If you’re not interested in Doctor Who spoilers or theory or anything related, come back in a day or two when I can guarantee the subject will not be Doctor Who. Otherwise, paraphrasing Bette Davis in “All About Eve,” fasten your seatbelt because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
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On Christmas Day 2013, the last Matt Smith episode of Doctor Who aired and our world is a little sadder because of it. The three-year collaboration between Matt Smith (the 11th Doctor) and Stephen Moffett (Executive Producer) has been a joy to watch despite all of its up and downs (and there have been many more ups than downs).
In this finale, the Doctor visits Trenzalore, a planet he’s been warned not to visit because he will be asked a question there that he cannot answer without bringing about the destruction of the universe. It has also been foretold that the Doctor dies on this planet. The Doctor discovers that if he stays on the planet and the Time Lords, behind the crack in the universe, get him to say his name, they will know it is safe for them to return. If he leaves, the Daleks will attack the planet and destroy its town of Christmas. So the Doctor stays and defends the town knowing that he is in his 13th and final body (which includes the war Doctor and ten’s second generation) and if this one dies, he’s done.
We discover that the Silence are clergy in the Church of the Papal Mainframe. We find out that a rogue element of the Papal Mainframe was responsible blowing up the TARDIS in season six and was responsible for assigning/forcing River Song’s assassination attempt on the
Doctor. Finally, we watched an aging Doctor join forces with his newest enemy, the Silence, in order to combat his oldest enemy, the Daleks (the enemy of my enemy is my friend).
Over the past three years, show runner Steven Moffat raised many plot points and questions during Matt Smith’s run of the series. Sadly, this finale seemed rushed in its attempt to answer all the issues raised over the last three years. On the whole, I think Moffett did a good job of addressing those questions; however, Smith’s farewell speech pales in comparison to David Tennant’s or Christopher Ecclestion’s final words as the Doctor and that was unforgivable. An opportunity was missed to make Smith’s farewell just as cool as he had made his bow tie and fez during his tenure. Smith’s last declaration to himself that he will always remember “… when the Doctor was me” does not have the heart tearing tug of Tennant’s fearful cry to us, “I don’t want to go.”
Frankly, I never cared for Clara Oswald as the Doctor’s companion, but I acknowledge that the combination of Amy/Rory and River is a hard combination to follow. However, I do see her being a good companion to the little bit of Peter Capaldi’s (the new Doctor) that we’ve seen.
That said, I will miss Matt Smith’s pompous, know-it-all Doctor very much. He was as close as the new series ever got to Tom Baker’s Doctor #4 (which is mental gold for me). And with that, “Raggedy man…goodnight.”
