*Spoilers.*
Sadly, as is true with a number of season finales on Who, “The Name of the Doctor” doesn’t quite come together for me. When it works, it really works, but there of plenty of unfortunate quirks in the writing and some inattentive plotting that drag it down.
Clara learns, via a dream-state “conference call” with the Paternoster gang and River’s data ghost from the Library, that big trouble is going down at Trenzalore. By this point, the Eleventh Doctor has already been warned off going to Trenzalore, but here, he thinks he’s figured out why: it’s the site of his tomb from the future. The ghoulish Whisper Men have set their sights on the Doctor’s final resting place, and if they can get in, it will have disastrous implications for all of space and time.
We’ll start with the nitpicks. I’m officially Completely Over creepy nursery rhymes in Moffat episodes—they no longer do anything for me. I also don’t like the cheap tricks, like the no-stakes aura that surrounds killing characters off just to bring them back ten minutes later, scenes of easy emotional manipulation that make zero logical sense, and the big, giant, that’s-no-way-out crisis being solved in such a Because Reasons way that the episode doesn’t even bother to show how the Doctor managed it. (I know—but tell you how I really feel, right?)
That said, there is stuff that I like. The old clips and nostalgia mainly work on me, even when I know the show is playing to my nostalgia. In the opening scene, when it was revealed where we were? I squeed, no lie. (However, I’m mixed on the particulars of how the Impossible Girl plot shakes out in this regard. Though it’s mostly shown well and, like I said, I love seeing the old Doctors again, it kind of bugs me. First, having hundreds of iterations of Clara save every Doctor at every point in his timestream smacks of “my companion is better than your companion!” showrunner posturing. And second, there’s no way I’m willing to buy Clara telling One and Susan which TARDIS to steal. The TARDIS left herself unlocked so she could steal a Time Lord and see the universe. That’s what the TARDIS told us in “The Doctor’s Wife,” and it will be my canon forever.)
I also think a good chunk of the emotional stuff is successful. As cheap as it is to kill Jenny off for ten minutes, Vastra’s bereavement and concern for her is affecting. Also, this episode might be one of the best in terms of the Eleven-Clara relationship. There’s tough stuff—Clara remembering the Impossible Girl discussion from an altered timeline and wondering what the Doctor is hiding from her—but there’s also lovely, supportive stuff, and I like how attentive Clara is toward the Doctor’s emotional well-being here (I like Clara when she cares about the Doctor— who knew, series 8?)
Despite my aforementioned misgivings about how the Impossible Girl story works, the big sacrifice scene is a good one. I get why Clara does what she does. It’s personal, because, as I said, she cares deeply about the Doctor and wants to stop his suffering, but it’s also bigger than that. His whole timeline is being rewritten, and that means countless lives are being snuffed out everywhere and everywhen. With all that at stake, I totally get Clara’s decision to step into the timeline to preserve it. But this is one where I really think she shouldn’t have come back from that sacrifice. I know I’ve advocated Clara staying dead before, and I’m sure it makes it sound like I just hate Clara, but the completely half-assed, unexplained save at the end undermines the beauty of what came before, and it cheapens that lovely scene of the choice Clara makes to enter the Doctor’s timestream.
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