The Name of the Doctor is actually really good. I wasn't expecting it to be as good as it was; I think it left me feeling a bit cold on first viewing and so I was fully expecting to be disappointed by it on a re-watch. But, as I say, I was rather pleased with it, and it's mainly because of the new context that I watched it in.
The Name of the Doctor is unlike every other series finale that we've had so far in the new series. It's not a big celebration where we get to see the Doctor triumph over evil, but at some sort of cost, instead it's a quiet, dark tale where we see the Doctor come face to face with his final days. There's so much finality and grimness surrounding the episode, from the fact that essentially every one of the main parts except for Madame Vastra gets killed off at some point in the episode to the darker shadows and tones that director Saul Metzstein paints the episode with, giving the impression that this is not the usual end of series romp that we've come to expect. And that's good, because it fits with what the story is aiming to be about: the Doctor coming face to face with his own mortality as the vast majority of the action is set around his grave. You wouldn't expect it to be a particularly rompy episode; it should be relatively serious and dark. But that's really just half the story of what this episode truly represents.
Although this was not known at the time, The Name of the Doctor was Matt Smith's last regular episode of Doctor Who. He's got two more episodes, both of which are 'special' episodes that stand relatively separate from the rest of the series. And over the course of those specials, we learn that Matt Smith's incarnation of the Doctor is technically the final incarnation of the Doctor, having used up all 12 of his regenerations. So read in all of that context, The Name of the Doctor feels like a farewell to Doctor Who itself, a quiet moment when we face the inevitable end of the programme and reflect on its power. When we dash through the Doctor's past in the time stream, we can now read this as one last look in the memory box before we put it away in a distant cupboard. Similarly, whilst it's a relatively brief and un-remarked upon scene within the story, the moment when the Paternoster Gang looks out at the night sky turning itself off because the Doctor wasn't there to save them speaks wonders as to the greater impact that the programme has had on the lives of millions, although the moment works far better on the smaller scale as we see the Paternoster Gang torn apart because of the Doctor's interference with them is removed, killing Jenny and making Strax into a monster, instead of the character that we know and love.
Read in all of that context, The Name of the Doctor becomes a sad and beautiful coda to the history of Doctor Who, before it goes forth into the great 50th anniversary celebrations that await us tomorrow. But before we do that, I just want to make a quick wrap up of something else.
The Purple Period of Steven Moffat's time as show-runner kind of ends here, with a bit of a run-on through the rest of Matt Smith's tenure before Capaldi takes the reigns as the Doctor, bringing with him a new approach to the programme. And watching it all again, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. The Purple Period is an era of variety, where each episode is wildly different from the next. Consider that within the 9 episode stretch from The Snowmen to The Name of the Doctor, we have 3 writers who do multiple episodes, each of which is completely and utterly different to their other stories for the same era. It feels good to see so much variety within the programme, an ability to really get a grip on the sheer breadth of travelling in time and space. But, alongside that, there's also a strong lack of consistency throughout the series.
Whilst the variety is good, it also means that there's no sense that each episode works in the same universe as the one before or after it - there's no real sense that Moffat is looking over the programme and keeping control of how everything will look at the end of the day. That's how we end up with relatively weaker stories like Nightmare in Silver or Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS; they could have been good stories had a little bit more attention been paid to them before they went to screen. It means that The Purple Period is unfortunately a bit of a failure, a time when Doctor Who should have been spectacular but it simply wasn't. It doesn't bode well for the final two episodes in this section, but oddly enough, I've got a feeling that everything will turn out just fine.
No comments:
Post a Comment