The Time of the Doctor/Deep Breath: A Cycle's Culmination

 Hello!

The Time of the Doctor followed on from The Day of the Doctor. It involved the return of the Time Lords, in a sense, as well as the reveal that the Doctor had exhausted his regenerations. The Time of the Doctor ends with the Doctor being granted a new cycle of regenerations by the Time Lords - though we don't actually know how many he has now. Deep Breath had the Twelfth Doctor suffering from major post-regeneration sickness - probably due in part to the new regeneration cycle.

Thirteenth regeneration!

The Time of the Doctor

The Time of the Doctor begins with a woman called Tasha Lem describing how a planet, called Trenzalore, began emitting a broadcast. Nobody could understand it, but everyone in the universe felt afraid anyway, and rushed to investigate. Tasha Lem got there first and put a forcefield around Trenzalore; she's the Mother Superious of a giant flying church. All the Doctor's enemies are there - though if everyone in the universe is there, it stands to reason that there's plenty of people who would side with the Doctor as well. The Doctor's also poking around; he's picked up a new companion, a cyber-head called Handles. Clara's still travelling with him, just not on that specific occasion. He's arranged a meeting with Tasha in order to go onto Trenzalore; before he goes to the meeting, he picks Clara up from Christmas dinner with her family. They get to the surface of Trenzalore and find the source of the transmission in a tower in a town called Christmas. The transmission is coming from the Time Lords - the plan to save Gallifrey in Day of the Doctor worked. They're asking the question "Doctor who?". It's a safe-word - only the Doctor and his allies know his name, so if somebody answers the question, it's obviously the Doctor, sending the signal that it's safe to return to the main universe. Of course, if the Time Lords emerged, the Time War would just begin anew; for that reason, the Doctor sends Clara away, then spends the next few centuries protecting Christmas from attackers. 300 years later, the TARDIS returns...with Clara hanging onto the door. She heard it dematerialising and hitched a ride, necessitating a slow journey through the time vortex to protect Clara from dying. The Doctor and Clara have a discussion, during which it is revealed that he's used up all his regenerations; he then sneakily drops her off at home again and returns to Trenzalore. Over the next six hundred years, he fights a full-on war against all his oldest enemies. Eventually, it's down to him and the Daleks, with the Doctor dying of old age; Tasha travels to the 21st Century in the TARDIS to pick Clara up again, so she can say goodbye. She greets the Doctor, now an elderly man, as he shuffles up the bell tower to wait for death; Clara, meanwhile, pleads with the Time Lords to help him. They oblige by providing the Doctor with a whole new set of regenerations; he then uses the energy from the first one to blow up a Dalek fleet, along with the town of Christmas. Clara and the townspeople survive by hiding in the basement of the clock tower. The Doctor then returns to the TARDIS, changing into new clothes just to regenerate, hallucinates Amy Pond, then regenerates at last. The first thing the Twelfth Doctor does is complain about the colour of his kidneys, followed by forgetting how to fly the TARDIS. Clara's reaction to this is priceless, as one might expect.

A crack in the wall, guarded by a now elderly Doctor. The crack is a crack in reality, with Gallifrey on the other side.

Deep Breath

Deep Breath starts with a dinosaur...in London, in the 19th century. Like The Christmas Invasion, it features the return of characters who were prominent during the previous Doctor's era - the characters in question are Madam Vastra (a Silurian), her wife Jenny, and Strax their Sontaran butler. Sontarans are a clone race, the 'perfect warriors'. Sontarans are enemies of the Doctor, first introduced in the Third Doctor's era; Strax, however, is a willing ally of the Doctor. The Silurians were the previous inhabitants of Earth - they learned of a coming catastrophe and went into suspended animation to wait it out. The  crisis passed, but they didn't wake, giving humans time to evolve and take over; over time, small groups have periodically woken up and disagreed with the new management. Madam Vastra woke up in the Victorian era, where she found that human construction workers had accidentally annihilated her family; she started eating construction workers as revenge. The Ninth Doctor found her and persuaded her to stop killing them, though this occurred off-screen - she first appeared on TV in the Eleventh Doctor's era. Jenny, meanwhile, is an ordinary human. Though given her wife's a lizard-person from the dawn of time and her butler's a disgraced alien clone warrior, maybe not that ordinary.

Left to right - Strax, Jenny and Vastra

Madam Vastra is called to investigate the dinosaur; Jenny quickly deduces that it's choking on something. That something is the TARDIS - during the end of The Time of the Doctor, the Doctor crashed it into a dinosaur's throat, tried to escape and took the poor thing with it. The dinosaur spits out the TARDIS; the Doctor soon emerges, very confused. Once the Doctor's been taken to Vastra's house, he quickly falls asleep...though Vastra helps by psychically knocking him out. He wakes up in the night and escapes from the house, making his way to the Thames, where the dinosaur is still roaring its displeasure at its new home; as the Doctor watches, it gets burned to death. By the morning, he still has not returned to Madame Vastra's house; Clara deduces his location through newspaper adverts. Clara reunites with him at a fancy restaurant, finding in the process that he has obtained a new outfit from a tramp. He and Clara quickly realise that there's something very strange about the other patrons of the restaurant - they aren't eating or breathing. It turns out that the other patrons are robots; a spaceship staffed by robots from the far future crashed in Earth's past, millions of years ago. Throughout these long years, they've been rebuilding themselves out of spare parts - human and animal; they were responsible for the death of the dinosaur. Vastra, Jenny and Strax lead an assault on the droids, while the Doctor pursues the main droid - the command node. The command node flies the restaurant into the air, suspended from a hot air balloon made out of skin! The Doctor and the command node tussle, which culminates in the command node falling and dying, resulting in the deactivation of the other droids. At the end, the Doctor and Clara have an emotional confrontation in modern Glasgow, where the Doctor begs Clara to recognise that he is the Doctor, making Clara the first companion since Ben, in the First Doctor's time, to straight-up reject the idea that the new Doctor is the same man as the old one. Technically Rose also struggled to accept the new Doctor - but she accepted that it was him within about ten minutes of the regeneration.

End of one cycle...

Beginning of another!

Overall, I quite enjoyed The Time of the Doctor. I do think it was a bit more rushed than The End of Time, but it's still a fitting send-off for the Eleventh Doctor. For one, the First Doctor started running from Gallifrey; at the end of his cycle, the Doctor stays still, in one place, for centuries, to protect others. Fittingly, by the end, the Eleventh Doctor looks quite like the First.  Also, the music from the Tenth Doctor's sacrifice plays again when Clara reunites with the elderly Doctor; while in The End of Time, it represents the Tenth Doctor's potential future fading away, I feel like here it represents all the moments the Eleventh Doctor has lived, fading into the past. Indeed, given that without Clara's intervention the Doctor would have died fully, it feels like all the moments the Doctor's lived, across all his lives, fading away. It's also fitting given how the Doctor's just come off the events of The Day of the Doctor.  He's just experienced the final battle of the Time War, three times over; now, he wages a millennium-long campaign to prevent the war from breaking out anew. Additionally, it's interesting how the Time War has almost overshadowed the Doctor's entire regeneration cycle. It was his first encounters with the Daleks, in his first and second lifetimes, which made them aware of life beyond Skaro and encouraged them to develop inter-stellar travel. In his fourth and seventh incarnations, he took actions which (apparently) contributed to the increasing tensions between the Daleks and the Time Lords: being sent on a mission to wipe the Daleks out at their creation by the Time Lords and baiting the Daleks into destroying Skaro, respectively. The Eighth Doctor's life was ended because of the Time War and the War Doctor fought in it; the Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors were continually haunted by what they did in the war. It's therefore fitting that the Eleventh Doctor's life culminates in him preventing a fresh outbreak of the war.

I quite like Deep Breath as well; my favourite thing about the episode is Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. Second is the Doctor and Clara's interactions - Capaldi and Coleman (Clara's actress) play off each other very well, creating effective banter. It's also effective at the end - the Doctor is hurt that Clara refuses to recognise him. Clara, meanwhile, feels abandoned by the Eleventh Doctor being replaced by a stranger. While I dislike how stubborn she is on that front, it would be wrong to criticise the episode for a genuinely good sub-plot where Clara struggles to accept the new Doctor. Indeed, she has a valid point - on some level, the Doctor is no longer the man Clara knew; that's the nature of regeneration. At the same time, the Doctor is right to feel hurt by her rejection - especially when the Eleventh Doctor, right before his regeneration, phones Clara, telling her to stick by the new Doctor. The Twelfth Doctor then, in an attempt to persuade Clara, repeats back to her what his past self said...and Clara's immediate response is to assume that he was eavesdropping, highlighting just how much she fails to recognise the new Doctor. On the other hand, when Clara does come round, she just needs to look at the Doctor to recognise him, despite the difference in appearance between the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors. It leads to a pleasant sequence where Clara, delighted to have realised that the Doctor is still the same person, hugs him. The Doctor grumbles that he's no longer a hugging person, but he's quite obviously just as overjoyed that Clara's accepted him.

However, a major problem with the episode is Madam Vastra's characterisation. For one, after incapacitating the Doctor, she calls men 'monkeys'; it's unnecessarily demeaning of men. From this scene, she is evidently someone who finds it perfectly acceptable to mock her delirious and dazed friend, attributing his confused state (and subsequent gullibility) to his gender, rather than the difficult and agonising process of dying and coming back that he just went through. Moreover, it's not a case of not being aware of regeneration - Vastra first met the Doctor when he was the Ninth Doctor. She's fully aware of regeneration and its effects, and still mocks the Doctor for his confusion. Additionally, various lines in the previous episode suggest that this delirium and confusion was, in part, there before the regeneration - in other words, the Eleventh Doctor was going senile, and this carried through to the start of the Twelfth Doctor's life. So Vastra's mocking the Doctor for losing his mental faculties due to old age - some friend! I especially dislike this because I had to watch Nana go through a similar decline - the Doctor's confusion reminds me of Nana's confusion. Seeing Vastra make fun of that confusion...it's disgustingly callous, especially as she's supposed to be someone the Doctor can rely on.

Moreover, Madam Vastra's relationship with Jenny is also demeaning - when Vastra makes that joke, Jenny's initially under the impression that it's another demeaning nickname for humans in general. This implies that it's common for Vastra to insult her wife's species, which itself implies a rather verbally abusive dynamic between the two. Indeed, this implication is made explicit by Vastra's explanation - 'People are apes. Men are monkeys'. Despite her wife's obvious discomfort with Vastra calling people apes, she still does it. Additionally, there's a power imbalance in their relationship as well. In public, Jenny pretends to be Vastra's servant - this makes sense, given that two women married to each other, in the Victorian age, would not be taken well. However, she also appears to be her wife's servant in private; Jenny herself notes that there's a rather suspicious coincidence behind the fact that she's still the one serving tea in private. Between that and Vastra's proclivity towards insulting Jenny's species, their relationship doesn't come across as particularly healthy. This isn't really addressed in the episode - indeed, this episode is the last we see of them. 

It's actually quite disappointing, as Jenny and Vastra are the only recurring LGBT+ couple to appear in the series thus far...and not only is their relationship somewhat unhealthy, but they're also never even seen again after this episode, so there's no chance of depicting them develop a healthier relationship. It's especially unfortunate both for Vastra and her relationship with her wife because previous episodes had depicted Vastra as being compassionate and moral, kind to her friends, with a few moments of insensitivity; previous episodes depicted her relationship with Jenny as overall healthy, and pretty sweet. A previous episode, in which Jenny died temporarily, had Vastra absolutely distraught; after reviving Jenny, Strax commented that the heart is a simple organ. Vastra's response that she has not found it to be simple indicates how deeply she cares for Jenny; her love for Jenny, by that episode, had enabled her to (mostly) overcome her prejudice against humans. Additionally, another episode had Vastra looking after the Doctor while he was suffering from depression - and she was nothing but kind and supportive. Here, her character and her relationship with Jenny get butchered in the name of a few moments of cheap comedy. It's tragic, and in my mind, it really brings down an otherwise great episode.

Overall, I'd give The Time of the Doctor 8/10 and Deep Breath 5/10.

Random observations:

-The Time of the Doctor clashes with an earlier episode, where the Doctor had died on Trenzalore. Or kind of, anyway - I like to think that a future final incarnation might have returned to Trenzalore to die there, with his TARDIS changing to match the Eleventh Doctor's TARDIS, resulting in the past version of the Doctor and Clara assuming that it was the Eleventh Doctor who died on Trenzalore.

-Both Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, who played Amy, were wearing wigs - they were doing other roles at the same time, which necessitated their heads be bald.

-The actual regeneration is a short, quick blur, which has attracted considerable mockery. But the regeneration had already started, and the Doctor used a lot of energy destroying the Dalek fleet. It's entirely possible that the actual transition was so quick because there really wasn't much energy left for that regeneration, most of it having gone into nuking Christmas.

-One of my favourite scenes in Deep Breath is the sequence where Clara and the Doctor reunite at the restaurant. During the course of the conversation, it is revealed that neither of them placed the adverts which led them to each other; it also turns out that the advert leading the Doctor to Clara referred to a 'needy egomaniac'. Clara gets side-tracked by the egomania comment, to which the Doctor says that the conversation is about the adverts, not the fact that the advert leading the Doctor to Clara implicitly called her an egomaniac. Clara then literally says "Nothing is more important than my egomania!" Accordingly, the Doctor promptly mocks her for that.

-Clara, Rose and Sarah-Jane may jointly hold the record for meeting the Doctor during his regeneration the most times: Sarah-Jane witnessed the Third Doctor's regeneration, interacted with the Tenth Doctor shortly before his aborted regeneration (and after), and saw him shortly before his regeneration in The End of Time. Clara interacted with the War Doctor shortly before his regeneration, witnessed the Eleventh Doctor's regeneration, and saw the Twelfth Doctor shortly before his regeneration. Rose, meanwhile, witnessed two regenerations (Nine to Ten and the aborted regeneration), and a past version of her was the last person to see the Tenth Doctor before his regeneration into the Eleventh Doctor.

-Regeneration count - extreme old age (Eleventh to Twelfth Doctor). New cycle, 13th regeneration.