For the first time in Steven Moffat’s run on Doctor Who, I found myself actually enjoying one of his episodes, even if it was marked by his usual tendency to radically rewrite history, canon, and everything else. In this case, that rewriting was very deliberately undertaken, and rather brilliantly done: the whole point was the complete restructuring of everything we know about the Doctor.
Needless to say, my dear, spoilers lie ahead.
Throughout the series, one thing about the Doctor has remained constant: he’s had a fixed series of regenerations that can be stably tracked through time. In the series reboot in 2005, we learned that he committed the ultimate violation to end the Time War by annihilating not just the Daleks, but his own people, killing billions of Gallifreyans in an attempt to wipe the Daleks from the face of the universe. This action has haunted him through every regeneration as he struggles to come to terms with his past, being variously ‘the man who regrets and the man who forgets,’ as Billie Piper in her role as Rose Tyler/Badwolf put it.
But we need to back up for a moment. ‘The Day of the Doctor’ takes place in a series of split timelines, including the modern day, Elizabethan England, and the Time War. In each one lives a different Doctor, until the three men (David Tennant, John Hurt, and Matt Smith) united in a bit of timey-wimey magic. While the episode was ostensibly about stopping an alien takeover of planet Earth, it was really about healing the Doctor’s ancient wounds, giving himself an opportunity to rewrite his own past and that of Gallifrey while living up to his own ideals. It was also a deeply moral exploration, something a bit unusual to see in the venerable series.
The Doctor has always been a conflicted character, because even as we watch him travel the universe, crossing spacetime divides to save people, planets, and societies, his great act of genocide looms in his past. Whether he’s haunted by it and it lingers in his every thought and move or he attempts to suppress it, it’s clear that he’s had hundreds of years to reflect on it, and to regret it: that as the Doctor, he views his conclusion to the Time War as one of his greatest failings. As well he should, for the argument that the means justify the ends simply doesn’t hold water when it involves not just the destruction of billions of lives but the extinction of an entire people.
‘The Day of the Doctor’ represented an opportunity to change that, as Badwolf, the living persona of the ultimate weapon (one so advanced that it had developed its own consciousness), took the War Doctor (John Hurt) into his own future to see what kind of man he would become as a result of his actions if he pressed the big red button. As the three men work together, he also comes to understand on a very personal level the tremendous cost of his actions, and the legacy his future regenerations will have to live with—but ultimately, he decides it’s the only thing he can do to put an end to the Daleks and prevent the entire universe from burning. His newer regenerations accompany him and offer to push the button with him, accepting culpability for their actions and ensuring the War Doctor isn’t forced to act alone.
It’s Clara who has a different idea, illustrating the strength of the Doctor’s companions. She points to the Doctor’s self-appointed role as a force of justice and compassion, appealing to the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) to ask him to seek peace, not violence, as a solution to the Time War. Between Badwolf’s discussion of the TARDIS as a symbol of hope and Clara’s illustration of the Doctor’s abilities to force disparate groups such as aliens and humans to negotiate treaties, the Doctor’s latest regeneration realizes that there is in fact a peaceful solution to the Time War, though a strange one that involves trapping Gallifrey in a moment of time with the aid of all his previous incarnations. It’s a solution that allows him to stop the war, forces the Daleks to destroy themselves, and doesn’t leave the Doctor feeling befouled with a legacy of senseless genocide.
And, of course, it’s a solution that rewrites everything we know, in addition to setting the tone for the future direction of the series. Now, the Doctor must find Gallifrey and rescue it from the pocket universe where it’s currently trapped, and now that Moffat has demonstrated his utter lack of fear when it comes to rewriting accepted canon, who knows what else can shift? While Moffat’s long had a tendency of erasing, eliding, and ignoring conflicts within the canon, an inevitable issue with a show that’s been running for 50 years, this is a vast and therefore different animal altogether: he has fundamentally changed the Doctor’s motivations, drives, and very personality.
Who is the Doctor, now that he’s not a man who sacrificed his own people to end the war with the Daleks? And who will the Doctor become, now that he’s a man who simultaneously retains that memory and the memory of the fix created in ‘The Day of the Doctor’? In a little over a month, we’ll be viewing the Christmas special, where we formally meet the new Doctor, and some of these questions will probably begin to be answered. But in ‘The Day of the Doctor,’ Moffat set up substantial material to be mined, giving Doctor Who new life for 50 more years of amazing episodes.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fanservice throughout the 50th Anniversary Special, from the use of the old titles at the opening to the guest appearance by former Doctor Tom Baker at the end of the drama; and even that hinted at more possible futures and adventures for the Doctor. This was an episode that not only dramatically expanded and advanced the world of Doctor Who, but also saluted loyal fans, without being too smarmy or self-referential about it.
I never thought I’d actually say this, but: well done, Mr. Moffat.