Closing time doctor who8/18/2023 ![]() ![]() It’s a taster of what the world will soon be like without him, and a perfect scene setting.īringing Corden and Smith back together was a no-brainer after The Lodger, and the same chemistry makes this fizz. ![]() Like Rose, she’s confronted in the dark by something frightening and alien – but the Doctor isn’t there to take her hand and tell her to run. ![]() Even the open is the same – as Shona stays behind in the shop while her colleagues dash off, to finish up. Fittingly, it riffs on the first episode of the revived show – this isn’t Henriks, but it might as well be. I like how Roberts handles this, largely avoiding maudlin introspection, but never letting the audience forget that this is the Doctor’s last adventure. Closing Time is similar – facing his death at Lake Silencio, the Eleventh Doctor’s “goodbye tour” sees him sit down and explore his life – contrasting his age with the youth of Stormaggedon and almost losing Craig to the Cybermen as a consequence of the Doctor’s actions, not only making the episode a satisfying denouement to The God Complex but an effective and arguably better exploration of who the Doctor is supposed to be than the finale.‘You blew them up with love.’ The 11th Doctor is on his End of Time stye farewell tour, dropping in on old friends before his inescapable fate at Lake Silencio. Boom Town is a flawed, if interesting, morality tale that works so much better if you treat it as Russell T Davies laying the themes and ideas of the finale at you. As The Parting of the Ways reveals, he chooses not to be. What it does have and share with its Series 1, 10 and 11 counterparts is *thematic* relevance, and it makes this group the most interesting to study.īoom Town sees the Ninth Doctor confront his past and the consequences of his actions an episode before his past literally returns from the ashes of the Time War, as well as exploring the Doctor’s morality and if he has a right to be judge, jury and executioner. Yes, Closing Time’s final scene is a set up for The Wedding of River Song, but for the Doctor the episodes are separated. These four are fascinating – Boom Town, Closing Time, The Eaters of Light and It Takes You Away are unquestionably standalone episodes not connected to the finale. ![]() Utopia is a masterpiece BEFORE the Master turns up that kick starts the biggest story since the 60’s, and Turn Left is a horrifyingly bleak and complex look at a world without the Doctor, only becoming a lead in to the finale at the end, with Rose’s warning of the stars going out setting up the Bad Wolf cliffhanger and straight into The Stolen Earth. And of course Utopia and Turn Left are all-time classics, the latter especially. It’s still too soon to call if it’ll hold the test of time as an episode in its own right, although it is fantastic. Series 12’s arc is a massive jumble of mess, but Haunting of Villa Diodati is a good enough episode to hold its own and satisfyingly set up the finale, which goes in a completely different direction to what had been established, for better or for worse. Face the Raven started life as a standalone episode by Sarah Dollard before Steven Moffat realised he could incorporate the arc into it – as someone who really doesn’t enjoy the Series 9 arc, this kinda taints Face the Raven for me, and I don’t revisit it often. I’ve then proceeded to lump these twelve into three groups of four –īUT, does the fact that these episodes must act as a lead-in ruin their rewatchability and make the show more serialised? There’s an argument to be made either way that Doctor Who is better as a serial show or as standalones, and these episodes are all great examples of the serialised storytelling we get in television shows. They are –įace the Raven (I personally classify Heaven Sent as a separate story from Hell Bent for the obvious reason that only one of them is good but Face the Raven is explicitly a separate episode)Ī wildly varied bunch of episodes in terms of quality and style. It’s a strange conundrum – do we hype up the finale? Do we just do a “normal” adventure? How do we make sure the audience cares about this one? We have, as a result, gotten quite possibly the most chaotic bunch of episodes of the revival. The audience is getting closer to the grand conclusion to the season’s arcs and characters but first, we’ve gotta get through one last episode. One of my favourite oddities about the revived series of Doctor Who is how the various seasons and showrunners tackle one of the most interesting slots in a season’s run – the episode before the season finale. ![]()
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