Saturday, April 19, 2014

The Day of the Doctor (2013)

Here there be spoilers, so don't say I didn't warn you.  Though I think most fans have already seen this 50th anniversary special by now.  I haven't seen any of series seven, the 11th Doctor's final season, so I was a bit reluctant to watch this right away.  Based on advice from wise council, who said this show could be watched without that seventh season viewing, I finally sat down and watched the whole thing.  And it was a lot of fun, for many reasons, some of which I will enumerate in the space below.

The whole invasion plot with the Zygons was mostly a Macguffin, to get the rest of the story started.  I'm not sure how I feel about there being a minus one Doctor, but for this story it works out just fine. 
 Very nice to see UNIT working again, and finding out the Brigadier has a daughter is cool (this may be already known in the series, but it was news to me).  Mostly I liked it for the 10th and 11th Doctors meeting.  This is not anything new, since there have been several previous team ups of the Doctors.  Usually they don't get along very well at first, since they all think they know better.
This case was no exception, but the two Doctors didn't do too much of it.  Still, it's always good to see some things don't change.  In fact, the first "Doctor" made fun of them a lot more.  He certainly was irascible at times, which makes one think of the First Doctor.  I wonder how Susan has been retconned these days...
So it all wraps up nicely, and then we have the last scene.  Being a long time Doctor Who fan, I loved it for so many reasons.  My first Doctor was the Fourth Doctor, and since he hasn't ever really done a team up special, this was great.  The reason was nicely explained, more or less, with just a hint of ambiguity.  But it's great to see the oldest Doctor actor show up, it finally gives a nice sense of continuity to this new series.  Sure, they've show clips of the previous incarnations, but having him be in the show... that's tops.
So this concludes our brief interlude away from Godzilla. 

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