Who Sunday: The Time of the Doctor, Steven Moffat

And so we come to the end of 2013 and Who Sundays. I’m sure we’ll be discussing Twelve eight months from now as his episodes air, and we’ve got Sherlock in the wings for January and February, but first, the last of Eleven. Whatever frustration I had with Moffat’s Who-centric stories, I loved Matt Smith’s Doctor without reservation. I swear, watching the Doctor is like adopting dogs: they all die too soon. I think that’s why I was so disappointed in this farewell episode. It felt like Moffat crammed everything he had into this one–Weeping Angels! Daleks possessing women! Amy’s back!–without giving much thought to story. It played like the Doctor’s Greatest Hits without becoming one. The beginning felt like Doctor Who meets Coupling; Clara’s lied about having a boyfriend (not even romcoms trot out that one anymore), he’s naked when she shows up, they go to church and then Clara’s naked, too, except there’s the illusion of clothes, so it’s just “heh heh they’re naked,” and then the Doctor meets an old friend, and she’s very arch and they’ve obviously been lovers, and boy, the Doctor’s getting a lot of action suddenly, plus I’m annoyed that he’s cheating on River Song, and then the other shoe drops and “Lem” is “Mel” spelled backwards, and she’s the high priestess of the Church of the Papel Mainframe and when last we left River (or first) she was loaded onto a hard drive, so Tasha has to be River, right? except she started the church and a splinter group that left it kidnapped Melody as an infant and turned her into River so that can’t be it . . .

I hated this episode. Not as much as “Love and Monsters,” but close. Incoherent in execution, alternately brain dead dumb (“I accidentally told them I had a boyfriend so you have to come to dinner”) and inexplicably complex (see Lem/Mel/River/Mainframe above), and all of it presented at the speed of light (that regeneration took about two seconds, so much for the drama of transformation), I can’t think of anything I’d keep in a rewrite. Matt Smith deserved better. So did we.

Now go ahead and tell me how wrong I am.