The Time of the Doctor (TV story)

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The Time of the Doctor was the 2013 Doctor Who Christmas special. It was the 800th episode of the series and the final appearance of Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor. It served as a conclusion to the entirety of the Smith era, bringing back both the Silence and Trenzalore and bringing their stories to a close. Karen Gillan also made a surprise cameo as a hallucination of Amy Pond, rounding out Smith's era.

The special tackled an issue that hadn't been talked about since the series came back in 2005: that of the limited amount of regenerations, introduced in The Deadly Assassin. It confirmed that the Doctor was actually in his 13th and final incarnation, before being granted a brand new regeneration cycle at the end of this story. It also served as Peter Capaldi's formal introduction as the new Doctor, after making a surprise cameo appearance in The Day of the Doctor.

The special marked the departure of producer Marcus Wilson, finishing his work with the series after Matt Smith's final scene was filmed.

Synopsis

Orbiting a quiet backwater planet, the massed forces of the universe's deadliest species gather, drawn to a mysterious message that echoes out to the stars. Among them, the Doctor. Rescuing Clara from a family Christmas dinner, the Time Lord and his companion must learn what this enigmatic signal means for his own fate and that of the universe.

Plot

The Doctor is among thousands of ships orbiting a planet after hearing a message being broadcast from it, a message that no-one can understand. He visits a ship, holding a Dalek Eye Stalk to show his bravery. Unfortunately, the ship belongs to Daleks, who fire at him until he teleports back to the TARDIS, where a disembodied Cyberman head that he calls "Handles" is plugged into the console. Clara calls the Doctor via the TARDIS phone, and pleads that he pretend to be her boyfriend for her family's Christmas dinner. The Doctor then accidentally visits a Cybership while holding Handles, where he is also shot at until he returns to the TARDIS again.

The Doctor picks up Clara from her home (after causing major embarrassment when he forgets to update his holographic suit to be visible to her family) and takes her to the planet's orbit. When asked to identify the planet, Handles claims it is Gallifrey, which the Doctor refutes. The two are invited aboard the Papal Mainframe, a space church headed by Mother Superious Tasha Lem. Tasha and the Doctor discuss the signal coming from the mysterious planet, while Clara repeatedly sees and forgets several Silents that surround her. She bursts into the room where the Doctor and Tasha are conversing, but forgets why after she does so.

Tasha sends the Doctor and Clara to the planet, but accidentally places them in the middle of an ambush by Weeping Angels. They escape to a town called Christmas, surrounded by a truth field, so no one can lie. Here the Doctor finds a crack in time through which the message is being broadcast. Using a copy of the Seal of the High Council he once took from The Master in the Death Zone, he has Handles translate it. The message is a repeat of the same question: "Doctor who?" The Doctor says this is the Time Lords, trapped in a pocket universe, trying to get out. If the Doctor speaks his name, the Time Lords will know they are in the right place and come through, and all the alien species above will descend on the planet and begin the Time War anew. Tasha contacts the Doctor, telling him this cannot happen and the Doctor refuses to withdraw and let his enemies destroy the planet, which she reveals to be Trenzalore – the place where he is supposed to die.

The Doctor tricks Clara into plugging a device into the TARDIS that transports her home. For the next 300 years, he defends Trenzalore from his enemies. He defended Chrismas in a number of ways. One time he disabled the cloaking device on a Sontaran vehicle, allow the Church to destroy. On another occasion, he tricked a wooden Cyberman, created to be too primitive to set off the alarm, into destroying itself after using the sonic and the truth field to make it think its gun had been turned around. According to Tasha, the Doctor seemed to forget of life before the siege. He spent his sparetime fixing the toys the children played with. He grew close to a child called Barnable.

Clara returns after gripping to the sides of the TARDIS and forcing the TARDIS to increase the shields and bring her back through the Time Vortex, slowing it down considerably. She meets a Doctor who has spent three centuries defending the town of Christmas. He now has grey hair and needs a walking stick. He reveals to her that Time Lords can only regenerate twelve times. She surmises that this shouldn't be a problem, as he is the "eleventh Doctor". He reminds her of "Captain grumpy", his Time War incarnation; although he didn't call himself "the Doctor", it still counted. So, too, did the regeneration used by the Tenth Doctor during his Meta-Crisis. He is therefore on his thirteenth, and final life. He and Clara then watch the rise for a few minutes. Shortly after, Handles dies – but not before finally reminding him that he needs to patch the TARDIS phone back into the console. He is then transported, with Clara, to the Papal Mainframe, now the Church of the Silence. The Silents are revealed to be genetically engineered confessional priests, whom Church members can confess their sins to, then later forget. (A renegade faction of these priests called the Kovarian Chapter broke away and travelled back in time to stop the Doctor reaching Trenzalore.) The Doctor later discovers that Tasha and her crew have been killed by the Daleks and turned into Dalek puppets. Three Daleks accost the Doctor. At the Doctor's urgings however, Tasha regains her mind and defends the Doctor, who escapes from the ship and tricks Clara home for a second time. He and the Silence then defend the planet from attackers above, until only the Daleks are left. This war lasted for a large number of years, possibly hundreds as The Doctor is seen to have become very old by the end of it.

Meanwhile, having returned to her family (who assume she's broken up with her "boyfriend"), an upset Clara later hears the TARDIS engines and runs outside, to find the TARDIS piloted by Tasha, claiming, "Flying the TARDIS is easy, it's flying the Doctor that's hard." She returns Clara to Trenzalore to see the Doctor, saying she could not let him die alone. The Doctor is now very old and often acts slow and slightly confused. He seems to have developed dementia, shown by how he thinks a man is Barnable despite the man telling him he isn't. He still won't release the Time Lords, knowing that it would mean Hell for all the universe. All his enemies have withdrawn save for the Daleks, whom he has been fighting with the aid of the Silence. The Daleks launch their final attack and the Doctor, finally out of ideas, weapons and regenerations, goes to meet them. Clara cannot watch this and returns to the crack in time, pleading with the Time Lords to save the Doctor, saying: "His name is the Doctor! All the name he needs, everything you need to know about him, and if you love him, and you should, help him!". The crack vanishes. At the top of Christmas's clock tower, the Doctor is preparing to die. Then, the crack appears in the night sky and through it, the Time Lords grant the Doctor a new cycle of regenerations. This happens just as the Daleks begin to taunt him: "The rules of regeneration are known! You have expended all your lives!" As his regeneration process begins, the Doctor uses the energy to destroy the Daleks and their ship.

In the aftermath, Clara returns to the TARDIS, finding the Doctor, whose youth has been restored. The Doctor informs Clara that this is "a reset", enjoying a bowl of fish custard, a meal he enjoyed at the very start of his now fading incarnation. Despite this renewal, he tells her the regeneration can't be stopped, and that it is simply taking some time to begin. Although revitalised, he will still change. Clara is saddened greatly when she realises that the Doctor she knew is about to disappear. However, the Doctor is not upset about the regeneration yet to come. He understands how fast everything about him and life itself can be gone in a moment, because it is always changing. He comforts Clara by telling her that times change, and so must he. The Doctor's hand begins to glow with regenerative energy and he makes peace with the fondest memories he had during this incarnation before its time is up.

Suddenly, he sees a little girl prancing through the balcony of the TARDIS with cheerful giggling, with every inch of its walls covered in her drawings of their adventures together, alongside those given to him by the children on Trenzalore. Aloud, he starts to reminisce about the past companion Clara never met: Amelia Pond, The Girl Who Waited, the one he lost so long ago - "the first face this face saw." Happily awaiting the regeneration, the Doctor gives this incarnation a fond eulogy. He assures Clara, "We all change, when you think about, we are all different people, all through our lives, and that's ok, that's good, you've gotta keep moving, as long as you remember all the people that you used to be. I will not forget one line of this, not one day, I swear. I will always remember when the Doctor was me."

"Raggedy Man... good night."

He sees an adult Amy Pond in the TARDIS - though she's been gone for so long and has been lost to him for hundreds of years - with her wedding ring on; it's not just her returning, but Rory too, in a symbolic way - the Eleventh's first companions are seeing him on into a new life. Amy descends from the balcony, places her hand against his cheek, and tells him, "Raggedy Man, good night."

The Doctor removes his fondest article of clothing.

The Doctor places his hand against her face as well, only to see he's reaching out for air. Ready to move on and become a new man, the Eleventh Doctor lets go of his greatest attachment to this incarnation – he removes his cherished bowtie, dropping it to the floor. In tears, Clara begs him not to change. He smiles, consoles her once more, and then suddenly jerks his head back.

The restored Doctor slowly adjusts to the realisation his whole identity has changed...

In barely a second's time, the Doctor has completely changed from the youthful alien Clara knew, to an older-looking man with curled silver hair and the impeccable razor-sharp gaze of the Doctor that joined the previous twelve to rescue Gallifrey from the Time War. Utterly dumbfounded by this new face, Clara can only watch as the Doctor stares her right in the eyes, before keeling backward, clutching his waist. He proclaims, "Kidneys! I've got new kidneys! I don't like the colour." Suddenly, the TARDIS begins shaking, and to Clara's horror, the new Doctor not only tells her that they're crashing into something, he also implies he's suffering from partial amnesia when he asks her if she knows how to fly the TARDIS...

Cast

with Karen Gillan as Amy Pond, and introducing Peter Capaldi as The Doctor

Crew

General production staff

Script department

Camera and lighting department

Art department

Costume department

Make-up and prosthetics

Movement

Casting

General post-production staff

Special and visual effects

Sound



Not every person who worked on this adventure was credited. The absence of a credit for a position doesn't necessarily mean the job wasn't required. The information above is based solely on observations of the actual end credits of the episodes as broadcast, and does not relay information from IMDB or other sources.


References

  • In Christmas a truth field is in force. The Doctor already knows about such fields, but hasn't encountered one for ages.
  • The Doctor refers to his Time War incarnation as "Captain Grumpy". He also says that he had a "vanity problem" as the Tenth Doctor, referring to his regeneration from that body into the same one.
  • The Doctor claims he is obsessive-compulsive.
  • The Doctor and Clara make use of hologram clothes.
  • The Cybermen engineer a special wooden version of their kind to sneak into Christmas without tripping the Papal Mainframe's technology detectors. It uses a flamethrower as a weapon and chants, "Incinerate" rather than "Delete" or "Upgrade in progress".
  • The Sontarans have invisibility shields to mask their presence in Christmas. This does not bode well for a bumbling Sontaran duo from a particularly unintelligent clone batch, who cannot see if the shields are up, getting them both obliterated by the Papal Mainframe.
  • The Doctor begs Clara to learn to use iPlayer

Species

  • Amongst the species massing at Trenzalore in response to the mysterious signal are the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Judoon, the Sontarans, the Silurians, the Terileptils and the Slitheen family.
  • The Cybermen are shown to use the Cybus phrase "Delete" in one of the drawings.
  • The Doctor traps a Weeping Angel with a mirror so that it is forced to look at itself.
  • A drawing of what may be one of the Racnoss hangs on the wall of the clock tower.
  • A drawing of an Ood and some Adipose hangs on the wall of the clock tower.

Story notes

If you'd like to talk about narrative problems with this story — like plot holes and things that seem to contradict other stories — please go to this episode's discontinuity discussion.
  • This is the first televised regeneration story in which the Doctor regenerates at the end of the story to end on a shot of a character other than the Doctor and the second since The War Games not to end on the Doctor's new incarnation. In this case, this story's final frame shows Clara's reaction to the newly regenerated Twelfth Doctor, not the Twelfth Doctor himself.
  • This story takes place over a longer amount of time than any other, with the Doctor having lived more than three-hundred years (probably far more) since the beginning of the episode.
  • This is the shortest regeneration story (in overall run time) to be broadcast on BBC1, as The Night of the Doctor was only shown on Red Button.
  • The regeneration is presented differently from other regenerations shown in the revived series, with the use of a prolonged explosion of energy occurring before the actor transitions. The final transition consists of a brief flash of light around the actor's head.
  • Regenerations in the revived series are presented as getting bigger and stronger each time. The ninth Doctor's regeneration into the tenth Doctor's introduced the regeneration flames. The Tenth Doctor's regeneration into the Eleventh Doctor's used the same effect but as a result of holding it in for too long, causes damage to the TARDIS. When Eleventh Doctor's regenerative abilities are reset into a new cycle, the effect is big enough to destroy a Dalek ship. However, when the first regeneration after the reset completes itself (the physical change from Eleventh to Twelfth), it is shown as a simple transition. This could be a callback to the first regenerations from the classic series, insinuating that regenerations grow increasingly violent and dangerous as Time Lords near the end of their regeneration cycles.
  • Before filming for this special began in September 2013, Matt Smith agreed to play a role in the American film, How to Catch a Monster. His character was depicted as having a thug-like buzz cut, which meant Smith had to have his signature quiff completely shorn off. By the time the filming was underway for the special, Matt's hair had not grown back enough to fill out the Eleventh Doctor's hairstyle. It was decided that he would use a hairpiece identical to his quiff, which also made it easier for makeup artists to apply ageing effects through older-looking hairpieces. In a humorous moment in the episode that references the wig, the Doctor, surprising Clara, removes a wig to reveal he is bald. (A cap was used to achieve the effect)
    • Though it can be assumed that The Doctor's hair grew back to normal during the many long years he stayed on Trenzalore and before he regenerated.
    • Coincidentally, Karen Gillan had also shaved her head for a role in the Marvel film Guardians of the Galaxy and wore a wig alongside Matt Smith in their final bow on the series.
    • Smith can also be seen wearing a wig in the teaser trailer for The Day of the Doctor.
  • During the filming of the special, Matt Smith suffered an injury to his leg and later had to visit a physical therapist to recuperate from the accident. This injury inspired a rumour that the script for the special would be altered to have the Eleventh Doctor lose a leg when the Weeping Angels attacked. The rumour was proven false when no such event took place in the episode.
  • This is both the second Christmas special and the second regeneration story to feature the Cybermen, being preceded by The Next Doctor in 2008 and The Tenth Planet in 1966 respectively. It is also the second regeneration story to feature the Daleks, the first being The Parting of the Ways in 2005. The show's very first Christmas episode, 'The Feast of Steven' in 1965, was also part of The Daleks' Master Plan but the Daleks were notably absent from that particular episode. This is the eighth story overall to feature both Daleks and Cybermen in the same episode with major roles, preceded by The Five Doctors, The Ultimate Adventure, Army of Ghosts/Doomsday, The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang, Return to Earth, The Mazes of Time and The Eternity Clock.
  • With their role in The Day of the Doctor, this marks the second time the Daleks have featured in two consecutive episodes, excluding multi-part stories and flashbacks. The first time was Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks. However, Planet is a continuation of Frontier and both deal with parts of the same Dalek threat, whereas some time has elapsed between the events of Day and Time and they both involve two separate Dalek threats: the Time War and the New Dalek Paradigm respectively. If Frontier and Planet are considered to be one story, then The Day of the Doctor and The Time of the Doctor can be considered the first stories to do this.
  • Though considering himself not much of a "weepy person", during the table read-through for the script of The Time of the Doctor, Matt Smith had an emotional breakdown while trying to read his final lines and cried. Steven Moffat immediately came over to his seat and hugged him while Jenna Coleman tried to avoid being overcome with sadness herself.
  • The new Doctor not knowing how to fly the TARDIS seems to suggest he has managed to have partial memory loss after regenerating, though this is the second time the Doctor has had amnesia/partial amnesia after regenerating as the Eighth Doctor soon after his own regeneration could not remember who he was at all until much later. (TV: Doctor Who)

Ratings

8.3 Million.

Filming locations

to be added

Rumours

  • Because of the leg injury suffered by Matt Smith during filming, the Doctor would lose a leg during the episode. This turned out to be false. The middle-aged and elderly versions of the Doctor, however, both rely on a walking stick to get around. In addition, while in the TARDIS waiting for his regeneration to kick in, the youthful Doctor is clearly limping in pain as he uses the console.

Production errors

  • When the Doctor and Clara arrive at the Papal Mainframe, the right column of the TARDIS is noticeably missing.
  • When the doctor is on the dalek ship at the beginning of the episode, one of the Daleks' eyestalk lights are not turned on.

Continuity

Home video releases

to be added

External links

to be added

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For the purposes of this list, a "regeneration story" is one in which a regeneration is actually and initially depicted. For this reason The War Games is not included below, even though it is commonly thought of as a "regeneration story". It doesn't actually include a clear scene of regeneration, and the preponderance of stories in other media confirms that the Second Doctor did not regenerate at the end of it.
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