The Day Of The Doctor: 50 Things We Loved (And A Few Things We Didn’t)
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11. The Moment may have ultimately just been a big, red-buttoned MacGuffin, but I do love the notion of a doomsday weapon that develops a conscience. Shades of The Iron Giant…
12. I liked the explanation that the Doctor parked the TARDIS so far away from where he was going to unleash the Moment because he knew the TARDIS — itself a living thing, if you recall — wouldn’t support his final solution. It would be the Chewie to his Han Solo and might talk him out of it.
13. It’s a shame we didn’t get to see Billie Piper as Rose Tyler proper, but then again her character already had a definitive wrap-up. Plus, the idea of portraying her as an aspect of Bad Wolf Rose, or possibly just The Moment borrowing that form, or possibly some combination of both — that’s classic Doctor Who. John Hurt’s Doctor hadn’t yet met Rose, so why would the Moment choose an unfamiliar form, and remain unseen by the Doctors who would recognize her? I like the ambiguity of it all, and it gave Billie Piper a more interesting role to bring to life.
14. “Stuck between a girl and a box. Story of your life, eh Doctor?”
15. Since “The Night of the Doctor” showed that the Eighth regenerated into the form of a young John Hurt, the implication is that the so-called War Doctor has been fighting the Time War for decades at least, long enough for his physical body to age to the point where he is in Day of the Doctor. No wonder he’s fed up with the Time Lord and Dalek shenanigans.
16. The Day of the Doctor is essentially Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, except we only get ghosts of Christmas Past (David Tennant), Christmas Present (Matt Smith), and Christmas Further in the Past (John Hurt). But with Hurt also standing in for Scrooge, since it’s his change of heart that’s in question. The War Doctor is confronted with the legacy, not just of the murder of all the Time Lords and Daleks, but how it will affect his future selves. I’ve got no idea who is Tiny Tim in this scenario though. Maybe one of screaming Gallifreyan kids?
17. The mysterious phone call to one of the UNIT employees that we see early on is a nice example of how this whole thing hews to Chekov’s rule that if you show a gun on the wall in act one, it has to go off in act three. In other words, don’t drop in irrelevant details unless they set something up later. Here we get the phone call, the glass blown out of the paintings, the stone dust, the memory erasers, etc. The Zygon bit of the story isn’t nearly as interesting as the story of the three Doctors and the Time War, but at least it’s artfully constructed.
18. “It’s a machine that goes ‘ding.’ Made it myself, it lights up in the presence of shapeshifter DNA. Also it can microwave frozen dinners from up to 20 feet and download comics from the future. I don’t know when to stop.”
19. David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor isn’t exactly rivaling Steven Moffat’s other TV smartypants when it comes to investigative powers. He fails to keep track of who’s a Zygon shapeshifter pretty much every single time. But at least that does give us…
20. The rabbit.
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