The Time of the Doctor: The Long Con

In the interest of reducing angry letters, this article may contain what some consider to be spoilers. Seriously, welcome to the internet. Now, moving on...

Doctor Who fans are the worst*. They’re more annoying than Radiohead devotees.

There, I have lobbed the hand grenade of opinion into the electronic ether – come at me, Broseph!

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The airing of Matt Smith’s final outing as the Doctor on Christmas Day (Boxing Day in Australia) occasioned much kvetching and bellyaching, mainly due to confusion surrounding what actually happened. Was a story that skipped and jumped across centuries with the occasional block of narration to sum up amazing off-screen adventures of the Time Lord a fitting send-off to the actor’s version of the character? What is interesting is how much of this criticism has focused on Steven Moffat and his tenure on the show.

It seems not that long ago that fans were clamoring for him to replace Russell T. Davies, whom they felt had also outstayed his welcome, yet now revisionism has set in Davies’ Tennant-era is fondly remembered.

In truth, the difficulty with Moffat’s run is how ephemeral it all seems. Doctor Who has become a candy-floss confection of whimsy and misadventure that reduces sentiment to sickly sweetness and sadness to maudlin moping. You know it is time to feel those pesky emotions when the score performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales swells.

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Moffat is presiding over the most successful era of the show, sweeping up America and other foreign markets in its hipster British twee-ness. Despite the fears of long-time fans, his run has not been hindered by this success, which might have led to a desperate attempt to court mainstream tastes. That would be a criticism more appropriate to the John Nathan-Turner-era. In fact, Moffat appears to have been busily constructing a weirdly insular epic for The Eleventh Doctor.

The Doctor has frequently faced death with the determined gait of a time traveler who can recover from physical death, regenerate and come at a problem from a different angle. Though, like any surgeon, death is something he has to be conscious of as a very real outcome. The Doctor gives death meaning – often he is unable to save the lives of people he meets on his travels, but their deaths will be put to some purpose. Hence the jubilation of his exclamation, given to him by Moffat, in The Doctor Dances:

"Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once, everybody lives!"

The Matt Smith years have been dominated by the theme of the Doctor facing his own death. Hints were dropped by arc phrases such as ‘Silence will fall’, 'Doctor, who?' and mention of the planet Trenzalore, where the Doctor will die. In amongst it all, the Time Lord has already cheated the fate revealed to him during The Impossible Astronaut, where he was shot by his brainwashed lover River Song by a lake in Utah. The Eleventh Doctor has all this time been busying himself with the problem of how to escape his own imminent end, as he approaches his set limit of regenerations.

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This is the problem Moffat set out to solve. How to escape the canonically determined end-point for the character established back in 1976 with The Deadly Assassin, when viewers learned Time Lords were only allowed thirteen ‘lives’?

As it happens the Eleventh Doctor (‘Captain Grumpy’ aside) has the solution – and it is Clara (Jenna Coleman).

Picture the scene – the planet Trenzalore, where the Doctor will die, is inhabited by a small farming community living in a town called Christmas, where it always snows and no one can tell a lie. Here the Doctor, who lies, has to tell the truth. No clever prevarications to help him. So when every enemy he has ever had converges on the town to wipe it out, ‘silence must fall’. He could say his name and return the Time Lords to this universe, but that would only lead to the Time War all over again. Instead he is locked in a stalemate, supported by his former enemies The Church of the Silence.

What does it all mean though? Why can no one lie at Christmas? Why does the Doctor keep sending Clara away and maintain the stalemate, when previously he has always found an escape clause?

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The Doctor lies. He manipulates, uses and tricks his companions and those he meets to achieve the greater good. Versions of him that have tried to bluntly assert how things should be, see David Tennant in The Waters of Mars for example, fail. The Eleventh Doctor plays at being the fool in a similar manner to Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor. He turns up to Clara’s family Christmas dinner naked, to cause confusion so she’ll accompany him to Trenzalore. Then he sends her away, which only makes her more determined to return. Promises he’ll never leave her behind, and then promptly does so again. All the while making oddly poignant asides that he will die soon and oh, if only Gallifrey could save him and break this stalemate (like they did in Troughton’s War Games), but for him to involve them would be disastrous.

Which in a roundabout way is Eleven seeding the idea in Clara’s mind to beg the Time Lords to give the Doctor an escape from his mandated death. It works. He is granted a new regenerative cycle and can set about rescuing his home world while preventing the outbreak of a second Time War.

Another possibility – isn’t it funny that Christmas is a place that happens to suit Eleven’s sense of sartorial style right down to the ground? The Doctor lies.

Fans complaining about Moffat have begun to suggest that Neil Gaiman would be a good replacement. Funnily enough The Time of the Doctor is reminiscent of The Sandman, in that Eleven like Morpheus uses the insoluble dilemma of his own imminent death to gain a second lease on life. Moffat, like Gaiman, is a fan of the long con disguised as narrative. The real question for the writer though is whether a television show can succeed as a puzzle-box instead of a gripping central narrative that audiences warm to.

-Emmet O'Cuana

*This may, in fact, be stated for dramatic effect. We love, and may possibly be, Who fans. Unfortunately the same can't be said for Radiohead fans ;)

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