The grand finale. The end of the season, which really reflected the season as a whole; a bit of a mess.
We join the Doctor wearing Roman togs, in a very strange world, an alternate reality, surrounded by odd things from bygone eras, Pterodactyls flying around, hot air balloons (makes a change from zeppelins I suppose), and Winston Churchill in power. So, obviously something has gone wrong with time and space. Again. Oh yes, again. In fact, when is this not happening?
Before we can bat an eyelid we’re then zooming back in time to somewhere after the events of Closing Time (good, because I don’t think I could have handled us going anywhere ‘during’ the events of that episode again) and following, through the Doctor’s narration, another speeded up and very rushed execution of storytelling as to why we started the episode in this strange land. We see the Doctor running around wearing his Stetson and frantically trying to find out a way to prevent his own execution. He has a chat with the Tesselecta crew again, the fat blue man Dorian from A Good Man Goes To War who is now just a fat blue head in a box (don’t ask) and very soon, very quickly, we learn that the Doctor escapes his fate by River Song refusing to shoot him while in the space suit anyway. So why she shot him in the first instance is a mystery, because now she seems quite confident that time can be re-written and has found a way to avoid killing him. So this confusing revelation now creates a paradox of sorts, as the Doctor was always supposed to die, and hence creates this bizarre reality whereby time stands still and all of history exists at the same time. Following? Good, because many are not, but Doctor Who really wants you to understand what’s going on so you’ll be back for the next series, even if by now you’ve lost all hope. Hold on though, because something hopeful is coming.
The first thing that struck me about this episode is how honest and sincere it came across. No longer is the Doctor waving his hands around needlessly and gurning pointlessly into the camera for sheer entertainment value. Instead, he actually responds in a manner worthy of the situation he’s in. Yes, he’s cracking the odd joke, but it’s in sync with the events around him, and not outside of what we would expect someone—anyone—in that situation to be expressing. The Doctor can be funny, angry, aloof, emotional, even outrageously pessimistic, but if all these reactions happen as though they are meant for audience pleasure rather than dramatic plausibility then the whole performance is nullified. And the jokes, told by the Doctor in this episode, are of a man within the believable realms of someone with an experienced sense of humour for a Time Lord of 900+ years to the type of situation presented. We can all make a leap of faith with regards to projecting our own beliefs to sync with that of a traveller who has experienced so much, but to make leap of faith that asks us to believe that any conscious being with a healthy fear of death would just start dancing around and cracking the sort of jokes one would expect to hear in a Saturday night sitcom is just asking too much.
Gareth Roberts gives us Closing Time, and it felt more like Closing Time on Doctor Who’s credibility. The penultimate episode leading into the series finale was more like watching 45 minutes of a comedy double act with Smith and Corden.
After the series break we return to Doctor Who series 6B in rip roaring fashion. There’s no let-up in the action; the story telling in the first five minutes alone is enough to convince us that that there’s energy to be found here, a story to tell, and that Moffat doesn’t want to waste any time telling it. Except it doesn’t really work.