Call Your Doctor

Since his time as the Doctor, Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth has gone through something of a reevaluation among fans. Although not well liked when, he first started off, getting featured in a rocky Series 8 (that was probably meant for Matt Smith’s Eleventh until the actor elected to leave after “The Time of the Doctor”), it took a while for the show to find its footing with Capaldi, and it was really when he got adventures all his own, away from Clara, that the Doctor was really able to shine properly. Capaldi has his own style, his own character, distinct from David Tennant and Matt Smith, and fans looking for that manic energy of the younger men didn’t find it with Capaldi. But once they warmed to him, they stayed loyal and not Twelve is considered one of the favorites of the series’ very long run.

It does help that his immediate follow-up, Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteen, had some of the worst stories ever written for Doctor WhoThe longest running sci-fi franchise (at least in terms of sheer seasons), Doctor Who has seen cancelations, relaunches, and reboots, but the core of the series remains the same: a madman in a box traveling through time and space. and her run (no fault of the actress) is considered a low point for the franchise. In comparison to that mess. Capaldi’s run comes away smelling like roses.

Still, all great things eventually must come to an end, and so it was that after three series and four specials, Capaldi elected to hang up his screwdriver. To mark the occasion the show, ably handled by at-the-time showrunner Steven Moffat, went with an old standby beloved by fans: the multi-Doctor crossover. The last time we’d had multiple Doctors together was for “The Day of the Doctor”, which marked the 50th anniversary of the franchise. Now we could have one for the changing of the guards, the shift from one era to another (ignoring the horrible stories that would come). It was time to bring out another Doctor from the show’s past so that two Doctors could have fun together. It was time, fittingly, for Twelve to meet One.

It had been some time since the First Doctor had come to play in any of the major crossovers. Although he had been featured in cameo appearances (such as in “The Day of the Doctor”), there hadn’t been any major stories featuring his character since “The Five Doctors” in 1983. That was, partially, due to the death of original actor William Hartnell in 1975, and he was replaced for that last special by RIchard Hurndall (although archival footage of Hartnell was used at the start of that special to honor the actor). For this new special the show once again recast the role of the crotchety old Doctor, finding a properly crotchety old actor to play the role: David Bradley.

Bradley is, of course, known for playing grumpy old men. He portrayed Argus Finch in the Harry PotterFirst released as a series of books (starting in the UK before moving worldwide), the Harry Potter series gained great acclaim before even becoming a series of successful movies. Now encompassing books, films, a prequel series, and a successful two-part play, the series even now shows no end in sight. films, and then took on the recurring role of Walder Frey in Game of Thrones, while also playing crochet old vampire killer Abraham Setrakian in The Strain. When you want someone to play old and grumpy you hire Bradley, and he’s good at it as, despite all reason, he brings warmth and charisma to these nasty little men. Having him play the First Doctor is, frankly, brilliant, and the show has since trotted him out again for a Thirteenth Doctor special as well (and the actor as said, more than once, he’d love to come back to play the First Doctor again).

Getting the two Doctors together actually works pretty well in the story. Twelve (Capaldi) having taken a mortal blow in his confrontation with the Master, Missy, and the Cybermen (at the end of Series 10) decides that he doesn’t want to regenerate, that he just wants to let it all end and see what happens next. He travels to the Arctic for some quiet and to let things happen as they must. But this isn’t the first time he’s come to the Arctic to avoid his regeneration cycle as, many lives before, he did the same thing when he was in his first incarnation (ignoring that the Thirteenth Doctor’s run then stated that there were many lives before the First). So when Twelve finds himself caught in a weird time distortion, he also realizes there’s another TARDIS, and the First Doctor (Bradley), out in the snow.

Pairing up with his former self, Twelve needs to figure out what is causing the time distortion. The men come upon a lost soldier who had been in the middle of a battle in December 1914 (the Great War) but then arrived here, in the Arctic. And then there’s a ship, flying above, demanding the dying soldier so it can place him in its archive. It has many people in its archive, each collected at the time of their death, and the A.I. of the ship swears that the people are happy. It even brings out Bill (Pearl Mackie) who is part of the archive. The Doctor doesn’t want to let the soldier die, and he doesn’t trust the A.I., so he grabs his companions, First Doctor included, and flees to prepare for a fight against the inevitable. In a sense, a fight against death itself.

This episode is a bit of a mess, if I’m being honest. A lot of that is due to the fact that while Twelve doesn’t trust the A.I. powering the ship, its cause does seem noble enough. It wants to document people and store them at their passing to add their collective experience to the archive. It can’t prevent death, which is what the Doctor dislikes, but that doesn’t make its actions evil. This is what the episode struggles with since it wants to portray the A.I. as a kind of villain but it never has the motivations behind that such that we really expect the fight with the Doctor to culminate in, well, much of anything.

Also dragging the story down a bit is the plot that the Doctor somehow doesn’t want to regenerate and would just give up his future lives. This seems silly since viewers in the audience knew the show would continue, with a new Doctor at the helm. It also comes just after the previous Doctor died when the Time Lords gave him a whole new set of regenerations. There was never a chance that the show was going to end with Capaldi and we all knew it. Hell, Whittaker’s casting as the next Doctor had even been announced before then, so clearly this wasn’t the end. This storyline feels needlessly indulgent for not much drama at all, really.

It also kind of ruins the ending for some characters. Bill, last we saw, had gone off in spirit form to travel with the Pilot from her first episode, and it created this lovely, if weird, bit of romance for her. Having her be part of the archive, then, implies that she just died soon after, or that the archive only caught the bit of her before she became a spirit traveler, which in either case means there was a whole line of experience that Bill, in the archive, lost out on. And there’s Nardole (Matt Lucas) as well, who makes an appearance here after going off with the colonists on their ship to live a (presumably) long and happy life there. He doesn’t talk about that time, though, and he looks the same as in his last appearance, so we can only infer that he died soon after, too. No one, apparently, got the happy endings they deserved, which is just weird.

Sure, I doubt the show meant to imply this. It brought out the companions so that Twelve could get his big ending. It doesn’t think through the implications, though, making it all feel flat and a touch sad.

With that said, it is fun to have Twelve meet One, and that bit gives the episode some much needed juice. Twelve was envisioned as an older Doctor, one who was more grumpy and crotchety. He was supposed to be the start of a new regeneration cycle, so Moffat thought he should be a lot like the First Doctor, to then let the following Doctors age down again, following a similar path for the series. Having Twelve meet the Doctor that served as his model is a nice little callback, a way to let the series loop and mirror itself. Plus, having the new Doctor apologize for the behavior of the old Doctor (who was written very much as an old man in the 1960s) is fun in and of itself.

Twelve’s final episode isn’t great, a bit of a weak final story for his last appearance (and from all indications Capaldi has no desire to return to the role, not any time soon at least). It gets good energy from its Doctor crossover, and it can have a little fun and humor because of it. But when it gets down to wrapping things up and letting the Doctor see his adventures from his past, it all gets very bogged down and silly (and not in a good way). Moffat can’t always stick the landing on his stories, a problem that has been noted many times in his run on this show and other projects, and this episode feels like another mismanaged ending. It’s not his worst, nor is it the worst story the Twelfth Doctor had to be in, but it would have been nice to see Capaldi go out on a higher note than this.