Mr. Harvey Appreciates DOCTOR WHO's Good Name
Season 7, Episode 13 “The Name of the Doctor”
When Madame Vastra discovers a threat to the greatest secret of the Doctor, she gathers together Clara, River Song, and her own team of Jenny and Strax to investigate. Things don’t go as planned, lives are lost, and all roads lead to Trenzalore.
The one place the Doctor should never go.
“What? You were expecting a body? Bodies are boring, I’ve had loads of them.”
That’s right kids, it’s the season finale, and it’s SPOILERS all the way down. Seriously, don’t read any further if you haven’t watched “The Name of the Doctor.”
Well, I’d said that I wanted for us to end the season strong, and luckily, we certainly do that. In spades. From answering the riddle of Clara, giving us the grave of the Doctor, bidding an apparent farewell to River Song, and giving us a Doctor we’ve never seen before, there is an almost embarrassment of riches to be had here, as well as a few missed opportunities and some hand wavy timey-whimey-ness, but ultimately, “The Name of the Doctor” gives us both a love letter to Doctor Who‘s fans, and a great ending to a wildly uneven season.
Let’s get the dodgy stuff out of the way, shall we? Why, oh why, why can’t we have a really great Richard E. Grant episode? Oh, he’s excellent, chilly and cruel, but still, he’s really only in about 15 minutes of the episode, and his plan is… curious. Yes, he’s able to step into the Doctor’s timestream and rewrite his history, but he doesn’t do anything to keep anyone from following him and undoing his tampering, which of course, Clara promptly does. No matter. As I said, Grant makes a great villain, and any chance to hear his sarcastic tones is welcome, even if we just need more of him. The same problem applies to his Whisper Men, by the way. Like the Vigil from earlier this season, they are wonderfully creepy monsters that disappear far too quickly, and really could use a return appearance somehow.
And Clara’s saving the day is another bit that doesn’t quite live up to what it implies, although most of that falls short because we really can’t see her save the Doctor, or at least foil the Great Intelligence, because we’re dealing with Original Series footage here, and there is, realistically, only so much Moffat & Co. can slot her into. What we get is pretty great by the way, with plenty of fanboy squee moments, but it’s the old storytelling in film thing, “show, don’t tell”, and we have a lot of tell.
The other Clara problem is the one that’s plagued us since she became a regular: there’s just not a lot of character development there, and here that takes a little of the impact away of the big reveal and her sacrifice, doesn’t it? Yes, she steps into the Doctor’s timestream, effectively killing the real her to save him, but aside from being funny and brave and sharp as a tack, what else have we really got to know about her, so that really means something? We keep hearing that she’s perfect for the Doctor, but we really don’t see that in any meaningful sense, aside from great chemistry between the actors, and of all the sins that this season has suffered from, that’s the one I regret the most. I like Clara, I like Jenna-Louise Coleman. I just wish she had been given more to work with, because outside of “Asylum of the Daleks” and “The Snowmen”, where we got tons of character in her copies, the original just hasn’t been given enough. Next season perhaps.
And then there’s the whole Silence thing.
So. If the Silence didn’t want the Doctor to go to Trenzalore, because there he would give the Answer, which would be the Doctor’s real name, thus opening his tomb, and they were willing to kill him to do it, and the Great Intelligence went to Trenzalore and lured the Doctor there to get access to his open timestream… does that mean that the Silence was trying to save the Universe from a rewritten past where the Doctor didn’t save all those lives and worlds and defeat the Daleks, Cybermen and so many others? Because that’s what I’m reading into all of this. Essentially, the Silence believed it was better to kill the Doctor and keep the good he had done from being erased by the Great Intelligence. So… bad guys? Obviously not good guys, but if the alternative is a Universe where the Doctor never existed… Hmmm. The mind, it boggles.
Enough quibbles and gripes. Let’s talk about the great stuff. Original footage. Seeing the Doctor steal the TARDIS (sort of), the Fields of Trenzalore and what that means, and all the rest. Some really great continuity moments and effect visuals and of course, John Hurt. All of that I’ll get to in a moment, but first, I want to talk about my favorite moment in the whole story.
This one:
The Doctor loves River.
One might think that would be a given, seeing as he’s her husband, but if you’ve paid attention, and I know you kids have, he’s never said it. He’s also never kissed her, unless she’s kissed him first, or unless he’s using it as a reward of sorts, as in “The Wedding of River Song”. Here he does. And here, although he still doesn’t say the actual words, he makes it quite clear: He loves her.
Oh he’s rubbish at the relationship stuff, but we knew that. Here though, we learn that he never visited the virtual River at the Library, that he could never find a way to say goodbye to River, because it hurt too much. Consider this exchange, when the Doctor reveals he can see and hear the virtual River, connected to Clara via a telepathic link, and also, as it turns out, the TARDIS:
River: “How are you even doing that? I’m not really here.”
The Doctor: “You’re always here to me. And I always listen. And I can always see you.”
River: “Then why didn’t you speak to me?”
The Doctor: “Because I though it would hurt too much.”
River: “I believe I could have coped.”
The Doctor: “No. I thought it would hurt me. And I was right.”
And then he kisses her. Not a little kiss either, but a full on, passionate, love-filled kiss. For a show not known for romance, this may well be the most romantic display the Doctor has ever shown, and if this is, in fact, the exit of Alex Kingston as River Song, then she goes out as strong as she came in, with all the rocky moments of her tenure on the show wiped clean. Sure, she could come back, and there’s an opening here for exactly that, but it’s meant to be an ending, without question. As the Doctor says, she’s an echo, and one that should have faded by now, God knows how many years/centuries/millenia it has been since she first entered the Library Data Core. The only reason she hasn’t is, like the Doctor, she doesn’t want to say goodbye. And then she does, because he still can’t bring himself to say the words, because his life is all about the endings he hates, and the pain of losing the ones he loves, over and over again, and she hurts him more than most, because, well, the Doctor loves River.
Damn near magic, those brief moments.
Also magic are the glimpses we get of the copies of Clara intertwined with the Doctor’s many lives. Sure, some of them are a touch iffy, like the 2nd Doctor shots, and while the BBC insists that the 8th Doctor makes an appearance, I can’t tell you where it is, even after watching this episode a dozen times, BUT! It’s still one hell of a tip of the hat to 50 years of Doctor Who, and since our story ends with “To Be Continued On November 23rd”, it’s the first part of an Anniversary story done right. My only quibble would be Clara directing the 1st Doctor to the TARDIS instead of the mutual coming together that “The Doctor’s Wife” described, but that can be waved away by Clara putting the timeline right again, so I’m going with that. Still, it’s fine work overall, bringing our previous Incarnations back, if only for brief moments.
But even if I think that Clara hasn’t been as developed as well as she should have been, she does get to do some good and important stuff here. Obviously she saves the Doctor, and obviously she makes a choice that is tantamount to a kind of suicide to save him, but it’s more the little things that really worked for me this time. Ok, one of them isn’t so little, as we finally get the missing word that makes “Run you clever boy, and remember” really work, and that word is “me”:
“Run you clever boy, and remember me.”
No wonder the copies of Clara the Doctor has already met say those final word to him every time; they were her final words to the Doctor. “Run”, because things could have gotten messy there, and, well, running is something the Doctor has made into an art form, “clever boy” because the Doctor is one, and “remember me” for a couple of reasons. First, because she’s making a sacrifice for him, and c’mon, that’s a perfectly normal thing to ask someone to remember, but more importantly, Clara has been learning throughout the episode that the Doctor doesn’t like endings, and keeps more information close to his chest than even she had realized by now. Things like “Professor Song” being a woman, the Doctor’s wife, and, well, mostly dead. It’s even more important to her, not knowing that the Doctor only doesn’t talk about the things that hurt him the most, to ask not to be forgotten.
Most of Clara’s great moments here are River related, actually. Whether it’s her reactions to River at the Conference Call, to her “only” seeing River at Trenzalore, there’s a tension there, between the lost wife and the new “Companion”, or shall we say, “Traveling Assistant”? As Vastra reminds her, the Doctor keeps his secrets, even when they aren’t that secret, and getting information about who he is and what he feels is challenging, to say the least.
The Fields of Trenzalore. As in the battlefields of Trenzalore. As in the fields of graves on Trenzalore, where the Doctor fought his final battle, winning of course, but losing his life in the process. The vast rows of graves, the monuments to the fallen, and the shattered TARDIS above it all, broken and serving as the final resting place for the quantum anomaly that is and was, The Doctor. It’s an interesting and stunning image, the TARDIS barely still “alive”, and holding the scar tissue of the Doctor’s time travel within.
“What else would they bury me in?”
(One does have to wonder though, exactly how River’s grave came to be there, fake though it is… who put the secret entrance in, and why? Of course, since there is that little out if Alex wants to return, maybe it was River herself. Or perhaps one of Clara’s copies.)
Our Victorian Trio returns, and I would be remiss if I didn’t praise all three once again. Neve McIntosh’s Vastra again gets most of the best lines, and her dealing with Jenny dying twice and losing Strax is really lovely, as is the chilling portrayal Catrin Stewart gives us when she is killed by the Whisper Men. And then there’s Strax… brawling it up in Glasgow, confusing River’s hair with her head, and losing a lot of the sillyness, especially when he saves Jenny and reverts to a time before he knew the Doctor. His interplay with Vastra is especially good, from asking if she has turned a darker green when she fumbles the introduction of River and Clara a touch, to that reverting of his antagonistic persona, both when Vastra threatens him if he can’t save Jenny, and when he does.Dan Starkey has quickly become a fan favorite, and yes, he’s funny as all hell, but I do likes these moments where he’s more than comic relief.
Matt Smith. Matt Smith gives us a Doctor here that starts out playful (“Oh those little… Daleks”, referring to the horrible children, who are horrible), then damn near falls apart when he realizes that in order to save his friends he must do what he never should: Visit his own grave, and, by the rules of time travel that Doctor Who has stated time and time again, lock that future into reality. Futures are potential, until you observe them, making them real, and the Doctor has now essentially assured that he will die at Trenzalore. No wonder he looks like he’s about to cry… who wants to know, to know, that you’re going to die? Bad enough he already went through that in Utah, but here? Here he knows that so much of his 11th life has been tied into the Silence and The Question, and his death is something that ultimately, he won’t be able to escape.
And it’s interesting, isn’t it, when the Doctor fights with the TARDIS, which is doing Her best to keep him from Trenzalore? Or when he refers to his grave as the potentially most dangerous place in the Universe, because he’s probably traveled in time more than anyone else? Or that his timestream is scar tissue on the fabric of Reality, because time travel tears through it a way that leaves a wound? Yes, there’s dark humor in much of this, and the sardonic side of our Time Lord is out in play, but it’s a grimmer Doctor here than we’ve seen in a while, and Smith delivers. I’v said it before, and I’ll say it again… I really enjoy Smith’s 11th Doctor, and it’s episodes like this that remind me why.
And then there is the Pachyderm in the Parlor: John Hurt as the Doctor. Or rather, John Hurt as the Time Lord who betrayed the name of the Doctor, failing to live up to the choice that name meant. Whom the 11th Doctor calls his greatest secret…
So what does that mean? Well, we seem to have some options, especially since the rumor mill is running at full speed. A couple of weeks back we got the “real” 9th Doctor rumor, where Hurt would be the Doctor who made the horrible choices we know he made in the Time War. But those choices were far worse than we’ve been told, so bad in fact, that the Hurt Doctor has been effectively written out of history, and Eccleston’s incarnation “becoming” the 9th in his place. That’s a pretty drastic change to our established timeline of the New Series, but not an impossible one, and certainly the lines about doing what he did for “sanity and peace”, and having no choice would fit the idea that he is the Time War Doctor. Other theories have him being the New Series version of the Valeyard (unlikely since he is clearly a past Incarnation), or — and I do like this one– the Time Lord who would become the Doctor, committing something so terrible, that he literally became a different man, regenerating into William Hartnell’s “1st” Doctor. The names of Omega and the Other have also popped up, and Hurt himself has been quoted as being part of a “Trinity” with Smith and Tennant, so pretty much all options are on the table. Personally, I’d be OK with any of these, as long as the story is good, because no matter which version/variant/incarnation Hurt is playing, he’s John Hurt for God’s sake, and he’s playing the Doctor.
So there we are, a really solid ending to a really uneven season, where we saw the Ponds leave and Clara arrive, the Cybermen get an upgrade and the Great Intelligence become the main villain of the second half of the season. We had some solid stories and some OK ones, and yes, some really disappointing ones this year, but we’re ending on what looks to be a intriguing buildup to the 50th Anniversary Special. Of course, we have to wait for 7 months to see what Moffat, Smith and Tennant have in store for us, but somewhere before that we also get An Adventure in Space and Time, the story of the creation of Doctor Who, starring David Bradley as William Hartnell, Brian Cox as Sydney Newman and Jessica Raine as Verity Lambert. Early word is that this is going to be a really excellent piece of both history and storytelling, and a great companion piece to the Anniversary Special.
Personally, I can’t wait. Seriously. Moffat, if you aren’t rolling out all kinds of preview webisodes for this…
