Day of the Doctor - Review

The weird thing about Doctor Who is it's more than the world's longest-running TV serial, it has become part of British culture. As such the 50th anniversary episode was, before broadcast, feted not so much as an event airing simultaneously to a global audience, but a monument. Was Day of the Doctor worthy of the hype?

Well, no. Nothing could be, really. But it did a job of work. Whizz-bang special effects abounded. The rubbery monsters were a nice homage to baddies past. Loose plot lines were left unresolved (what did happen to those human/Zygon negotiations?) Daleks. And Tom Baker! All made for a canon-defining story, and Steven Moffat and team can have themselves a few tots at the after show party tonight. It was fun, jolly and entertaining.

Me being me, there are two quick points about those "deeper" things pseudo-intellectual blogs like this one tend to fixate on. First, must I go on about Steven Moffat and women again? I'm afraid I do. I've written about this on a couple of occasions, and this is just a tiny morsel of the Gallifrey-sized library of comment sitting on the internet. It's not just me saying Moffat has issues with the portrayal of women, it's hundreds of thousands of Who fans. On this occasion, women were positioned either as ciphers for weakness and indecision. Or both. Take the cameo from Good Queen Bess. Elizabeth I is portrayed as a saucy, bosom-jiggling minx who can't wait to jump on the Doctor's bones. De ja vu much? I would also have been very surprised had he not used the "I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman" line, which he did in vintage Moffat fashion. Come on, seriously, it's like she was plucked from a Carry On, complete with the unreconstructed dodgy gender politics. 

Then there is Billie/Rose/Sentient computer programme and Clara. It has been canon since the 2005 reboot that the Doctor is the sole survivor of his people (apart from The Master, of course) and that he is haunted by his "necessary" genocide of the Time Lords. Necessary, because it was to save the universe from the Daleks. Day of the Doctor takes us to the moment where John Hurt, the missing "war" Doctor is about to press the button. He is joined by his two future selves - the David Tennant and Matt Smith iterations - so he does not do it alone. Pulling them back from the brink is the indecision, the consciences represented by the women. Their resolution, their grim conviction that destroying their civilisation is a necessity is dissolved by Clara's tears and weaponised Rose's visions of hope amidst the suffering. And so a new plot is hatched in which the Daleks are wiped out, but Gallifrey is whisked away and frozen in a pocket parallel universe to be retrieved by the Doctor at some unspecified future point.

It's a good job they did, of course. Though quite how Peter Capaldi is going to play a happy Doctor no longer burdened by historical guilt will be interesting. But why did the indecisive role have to fall on Clara and Rose when Matt's hipster Doctor carries enough self-doubt around to out-miserable Morrissey? Especially when moments later he exclaims he'd been thinking about the plan they go on to put into action for centuries. An innocent slip of the script? Or because it's only women who do conscience? Who fans are too familiar with Moffat by now to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The second point is how thoroughly Moffat has ploughed into the canon. Not that a show's mythology is sacred, or is a big deal anyone but the keenest of fans. Yet how he has treated it is telling. With Russell T Davies, the Time War was the reboot's jumping off point. No more Time Lords. No more Daleks (though, thankfully, he soon got around that). We were told that both species were erased from the history of the universe and secured in a continuity known only to the Doctor and the viewer. This way, Davies could set off and build a new mythology on his inheritance while being respectful with what went before. It acted as a clear punctuation, a break separating the old from the new. So old enemies came back and were updated, but that's as far as it went. Moffat, however, has twisted, pinched, tinkered and rewritten the canon Davies took care to bury away in a bunker of plot points. And so, paying little heed to previous continuity, three episodes into his reign the Mark Gatiss-authored Victory of the Daleks properly brought them back as bad 'uns. More audacious was last season's finale, in which Moffat inserted Clara into key points within previous Doctors' stories. This included suggesting that the Hartnell-era Doctor might want to take off in the TARDIS. And finally in Day of the Doctor, the mythology established over the last eight years is done. The key psychological flaw in the character was done away with.

Taken together Moffat has stamped himself all over the work of the last 50 years. He is to Who fandom what Margaret Thatcher was to the post-war settlement. Davies was the man who brought the series back, but it will be Moffat who will leave the most indelible of marks. Were Moffat to disappear to spend more time with Benedict Cumberbatch, his successors are unlikely to have as profound an impact on the show as he. His rewriting of the mythos will echo down the decades, much like the Doctor himself.