The Time Of The Doctor: Three Things We Loved About Matt Smith’s Farewell
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The Puzzle Pieces
While Steven Moffat’s tenure as showrunner has definitely had some rough patches, he’s always been a great idea man. I remember the conversation I had with a friend after watching the “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead” two-parter where he was remarking on just how many crazy sci-fi ideas were crammed into those episodes. A planet-wide library. Predators that lived in your shadow. A true love whose relationship unfolded backwards. “Donna Noble has been saved.” Any one of those could have served as the basis for an episode, but Moffat’s script threw them all into a blender and made something even more awesome.
That’s how I feel again, having watched “Time of the Doctor.” While Matt Smith’s tenure as the Doctor hasn’t always been perfect, looking back at it now it’s amazing how well Moffat pulled together all the disparate ideas and mysteries he’s given us over the years. “The Time of the Doctor” not only satisfactorily explained questions such as the Doctor’s fate on Trenzalore, the regeneration-limit problem, “Silence will fall”, and the importance of the Doctor’s name, it tied those resolutions into things even further back than I’d expected. The fact that the crack in Amy Pond’s wall came back into play was a great surprise, and the way it was used made sure there was still plenty of story to be explored while simultaneously closing out the Eleventh Doctor’s story in a lovely way. After how “The Day of the Doctor” ended, I was genuinely surprised when Handles said the word “Gallifrey,” and I didn’t expect the Time Lords to be addressed again this soon. All the more satisfying, then, that the Time Lords and the Doctor’s homeworld played an integral part in this story, but without actually resolving those ongoing plot threads.
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