his own experiences. Even at his most heroic, The Doctor has never been comfortable in the role of hero and never seems to want to acknowledge this.

But unlike a few of his other incarnations, he doesn’t just shrug off the presence of heroism or acknowledge it in any one other than himself. As the Twelfth Doctor, and when he isn’t sulking like a spoiled child, we see him literally analyzing and becoming critical of the hero: not just in what may or may not be Robin Hood, but the archetype of heroism itself. It is a somewhat heavy-handed reminder to the audience that The Doctor may not be that striking heroic figure that we have been blessed with these past couple of seasons. At the same time however, that question is still in doubt: especially when Robin Hood, having talked with Clara at length, makes The Doctor realize that Clara thinks of him as her hero.

Really, this whole episode just brings a lot more uncertainty as to where this Doctor is going. I mean, in addition to “doing something about his mistakes,” he also has to find Gallifrey at some point: his home world that still lives if “The Day of The Doctor” and “The Time of The Doctor” are of any indication.

There are some other fascinating elements in this episode. For instance, we have more robots — this time in medieval aesthetics — seeking their “Promised Land” when not helping the Sheriff of Nottingham. It makes me wonder if the “Heaven” of Missy is the same place as this “Promised Land” and just why the robots have been introduced twice in three episodes. It’s also good to see Clara developing more as a character in her own right and calling people on their nonsense as opposed to someone who is “born to save The Doctor.” But when all this is said and done, I will add this. Even though the element of Robin Hood and his Merry Men was a red herring, I like how The Doctor still has elements of ridiculousness, albeit with something of a nasty streak.

He should really make it part of his new catch-phrase.

Or perhaps the Twelfth Doctor should moonlight as a Ginosaji.

Or maybe he was just trying to demonstrate to Robin Hood that a spoon full of sugar really does help the medicine go down.

It’s all right. I’m done. For now.

Doctor Who: A Deep Breath Against Uncertainty

August 25, 2014 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Do you happen to know how to fly this thing?

This was the question posed to us at the end of the last season of Doctor Who. It might as well be the quintessential Whovian question directed towards both The Doctor and the writers of the show. The program itself always explores what it is, always changing, while at the same time attempting to keep the core of itself the same. After watching “Deep Breath,” the first episode of Season Eight, this weekend I realize there are a lot of ways you can look at it.

A little while ago, I was examining the different eras of Doctor Who and comparing them to the Ages in comics. I had a theory that, after “Time of The Doctor,” we would be moving past the dark angst-ridden era of Doctor Who revisionism begun by Russell T. Davies and into a reconstructionist phase: a place where everything went back to basics with a modern sense of storytelling. I actually thought the presence of Tom Baker in “The Day of The Doctor” hinted on a season that was a return to wonder and adventuring. I thought, with the rescue and quest to find Gallifrey, that the darkness would finally be banished or at least heavily minimized.

Of course, I was very wrong.

You see, I forgot something when making these comparisons. I forgot about the so-called “Golden Age” of Doctor Who. Just like the Golden Age of comics, those early adventures could be dangerous, sinister, and downright creepy. And The Doctor himself was not always a trustworthy Time Lord and you always had to kind of watch your back around him. If the Eleventh Doctor’s run felt like witnessing a fairytale, then it really seems like the Twelfth Doctor is a throwback to the terror of the original: like the ancient cautionary folktales of old attempting eat their sanitized offspring … only far grittier and even more discomfiting.

“Deep Breath” is almost a warning to the audience. It starts off with a dinosaur running amok in Victorian England and spitting out the TARDIS that Peter Capaldi’s Doctor hasn’t yet learned to fly. You have the Paternoster Gang: complete with the Silurian detective Madame Vastra, her wife and maid Jenny, and good Sontaran Strax. It seems to begin like any strange wild, wacky Doctor Who adventure.

It’s not.

It’s no surprise that The Doctor is confused and disoriented in his new Regeneration. We’ve seen him deal with similar situations in the past. But this time, when you consider how he was an old man in “Day of The Doctor” and all the other events he survived, watching him attempt to remember things and fail is actually quite unsettling. The part where the Gang brings him to a bedroom at Vastra’s home really stands out at me as he was actually terrified of being in a small enclosed space that was small on the inside and separated by different rooms. He just couldn’t understand it and, if your last memories are of being in something like the TARDIS, this disorientation — along with his Time Lord conception of space and time around him — makes a fair amount of sense.

I think it was actually hard for me to watch Clara deal with this. She is watching her best friend, who she doesn’t even recognize any more, suffer from what looks like dementia. This new man is not The Doctor that she loves and it takes her a while to admit that to herself.

It takes Madame Vastra, with Jenny to moderate her patience, to make Clara face this. The Silurian makes a very fascinating point about how The Doctor’s previous Regeneration — if not the other two before it — were attempts to fit in among humankind: almost like a veil. For me as a fan, I was both sympathetic to Clara — as she was very much in love with the Eleventh Doctor — but just as annoyed with her too as Vastra was: though for a different reason. In the previous story arc it was very clear that Clara jumped into The Doctor’s timestream and created different versions of herself throughout his various timelines. While I’m not sure how extensive her memories are of her other scattered selves, the fact is she has seen him in all of his incarnations. Even in “Day of The Doctor” she met the Tenth Doctor and The War Doctor. She knew he could change and that he had been different people. But suppose what we are seeing here is the loss of her Doctor and her process of having to accept this.

Meanwhile, The Doctor himself is trying to get used to the person he has become: or rather becoming the person that he now is. Even though some of his traits are familiar, such as his need to talk to the point of babbling and getting lost in his own thoughts, his anger is much more apparent now. After running away from Vastra’s house, he calls everyone around him “pudding heads” and promptly dives into a river. At one point, when he demanded a man’s coat I was genuinely concerned that this person — whom many of us saw as a hero — was going to attack and rob some poor, scared drunk old man.

And then there was the part in the show when he seems to actually abandon Clara to their enemies.

I have to admit: even though I’d had some impatience with Clara before, and on some level I knew he wouldn’t just leave her I … actually wondered. Clara’s shock and grief were very clear and a part of me hoped that when she got out of her predicament, she’d get the chance to outright slap him.

That all said, I really loved the monsters in this episode. They were essentially Clockwork droids that had crash landed on Earth ages ago and used human flesh and organs as spare parts to keep them going. They mostly reacted to humans, but there is something very grisly about watching them move around jerkily wearing motley suits in various stages of decorum and decay. Basically, they are from the sister ship to the SS Madame de Pompadour and wear human skin. It’s even at a point where they have absorbed so much human matter that they believe they are attempting to rebuild their ship and find a “promised land.”

The fact that a “repaired escape-pod” of theirs utilizes a hot-air balloon made of human skin really tells you a lot about the spirit of this episode right there.

What I find fascinating is the clockwork element in this episode and potentially others. The introduction sequence is composed of a collection of synchronized golden-worked gears. At one point I was under the impression that Steven Moffat was attempting to sabotage the Miltonian clockwork perfect universe of Russell T. Davies by creating his “tears in space and time,” but it looks like I was wrong again. In fact, there is a very steampunk look to this episode: even and especially when you look at The Doctor’s new suit with its white shirt, black coat and red in-lining the very end.

I think that, for me, this episode actually — for the first time — made me afraid of Doctor Who. The monsters were genuinely disturbing. The Doctor himself seemed to display more anger, ruthlessness, and a lack of dependability hearkening back to the First. And there was one time I wondered if the Gang was going to survive.

I wondered if The Doctor was even going to come back for Clara: and that sense of abandonment of her and our expectations was a horror far more terrible than any human-harvesting robots.

This isn’t even mentioning the ad in the paper that brought Clara and The Doctor back together, or why The Doctor’s new face seems so familiar to him. There are some hints that go back to previous episodes on those little details alone. And then there is the presence of a mysterious woman named Missy at the very end of the episode.

It’s funny. When Doctor Who began in 1963, it was meant to be a children’s show. At the same time, however, the monsters were always meant to be terrifying and the adventures truly harrowing even as it was clear that The Doctor himself wasn’t necessarily meant to be a hero. In fact, his new musical theme such as it is — sounding like a wind raking the night with a hard cold edge — is something I still need to get used to.

So where might this all be going? Does Steven Moffat know how to fly this thing? In the past, the shaky episodes and moments of questionable continuity have made me wonder. But if “Deep Breath” is any indication of what we might expect in the future, we might be looking a season that isn’t going to pull any punches.

Because there is a difference between personal angst and dark speculative fiction, and while we might have moved past the former there is still a whole wide multiverse of uncanny adventure for which to look forward.

My Impossible Girl. Thank You, And Goodbye: Jenna-Louise Coleman To Leave Doctor Who?

August 18, 2014 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

According to an article for Mirror written by Simon Boyle, the actress playing Clara Oswin Oswald will exeunt from The Doctor’s time-stream after one last role in a Christmas Special. If true, it wouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. Aside from the fact that there have been rumours of Coleman’s leave-taking for some time, it already seems clear that Clara’s relationship with the Twelfth Doctor will be much different from the one she had with Matt Smith’s Eleventh.

Gone will be the flirting and skirting around the edges of mutual affection. Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, we are told, will be more random, cantankerous, and far less patient and open about his priorities. Still, for me personally it rankles a bit. I have a confession to make. The truth is, I didn’t really like Matt Smith’s Doctor completely. I mean, he wasn’t a bad Doctor and he definitely had his moments. I suppose I truly appreciated Christopher Eccleston and, of course, the epic David Tennant. And I will also admit to you that I have something of a romantic streak and I really appreciated the relationships that Nine and Ten had with Rose Tyler. Back when the Time Lords were extinct and he only had so many lives left to him, I felt for him and hoped that he would find companionship with what time he had left. There was this great dichotomy of his physical age not matching his chronological or even intellectual capacity.

For me, Clara Oswin Oswald was built up to be this great mystery and in the beginning a very compelling and strong character. I admit I was fan-shipping them. I won’t lie: there was an excellent parallel between Clara existing in different historical eras and The Doctor traveling throughout all of them. I actually wanted to believe that she could have been that Companion that not only had the romantic love that Rose did, but could have been the first one that The Doctor actually consummated a relationship with. It’s true that he has had other romantic relationships, such as the one he had with River Song, but his relationships with his Companions have always been different. I personally hoped that with Clara there would be that interlap and, for the first time the man who was never involved with his Companions in that way, might have truly found something else in his Impossible Girl.

I know many Whovians would like The Doctor to keep his other relationships separate from those that he has with his Companions or, indeed, not have any relationships but Platonic and asexual associations but there were so many hints, or I believed there to be some, that Clara — who has been in his time-stream and seen all of him — might have stayed much longer and created a different dynamic.

I also admit that while I’ve had issues with Steve Moffat’s writing style and how he portrays relationships, but at least this would hopefully not be like an otherwise brilliant writer such as Russell T. Davies and the cop out that was Rose Tyler and the Meta-Crisis Doctor. I do find it odd that someone who has been that close to him, indeed knowing him his entire lives, would just leave him. But, nevertheless, the prospect of seeing just what happens to Clara intrigues me and though whether or not we will all get to see Jenna-Louise Coleman’s final performance as The Doctor’s Companion some Christmas soon — or if this is just more conjecture and rumour — remains yet to be seen.

I Don’t Want to Go: An Adventure in Space and Time

December 2, 2013 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

There will be spoilers.

While Doctor Who has always been about traveling through time, it’s in Mark Gatniss’ docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time that we find ourselves at the point where it all began.

But just like the program itself, An Adventure in Space and Time neither begins nor continues in a completely linear fashion. The film starts off with William Hartnell, played by David Bradley, contemplating a blue police box in front of him, in his car in the night as a policeman asks him what he’s doing there. Hartnell looks far and away as the events of the film, from 1966 to 1963 and back again, unfold on the original TARDIS console’s counter display.

Before watching this docudrama, I didn’t know much about how Doctor Who was made beyond some very superficial details. We see Verity Lambert attempt to function, and gain recognition as a producer in an “old-boys’ dominated field. She finds solidarity with the British-Indian director Waris Hussein as he faces a background of racial discrimination. I will also admit that I did wonder why BBC executive producer Sydney Newman didn’t have a British accent and seemed to sound more American than anything else, until I realized at the end of the movie that he came from Canada.

It was also very fascinating to watch the development of Doctor Who: from the rudimentary production arrangements, the pioneering of certain forms of cameras to deal with the program, and all that difference between a character called “Dr. Who” and The Doctor. “Dr. Who” is a character that Newman envisions, and Lambert and Hussein sell to William Hartnell who is tired of playing soldier and “tough-guy” roles but he is not The Doctor as of yet.

As for William Hartnell himself, he is portrayed as both a cantankerous old man with a bit of a temper and a lack of patience towards stagehands and, at one point his own granddaughter, but at the same time he is a friend to his co-actors, emotionally attached to Verity Lambert, and always seeking the role of the old man with the twinkle in his eye.

His “Dr. Who” is at first gruff and cold to a point where it both bothers Newman and himself. Perhaps some of this dissatisfaction comes initially from his hesitation in attempting to portray a children’s show’s protagonist. After a career of playing soldiers and authorities, attempting to become a children’s hero might have seemed a considerable stretch to him. Yet An Adventure in Space and Time makes it more than that. It shows a man in poor health, in his mid-fifties wanting to do something more and different, to no longer be type-cast while at the same time trying to keep up with a hectic television actor’s schedule and his own professional standards. For instance, it really bothers Hartnell that the scenery of the TARDIS doesn’t even exist yet when he is rehearsing his lines in the studio and it takes a special kind of iron-willed effort on Verity Lambert’s part to make sure that the TARDIS and its console room happens.

But once the console room happens, we see that transition from “Dr. Who” into The Doctor, even if the producers and staff still refer to him as the former. I will admit it is still hard for me at times to look at David Bradley as William Hartnell, or at least with regards to his voice as the First Doctor. Hartnell has a higher voice that, while deep, has a trill at the end of his sentences that Bradley doesn’t seem to master. It could also be, based on what is left of the First Doctor’s episodes that his put-on voice sounds different on the audio at the time. It might also be that David Bradley’s previous roles like Argus Filch from Harry Potter and Walder Frey in Game of Thrones has biased me against him. However, what he may not completely capture in sound, he definitely expresses in spirit and presence. I suppose the difficulty here, at least for me, is that you have to remember that this is the story of the program’s production and William Hartnell’s role in it. This is the story of Doctor Who, not just William Hartnell, nor the character of The Doctor.

Nevertheless, the docudrama makes it abundantly clear just how close this whole argument came to becoming a moot point. From the bad conditions of their studio and its sprinkler system, to a lack of scenery, as well as Lambert’s authority being questioned and challenged, their first episode airing on the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and even Newman’s old insistence that Doctor Who be a show without “robots or bug-eyed monsters,” there were many instances where this program could have ended after the very first episode: becoming just another obscure, failed, black and white science-fiction oddity.

As the film progresses, we also get to see the development of the early Doctor Who fandom and Hartnell’s growing love for being The Doctor. He even interacts with children in the role off-screen and seems to enjoy it. But this docudrama is not ordinary. It isn’t linear or solely based in reality as we know it. Before it becomes too prosaic, there are at least three moments that hit me directly in the heart as a Doctor Who fan and went beyond my expectations. The first is that point when, after Hartnell is told about the concept of Regeneration (making so that, indeed, no one is irreplaceable and completing the idea of The Doctor as opposed to “Dr. Who”) he breaks down and begins to cry, saying, “I don’t want to go.” It makes me honestly wonder if Hartnell actually said this in real life and if in 2010 one Russell T. Davies wrote it into “The End of Time” for one David Tennant.

The second moment that got me was the realization that Hartnell actually knew, perhaps more than the new generation of production crewmen and staff, how to make the prop of the TARDIS console work. And then, there was the last moment which I am not going to spoil. You should definitely watch this film. I will say, however, that in that one fourth-wall breaking moment at the end Hartnell realizes that The Doctor will continue long after his successor Patrick Troughton and that even though it is fan-service, it’s fan-service of the most beautiful kind.

Not too long ago, in “The Day of the Doctor” we Whovians discovered the existence of an incarnation of The Doctor that sacrificed his name to become a soldier. Two days before the 50th Anniversary episode we are reintroduced to a man who was tired of playing soldiers and wanted to portray something different, to a show that became something more and with many great people behind it created a legacy, one that doesn’t want to go, and one that is still with us even now.

CORRECTION: John F. Kennedy’s assassination happened one day before “An Unearthly Child” premiered, not on the same day.

Everybody Lives: A Review of The Day of The Doctor

November 25, 2013 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I am going to quote River Song again when I say, “Spoilers.”

So for those of you who haven’t put on your Tenth Doctor’s 3D glasses this weekend or this coming week please don’t read any further.

Before The Day, there was The Night, and then Last Day. I am time-stamped on G33kpr0n in What Will Happen on The Day of The Doctor? as stating that it is quite impossible to predict a Doctor Who episode, never mind the 50th Anniversary Special. But I did make a few theories, just as I did in What Is a Doctor and When Does He Stop Running? in my Mythic Bios Blog.

I am not upset that my possible theories were wrong, not really. I went into watching “The Day of The Doctor,” on Space at 2:50 pm with no other expectations save for the fact that we were going to see how Gallifrey died. I mean, this is what we’ve been told since 2005. Gallifrey is no more. Gallifrey falls. The Doctor is the last of his kind and he keeps losing his Companions over and again. As the last of the Time Lords, The Doctor is alone. From 2005 to the present, this is the story that we have been told and that we have seen play out time and again. But just as we all had our theories about how this would all go down, there was what we thought and then there was what happened, what will happen, or what is happening right now to those of you watching this for the first time.

The episode begins with the original 1963 Doctor Who introduction sequence, complete in black and white, and so close to the junkyard owned by one I.M. Foreman where the adventures of The Doctor began. After Clara leaves from her new work at a school, where The Doctor’s first Companions may have once taught his granddaughter, to go see him and U.N.I.T. is in so much of a rush to get The Doctor to help him that they basically tow away him and his TARDIS by helicopter, The Doctor finds his past catching up with him.

U.N.I.T., led by the Brigadier’s daughter Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, brings The Doctor to their Under-Gallery, where Queen Elizabeth the First placed all paintings deemed “not fit for public consumption” to see a sample of Time Lord-painting. This painting is a depiction of the last day of The Last Great Time War and the fall of Gallifrey’s second city Arcadia. Suddenly, The Doctor remembers that incarnation of himself that he doesn’t like to think about, the one he and Clara saw again in “The Name of The Doctor” when he crossed into his own time stream. We are treated to a look at the three-dimensional painting, which is bigger on the inside, of a golden, blood-red ravaged Gallifrey…

And then we are right in the War.

Murray Gold’s “The Dark and Endless Dalek Night” plays grandiose and horrifying in the background as Dalek saucers and Time Lord defences battle it out. But we see something new on Gallifrey’s surface. In “The End of Time,” all we saw was the Time Lord High Council in fascist red and gold proclaiming what would be the Ultimate Sanction, or the obliteration of the universe to assure their ascension as beings of pure consciousness. The Doctor made it clear that the Time Lords had been completely corrupted and irredeemable by battle lust and war. I mean, think about for a few moments. Imagine a whole people that can Regenerate and manipulate the laws of Time itself. Now think about Rassilon, the founder of Time Lord society and the inventor of much of their technology, removing the thirteen Regeneration limit and with modified Battle TARDISes dying over and over again. The Time Lords and, by extension, Gallifrey were basically deemed as bad as the Daleks and this was the reason for The Doctor’s terrible decision. This was the reason he used The Moment to destroy all of them.

In my own Mythic Bios article, I saw it as an act of euthanasia, of basically putting an entire people that had gone rabid with a hunger for power to sleep out of mercy for them and the Universe. I saw it as a hard, but necessary thing. But we had hints that just as the Time Lords had done terrible things, they also weren’t all monsters even at this point in this game. Look at the mini-episode “The Last Day” for instance. Those soldiers were just people. They were just trying to defend their home. You see from the perspective of a Gallifreyan or Time Lord soldier another giving you a helmet and he has this look of empathy and shared suffering on his face. This is not a madman or a monster. They are the front-line that has to defend their home and their families.

Yes, Time Lord society has families. Despite earlier versions of the Doctor Who mythos where Time Lords were Loomed or artificially woven and grown into existence, Time Lords and Gallifreyans have parents … and children. And this is where the episode punches you in the stomach. You assume that all the Time Lords were engineered adults, even if they were once children. I even had the belief that an elder race like the Time Lords would have few, if any children at this stage in their evolution. But you see them. You see the Gallifreyan children cowering with their protective and very terrified parents. All of that over-exaggerated Gallifreyan fashion that we have seen over the years is tattered and clothing essentially war refugees that die by Dalek and friendly-fire. It is truly awful and perhaps that is the reason why Moffat does not show gratuitous Regeneration scenes. First of all, I am pretty sure that the Daleks could have replicated something like staser fire, one of the few weapons that can kill Time Lords instantly, and second of all it illustrates that there are no take backs in war where innocents die.

Then we see The Doctor, The War Doctor, who has frankly become my favourite. He is a worn, haunted, sad old man who has seen and dealt more death than any self-conscious being ever need to. Even as he rescues some refugees by having the TARDIS smash into some Daleks, he uses a gun to carve the words “No more” into a wall. It is as though he is writing his own name as the artist of the Time Lord painting we see from Doctor Eleven’s perspective. He might as well be.

After some very concerned Time Lord soldiers, who are fed up with the High Council for doing essentially nothing (which is another indication that not all Time Lords were aware of, or even agreed with the Ultimate Sanction) realize that The Doctor has stolen the most powerful super weapon in existence we think we know where this is going. It is The Moment.

We find The Doctor in an isolated spot, having left his TARDIS miles away, either because she won’t have to see him detonate the device or watch him die. Despite the lack of hope in his eyes and his weathered, unkempt face he is still The Doctor. He is tinkering with The Moment and trying to puzzle it out like he does any other toy he comes across.

And then we see Rose.

No. We actually see The Moment, as the device’s sentient program, taking on Rose’s Bad Wolf incarnation and deciding to make The Doctor fully aware of the consequences of what he intends to do. She is beautiful and golden in the feral way that her moniker suggests. The Moment has taken the image of someone from The Doctor’s past, or future, to attempt to relate to him. It is her that confronts him about the children. And you can see in his eyes even before he says anything that he intends to die with The War. It makes too much sense. After all the horror and the loss even later in his life, it is a miracle that The Doctor has never committed suicide. But The Moment, Bad Wolf, or Rose will not make it that easy for him. For some reason, The Moment has decided to make him face his decisions and his future by opening warps through the War’s time lock. Talk about an excellent piece of Ancient Time Lord technology huh?

These warps are how Doctor Eleven, Ten, and The War Doctor end up meeting in 1562 England. Despite the grimness of everything I’ve described so far, there is your typical Doctor Who silliness. Doctor Ten continuously mistakes Elizabeth the First as being a shape-shifting Zygon imposter (I’m thinking his shape shifter device kept getting confused by his own energy), while Doctor Eleven threw a fez through two of the warps that brought them all together. Even The War Doctor is exasperated by these younger, future versions of himself. In the scene where he meets them for the first time, convinced by The Moment to talk with his future selves, he actually mistakes them for The Doctor’s Companions. At first, I thought he was totally messing around with them, asking for The Doctor and calling them Companions until I began to realize that he genuinely didn’t know.

I will say that at this point in the venture, I thought Eleven would react much more angrily to The War Doctor given his denunciation of him in “The Name of The Doctor.” But he and Doctor Ten just seemed shocked. And after they are captured by Elizabeth’s guards, seemingly under the Zygon imposter’s command we see them pretty much face each other down. The War Doctor asks them if they ever thought about how many children there were on Gallifrey. There is another punch in the stomach for everyone in the audience. But whereas Doctor Ten does, in fact remember, Doctor Eleven claims not to and there is this very real, very angry moment between him and Ten about how he could “move past” something of that kind. Basically, even in a jail cell The Doctor is still running from his past and what he did that one time during The Time War. Meanwhile The Moment, who is still Rose and can only be seen by The War Doctor, is feeding him lines and asking him to consider matters. I was thinking about all those Doctor/Rose fan-shippers that were crying inside about how close this approximation of Rose was to Doctor Ten and Eleven, and yet so far away.

Then each of them is led by The Moment, through The War Doctor, to realize that despite the different appearances of their sonic screwdrivers they all still have the same software. They are about to use them to break out when Clara, who the Zygons underestimated rather stupidly, just opens the unlocked door. Yes, all three Doctors are that absent-minded: constantly searching for complex solutions, when the answer is right in front of them. It happens to us all. But then what seems to be the Elizabeth imposter leads them out to show them how the Zygons are planning to conquer Earth. With their homeworld having been destroyed in the beginnings of the Time War, the Zygons somehow reverse-engineered Time Lord art technology (perhaps through the presence of the Time War painting that is somehow at some point in Elizabethan England) send themselves into other paintings to release themselves in Earth’s future. All of these events are components to another, greater Moment that comes up very soon.

So after realizing that Elizabeth I is the real one pretending to be her imposter (that she stabbed to death in the forest) and her impromptu wedding with Doctor Ten, all three Doctors come into the TARDIS and find a way to go back to 2013 into a “TARDIS-proofed” U.N.I.T. Black Tower and stop the mutually-assured destruction of London situation happening between the Zygon infiltrators and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. It is here that we see Doctors Ten and Eleven taking their regret over what happened in The Time War and using it and craftiness to get both sides to agree to peace-talks. Clara then has some alone time with The War Doctor, a far cry from the young energetic man she has been travelling with and says that his eyes “look young” while those of his counterparts look so terribly old.

It is here that The War Doctor comes to his decision. He realizes that his “necessary mistake” in destroying Gallifrey is the only way to get his future incarnations to “grow-up” into the people that they have become. He plans to be the force that they learn from. And I know that I, as part of the audience watching this commercial-less simulcast, braced for what was going to come.

But even though this was not a Christmas Special, a 50th Anniversary counts for something. Even as The Moment makes him pause again, the other two Doctors with Clara in tow come to where he is now. It is heartbreaking to see The War Doctor want them to leave him so that he can do what he, albeit doubtfully now, still believes is necessary and Regenerate alone. But they accept that he is a part of them, after denying his memory for so long and they are all about to activate The Moment’s Big Red Button when…

Clara comes in and reminds The Doctor why he named himself The Doctor. The Moment too takes the opportunity to show all of them Gallifrey’s families and children. There have so far been two reoccurring themes in this episode. The first part of the episode starts at a school house with children in an English public school with its old private-school trappings. It is not unlike the Time Lord Academy in which The Doctor and so many others grew up. We see the children in the War. We see them at play in the sunlight of The War Doctor’s dusty memories. And then we see them hanging up colourful ribbons and streamers despite the destruction around them. We see something that we have not seen so far in this whole episode.

We see hope.

We also see women. It is no original idea or trope for a female archetype to be the helper or saviour of a male character. The Moment does everything she can to lead The Doctor to an informed decision not determined by despair. Clara reminds The Doctor of his purpose and is always his Companion. Elizabeth the First flat out states that arrogance typifies all men. Even the TARDIS, Sexy, won’t leave The Doctor in any incarnation. She even smashed down some Daleks like a Battle TARDIS. Where The Doctors act, these characters ask and question. And yes, they help save The Doctor from the spiritual damnation we’ve seen him struggle with since 2005.

In them, we see life.

And then a potential catastrophe becomes a eucastrophe: a happy-ending.

Between the three Doctors and all of their other incarnations–including the Thirteenth Doctor–they use the time-freezing technology used by the Zygons–the “cup of soups”–to capture Gallifrey and deposit it into another pocket universe.

In this way, it looks like Gallifrey is destroyed along with the Daleks. But Gallifrey is not destroyed. Through loops and contradictions and layers of Space and Time Gallifrey doesn’t rise, or fall, or die. It lives.

In the words of the Ninth Doctor, “everybody lives.”

The ages-old and weary War Doctor leaves, finally at peace and although his later incarnations lose all memory of this crossover event, he Regenerates. We don’t see Doctor Nine, which is a little disappointing, but this is not unexpected. Ten also leaves knowing that he will not remember, but stating that they need a new destination aside from the doom of Trenzalore. But Doctor Eleven remembers.

I am almost finished. Like a TARDIS, this 50th Anniversary Special is “bigger on the inside.” As Doctor Eleven wonders if they succeeded in saving Gallifrey, and ponders embracing Elizabeth’s role to him as the curator of the Under-Gallery he … meets or reacquaints himself with someone. At first, I wondered how this was possible and who the elderly Curator could possibly be. But after re-watching the episode to write this review, I realized that The Doctor can actually decide what face he takes on in his Regenerations. He can even take on old faces.

So when an elderly Tom Baker all but confirms that Gallifrey is saved and that the painting in front of them is called Gallifrey Falls No More. It is left ambiguous as to whether or not The Curator is a future version of The Doctor, or a possibility, or someone else entirely. Ending the episode with that gentle, wise lighthearted moment, with a potential Doctor without bitterness and regret and filled only with a kindly acceptance, changed the whole tone of the series in that one moment. And Doctor Eleven taking his place alongside his other incarnations with the First Doctor standing in back of them with his arms crossed is positively inspiring.

There is so much I know I’ve missed in this review and I have tried to capture all of it in something like a Time Lord-painting. There are those who would say that this whole Special was a cop-out: that it negated all of The Doctor’s experiences and that it leaves plot holes and weaves itself with clichés. But I think that now, this Special leaves a whole other level of possibility and paths yet to travel. I asked a question in the title of my Mythic Bios post. I asked “When does The Doctor stop running?”

The answer is that he doesn’t. The Doctor will never stop running. It is his nature to run. But he has changed. Because now, for the first time in ages The Doctor won’t be running from something. Rather, The Doctor will be running to his destination, to his end and Gallifrey and all the possibilities beyond it. Everybody lives, gentlebeings and now perhaps we can see The Doctor do that as well. Perhaps we can now see him truly live.

What Will Happen on The Day of The Doctor?

November 22, 2013 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

This article and its contents will be time-stamped, but they certainly won’t be time locked … whatever that means anymore.

So in the immortal words of River Song, “Spoilers.”

After May 18, 2013 there was, if you will pardon the pun, a large moment of silence. Then, on September 28 after “The Name,” there was a name. For a while, after that, there were murmurs until, on October 19 Time itself became suspended as though holding its breath in a debris of lives and, from a mountaintop a green-hued sonic screwdriver is pointed at the skies. And like a released elastic band, Time speeds up on November 9 and war and chaos come spiraling towards us with the “premonitions” that a soldier claims do not exist. But I am getting ahead of myself because, before that on the same day, there is one more moment of silence before a plunge into the epic music and story of a man known to his foes as the Oncoming Storm.

And then we go back. Yes, we shall go back. We go back to November 14 from a countdown of Eleven, Ten, Nine until Eight on The Night of The Doctor when we see the fateful decision that forever shapes the numbers that come after. And just when we think it’s over, just when we think that perhaps we will only see fragments of a war and nothing beyond what will be seen, on November 20th we witnessed The Last Day of the Time Lords.

These are the main trailers and mini-episodes leading up to the 50th Anniversary Doctor Who episode “The Day of The Doctor.” So as “The Day of The Doctor” awaits us tomorrow on cable, in movie theatres and even on its own global simulcast, what do we already know about this episode?

Well, trying to predict Doctor Who is a lot like attempting to predict God in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens, because like The Doctor “God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”

The above pretty much sums up my feelings on trying to forecast the Oncoming Storm’s episodes, never mind the 50th Anniversary Special. However, based on various clips, trailers, and the two web mini-episodes here is what we can put together so far in something like the strange Doctor Who puts, well, anything plot-wise together. First, let’s look at what BBC released with their hashtag:

“The Doctors embark on their greatest adventure in this 50th Anniversary Special: In 2013, something terrible is awakening in London’s National Gallery; in 1562, a murderous plot is afoot in Elizabethan England; and somewhere in space an ancient battle reaches its devastating conclusion.

All of reality is at stake as the Doctor’s own dangerous past comes back to haunt him.
World, are you ready? #SaveTheDay”

Now, it seems likely that Doctor Eleven and Clara got out of his own time-stream and based on the small clips, such as their time at the museum, they are the ones in 2013. We also know, based on past episodes, that Doctor Ten was once romantically involved with Queen Elizabeth I (apparently married to her) and something happened between them that made her so angry she ordered his death. Finally the ancient battle coming to its conclusion, based on what little we know of temporal war and the fact that The War Doctor, played by John Hurt and identified as such in the credits of “The Night of The Doctor,” aged from a young man to a very old one seems to be evident, or at least to me. What is also interesting is that the Zygons, classic shape-shifting Doctor Who monsters, are also making their appearance in the 50th Anniversary Special along with the Daleks.

Whether or not they are a part of the Time War or they are after it is unknown. The fact that the TARDIS is being lifted however seems to indicate that Earth is aware of The Doctor again, or that U.N.I.T. is getting involved in what will most likely be a potentially cataclysmic event. Rose Tyler is also going to be with The Doctor, at least the Tenth one as his Companion before she is taken to an alternate reality, and she seems to be present with The War Doctor at The Moment where he destroys both Time Lords and Daleks in her manifestation as Bad Wolf.

And now we go further into conjecture, if we aren’t there already. I certainly know I am. For me, the fact that the white rift opens in the museum in front of Clara and The Doctor reminds me of “the cracks in time” that occurred with the TARDIS’ destruction back in “The Eleventh Hour.” At the same time, this is not the first instance in which Time has conspired to place The Doctor with his past incarnations when the need arises.

But I think what disturbs me the most is that, on Trenzalore The Doctor jumped into his own time stream. This is apparently something that no one should do, and most people do not survive it. For me, I suspect that there are consequences for The Doctor entering his own time-stream at the point after his own death and I think that the presence of The War Doctor is indicative of this. He is an incarnation that The Doctor does not like to acknowledge based on his actions during The Last Great Time War.

Yet I wonder if perhaps The War Doctor is in some ways a gate onto himself due to his psychic trauma and influence over Time past the apparent time lock around the events of the War and if by entering his own time-stream, in a similar way to how the Time Lords used The Master to bring Gallifrey and the War to 2010 in “The End of Time,” he has unlocked something incredibly terrifying. It would not be the first time that The Doctor has inadvertently unleashed a horror on the universe out of curiosity or a sense of compassion. After all, the Daleks were once trapped in their own City on Skaro and weren’t even aware of life on other worlds before The First Doctor decided to pay them a visit.

Aside from all this speculation as to how we can even see The Time War with the time lock (without going insane like Dalek Caan) and what is going to happen is beyond me and, frankly, I am overjoyed to see how this will all fit haphazardly and gloriously together. But there is one thing I would definitely like to see in this 50th Anniversary Special. I would love to see the Tenth Doctor’s response to seeing The War Doctor which will hopefully be different than Eleven’s response. Yet more than that, I want to see Bad Wolf Rose interact with Doctor Eleven and see her show The War Doctor a little more compassion because, if anyone deserves it, it would be him for doing what none of his other incarnations could ever do.

I am fascinated by one rumour however. We have already seen Paul McGann’s return in “The Night of The Doctor,” but apparently Tom Baker, who once played the jelly-baby eating Fourth Doctor, is going to make his own appearance as well. Whether he is coming back as the Fourth Doctor or in another role is a different story entirely.

Time always brings with it surprises … and this is especially true for Time Lords. And please, post your speculations and comments down below so we can predict how The Doctor’s day will go. We’ll see you in Utopia.

The Last Day: Another Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Mini-Episode

November 21, 2013 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

This is now my thirteenth post and I wouldn’t be surprised if I turned into The Valeyard at this point. All right, before I go on just watch this video. Please watch it.

Are you done?

All right. I came across this today from Jenna-Louise Coleman’s Facebook profile. At first, it was a broken link until she linked to it from another Doctor Who Profile. Now, we have seen a lot of trailers and one other mini-episode “The Night of The Doctor.” So when I came across this, I felt like the soldier from whose perspective we are viewing the situation.

I will admit, I didn’t know who these soldiers were, or even what episode this was even going to be. It was like seeing that small little speck, you know? You are that soldier and you are looking for a bird or some kind of avian in the sky.

But then you realize This. Is. Gallifrey.

And then you look at the title to this mini-episode, Steven Moffat’s “The Last Day,” you as the viewer already know where this is going.

That’s not a bird.

At first, in a manner not unlike the soldier and his, or her, fellows I wondered if this was real: if Coleman wasn’t linking us to an especially zealous fan-made video about The Last Great Time War. But as I went online, I saw a whole slew of links to this one video and, by the time I got to Doctor Who TV I knew that this was legitimate. There were some other indications too for more nuanced viewers of the series. For instance, G33kpr0n’s editor Rob pointed out that the soldiers of Gallifrey are all wearing The Seal of Rassilon on their armour. It goes to show you that even now I still have a lot to learn as a geek which, frankly, is a whole load of awesomesauce.

Now I am just going to go into some conjecture of my own. I’m guessing that the helmets the soldiers (who may have been recruited from the Chancellery Guard or the non-Time Lord Gallifreyan citizenry) are wearing to access the memories of dead soldiers are extensions or an adaptation of The Matrix (which is a super-computer that, among other things, contains the memories of deceased Time Lords and stores information to predict the future, hence the soldier’s insistence that what “you” are seeing is “not a premonition”). It would be useful to store all of this information to transfer to the next mind of the newest soldier, you, for your very first day guarding the planet of Gallifrey.

Unfortunately, as you see through this unique second-person perspective of the War that also manages to humanize the Time Lords and their army while showing just how Frontline Combat they have become, you realize that you are not viewing a bird or even a flock of birds.

It’s a murder of Daleks.

And while there is “The Night of The Doctor,” “The Day of The Doctor,” and what should have been your first day on the job guarding your home world ultimately becomes your “Last Day”: The Last Day of Gallifrey.