A Few Notes on Eight point Five

Some call him the War Doctor.  Others call him the John Hurt Doctor, or simply the Hurt Doctor (which seems apt.)  Still others call him Moffat’s Insatiable Need to Pull One Over on the Fans and Also a Tool to Facilitate His Desire to Be the One to Address the 12-Regeneration Limit.  This is Eight point Five.  (Spoilers ahead for “The Day of the Doctor,” the preceding minisode “The Night of the Doctor,” and the novel Engines of War.)

I think Eight point Five can be best characterized by his first interactions with the Moment.  Perceptively, she asks why he walked so many miles before priming the weapon and speculates that he didn’t want the TARDIS to see.  In this observation, more than any Doctor-numbering retcon, we learn how Eight point Five has drawn a curtain over himself.   He knows what he has to do, he knows how horrible it is, and in a particularly human flash of emotion, he’s trying to shield the eyes of his magnificent time-space ship from it.  He shies away from the light.  He wants to be alone with the weight of what lies before him.

This follows beautifully from “The Night of the Doctor,” in which sweet, vibrant Eight at last stops running from the Time War.  This decision comes in perhaps the most brutal way it could have:  a would-be companion, horrified to be in the presence of a Time Lord, chooses to burn in her crashing ship rather than let him save her.  Thanks to some strong-arming by the Sisterhood of Karn, the Doctor finally admits he can’t stay above the fray.  As the Sisters note, the universe is being torn apart, and it has to end.  He has to end it.  And in order to do so, he has to end as well.  He has to steel himself against the task at hand and become someone who can bear it.  “Make me a warrior,” he begs as he prepares to put away the mantle of Doctor.  Just as Eight point Five retreats from the TARDIS, Eight has to be alone before he can regenerate into this new, harder man.  When the Sisterhood tells him it will hurt, he’s glad of it.  He wants it to tear through him, he wants it to eat him, and with the coming role he’ll have to play, he wants to start his penance early.  His final words are farewells to the memories of companions he’s known.

However, in light of Eight’s sacrifice and the through-line that carries into “The Day of the Doctor,” there are two things I can’t get behind (to be fair, only one is really canonical, but still.)  First, there’s the glimpse “The Night of the Doctor” gives us of Eight point Five’s earliest moments.  It’s clearly not a contemporary John Hurt; instead, it’s archive footage of a decades-younger Hurt in a previous role.  The implication is that Eight regenerates into a fairly young man who spends hundreds of years fighting the Time War – it would have to be centuries for Eight point Five to age so much – before coming to “The Day of the Doctor.”  This is supported by Engines of War, which follows a single adventure of a battle-weary Eight point Five.

I hate that Eight point Five joins the war for so long.  The whole point of it being him instead of Eight or Nine (besides the aforementioned Moffat-related reasons) is that he has to physically become someone else to end the Time War.  That’s why the Sisterhood helps him, so he’ll spare the universe the endless warring.  It’s why Eight point Five regenerates at the end of “The Day of the Doctor” without any wound:  his job is done.  To take this small, intensely personal story from “The Night” to “The Day” and insert multiple centuries in the middle disrupts the flow.  Eight point Five wasn’t born to fight.  He was born, very specifically, to bring the fighting to a close, and the details of that first image and Engines of War, to me, go off-book.  Tsk, tsk, show.