I guess this could count as a movie for the Christmas Spirit Challenge I'm participating in this Christmas. Note to self: add "The Time of the Doctor" to 'Films I've Watched So Far' on my Christmas Spirit Challenge post.
Anyway, I have mixed feelings with this episode - not because it wasn't good. It was great, even! But "The Time of the Doctor" is the episode where we say goodbye to the 11th Doctor and say hello to the 12th (though we only see Peter Capaldi's Doctor for less than a minute before the episode cuts to credits).
Now, as a reminder, if you haven't watched "The Time of the Doctor" yet, I suggest you read no further. I don't want to spoil it for you!
This is a curious episode/movie/thing, whatever you want to call it. It opens with Clara Oswald (my favourite companion to date) ringing the doctor on his phone (which is located outside the TARDIS, in space) Apparently, her mother, father, and grandmother are coming over for Christmas dinner - and somehow, some way, Clara let it slip that she had a boyfriend (which she doesn't).
So in her panic, she calls up the Doctor, who's in space hovering above a strange planet surrounded by almost every alien the Doctor has had to face. (Okay, this makes this the second 2016 Sci-Fi Experiance appreciation post about a ton of aliens over a planet involving the Doctor in some way, lol).
The Doctor abandons his spot amongst all the alien ships and his TARDIS appears in the field next to Clara's apartment building.
And guess what? Clara's apartment building doesn't posess an elevator, meaning that whoever wants to visit her, or if she wants to go anywhere, they have to climb an almost never-ending staircase. And Clara's apartment is halfway up the building! I can just imagine the dread she must feel after every long school-day. Her feet may be sore and she is faced with having to climb all those stairs before she can have a chance to relax! I makes me grateful that I only have eight stairs to climb before I get to the back door of the house I'm in now.
This episode induced a lot of bittersweet feelings inside of me. There was humor and there was war. We learned that the planet he had been hovering over before Clara called him was, in fact, Trenzalore, the planet where Clara jumped into the Doctor's time stream and scattered herself all over time and space in order to protect him from the Inteligence, but way back in time before it was converted into a planet-sized graveyard.
And because the Doctor was there, defending the town called Christmas, Trenzalore probably never became that graveyard.
Points I liked about this episode:
- We got to see an almost fatherly-side of the Doctor because all the children in Christmas looked up to him.
- I got a chuckle out of the wooden cyberman with the flame-thrower strapped it its forearm. Well, that was smart - not. lol
- It tied up a lot of mysteries - we found out why the TARDIS suddenly exploded in "The Pandorica Opens"/"The Big Bang", where the Silence came from, and why Trenzalore was so important.
- I liked Handles, the cyberman head. Handles was the Doctor's closest "friend" for three hundred of the years he was on Trenzalore. He got to see one last sunrise and reminded the Doctor to patch the phone through the TARDIS' console before he finally died.
Points I didn't like about this episode:
- Seeing the 11th Doctor so close to death from old age. He was the first Doctor I was introduced to, so he was my favourite. Props to the makeup department for making the character's age look so real on the actor!
- The fact that the "Church of the Papal Mainframe" considered itself a church when all it seemed to be was a nudist colony ship that was militaristic in nature and used religious-themed codewords. They are also the Silence, and I never really liked the Silence anyway (since they were trying to kill the Doctor, caused Time to explode, and terrorised practically everyone since no one could see them and remember them once they looked away).
Other than that, is was a pretty good episode/movie. Now I can finally watch the escapades of the 12th Doctor!
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