New Who Review for the Name of the Doctor

[puppetmaker]

I am asking for speculation only. I have managed to avoid the 50th anniversary spoilers so far. This entry goes up to the end of this season and stops. All previous episodes of Doctor Who may be discussed in comments.

Overall this half season has been good but not Great. I have enjoyed that nods to the previous incarnations of the Doctor. There has been great affection to the previous incarnations of the Doctor and it is nice for them to re-enforce that 8 is canonical.

I enjoyed the Name of the Doctor and thought that, over all they played fair with it. It did bring together all the threads starting with the Christmas episode and the rest of the season along with the previous part of the season. Moffat seems to like doing the making each episode important at the end and has done so with varying success.

I am looking forward to the next episode a lot.

Spoilers behind the cut and in the comments since I am assuming that not everyone has seen this episode yet.



So Clara was genetically encoded on a leaf? I am really fuzzy about that. That she would sacrifice herself to save the Doctor I don’t have a problem with that had been set up back in the Snowmen. I also would have perfectly happy for her to have been a normal human being that did something extraordinary rather than having been bred for the role.

It was nice to see Richard E. Grant again as the Great Intelligence. And the idea of the “body” being a timey whimey kind of thing didn’t bother me at all. The Doctor is not his body but his deeds and actions.

It was nice to see Alex Kingston as River even if she is only the echo from the library. I had sort of forgotten that she “died” in Forest of the Dead. So we saw her end before her beginning.

And we still don't know his name but I expected that from the moment I heard the title of the episode.

In the interest of Full Dislosure, I am a big John Hurt fan and have been for a very long time. So I heard the voice and my brain went “wait a minute I know that voice” but the reveal had me in one of my rare squees. It’s F’ng John Hurt as the Doctor. I haven’t been this excited since it was revealed that Derek Jacobi, another actor I am a big fan of, was the Master. My concern is that this will be 15 minutes and then we are back to the status quo or a new (old) Doctor. I honestly don’t care what the story is, I know that Mr. Hurt will act rings around all other comers unless Jacobi show up and then it would be an acting throw down (anyone else remember I, Claudius?).

So overall, enjoyed it and looking forward to the anniversary episode. And if this brings John Hurt to the SDCC, all the better.

I am grateful that Doctor Who is still going.

Comments

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

I was . . . less impressed. It felt like the prelude to a storyline, rather than an actual episode itself--I told jendaby about the Key to Time story afterward, and said this should have been like that, or at least like Keep Left, where we actually SEE Clara doing what she says in her voiceover (I'm leaving that vague for those who haven't seen it yet). I love Lady Vashtra and Jenny and Strax and felt they were underused, and I know I'm in the minority but I've never liked River Song (she's just too smarmy and the crazy Moffat love for her character is just way over the top). I'm interested to see what they're doing with John Hurt--I have a theory, and I've seen one other that also works well though it's a little too much of a retrofit for my taste--but he is a great actor and I'm excited to see more of him, presumably, in the holiday eps. I'd agree, though, that this half of the season has been good but not great.

[puppetmaker40.livejournal.com]

I have to say that Seeing John Hurt listed as the Doctor made up for the rest of the episode for me, heck most of the season as well and that is a personal bias. If it had been just about any other actor, I wouldn't have thought as much of it.

[wookieegunner.livejournal.com]

It didn't feel to me like she was bred for the role as much as she was a massive paradox, more a metaphor for the Doctor's "Butterfly Effect" then an example of predestination.

As far as the leaf thing, Doctor Who has never been big on differentiating sentience as coming from a specific form of life, so I chalked that up to "timey wimey garbaldy goop." much how the leaf was handled in the episode with the little girl singer (sorry can't remember the title).

[lyssie.livejournal.com]

I suspect the leaf thing was more of a metaphor, a sort of anchor-point for Clara's life. It began with the most important leaf in the universe (quoting Rings of Akhaten), and it's a stable-point for Clara to grasp hold of whilst she's whirling through the vortex, with her head filled with a million different lives and eleven different Doctors and umpteen companions, and--

It's no surprise she's ungrounded and lost at the bottom of the well ("I don't know where I am", indeed).

I expect her memories to fade back into normal, eventually.