![]() ![]() This hour wisely stays away from Christmas altogether until that moment, and it is the deftly played ace in Moffat’s narrative deck. The moment of the Captain’s death provides the jumping-off point for the drama, and culminates in the Twelfth Doctor jiggering with time just enough to save him from that death by returning him to the war in the middle of the Christmas truce of 1914. ![]() ![]() So an onscreen return for one of modern Who’s most controversial writers was more than welcome, and his Captain never for a moment feels any less important to the goings-on than the three scene-stealers he’s working with here. Way back in the third season of the new series, Who scribe Mark Gatiss’s performance as a mad scientist was the high point of the otherwise somewhat average “The Lazarus Experiment.” He arguably felt even more at home in front of the camera than behind. There’s much beauty in the way the old fogy responds to the brave new worlds ahead of him. Never for a moment did I not buy this version of the original, and beyond nailing the character, he’s marvelous at playing the material itself. I’d swear Bradley spent hours poring over Hartnell episodes in an effort to get it right. I kept waiting for him to purposefully fluff a line just to make it authentic. The posture, the stance, the look - all of those things unquestionably worked, but to my ear, it was the speech patterns that knocked it out of the park. Instead, he gave us a subdued hour of character beats punctuated by blasts of nostalgia - undoubtedly a sly way to go about wrapping things up.Īfter excelling as William Hartnell in the love letter of a TV movie An Adventure in Space and Time (and before that as the villain in an episode penned by incoming showrunner Chris Chibnall), David Bradley returns to the world of Doctor Who to play the First Doctor proper, and the results are nothing less than dazzling. He learned a lesson, and this time around, seemingly knew that going bigger than the season finale was not in the cards. Four years ago, after the gargantuan 50th-anniversary special “ The Day of the Doctor,” Moffat seemingly attempted to go even bigger with “ The Time of the Doctor,” and it failed. This hour was the postscript, the epilogue, the punctuation at the close of a terribly long sentence. There was no way that this hour could best the mission statement of the season-ten finale “ The Doctor Falls,” which was as much about the end of the Twelfth Doctor as this outing was. “Twice Upon a Time” is lean on plot and heavy on character, which, after Matt Smith’s bloated misfire of an exit four years ago, was precisely the correct tone for the series to strike. A Time Lord even more so.” - The Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison), “The Five Doctors” “A man is the sum of his memories, you know. After 12 years of working on the show, coupled with a lifetime of fandom before that, there can be no doubt that Steven Moffat’s memories are often overflowing with Doctor Who. Perhaps this final hour was his chance to walk down memory lane by reintroducing the incarnation of the Doctor that started it all, and toying with the notion that more than anything else, memories make us who we are. He’s been crafting how we view this TV series since the very first season of the revival way back in 2005, when he unleashed “ Are you my mummy?” on an unsuspecting public, and he’s barely had time to look back since. Watch Jodie Whittaker Become the Doctor in Her Doctor Who Regeneration Sceneīeyond the narrative, the no-brainer part really comes into play when one considers that Moffat has been waist-deep in Doctor Who for the last seven years as executive producer, and at least knee-deep as a writer for the five years prior to that. ![]()
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