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Dec 25, 2013 · The Time of the Doctor: Directed by Jamie Payne. With Matt Smith, Jenna Coleman, Orla Brady, James Buller. The Doctor's worst enemies, The Daleks, The Cybermen, The Angels and The Silence, return, as the doctor's eleventh life comes to a close, and his twelfth life begins.
- (8K)
- Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi
- Jamie Payne
- 2013-12-25
- Overview
- Synopsis
- Plot
- Cast
- Worldbuilding
- Story notes
- Continuity
- Home video releases
was the 2013 Christmas Special of Doctor Who. It was Matt Smith's final regular appearance as the series lead, but unusually it did not formally introduce his successor, since Peter Capaldi's Twelfth Doctor had already been seen in the previous episode, although this story marks the first chronological appearance of the Twelfth Doctor properly.
The show's 800th episode — and the last produced by Marcus Wilson — it served as a conclusion to the entirety of the Smith era. It especially tried to give final relevance to the Silence, the cracks in time, Trenzalore and the salvation of Gallifrey. As such, it was a unique attempt at narrative conclusion for storylines running through the entirety of a particular incarnation's tenure. It also significantly aged the Doctor, establishing that the Eleventh Doctor had lived much longer than any other incarnation.
But it was especially important to the history of the programme because it addressed an issue that hadn't been talked about in the series since its return in 2005: the limited amount of regenerations in a Time Lord's regeneration cycle. This episode confirmed that the Tenth Doctor's aborted regeneration in Journey's End did indeed use up a whole regeneration, and with the retroactive introduction of the War Doctor in between their Eighth and Ninth incarnations this meant that the Doctor had no more regenerations left, leaving the Eleventh Doctor as the thirteenth and final incarnation in his regeneration cycle. However, the Doctor is granted a brand new regeneration cycle at the end of the story, drastically altering his fate. This is not only the first time that a new regeneration cycle has been given on screen but the depiction of a new regeneration cycle ensured that the programme would be able to continue and keep casting new actors in the role for potentially decades.
The necessity for this had previously been unclear. Some early episodes of the show had suggested the Doctor's lifespan was practically infinite. Even Matt Smith's Doctor seemed to hint at this possibility in an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures. But other stories, starting with The Deadly Assassin, set the limit to thirteen lives. Time was the first episode of Doctor Who produced by BBC Wales to choose a side, confirming that a "regeneration cycle" indeed consisted of just thirteen incarnations.
The only way to do this, however, was to change some other continuity. From one perspective, getting the Eleventh Doctor to the magic number thirteen meant that no BBC Wales incarnation could technically be the number under which they were marketed. This had already been the case once The Night of the Doctor definitively showed the Eighth Doctor regenerating into the War Doctor. Time, however, incremented the number again, explicitly stating, as mentioned above, that the aborted regeneration shown at the conclusion of The Stolen Earth and the beginning of Journey's End "counted". This made the "Eleventh Doctor" the thirteenth life.
Nevertheless, writer Steven Moffat said in DWM 467 that the BBC marketing was also narratively correct: "I've been really, really quite careful about the numbering of the Doctors ... It's not a matter of counting the regenerations, but of counting the faces of the Time Lord that calls himself the Doctor."
Orbiting a quiet backwater planet, the massed forces of the universe's deadliest species gather, drawn to a mysterious message that echoes out to the stars - among them, the Eleventh Doctor. Rescuing Clara from a family Christmas dinner, the Time Lord and his companion must learn what this enigmatic signal means for his own fate and that of the uni...
The Doctor is among thousands of ships orbiting a planet after hearing a message being broadcast from it, a three-toned message that no-one can understand. Shrouded in a cape the Doctor visits a ship while holding a Dalek eyestalk to show his bravery, and that he comes in peace. He demands them to identify themselves by species and planet of origin. Unfortunately, the ship belongs to Daleks, who fire at him until he teleports back to the TARDIS, where a severed Cyberman head that he calls "Handles" is plugged into the console. After avoiding a near disaster, the Doctor removes his cape and scolds Handles for sending him to a Dalek ship while he was "holding a broken bit of Dalek". Handles, who as a robot interprets everything literally, replies he didn't specify a preference for transport.
The TARDIS phone begins to ring, but the Doctor cannot answer the call from the inside. The ship's telephone device has been incorrectly fed to the dummy handset on the outer shell of the police box. He orders Handles to remind him that he needs to patch it back into the console unit, eventually growing exhausted of Handles' inability to grasp figurative language. He then tells Handles to "Just pick a random number, express that number as a quantity of minutes, and when that time has elapsed, remind me to patch the telephone back through the console unit". Clara is calling the Doctor via the TARDIS phone and pleads that he pretend to be her boyfriend for her family's Christmas dinner. She is having difficulty squaring things away for the event, including how to cook the turkey properly. At the same time, the Doctor has been put in a bind by having to answer her call from outside the TARDIS doors as he hovers through space among a legion of alien races. He leaves the phone hanging before his companion can clarify that she needs a Christmas date after inventing a boyfriend. The Doctor has identified the arrival of a new ship on the TARDIS scanners and materialises the TARDIS on board to hopefully greet the occupants in peace. His luck is even worse this time: the Doctor accidentally visits a Cyber-ship while holding Handles, where he is also shot at until he returns to the TARDIS again. The Doctor, trying to evade the volleys of laser fire from the Cybermen, and Clara, cooking a Christmas dinner under tension, agree to lend each other some assistance.
Clara caters to three people over for Christmas, her father Dave, her grandmother, and Linda. Clara doesn't let them figure out she's messed up the instructions for cooking the Christmas turkey and runs outside with relief when she hears the TARDIS materialising. The wind catches her paper crown and she lets it be carried away, more concerned that the arrival of her "boyfriend" is just in time to bail her out of a jam.
The Doctor picks up Clara from her home but gives her the strangest greeting yet. Upon entering the TARDIS, she is shocked to see that the Doctor is naked. She is immediately flustered by his nudity and tells him to stop before he embraces her, daring to ask why he has stripped. He explains by saying he is naked because he plans to go to Church. He uses a holographic filter to project an image of clothes. She takes him inside to meet her family. They appear very embarrassed in meeting him. Dave stares at his behind with a boggled look on his face; Linda is looking on with perplexed discomfort; Clara's gran gives the Doctor a good look over and starts flirting with him - her irreverent giggling suggests she's a bit tipsy. Clara initially does not understand why they are all behaving weirdly, but the Doctor suggests it might be because he didn't update his holographic suit to be visible to her family. She ushers him out of the room with the explanation to her guests that "he's Swedish." Clara asks for an honest opinion of her turkey; the Doctor snarks, "I think a decent vet would give it an even chance." She asks if he has an app for the turkey on his sonic screwdriver. He doesn't like her indignant remark about his screwdriver. The device "doesn't do turkey", nor does anything else. The Doctor tells Clara she would need a time machine. She gives him an indicative glance until he quits missing the obvious solution.
They take the turkey to the TARDIS, where Clara opens up a panel near the floor. She can put the bird in the time winds beneath the console to cook it - or, possibly, bring it back to life, the Doctor points out. Dematerialising the TARDIS, he takes her to the planet's orbit. When asked to identify the origin of the transmission, Handles claims it is Gallifrey, which the Doctor refuses to believe. They are then invited aboard the Papal Mainframe, a space church headed by Mother Superious Tasha Lem. The Doctor gives Clara a pill so that she too will have holographic clothes, as nudity in the Papal Mainframe is considered a mark of respect. Tasha and the Doctor greet each other, Tasha complimenting his latest incarnation. They discuss the signal coming from the mysterious planet, while Clara repeatedly sees and forgets several Silents that surround her. She bursts into the room where the Doctor and Tasha are conversing but forgets why after she does so.
Tasha sends the Doctor and Clara to the planet, but demands that he relinquish the TARDIS key he has snuck in through his holographic clothes, which she is trained to see through. She does not want the Doctor bringing any technology onto the planet, including summoning his TARDIS. The Doctor complies, and Tasha reminds him that she wants both him and Clara back in an hour. Unfortunately, she accidentally places them in the middle of an ambush of Weeping Angels hiding beneath the snowdrifts. Here, Clara is nearly captured by an Angel when it grabs her by the ankle, but the Doctor helps her wriggle loose. The Angels surround them as the heavy snowfall keeps blinding their vision, but the Doctor unzips his coif and pulls out a spare key that lets him summon the TARDIS, which materialises around them. Clara is stunned at the Doctor's hairless head. Once in the TARDIS the Doctor drapes the wig over Handles and reveals that he pulled the "old key in the coif" trick on Tasha Lem. Clara states that she suspects that he just got bored one night and shaved his head, which he somewhat reluctantly confirms. Clara asks if that's what happened to his eyebrows as well. The Doctor replies that they're "just delicate". Clara is bothered by the Doctor's bald head and comments that his prominent ears now stick out like "rocket fins", he is pleased by this comment but does don the wig again.
•The Doctor - Matt Smith
•Clara - Jenna Coleman
•Tasha Lem - Orla Brady
•Dad - James Buller
•Linda - Elizabeth Rider
•Gran - Sheila Reid
The Doctor
•The Doctor refers to his Time War incarnation as "Captain Grumpy". He also says that he had a "vanity problem" as the Tenth Doctor, referring to his regeneration from that body into the same one. •The Doctor has shaved his hair, making use of a wig to hide a TARDIS key inside its coif while presenting Tasha Lem with a decoy key. •Clara notices the Doctor's ears stick out much more without any hair and compares them to rocket fins. •The Doctor claims to have OCD.
Technology
•The Sontarans have invisibility shields to mask their presence in Christmas from the Papal Mainframe. •In Christmas, a Truth Field is in force. The Doctor already knows about such fields but hasn't encountered one for ages. •The Cybermen engineer a special wooden version of their kind to sneak into Christmas without alerting the Papal Mainframe's technology detectors. It uses a flamethrower as a weapon and chants, "Incinerate" rather than "Delete".
Species
•Amongst the species massing at Trenzalore in response to the mysterious signal are the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Judoon, the Sontarans, the Silurians, the Terileptils and the Raxacoricofallapatorians. •The Daleks have regained their memories of the Doctor from Tasha Lem's mind after they had been deleted by Oswin Oswald and learned how to mount enormous versions of their gunsticks on tanks. •The Cybermen are shown to use the Cybus phrase "Delete" in one of the drawings. •There is a drawing of the Doctor fighting a Sycorax. •The Doctor traps a Weeping Angel with a mirror so that it is forced to look at itself. •A puppet of a Monoid is seen. •A drawing of what may be one of the Racnoss and a Pyrovile hangs on the wall of the clock tower, as does a drawing of an Ood and some Adipose. •The Doctor mentions an instance when he arm-wrestled a Draconian. •The Silents are revealed to be high ranking Confessional Priests of the Papal Mainframe (later the Church of the Silence), which were genetically engineered to allow people to confess their sins without remembering doing so, accomplished by fashioning the priests so anyone looking at them would forget their encounter when they looked away.
•This is the first televised regeneration story in which the Doctor regenerates at the end of the story to end on a shot of a character other than the Doctor and the second since The War Games not to end on the Doctor's new incarnation. In this case, this story's final shot shows Clara's reaction to the newly regenerated Twelfth Doctor, rather than the Twelfth Doctor himself.
•This story takes place over a longer amount of time than any other before it, with the Doctor having lived through 900 years by the end of the episode. Its record would later be broken by Heaven Sent, however, taking place over 4.5 billion years.
•Starting its broadcast at 19:30, this episode has the latest transmission time of a Doctor Who Christmas special.
•This is the shortest regeneration story (in overall run time) to be broadcast on BBC1, as The Night of the Doctor was only shown on Red Button.
•The regeneration is presented differently from other regenerations shown in the revived series, with the use of a prolonged explosion of energy occurring before the actor transitions. The final transition consists of a brief flash of golden light around the actor's head.
•Regenerations in the revived series are presented as getting bigger and stronger each time. The Ninth Doctor's regeneration into the Tenth Doctor's introduced the regeneration flames. The Tenth Doctor's regeneration into the Eleventh Doctor's used the same effect but as a result of holding it in for too long, causes damage to the TARDIS. When the Eleventh Doctor's regenerative abilities are reset for the beginning of a new cycle, the effect is big enough to destroy an entire Dalek mothership and several fighter pods. However, when the first regeneration after the reset completes itself (the physical change from Eleventh to Twelfth), it is shown as a relatively simple transition.
•Handles' response of "Affirmative" is reminiscent of K9. (TV: The Invisible Enemy, et al.)
•Clara's poor cooking skills are again in evidence, as she needs the Doctor's help to cook her family's Christmas turkey. (TV: Asylum of the Daleks, The Name of the Doctor)
•The Doctor explains the cracks in time and the events of the reboot of the universe to Clara. (TV: The Big Bang)
•To allow translation of the message, the Doctor uses a Seal of the High Council of Gallifrey, telling Clara he "nicked it off the Master in the Death Zone." The Third Doctor, while there, did exactly that, incorrectly and arrogantly assuming that the Master had himself stolen it long before learning it was Borusa who was the enemy. The Doctor stated at that time he would return it to the High Council at the "first opportunity". Clearly, he never got around to it. (TV: The Five Doctors)
•Clara is aware of the Master's Tremas incarnation, having met him when she was kidnapped by Adam Mitchell. (COMIC: Endgame)
•The Doctor confirms to Clara that although he is "Number Eleven", he has in fact used all twelve of his regenerations, and is, therefore, unable to regenerate again. The two "missing" lives are the War Doctor who was not generally referred to as "the Doctor" due to his actions in the Time War, and the fact that he rejected the title moments after his regeneration by declaring "Doctor, no more.", (TV: The Night of the Doctor, The Day of the Doctor) and the abortive regeneration by the Tenth Doctor when he sent his regeneration energy into a matching bio-receptacle (his severed hand) rather than change. (TV: Journey's End) The Doctor's statement also implies that River Song's sacrifice of her remaining regenerations to save his life only transferred the healing effect of regeneration energy, not her remaining lives. (TV: Let's Kill Hitler)
DVD & Blu-ray releases
•The Time of the Doctor was released as part of "The Time of the Doctor + Other Eleventh Doctor Christmas Specials" sets on DVD and Blu-ray, in region 2/B on 20 January 2014 and region 4/B on 22 January 2014. Other Christmas episodes from Matt Smith's tenure were included: A Christmas Carol, The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe and The Snowmen. •The US version of the DVD and Blu-ray was a standalone release, with no additional episodes, on 4 March 2014. •The Time of the Doctor was also included on the 50th Anniversary Collector's Edition alongside The Name of the Doctor, The Day of the Doctor and An Adventure in Space and Time. The Australian release was identical to the UK release. These DVD and Blu-ray sets were released in region 2/B on 8 September 2014 and in region 4/B on 10 September 2014. •The US equivalent of this, The Complete Matt Smith Years, also featured it alongside all of Matt Smith's televised appearances up to and including his regeneration story.
Digital releases
•A bundle including the Christmas Specials mentioned above was released on Google Play, iTunes and Amazon Instant Video in HD or SD. It included the Farewell to Matt Smith featurette. The Amazon Instant Video release also added Prequel to the Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe, Vastra Investigates and The Great Detective. •The special was added to Netflix instant streaming in the US during September 2014. It is listed as episode 16 of Series 7. It is also available on Hulu. •In the United Kingdom, this story is available on BBC iPlayer as part of Series 7.
Plot. Thousands of aliens orbit the planet Trenzalore, from which a message, "Doctor who?", is continually being broadcast across time and space. The Church of the Papal Mainframe constructs a force field around Trenzalore.
The Time of the Doctor Sci-fi drama. The universe's deadliest species gather near a quiet backwater planet, drawn to a mysterious message that echoes out to the stars.
Dec 20, 2014 · The Time of the Doctor. Sci-fi drama. The universe's deadliest species gather near a quiet backwater planet, drawn to a mysterious message that echoes out to the stars. And amongst them, the...
The Time of the Doctor. 25/12/2013. Orbiting a quiet backwater planet, the massed forces of the universe's deadliest species gather, drawn to a mysterious message that echoes out to the stars. And amongst them — the Doctor.
Dec 25, 2013 · Synopsis. Orbiting a quiet backwater planet, the massed forces of the universe's deadliest species gather, drawn to a mysterious message that echoes out to the stars - among them, the Eleventh Doctor.
