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.

Character Highlight: Doctor Eight point Five (Doctor Who)

 

I’ve mused on Eight point Five before (my preferred name for him, rather than the War Doctor – if we’re gonna insert extra Doctors who mess a little with the numbering system, let’s at least give them numbers of their own,) in which I mainly wrote about how I think the limited material available for him feels contradictory and not altogether satisfying.  I mostly stand by that.  Feelings about inserted Doctors aside, I think there was something here and that John Hurt could have done wonderfully with it, but the story it needed just wasn’t there.  Still, for better or worse, he’s part of the fold now, even if the show itself and its supplementals seem to continuously forget that, so he’s worth a write-up on his character instead of just his storytelling inconsistencies (spoilers for “The Day of the Doctor.”)

Before we start, we do have to do a little more complaining about this whole concept.  Nine, Ten, and Eleven have never disputed the big fact – the Doctor ended the Time War – and the guilt stemming from that is a major facet of both Nine and Ten’s characters.  Given that acceptance of culpability, why would the Doctor who actually did the deed be consigned to a secret regeneration never spoken of and declared unworthy of being called the Doctor?  It feels like a retcon, and not just in the plot sense of the entire thing obviously being a retcon.  Eight point Five being a secret shame smacks of an attempt to hide or deny what happened in the Time War, and that’s never what the Doctor’s been about.  (Personally, if this was the route the story had to go, I would’ve had the stuff with the Moment happen almost immediately post-regeneration, with the brunt of Eight point Five’s life being spent with Ten and Eleven in “The Day of the Doctor.”  Then, he would’ve forgotten everything he did with his later selves and, upon regenerating into Nine, would’ve been disoriented and assumed he came directly from Eight, fuzzy on the precise details of what had happened but knowing his aim had been to end the Time War and seeing the result of Gallifrey and the Daleks both being gone.  That way, when Eleven sees Eight point Five in his timestream in “The Name of the Doctor,” he wouldn’t actually know who he is because he would’ve forgotten virtually all of it.  Doesn’t that work better?)

Oi – sorry.  Got off-track there.  Onto Eight point Five himself.  For all that the Doctor’s later incarnations reject him as being “not the Doctor,” there actually isn’t a significant difference between him and his fellow regenerations (and not just in the cheesy “you were the most Doctor of them all!” way that comes up later in the episode.)  He’s more serious, more melancholy, than the Doctor usually acts, but he’s not the hard, ruthless destroyer-of-worlds they paint him as.  I mean, he does take the Moment and plan to use it, obviously, so in action, that’s what he’s going for.  However, when Eight is regenerating, he says, “Make me a warrior,” because he knows he won’t be able to do it as he is.  That’s what the Sisterhood of Karn promises he’ll be, but that’s not quite what he gets.  This is still a man who carries the Moment miles away from the TARDIS because he doesn’t want her to see what he has to it.  This isn’t a man who doesn’t care; this is a man whose hearts break as he makes hard choices, and that’s what the Doctor has always been.  Ending the Time War is the most devastating thing the Doctor has ever done (or it would be if he’d actually done it – “The Day of the Retcon” is a more apt title for this episode all-around,) but it’s far from the only time he’s felt his only option was to end things in fire.

It sometimes startles me how Doctory he is, particularly the way he bickers with Ten and Eleven.  Even if that’s how his personality naturally tends, it seems flippant given the situation he’s just been pulled out of, the decision that must still be weighing heavily on his mind.  It takes some of the gravitas away, I think, when he ribs on the other Doctors for being so young and goofy – yes, he still comes across as the more serious one, but he has much bigger fish to fry at the moment.

Maybe I’ll be able to make more sense of him when I get around to his audio adventures.  Eight felt fully formed to me with only a single televised story, but Eight point Five is still something of an enigma to me (granted, he had two other Doctors to contend with, but the fact remains.)  He doesn’t actively go against my tastes like Six sometimes can, but he feels half-formed, not quite cohesive.  I might need more to go on before I can form a better opinion of him.

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.