On April 3rd, 2010, a new era of Doctor Who began with “The Eleventh
Hour,” and this week, that era came to an end with “Twice Upon a Time,” the
Christmas Special that saw Steven Moffat, Peter Capaldi, and a whole host of
other creatives from the era take a bow, handing the reigns off to Chris Chibnall
and Jodie Whittaker for the show’s next, exciting step forward.
But with any change comes a chance for
reflection, which is what I am doing here. Now that his final episode is out in
the world, I am counting down all 40 – count ‘em, forty – Doctor Who stories
Steven Moffat has contributed, as writer or, in a few rare cases, co-writer,
from 2005’s “The Empty Child” to this
week’s “Twice Upon a Time.” I watched every single one of these again, took
extensive notes, and ranked them from least-favorite to most-favorite.
This series is also a walk down memory lane,
as I have included links to my original written reviews and/or the original Weekly Stuff Podcast reviews to every episode. For “The Eleventh Hour,” which
we reach today, I have even, in a rare little treat, gone back and found my
original written review, which was either never published or published on a
site that doesn’t still exist, and republished it on this blog under its
original date for completion’s sake. Certainly a good window into my mind at
the outset of this incredible journey.
This list will be published in four parts,
once a day through the end of the week, with each part containing 10 episodes.
I hope you enjoy, and if you would like to listen to these rankings in Podcast
form, we did a whole
episode for that.
Be sure to catch up with Part 1 and Part 2 if you
haven’t already, and without further ado, let us continue with Part 3 - #20 - #11, coming up after the
jump…
20. A
Good Man Goes to War
Eleventh Doctor, Series 6; Directed by Peter
Hoar
“You make
them so afraid. When you began, all those years ago, sailing off to see the
universe, did you ever think you’d become this? The man who can turn an army
around at the mention of his name.”
Easily the best of Moffat’s Series 6 scripts,
“A Good Man Goes to War” is also the most effective of Moffat’s ‘Doctor Who mythmaking’ stories, a trope
he leaned on a lot in the Eleventh Doctor era but never expressed as fully or
as elegantly as he did here. Part of that comes from the episode keeping Matt
Smith off screen for so long, and then challenging the Doctor’s identity and
actions so much in the episode’s final stretch. In an episode comprised almost
entirely of great moments, many of them grand and operatic, my favorite one is
its quietest, when the Doctor comforts a dying soldier named Lorna, who joined
the army just to meet her favorite legend; only the Doctor doesn’t remember
her, and the work Matt Smith does in illustrating a Doctor pretending to be the
mythical hero this dying girl wants him to be is some truly powerful stuff. And
it speaks to what the episode does so well, in funneling this big, climactic
confrontation down to a personal reckoning, with the Doctor very definitively
losing a battle, disappointing his friends, and being called on the darker side
of his legacy by River Song (in what is easily one of Alex Kingston’s greatest
and most effective moments as the character). In the Eleventh Doctor era,
Moffat’s scripts, like the Doctor himself, could sometimes get too ‘big’ for
their own good; but “A Good Man Goes to War” is a practically perfect marriage
of the writer’s most thoughtful and bombastic qualities, the thematic rigor and
the showmanship blending to powerful effect.
19. The
Husbands of River Song
Twelfth
Doctor, 2015 Christmas Special; Directed by Douglas Mackinnon
“When you love the Doctor, it’s like loving
the stars themselves. You don’t expect a sunset to admire you back. And if I
happen to find myself in danger, let me tell you, the Doctor is not stupid
enough, or sentimental enough, and he is certainly not in love enough to find
himself standing in it with me!”
“Hello sweetie.”
Peter
Capaldi and Alex Kingston only had one episode together, and yet when I think
back on River Song, I imagine her standing beside the Twelfth Doctor just as
much as I do the Eleventh. This is due in no small part to Capaldi and
Kingston’s sterling chemistry, nor can it be denied that having the Doctor’s
physical appearance be closer in age to River makes it easier to buy into their
romance (Capaldi and Kingston look like they could be a real-life married
couple, whereas Matt Smith, for all his wonderful qualities, didn’t have that
same kind of ‘gravity’ standing next to Alex Kingston). But this is also
because “The Husbands of River Song” is, simply, a very good script, manic and
wild in places – you can feel Moffat cutting loose with the silliness after the
sheer emotional weight of Series 9, and it’s easily one of his funniest scripts
– but with a tremendously strong heart that takes the central relationship
between River and the Doctor more seriously than ever before.
Where
Eleventh Doctor stories with River were big, fantastic, and operatic,
“Husbands” is intimate, a story about two people who love each other deeply too
afraid or vulnerable to admit so to the other. And when the moment comes where
they finally do have to lay those cards on the table – I’ve quoted it above,
and it’s one of my very favorite Twelfth Doctor moments – the emotional impact
is vast, an impact that only snowballs over the last fifteen minutes as the
Doctor prepares his and River’s final ‘date’ on Delirium. Romance is something
Moffat largely (and wisely) elided during his time on Doctor Who, but the home stretch of “Husbands” embraces it
beautifully, and the closing scene contains some of the best material Kingston
or Capaldi ever got to play. And even as we know where River’s story will eventually
take her, Moffat finds a clever, elegant way to give her and the Doctor
something of a happy ending, a magic trick that makes the character’s entire
winding arc seem more complete and impactful in retrospect.
18. The
Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang
Eleventh Doctor, Series 5; Directed by Toby
Haynes
“Oh, that
box. Amy, you’ll dream about that box. It’ll never leave you. Big and little at
the same time, brand-new and ancient, and the bluest blue ever. And the times
we had, eh? Would’ve had. Never had. In your dreams, they’ll still be there.
The Doctor and Amy Pond…and the days that never came.”
In 2010, it had been pretty well established
that Doctor Who finales stunk.
Russell T Davies had many positive qualities as a writer and showrunner, but
mounting an effective 2-part closing story that wasn’t buried under the weight
of its own misplaced ambition wasn’t one of them. But as we progressed through
the revelation that was Series 5, and saw how deftly and effectively Moffat and
company laid out both the story and character arcs of the season, it felt more
and more like the show might just be able to turn a corner when it came time
for the finale – and lo and behold, it did. “The Pandorica Opens” and “The Big
Bang” are big and rousing and ridiculous episodes in the ways we’d come to
expect from prior finales, but with a much greater sense of focus, theme, and
especially character, as the second hour in particular ties the season-long
story of the old, raggedy Doctor and young Amy Pond together in emotionally
impactful fashion. The closing stretch of “The Big Bang,” as the Doctor walks
through his past as he prepares to be erased from history, is a stunner, featuring
incredible work from a wise-beyond-his-years Matt Smith, and some of Moffat’s
most wistful, evocative writing (the speech quoted above is an all-timer, plain
and simple).
If I can make any knock against this story,
it’s that the first hour does feel a bit wheel-spinning in places (some of the
stuff in the Pandorica’s cavern, with the Cyberman corpse, goes on much longer
than it needs to), and save for Matt Smith’s magnificent speech in Part 1, most
of the memorable moments are concentrated in the second hour. But that’s not a
bad problem to have overall, especially for what was the first modern Who finale to truly fire on all
cylinders, to deliver on a season’s worth of mystery and character arcs in the
most satisfying ways possible, and to affirm the value of these characters and
performances in such joyous, satisfying fashion.
17. Twice Upon a Time
Twelfth & First Doctor, 2017 Christmas Special; Directed by Rachel Talalay
“Laugh hard. Run fast. Be kind. Doctor. I let
you go.”
I’m
writing this one on Christmas Day, just after seeing the episode, still wiping
tears from my eyes after Peter Capaldi’s pitch-perfect final scene – all of
which makes this the hardest episode for me to rank, because it’s still so
fresh. I’m putting it one spot below Matt Smith’s final episode, but above
everything else, and that feels right for now. Capaldi’s swan song was uniquely
diffused across the two-part Series 10 finale (which you’ll hear about a bit
higher up) and this one, “Twice Upon a Time,” which acts more as coda than its
own bombastic finale.
But what
a coda it is. Aggressively small-scale, “Twice Upon a Time” is a heartfelt
consideration of legacy, time, and moving on. It’s a little messy in places,
bursting at the seams with beautiful and witty dialogue, and deeply metatextual
to the bitter end – and it’s exactly what Steven Moffat’s final episode
probably always had to look like. Just as two Doctors grapple with their
impending regeneration, this story is all about Moffat, Capaldi, and the
viewers at home learning to embrace the change that awaits. Moffat will always
have that meta streak inside of him, and I think he employs it beautifully
here, with a story perfectly tailored to transition us out of his stewardship
and into another’s, and one that, once again, shows just how deeply he
understands the character of the Doctor. Both of them, in this case, as we not
only get a wonderful final turn from Peter Capaldi, but a great performance
from David Bradley as the First Doctor, paying tribute to William Hartnell
while still making it his own. I love what Mark Gatiss, Pearl Mackie, and a few
surprise guests bring to the table as well, and as a regeneration story should,
it all culminates in a cascade of emotions that brings the tears flowing
freely.
Capaldi’s
stupendous final monologue is his era in microcosm – written with soaring
emotive rhetoric by Moffat, directed with incredible panache and immediacy by
Rachel Talalay, and performed to perfection by Capaldi himself. All three
(along with composer Murray Gold, turning it what very much feels like his
final score for the show, given how deeply it calls back to Modern Who’s earliest days) take the
opportunity not only to say goodbye, but to beckon to the future – to give
advice on what they’ve learned, to verbalize what they care most about, and in
the end, to let go. That’s what Doctor
Who is all about. It has been in the best of hands for almost a decade now
– and I think everyone on screen would join in me in expressing the deepest
excitement and anticipation for seeing what the new team shall do.
16. The
Time of the Doctor
Eleventh
Doctor, 2013 Christmas Special; Directed by Jamie Payne
“I will not forget one line of this. Not one
day. I swear. I will always remember when the Doctor was me.”
If “The
Time of the Doctor” only had that pitch-perfect final scene quoted above going
for it, that sad, beautiful, uplifting, expertly written, performed, scored,
and shot regeneration sequence, it would still be a pretty good episode in its
own right. The shot of Eleven’s bow-tie falling to the floor in slow-motion
would, on its own, rank this episode pretty highly on my list. But “The Time of
the Doctor” is so much more than just those final minutes, and it took me a few
years and multiple viewings to fully wrap my head around what Moffat was going
for here. It’s easy to cynically read this episode as a rushed attempt to
wrap-up three seasons of dangling plot threads in one single hour, and to be
sure, there are some moments of narrative clunkiness in wrapping up all the
Eleventh Doctor’s adventures.
But
Eleven was always a larger-than-life figure, a Doctor Moffat liked to surround
in mythmaking and fairy-tale, and it seems fitting that his final adventure
would not only be his grandest, but the one we in the audience see the least
of. “Time of the Doctor” is essentially told through Clara’s eyes (and Jenna
Coleman’s exquisite performance), meaning that when she is sent away from the
Doctor, only to return to him centuries down his timespan, we don’t see
anything from that gap either.
It is an
utterly unique way to structure a Doctor’s final story; instead of one final
adventure leading to a fatal blow, Eleven lives several lives in a single town
over the course of this story, and many of the major threats and challenges he
faced rippled into his past as a result of the story told here. It is, in
retrospect, a truly elegant and creative way to cap Eleven’s excellent tenure,
and most importantly, it gives Matt Smith room to deliver what is perhaps his
finest work as the Doctor. Some wonky old-age makeup in the middle section
aside, Smith gracefully glides through all the wild contours of this story, successfully
making us believe, as he had from day one, that this visibly young man was many
hundreds of years old underneath, wearing that age and wisdom on his sleeves in
the most compelling ways. Perhaps the highest praise I can lend “The Time of
the Doctor” is that as a tribute to a truly special performance, it positively
soars.
15. The Magician’s Apprentice /
The Witch’s
Familiar
Twelfth Doctor, Series 9; Directed by Hettie
MacDonald
“I came
because you’re sick and you asked. And because sometimes, on a good day, I’m
not some Time Lord who ran away. I’m the Doctor.”
Opening the modern series’ best season off on
spectacularly confident footing, this is one of those stories where Moffat’s
writing is simply on fire, packing the story with so many incredible ideas –
some wildly fun, others deeply dark and profound – throwing out great lines of
dialogue like he has extras to spare, pushing each character to fascinating new
places, and wrapping it all around a hugely compelling central theme: What if
the Doctor, while wandering the universe, stumbled upon Davros as a child, and
in failing to save the boy inadvertently created his greatest enemy? And what
if an older, dying Davros remembers, and wants to confront the Doctor not
through war, but through a dialogue? The centerpiece is truly the conversations
between Peter Capaldi and Julian Bleach, an astounding series of scenes in
which these two centuries-old enemies sit down and talk, and even reach a point
of genuine empathy with one another.
It’s let down just a little bit by a climax
too full of double-crosses, but it’s hard to hold that against the story when
it is so bountiful with other riches. The expertly-calibrated use of Michelle
Gomez’s Missy alone makes this the second-best Master story of the modern
series, her antics perfectly walking the line between funny and horrifying, and
culminating in one of the most dreadfully evil things the Master has ever
attempted (trapping Clara inside a Dalek and almost convincing the Doctor to
destroy it). But the episode belongs to Peter Capaldi, who makes his entrance
riding a tank and shredding the electric guitar, and ends it by debuting the
‘Sonic Shades,’ a Doctor Who fashion
accessory that belongs in the pantheon next to the scarf and the bowtie. In
between, he gives us an absolute acting masterclass, taking the Doctor to
places he had never been before – and for the incredible Series 9, this was
only the tip of that particular iceberg.
14.
Extremis
Twelfth Doctor, Series 10; Directed by Daniel
Nettheim
“It’s
like Super Mario figuring out what’s going on, and removing himself from the
game. Because he’s sick of dying.”
“Extremis” is one of three episodes from the
Twelfth Doctor era (the others being “Listen” and “Heaven Sent”) where you can
comfortably say Moffat is doing something Doctor
Who has never attempted before, going out on experimental and surreal limbs
the push the series to bold new places. “Extremis” is far and away the zaniest
of these, combining the Doctor’s ongoing blindness, a book that compels anyone
who reads it to commit suicide, a death cult party at CERN, and a nihilistic
computer simulation into one of the most unsettling, disturbing, and endlessly
engaging episodes of the modern era. The final sequence in the White House,
with a dead President and a Doctor facing complete and utter defeat, is an
all-timer, and the conclusion leaves one so shaken and disoriented that, much
as I enjoy the ‘Monks Trilogy’ overall, one could argue this would be an even
stronger story if it just stood on its own, unresolved, a glorious enigma of an
hour. Layering the flashbacks to Missy’s aborted execution just enriches things
even further, giving the Doctor one moral dilemma to reminisce on as he faces
an existential crisis in the present, all of which foreshadows the character
reckonings of the Series 10 finale.
13. The
Zygon Inversion
(written
with Peter Harness)
Twelfth Doctor, Series 9; Directed by Daniel
Nettheim
“I fought
in a bigger war than you will ever know. I did worse things than you could ever
imagine, and when I close my eyes… I hear more screams than anyone could ever
be able to count. And do you know what you do with all that pain? Shall I tell
you where you put it? You hold it tight! ‘Til it burns your hand. And you say
this: No one will ever have to live like this. No one else will ever have to
feel this pain. Not on my watch.”
Both as one half of a larger two-parter and
as an episode for which Moffat is only a ‘co-writer,’ “The Zygon Inversion” is
difficult to place on a list such as this. But the final twenty minutes – and
the ten-minute span that encompasses the Doctor’s passionate, Socratic
back-and-forth with the Zygon ‘Bonnie’ in particular – are so ludicrously good,
so singularly well-written, so powerfully acted, and so riddled in Moffat’s
distinctive fingerprints, that I don’t think any full accounting of Moffat’s Doctor Who tenure can be undertaken
without them. It’s a great episode on the whole – so much so that Part 1, “The
Zygon Invasion,” feels completely reverse-engineered from this hour – full of
big, interesting ideas and featuring a great dual performance by Jenna Coleman.
And the episode’s closing scene in the TARDIS provides one of my favorite
Doctor/Clara exchanges. “Longest month of my life,” the Doctor says about the
moment he presumed Clara dead. “Could only have been five minutes,” she says
cheerfully. “I’ll be the judge of time,” he almost whispers, deadly serious.
But it’s that 10-minute speech/exchange that
makes this hour an all-timer. In the abstract, it is such an audacious idea – a
whole 2-part invasion story that boils down not to bombastic action, not to one
of the Doctor’s clever tricks, but to a conversation on the philosophical
underpinnings of war itself. In execution, it could not be realized any more
powerfully, with Peter Capaldi giving one of the very best performances I have ever seen, in any medium. The sheer
number of steps he has to walk us through, the shifts in tone and style and
focus the speech winds across, is a challenge in and of itself, but it’s the
way he makes this all seem like such a righteous, cathartic release for the
Doctor is a wonder to behold. And the most powerful part might be completely nonverbal.
When he finally has Bonnie starting to consider peace, he gives her this little
smile of empathy, and the look on his face is simply unreal. It feels like no
person should be able to emote that much just with their face, and it moves me
to tears every time. In 20 years, this is going to be one of those sequences
that Doctor Who fans rightfully
regard as legendary, a major marker in the show’s history that will likely
inspire writers and actors not just on this show, but on other shows in other
genres. It is truly masterful, and that’s more than enough to give it a very
high spot on this list.
12. The
Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone
Eleventh Doctor, Series 5; Directed by Adam
Smith
“A needle
in a haystack.”
“A needle
that looks like hay. A haylike needle of death. A haylike needle of death in a
haystack of…statues. No, yours is fine.”
If “Blink,” the first Weeping Angels story,
was ingeniously minimalist, then this two-parter, their second appearance, is
almost gleefully maximalist, taking the basic threat of the Angels and
exploding it out across a far wider action-adventure canvas. It is insane just
how many creative, terrifying ideas Moffat packs into these two hours. It jumps
breathlessly from scene to scene, each sequence upping the ante from the one
before, always finding a new terror for the angels to enact upon the group:
from living inside a recorded image, to inhabiting long-dead statues, to
speaking through a deceased young soldier, to living inside Amy’s mind and
forcing her to verbally count down to her own death against her will, to Amy
having to move through an entire field of Angels while keeping her eyes shut.
And if all that somehow wasn’t enough, the season’s central threat of the
cracks in time show up in the second half to make the situation even more
fraught. It is an absolute roller coaster of action and horror, and while there
may be deeper episodes of Doctor Who than
these ones, there are few as viscerally imaginative or exciting.
11. The
Eleventh Hour
Eleventh Doctor, Series 5; Directed by Adam
Smith
“Hello.
I’m the Doctor. Basically, run.”
One of the very best Doctor introduction stories
ever told, “The Eleventh Hour” started both the Matt Smith and Steven Moffat eras
off on the most confident, energetic, and refreshing note possible. Reworking
ideas seen in earlier scripts like “The Girl in the Fireplace,” Moffat
introduces both the Eleventh Doctor and Karen Gillan’s Amy Pond in one
breathless, beautiful story, and by episode’s end – heck, by the end of the
‘fish custard’ scene, before Gillan’s grown-up Amy has even appeared – both
characters are so firmly, exquisitely established that one feels ready to
follow them anywhere. ‘Confidence’ really is the key word here, as Moffat,
Smith, and Gillan all seem 100% self-assured in this debut outing, the writing
knowing exactly what story it wants to tell and exactly how to tell it, the
performances fully fleshed-out and three-dimensional from the word go. It all
comes together in one of the most rousing climaxes in all of modern Who, as the Doctor, having saved the day,
calls the alien threat back to Earth, gives them a stern talking-to while
assembling his new outfit, and steps through an image of the preceding 10
Doctors to pronounce his presence to the world, all while Murray Gold’s iconic
Eleventh Doctor theme blares in full glory for the first time. “I’m the
Doctor,” Smith announces matter-of-factly. And after the hour we’ve just seen,
we don’t doubt him in the slightest.
Come back tomorrow for Part 4, with #10 - #1,
as we conclude our journey through all 40 Steven Moffat Doctor Who stories!
Follow author Jonathan Lack on
Twitter.
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