Every so often, the podKast likes to go live on Google Hangouts – and what better excuse than to discuss Doctor Who‘s 50th anniversary episode The Day of the Doctor?
Here, James McLean, Brian Terranova and Kasterborous editor Christian Cawley discuss the feature-length episode, read out comments from those watching live and also spend a few moments on An Adventure in Space and Time and The Five(ish) Doctors – Reboot. We also cover various continuity questions raised by the Doctor’s successful saving of Gallifrey.
If you prefer the audio version of the podKast, worry not – it is now available to you via the player below:
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Kasterborous PodKast Series 3 Episode 43 Shownotes
- An Adventure in Space and Time on BBC iPlayer
- An Adventure in Space and Time Reviewed
- The Day of the Doctor on BBC iPlayer
- The Five(ish) Doctors – Reboot on BBC iPlayer
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I loved it all, BUT I thought it was going to start literally AFTER the end of The Name of The Doctor. HOW DID THE DOCTOR GET OUT OF HIS OWN TIME STREAM???
He just jumped in and saw versions of himself running around and picked up Clara and talked to the War Doctor and then left and just jumped back out with Clara? Starting the 50th Special like they did left me perplexed. I thought the Special would have dealt more with Clara still running around helping all the different versions of him. Instead it started like a 70’s Pertwee show where UNIT has a problem and they summon the Doctor as an advisor to help out with a situation.
When Hurt started regenerating I got excited that maybe we’d see Eccleston, since Moffat brought back Paul McGann, so maybe he had gotten Eccleston as well as a surprise. Alas, it was not to be. That was a downer and I think Eccleston should have given his time at least to the story as it would have tied it up really nice seeing him regenerate and saying “Fantastic” or something.
Thankfully Tom Baker came in at the end and stole the whole deal. He is still THE Doctor!
Overall, loved the Time War scenes as well. Looked superb and dare I say… epic!
I had that problem with it as well. Then again maybe the point is they AREN’T out of his Time Stream yet??
this is going to be teal deer, & i qualify this by saying, actually, i enjoyed the Day of the Doctor (henceforth DoD) very much, but, anyway: seems to me RTD’s most important innovations just got shaken off the show’s back. i’m sure there are ways to narratively reconcile (read: excuse) what happens, per se, but i’m not so sure it’s possible to reconcile *what it means* – RTD’s era is preserved narratively, but only in letter, not in spirit/essence.
i see RTD’s most impt innovations in that regard being 1) the Doctor’s pain & 2) the Time Lords having become as unqualifiedly terrible/evil as the Daleks. DoD has taken away the substance of (in particular) Nine’s (now Ten’s, yeah?) pain – contrary to what Brian says (at the point i’m at in the Podkast anyway), the fact that he didn’t actually do what he thought he did definitely cheapens what becomes basically empty &/or misguided posturing – basically, Moffat has just turned his pain into a mean-spirited joke at his expense (there’s also an ontological paradox embedded in there that’s meant to complicate/excuse it, but it doesn’t really come off). i wonder if that mightn’t be why Eccleston walked out? probly not, but it gives his decision more dignity, imho. i mean, it’s tragic, almost Shakespearean, but not very dignified at all for Nine (now Ten).
DoD also pretty much let Gallifrey off the hook. End of Time told us in no uncertain terms that bringing Gallifrey back is Bad News (remember that powerful scene where the Doctor finally takes the gun from Wilf? that speech about how he ‘chooses to remember’ Gallifrey a certain way that wasn’t how things really were?), a view reinforced not too long ago by The Night of the Doctor; DoD, however, suggests that Gallifrey was simply the victim of Dalek aggression, maybe just doing what was necessary to survive, that Cass’s perception in Night was, basically, mistaken, if representative of the popular view of the war. this to my mind proves what i’ve always thought was Moffat’s agenda all along: not usher the show into a new era, but bring it back to more ‘classic’ forms; i.e. he’s bringing (brought?) the show back to the way it was before RTD did what he did to it (arguably the most innovation the show’s ever seen to date).
also: the amnesia is a terrible excuse, an explanation that by no means serves as justification. as i said, it renders RTD’s run essentially a mean spirited joke at the expense of Nine, Ten (or should i say Ten, Eleven?) & the audience.
However, there’s this aspect on the flipside of it that made me sorta happy: for a minute there, i really thought they were going to make the mistake Orson Scott Card made w/ Ender’s Game – essentially excusing the Doctor’s terrible acts as necessary by basically saying it’s ok because he’s good people w/ good intentions doing essentially the same terrible thing that terrible people would do albeit w/ terrible intentions. so hurray for Clara on that point.
again, sorry for wittering on, but there you go, & if you made it this far, thanks for reading.
i think you make some really interesting points there. I personally think the Time War, the change in the Time Lords and the survivors guilt was some of the most fascinating aspects RTD did. The Time War was a great buffer between old and new series continuity, giving the show new space to play, the change in the Time Lords, well, Time Lords had become very dull by the end of the classic era – I could imagine the War Games Time Lords being more akin to the power we see in End of Time – and as with any regime, what the leaders do doesn’t mean the rest of the people are the same. Many militant war regimes are not supported by their people, One could argue that Day of the Doctor gave us that little extra colour, reminding us, and the Doctor perhaps, that while the Time Lords in charge had become militant and as narrow focused as the Daleks they fought, they were not necessarily representative of all the people – Doctor himself being an example. Without wanting to be political, take the recent world wars and the atrocities committed, were not sanctioned by the civilians of their nation. You say WW2 showed Germany gone mad, but you wouldn’t be suggesting that all the nation felt the same or wanted the same as those in command.
While I liked RTD, I agree, I think this was good closure to what he begun and a good introspective look at how RTD and Moffat wrote Doctors, with the latter clearly looking to have Smith distance himself from Tennnat and Eccleston’s guilt. This was neatly studied, justified and resolved in this episode.
At the same time I agree with you that dramatically the resolve does somehow cheapen the pain that Eccleston and Tennnant carry given we know there was no mass genocide – I accept the continuity offered, will move on with it, but personally I did feel the episode someone killed the very dramatic notion it set up: a War Doctor whose actions were so far removed from the Doctor, he forgo his name to finish a war saving billions, by sacrificing millions. In the end, he was just a Doctor, which has its own cool drama to that resolve, but I did like the idea that the Doctor IS a dangerous man (Curse of Fenric, Tribe of Gum, Runaway Bride), and the War Doctor was that man with no moral boundaries… in the end he was… perhaps in a perfect world we’d need to have seen what else the War Doctor did in the name of not being the Doctor to justify his mantle!
Has any clever bod used image analysis yet to work out which episodes the First and Second Doctor clips were lifted from in the Gallifrey War Room scene? Just to make sure they haven’t gone and shoved footage from “missing Episodes” in front of us all just to stir the Omnirumour pot some more?
I did enjoy the 50th an enjoyable romp.But thinking about the out come and the change to the show like saving gallifrey what change’s to the serie’s past will happen.And im not the only one’s to notice, for one the master may not have been resurectured by the timelords,or if he was would the timelords have bothered with putting the drum beat in his head as the timelords planet is now frozen in time somewhere,so they would never have turned up next to earth in the first place.So the master would not turn insane with the constant drumming and may be quite a normal timelord.Also would this change the 10th dr from regenerating as there would be no timelords to stop and no wilf to free.And im sure a few fans will notice a few more thing’s over time.
That all still happens. The only difference is no one – bar the 11th Doctor onwards (or 12th depending on your preference) – knows that Gallifrey never burned but in the final moment was frozen and lost, the dalek fleet destroyed by themselves and that day remains time locked. Rassilon still sends Gallifrey to Earth at a point prior to the finale of the Day of the Doctor (Doctor has The Moment in End of Time, but hasn’t used it yet, so has to be before the Day of the Doctor finale battle). So Gallifrey could have popped out to Earth then back before we see what we see.
Thought TDOTD ticked all the boxes and was a lot of fun. S Moffat delivered a story that was enjoyable for everyone and yet still full of back slaps and in-jokes for the fans, with some cracking lines for our three main leads and a couple of surprises thrown in, thought in the circumstances ( ie: Eccleston declining to appear and the surviving doctors not looking anything like they did back in the day ), Moffat did the very best he could while still telling an interesting back story that would be accessible and dramatic for all. Two points though, didn’t quite get the whole throwing the dead Dalek in the room bit, bit confusing the way they shot that, didn’t really know where it came from or what they intended that scene to signify and on a personal level didn’t clock Pertwee in the scenes when all 13 doctors show up round Gallifrey. He is very much my Doctor and although i loved the final shot of them all and pleased to see him then, with Hartnell front and centre; quite right, bit disapointed not to see Doctor no 3 in his Tardis when all the others were clearly there in shot. Hopefully it was just me and i missed him, maybe the dvd will address it, maybe not. All in all though loved the story and think it will go down over time in fandom as a bit of a fav. No mean feat Mr MOFFATT
Love the site, guys, really do. Thank you for all hard work you do – I’ve order the comic as a way of “giving back”.
That’s really good of you, thanks Antpoc!
I thought you seemed a little dismissive of Clara’s role. Someone said that she didn’t have much to do. But surely she was pivotal?
The Moment plot was a mirror of the Zygon plot. An outsider sees there’s another option: you don’t actually have to press the button. The Moment took the Hurt Doctor there to meet Clara because, as we know, Clara was born to save the Doctor.
It just makes me wonder all the more who (or Who) she actually is.
As to the getting-out-of-the-timestream thing – I thought it would start there too. But on reflection, that would have been confusing to the casual viewers. Moffat probably wondered why everyone was going on about it. The timestream was collapsing, the Doctor emerged from the cosmic lava lamp with Clara in his arms, they picked up Vastra and Co, and off they went home. Then Clara went to College, qualified as a teacher, had a lot of adventures, learned to close the doors by clicking her fingers (in gloves!), and three or four years went by.
…. maybe they’re still in there!