Bringing a man back to die perfectly illustrates that. The First Doctor told Bill that life isn’t a fairy tale. That’s when he reveals that he’s the ancestor of the Lethbridge-Stewarts. They need to return him to the moment of his death. With no enemy to fight, what is there left to do? Both Doctors trying to die in the same place at the same time created the time error that brought the Captain to them. Despite the common arrogance of the Doctor, he doesn’t always see himself as the essential hero people see him as. This Bill was sent because the Testimony wants to understand the Doctor and through her conversation with the First Doctor and her memories, they get a better idea of who he is or, more importantly, how he sees himself. I couldn’t help but wonder what that meant for the Bill that went traveling with Heather. She is only Bill in the sense that she is all of her memories. Third, that Bill is now part of the Testimony. Second, that the First Doctor is afraid of regenerating. It’s an interesting choice that Moffat would bring him back when the Doctor is struggling with regenerating or fading away. This was the Dalek who looked into the Doctor and found him to be a ‘good Dalek,’ not a good man. He visits Rusty, the Dalek he went on a miniaturized journey through in season eight, for it. Twelve decides that they need more information on the Testimony. The Doctors ultimately make a run for it, taking Bill and the increasingly shocked Captain with them. Instead, he thinks that she is some kind of duplicate. It seems unbelievable that she’s standing there, whole in front of him and he doesn’t believe it. When he last saw her, she was a Cyberman sacrificing herself for people she barely knew. In exchange for returning the Captain to them, the Doctor gets to see his last companion, Bill Potts, again. They picked the Captain up before his death for this purpose and were in the process of returning him to his timeline when an error in the time stream pulled him out. They are aliens from the distant future who harvest memories from people at the point of their death. The TARDIS is taken into the Chamber of the Dead where they meet the ‘villain’ of the episode - the Testimony. Second only to the First Doctor telling Bill she was going to get a smacked bottom if she continued with her bad language. One of my favorite sequences involved Bill telling the First Doctor that she too has experience with the fairer sex. Our Doctor is constantly trailing behind him asking him not to say things like that anymore. The First Doctor is like someone’s grandpa, filled with judgemental statements and borderline problematic phrases. In the meantime, the First Doctor slowly comes to the realization that he’s meeting his regenerated self. He joins the two Doctors on an adventure to see what is stopping time. He emerges from the crater only to be taken by strange glass people before being released in the south pole with no idea of what’s happening. We flash to 1914 Ypres, where the Captain, played by Mark Gatiss, is stuck in a crater getting ready to kill or be killed by a German soldier before time stopped for him. Something we soon see when time freezes and a British World War I Captain walks onto the scene. Both Doctors have their reasons for not regenerating but that refusal has consequences. Or we die as we are,” the Twelfth Doctor tells his counterpart. “We have a choice: either we change and go on. He, too, is on the brink of regeneration but stops it at the last moment.Īt the South Pole, these two versions of the Doctor meet. As he talks to his companions, the black and white footage morphs into color with David Bradley, who played the First Doctor in the 2013 TV movie, An Adventure in Space and Time, seamlessly taking over. The Christmas episode begins with grainy archival footage of the last episode of William Hartnell, the First Doctor. We ended season 10 with the Doctor stopping his regeneration and meeting a surprise guest in the form of the First Doctor. Instead, this episode is all about letting go. Steven Moffat didn’t give us a complicated plot filled with intricate details and an evil villain that required the Doctor to suit up one last time to defeat. It seems weird to say, but the plot of the Doctor Who Christmas special isn’t that important. There were a number of episodes, including “Heaven Sent” - an episode that focused entirely on the Doctor - that showed the strength of Capaldi’s acting abilities and the essence of his Doctor. He did care, he just showed it in a different way. This, in part, led to a rough first season eight with only a few standout episodes like “Listen.” The next season, nine, was much better. He was more alien than any of the other Doctors in the reboot. Gruff and abrasive, he was almost the complete opposite of my then favorite Doctor, Eleven. Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor grew on me slowly.
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