Top (Three) Big Damn Hero Moments: Doctor Eight point Five (Doctor Who)

Eight point Five (a.k.a. “the War Doctor”) is in an even trickier spot than Eight when it comes to chronicling his biggest victories. His televised “era” is similarly restricted to a single 90-minute special, only Eight point Five has to share it with two other Doctors! Like other multi-Doctor specials before it, “The Day of the Doctor” saves its biggest wins for the current Doctor, so Eleven gets the most to do. As such, I couldn’t find a full Top Five for Eight point Five, and the Big Damn Hero moments I did come up with tend more toward partial victories or moments with caveats. Still, if he counts as a regeneration, he should get a Top (Three) Big Damn Hero Moments post, so here we are (spoilers.)

 

Not Wanting the TARDIS to See (50^th Anniversary Special – “The Day of the Doctor”)

The Doctor is convinced that he needs to use the Moment to end the war, destroying the Daleks and the Time Lords alike. But before he attempts to activate it, he carries the Moment across the desert for miles. The Moment is the one who realizes why: he doesn’t want the TARDIS to see what he has to do. On what he thinks will be the darkest day of his lives, as he leaves behind the name Doctor and prepares to do the unspeakable, he at least wants to spare the TARDIS from being a part of it. This scene is always the first to come to mind when I think of Eight point Five, a gentle example of kind strength on a day when he had little else to give.

 

Determining How to Get Out of the Cell (50^th Anniversary Special – “The Day of the Doctor”)

This moment is doubly undercut. First, the Doctor gets a nudge from the Moment, and second, this plan doesn’t actually get him and his successors out of the cell they’re in – Clara bursts in at the last second, pointing out to them that the door was never locked in the first place. But we don’t get a ton to work with here, and it’s still a smart bit of timey-wimey ingenuity, so I’m counting it. Prompted that he, Ten, and Eleven all fundamentally have the same screwdriver, Eight point Five realizes that if he uses his screwdriver to start the prohibitively-long calculation to figure out how to disintegrate the cell door, that calculation will continue to run on his screwdriver across the next several lifetimes. Sure enough, Ten hears the subroutine running on his screwdriver, and Eleven realizes that it’s just completed on his. As Eleven says, “400 years in 4 seconds!” Not a bad notion, Eight point Five!

 

Putting the Plan Together (50^th Anniversary Special – “The Day of the Doctor”)

I’m not sure whether you’d call this a tag-team effort or if Eight point Five and Ten are just quick on the draw to catch up with Eleven’s plan – there’s a lot of Doctors doing that Doctory thing of coming up with an idea and spinning around extolling it happily before anyone actually explains said plan. But whichever Doctor comes up with it, they all reach the same conclusion: use the power of the Doctor’s TARDIS throughout (at least) thirteen of their lives to create a stasis cube big enough to hold all of Gallifrey, hiding it from the Daleks in a tiny sliver of time while the Daleks get caught in their own crossfire and destroy themselves.