*Spoilers.*
Man, I love Twelve. I feel like it took a while for the show to fully appreciate that blunt, slightly-curmudgeon Time Lord, but I could always tell he was still the Doctor. Even if the writing frequently let him down during his seasons, he still managed to pull it out with aplomb on numerous occasions. Here are my favorites.
Assembling the Time Heist (Series 8, Episode 5 – “Time Heist”)
The Doctor comes through twice here! First, he plans the heist of an impenetrable bank for altruistic reasons, planting key supplies he’ll need, gathering the experts who can help him do it, leaving clues for the crew, and then wiping everyone’s memory, including his own, so the psychic alien “Teller” won’t know their intentions. Everything is meticulously plotted out for the Doctor, Clara, and co. to reach the bank vault at a key moment, and once there, the Doctor is able to infer despite his wiped memories that he was the architect of the heist. Furthermore, he realizes they were never there to rob the bank at all. It was a rescue mission, freeing the Teller’s imprisoned mate that the bank’s owner was using to coerce the Teller into doing her bidding. Clever, intuitive, and compassionate—everything I could want in a Doctor.
Facing the Mummy (Series 8, Episode 8 – “Mummy on the Orient Express”)
A great moment from my favorite series 8 episode. It’s hard for the Doctor to study/defeat the Mummy when it can only be seen by its victims, so he uses a little technological cheat to put himself in the Mummy’s crosshairs. With only 66 seconds to solve the mystery, he puts the pieces together and realizes the truth: the Mummy is the remains of a cybernetically-enhanced soldier from a long-forgotten war, with its tech forcing it to stay in the fight long after it’s over. The Doctor’s “defeat” of the Mummy, at the last second, is to tell it they surrender, which shuts down its programming and finally allows it to rest. I love the compassion of that resolution, and I also love how thrilled the Doctor is to come up against this legendary boogieman; I just adore his enormous grin as he announces, “I’m the Doctor, and I will be your victim this evening!”
Decoding the Coordinates (Series 9, Episode 3 – “Under the Lake”)
Two-part brainy-Doctor move here. They need to work out what the “ghosts” on the base are saying, but their words aren’t audible. The Doctor lures them into the Faraday cage where they can’t harm anyone, then records them so Cass can work on reading their lips. Then, once they get the message—“The dark, the sword, the forsaken, the temple”—the Doctor deciphers its meaning. They’re not just words, they’re coordinates, a rather poetic way to pinpoint their location across space. The “ghosts” are a signal, beaming the coordinates out through space, calling who-knows-what to them. A clever idea to discover their message, and plenty of Doctory intuitive leaps of logic to determine what it means.
Presenting the Osgood Box (Series 9, Episode 8 – “The Zygon Inversion”)
A radicalized group of Zygons is on the brink of war with humanity. Both sides literally have their hand on the button, but the Doctor has made it a little more difficult than that. The “Osgood box,” a.k.a. the Zygon version of a nuclear football, isn’t one box, it’s two. And inside each box is two buttons: one that will give the pusher all the war and destruction they want, and one that will blow their plans to hell. As Kate Stewart and the rebel Zygon leader Bonnie stand over their respective boxes and try to get the Doctor to tell them which button to press, the Doctor uses the setup to force them to stop and think about war. In a “just engrave Peter Capaldi’s name on the BAFTA right now” marathon speech, the Doctor draws on his own experiences in the Time War to get Kate and Bonnie to reflect on the consequences of what they’re about to do. The speech is full of gems, but it culminates in the Doctor admitting that he sees the dead every time he closes his eyes, and then this is what he says. “Do you know what you do with all that pain? Shall I tell you where you put it? You hold it tight ‘til it burns your hand, and you say this: ‘No one else will ever have to live like this. No one else will ever have to feel this pain, not on my watch!’” Mic drop!
Freeing the Creature (Series 10, Episode 3 – “Thin Ice”)
Lord Sutcliffe’s family has gotten rich exploiting a mysterious creature they’ve imprisoned in the Thames, and now he plans to orchestrate an explosion during the Frost Fair to feed all the fairgoers to the creature, which will help him maximize his profits. The Doctor pulls the classic move of turning the baddie’s plan against them—he dons a diving suit, steals Sutcliffe’s explosives, and plants them on the creature’s chains under the ice. So, when Sutcliffe tries to blast the ice, he blasts the chains instead, freeing the creature. Bonus points for the Doctor’s discussion with Bill beforehand, wherein he acknowledges the risk in setting the creature free, knowing that it might attack innocent people on the banks. “I don’t know the answers,” he admits. “Only idiots know the answers. But if your future is built on the suffering of that creature, what’s your future worth?”
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