![]() I have to say, I saw the Lethbridge-Stewart revelation coming a mile off. Something that worked particularly well for both long-term fans and newbies, was that the First Doctor was given a rationale – “Why does good prevail?” He was also convinced to take a more proactive approach on his travels, witnessing how the 12th fixed the timeline of the appropriately stiff-upper-lipped World War 1 officer Captain Archibald Hamish Lethbridge-Stewart (writer and actor Mark Gatiss), so he could survive a confrontation with a German soldier (a cameo from another Doctor Who writer, Toby Whithouse). ![]() Beyond that, Bradley certainly caught the spirit of Hartnell’s performance, lapel-clutching, ‘Hmm’-ing and fantastic vintage TARDIS set and all. The not-exact-likeness-to-Hartnell was neatly explained through his face being “all over the place” because his regeneration was under way. ![]() On the whole Bradley acquitted himself well. Having said that, a much better joke was how embarrassed the 12th Doctor was at the First discovering his electric guitar in the TARDIS. I know we have this whole professor-student thing going on, but…” possibly the most knowingly risqué Doctor Who has ever been. Moffat was able to flip it to show how far the series has come in its attitude to sex, with the response of Pearl Mackie’s Bill Potts: “I’m a broadminded girl. It has to be said, though, that his most jaw-dropping statement – “If I hear anymore language like that from you, young lady, you’re in for a jolly good smacked bottom!” – originated in the series, namely 1964’s The Dalek Invasion of Earth (and it was probably dodgy even then). For every emotionally resonant moment like the reappearance of companions Clara (Jenna Coleman) and Nardole (Matt Lucas), there were rather clunky moments in which the 1960s First Doctor’s distance from 2017 TV was shown up through his sexist comments. Appropriately for the noctural, melancholy atmosphere created by director Rachel Talalay in a regeneration story, the Testimony were basically a hi-tech Heaven. The plot trigger was the Testimony, a huge database of stored memories of the universal dead, through which Moffat was able to revisit one of his favourite themes, that “we are all stories”. Instead, we had a plot-light, low-key, elegiac coda to the Capaldi and Moffat era. The story was atypical because, as the 12th Doctor said, there “ an evil plan”. Following the theme of A Christmas Carol, where a man is given perspective on his whole life and the chance to change it, here we had the Doctor being given the same opportunity, through the eyes of his latest incarnation looking back at “the original”. The idea may have been obscured by the stylish colour recreations of the First Doctor’s last story The Tenth Planet and the banter between him and Peter Capaldi’s 12th, but here the First (David Bradley from 2013’s An Adventure in Time and Space, reinterpreting William Hartnell) was effectively the Ghost of Christmas Past, the 12th was Christmas Present and the promise of 12th’s regeneration into the 13th (Jodie Whittaker) the Ghost of Christmas Future. Seven years later for his final Doctor Who script, there’s a nice sense of Moffat’s tenure coming full circle, as he crafted another, more subtle variation on A Christmas Carol. In 2010, in the first Doctor Who Christmas special that showrunner Steven Moffat wrote, he riffed on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol through the character of the Scrooge-like millionaire Kazran Sardick (Michael Gambon), with the Doctor (Matt Smith) standing in for the ghosts of Christmas Past, Past and Future. ❉ Peter Capaldi takes a subdued bow as the Doctor in a piece of genuine television history.
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