The Name of the Doctor

Doctor, what is your name?

The Name of the Doctor was the big lead in for the 50th anniversary special. It also was looking to reveal the mystery behind Clara as well as start to peel back the onion on a number of mysteries that swirled through the Eleventh Doctor's tenure. This gave the story a fairly tall order to fill and it was debuted with much hype. It also was the first of four straight stories to go with the "... of the Doctor." naming convention. I remembered enjoying this one the first time through but does it stand when the hype has faded?

Plot Summary

Madame Vastra goes to see a condemned murder who offers information about the Doctor in exchange for his life. She evaluates his information and decides to hold a discussion with other parties about it. She puts herself and Jenny to sleep and sends notices to have Strax and Clara put to sleep as well (Clara by means of a sleeping agent in the paper of the letter she sent).

Clara wakes to see the three Paternosters around a table in a dream world where they are joined by the River Song impression from the Library, whom Clara has never met and had only occasional references by the Doctor. Vastra relays the information along with a set of space-time coordinates. River realizes something about the message but before she can relate it, Jenny is attacked in her real body by creatures called the Whisper-Men. River forces everyone to wake up but Jenny, Vastra and Strax are all captured.

Clara wakes to find the Doctor duped by her charges into playing blind-man's bluff while they slipped out to a movie. She tells him what happened and the Doctor rushes off to the TARDIS. He realizes that the message meant that his grave has been found on the planet Trenzalore. He takes the coordinates from Clara's memory and they head off there, though the TARDIS resists them the whole way. The Doctor is forced to forcibly land on the planet and they walk through a graveyard toward the dead Doctor's TARDIS, which has grown to enormous size.

As they walk, Clara sees and hears River, who kept the line open from their earlier chat. Clara and the Doctor find a tomb with River's name on it and she prompts Clara that it might be a passage to the Doctor's tomb. They open it as a group of Whisper-Men appear and rush at them. They are chased through the tunnel until they come to the TARDIS and lock the Whisper-Men out. As they walk through the TARDIS, Clara begins to remember what the Doctor revealed about her during Journey to the Center of the TARDIS.

The Doctor and Clara meet the Paternosters who are being held by the Whisper-Men and the Great Intelligence, taking the form of Dr. Simeon. The Great Intelligence threatens to kill the four friends unless the Doctor opens his tomb by stating his real name. The Doctor begs him not to but River, unseen to all, states his name and opens the doors. The Great Intelligence enters and they find a glowing rip in the fabric of space-time, which gives access to the entirety of the Doctor's timeline.

The Great Intelligence enters the timeline, destroying the Doctor's past and future. As he does, the Doctor loses strength and begins to die. Vastra notes stars going out as the Doctor's victories are reversed. Jenny disappears as she was saved by the Doctor. Strax also becomes hostile and Vastra is forced to kill him. Realizing that the only way to save the Doctor is to restore the Doctor's timeline, and knowing she has already done it before, Clara steps into the Doctor's timeline. Thousands of replicas of her are made across time and space (including those seen in Asylum of the Daleks and The Snowmen) but the prime version of Clara falls into a rocky space surrounded by echos of the Doctor's past.

Clara's entry saves the Doctor and restores his previous victories, including Jenny and Strax. He then elects to go after Clara. River appeals to him not to and he acknowledges that he was able to see her the whole time. They have a last kiss and finally say their goodbyes as he enters his time stream. He finds Clara confused and offers her a copy of her parents' leaf to ground her. He then grabs hold of her. Before they can leave though, a new figure emerges from the shadows. Clara faints from the stress and the Doctor backs out of his time stream as the War Doctor comes into focus.

Analysis

I think we can call this one a fairly good episode, although like a number of the Steven Moffat stories in this era, it loses a little bit when watched out of context of the rest of the series. I had actually forgotten that it makes a heavy reference to the events of Journey to the Center of the TARDIS since that is where the Doctor told Clara about her other iterations. But it still flows fairly well, although I noticed my appreciation of the Paternoster Gang was a bit diminished this time around.

The Doctor was enjoyable as always here but he was not the real driver of the plot. Nearly all the action was centered around the various companions so that the Doctor seemed fairly ineffectual up until the end. He also seemed a bit weak when directly confronting the Great Intelligence, needing River to give the Intelligence what it wanted and then having Clara do the actual saving. Of course, since they'd already run across evidence of what Clara had done, the whole thing was inevitable so his weakness could be somewhat excused. But it was still a little disappointing.

The Doctor's best scenes were actually with River and her performance in general was quite enjoyable. In many ways, her and Strax were the only source of levity and her humor always seems more witty and enjoyable than the slapstick that Strax indulges in. But when she goes for the more serious moment of actually giving him hope that Clara is alive and that he has to say goodbye, it works really well and has a poignancy to it. I also like it that they didn't expand on the cheap gag of showing the view from the Paternoster Gang and showing the Doctor holding air when he is holding River. That would have ruined the mood and I thought that scene in particular was quite well done.

I must also say that I actually like Clara in this story. Overall, I think my enjoyment of Clara is greater in Series 7B when she is still the Impossible Girl. Less of her personality is developed because the quest narrative takes precedence and that makes her more enjoyable overall, at least to me, as I find her regular personality somewhat annoying. But she did well here, being on her heels most of the time and acting as River's puppet for a short while. I can find no fault with her here.

The Paternoster Gang was okay but they were a bit disappointing to me. Strax was his normal self so that was par for the course, but both Jenny and Vastra seemed less than themselves here. That's less of a leap for Jenny given that she is often portrayed as the lesser of the two and it seems she was attacked first so a more diminished presence should be expected. But Vastra seems nearly helpless through most of the story and that just doesn't suit her. A mind as developed as she has should be always in motion and prepared to make plans. Having her stand and fret while waiting for someone else to figure out what to do just doesn't suit her and lessened the overall character. They were still enjoyable, but less than they should have been.

The villains were a bit wasted in this I thought. The Whisper-Men were quite scary in appearance and their existence as manifestations of thought made them particularly creepy. But they don't do much aside from menace and act as the slow-moving soldiers for the Great Intelligence. The Great Intelligence himself is also underutilized as doesn't even appear until nearly the halfway point of the episode and then is torn apart by the time winds after entering the Doctor's time stream. It also seems rather weak that he kills himself to destroy the Doctor and doesn't think of doing anything to the other people who might come in after him and thwart his plans.

To cover a point raised by HISHE, how exactly does Clara's thousands of fragments overcome the fragments of the Great Intelligence? Is she stronger than he and just overwrites him or does she actually have to fight him (and if necessary die) as her two previously shown iterations do? Also, why is the Great Intelligence destroyed but Clara not upon entering the time stream? Is it because he exists as thought while she still has a flesh and blood body that holds up better in the time winds? Of course, she would have died soon enough due to the mental damage done in the time stream, but it's still a bit of an unresolved point that bugs me.

The story also suffers a little bit from aging in the way that it introduces the War Doctor. The Doctor notes that the War persona is his secret and his actions were not in the name of the Doctor. He then leaves and the War Doctor turns around to then have words on the screen saying "Introducing John Hurt as The Doctor." At the time I'm sure this was a huge squee moment but with the 50th anniversary long over, it's a break in the narrative flow and upsets the mood. I think there was enough clarity from Clara and the Doctor's conversation to denote that John Hurt is a previous iteration of the Doctor and having the credits roll after he turns around with nothing more than a steel gaze would have been sufficient. The moment could have been done in the closing credits with a solo credit line saying the same thing on the closing credit background. I'ts a pretty small nit but it does bug me a bit.

The overall direction was pretty good and the effects weren't completely terrible either given how much old footage Clara had to be spliced into. Clearly the worst insert was with the Second Doctor. The green screen was painfully obvious and I can't understand why the Second Doctor was running around in his fur coat in Southern California. If it had been a scene on a mountain and they were clearly attempting to recreate The Abominable Snowmen, I would have understood and the green screen would have been easier to forgive, given the very limited amount of footage there. But the setting made no sense to me and that just stuck out. Clara falling into the time stream also looked pretty fake. Falling just seems to be something that television can't quite get right.

As for the story itself, it works fairly well, even if you need to rewatch other stories in the Series to get all the nuances. That's not abnormal for modern Doctor Who and even the classic series would have stories make notes to past stories so that doesn't bother me. I think the it would have been a little better served to have been longer as some of it seemed a bit rushed and underdeveloped. Yet there was no real point of padding so it's just a case of cramming so much into a show that other details get dropped. That feeds into the rushed feeling in certain scenes but I'd rather have a story where a little bit of trim was made than to have a story that has been padded up.

Overall, this was a pretty good lead in to the anniversary special. Was it perfect; no. But it had a good overall feel and pace and it was engaging the whole way through, even if it went overboard on the melodrama at times. It was a good story and an easy one to rewatch, but also clearly not a story to lead a new fan into. But that's not going to stop me from pulling out now and again to watch on it's own.

Overall personal score: 4 out of 5