Away from the Hype: THE DAY OF THE DOCTOR

Doctor Who first aired the day JFK was killed. It ran until 1989 before it was canceled. They tried a movie revival in 1996 which failed to take off before it was finally and massively successfully brought back in 2005. 

The show follows the adventures of a Time Lord and his companions traversing space and time having adventures and saving lives. 

It’s brilliant. 

November 2023 saw the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who celebrated with three special episodes that culminated in the arrival of the 15th Doctor played by Ncuti Gatwa.

Ten years previous, the 50th anniversary was commemorated with a feature-length episode that brought back the 10th Doctor played by fan favorite David Tennant (who also appeared in the 60th but as the 14th Doctor) to save the universe alongside Matt Smith’s 11th Doctor.

It was very well received at the time and managed to tell an exciting story full of old Doctor Who history and new mythology too. 

Unlike the 60th anniversary specials which felt like an ending and a new beginning for Doctor Who, “The Day of the Doctor” is a celebration of the show filled with fan service, callbacks, and hints towards the show’s future. 

As a massive Doctor Who fan, it was pitched towards me and my kind while also aiming to appeal to new Who fans whose knowledge of the series began and ended with the 2005 revival. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Watching the 60th specials, I found myself thinking about the 50th special and realizing I hadn’t watched it in a long time. In fact, it was three Doctors ago. An eternity in Doctor Who time. And when I did watch it, it was around the time of its release when “The Day of the Doctor” hype was at its zenith. 

With that time ten years in the past now, it’s time to watch “The Day of the Doctor” away from the hype.

The Day of the Doctor

The 50th Anniversary of the show announced very quickly what kind of celebration it was going to be by opening with the original Doctor Who titles followed by a recreation of the opening moments of “The Empty Child”, the first-ever episode. 

Fan service often gets a bad rap and fans have a strange relationship with it. If you include cameos or callbacks in your work, it can be viewed as cheap and a ploy but if you don’t that’s also somehow a problem. 

The 60th-anniversary specials were criticized in some circles for lacking fan service. Some viewers wanted appearances of former Doctors or companions (though they got three which is fairly impressive). The 50th anniversary on the other hand was criticized, possibly by the same viewers, for having too much fan service at the cost of the plot. 

Obviously, for anyone who has spent more than five seconds on the internet, fandom is a fickle beast. The same Star Wars fans who hated The Force Awakens for being too much like the Star Wars they’d seen before also misguidedly hated The Last Jedi for being too unlike the Star Wars they had seen before but it’s probably better to avoid those people and their YouTube channels to the benefit of your mental health. 

Full disclosure, I love a bit of fan service provided it’s done right. The kind that irks me is when you get an origin story for something that doesn’t need it like the first Wolverine movie giving us the origin story for his jacket. An answer to a question nobody asked. 

But done well, it can be a wonderful celebration, a wink to the fans, or a reward for paying attention. With “The Day of the Doctor”, it’s all of those things and a little bit more. 

The 2005 revival Doctors have always lived in the shadow of their actions during The Last Great Time War when they activated a bomb called The Moment, which wiped out both sides of the conflict: The Time Lords and the Daleks. Doctor Who being Doctor Who, the Daleks would return but the Doctor remained the last Time Lord because he was the one who ended the war and was punished with survival. 

“The Day of the Doctor” takes us back to that moment and we see that the Doctor who lit the fuse on the galaxy eater was a formerly unknown incarnation known as The War Doctor played by the legendary, incomparable John Hurt.

Hurt is writer Stephen Moffat’s masterpiece. A surprise Doctor with no past that we know of who can play the role of destroyer. After all, it would be hard to watch a Doctor we’ve fallen in love commit genocide, but a new Doctor? Much easier. 

It helps that Hurt is a perfect Doctor. He falls neatly in the space between the old Who and the new Who. He’s a grumpy old man but he has the twinkle in his eye that every Doctor has had from Hartnell to Gatwa. He also represents those fans who aren’t as happy with the wackiness of the modern era and gets a few barbed one-liners about it to his younger/older counterparts. Younger actors, older Doctors that is.

Speaking of the other Doctors, Matt Smith continues to be a wonder as the 11th Doctor, a personal fave, and David Tennant returns home to reprise his role as the 10th Doctor. In a just world, where the BBC didn’t treat Christopher Eccelstone like trash, we would have had the three new-Who Doctors on an adventure together but I love John Hurt and his War Doctor too much to be too sad about this. 

The fascinating thing with a multi-Doctor adventure is when you see a group of actors together playing the same character but differently. It cements the central idea of what makes The Doctor work as a character. The childish charm, the giddiness, and the indefatigability along with the potential for rage and destruction are all aspects embodied by the actors with each sprinkling enough of their personality on it to make it their own.

This is most evident in the scenes when the three Doctors are the only characters on screen. They’re all the smartest person in the room so they resort to childish bickering and name-calling but there is obvious camaraderie and tragedy amongst them. After all, for the 11th Doctor, he’s talking to two people who he knows will die (in a way) and for them, they’re seeing the embodiment of their mortality (in a way). 

The real fan service is seeing these three wonderful actors having the time of their lives playing off each other managing to mock the ideas of Doctor Who while embodying them as well. 

As to the story of the episode, it’s a mixed bag as it begins with a plotline about a Zygon invasion that begins in Elizabethan England with 10 and spreads to modern-day England with 11. All this is happening while War is debating mass genocide.

Billie Piper, returning not as Rose but as the conscious of the bomb, pulls all these parts together to give War a lesson in the cost of killing, and to give 10 and 11 an idea of what it means to be the Doctor on the day it was impossible to save everyone. 

“The Day of the Doctor” seems to zip between deciding which is the A story and which is the B, as the Zygon plotline of men in rubber alien suits is compelling enough for a Doctor Who episode, it is a bit of a silly companion to the massive ideas and implications of revisiting the Time War and its consequences. Moffat mostly gets the tones right but at the cost that towards the end, the Zygon plotline is vaguely sorted and then just forgotten about until two seasons later when the 12th Doctor (Peter Capaldi) gets embroiled in more Zygon drama in a quasi-sequel to “The Day of the Doctor”. 

However, the payoff of the Doctors saving Gallifrey is worth dropping a plotline as having every single iteration of the Doctor (including the at that point unseen 12th Doctor) appear to save the day is a wonderful moment like something from a fan’s wildest dreams.

Conclusion

“The Day of the Doctor” holds up incredibly well. Some of the earlier episodes of New-Who are a bit clunky and look cheap even though they were made in 2005 while “The Day of the Doctor” looks gorgeous and cinematic. 

Its stars are in top form with Hurt as the standout. It can’t have been easy to join something so established and play a character with so much history. He didn’t have the thing other Doctors have where they get a few episodes to find their feet, he had to join this fully formed and he excels. That Hurt died before he could appear again is a tragedy for Doctor Who and for all of cinema as he was a legend.

Speaking of legends, Tom Baker’s appearance in the final moments puts the fan service cherry on top. Baker is often called the best Doctor and his run is iconic with his massive scarf and insane hair becoming an easy shorthand for what the Doctor looks like. 

I couldn’t suggest this as an easy jumping-on point for new fans but then there are lots of those as the show reboots every few years and gives you a chance to jump in with a brand new Doctor and companion. 

Even now, Ncuti Gatwa has only appeared in one and a bit episodes and he’s amassing an army of fans old and new who want to see what this new Doctor is capable of. 

“The Day of the Doctor” marked 50 years in the TARDIS and we recently celebrated 60 years. Here’s to the next ten and beyond.