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Doctor who twice upon a time online11/13/2023 So is it any surprise that, in the end, we finally do see Clara again? And that Twelve finally gets to remember her, his original companion? (And I guess it makes sense that it’s O.K. The segment is called “Twice Upon a Time,” after all. Still, that’s O.K., because the episode is essentially the longtime Who writer/showrunner paying tribute to his own run on the series. Does it matter that the “real” Bill died (or whatever is it that happened to her in “The Doctor Falls” when she became a space-water creature), if this Bill has all of her memories? What are we, really, without our memories and experiences? Sure, the idea of capturing someone’s essence in the final moment before their death is basically a Moffat concept we’ve seen before (remember, Clara Oswald is out there somewhere right now, flying around with Ashildr in that millisecond before she must die), but there’s actually quite a bit of Moffat recycling going on here. Pearl Mackie also returns as a faux-Bill Potts, or at least that’s one of the questions at the center of the episode. And that’s before we even get to the reveal that his story is set during the legendary 1914 Christmas truce which saw many British, German and French troops stop fighting long enough to celebrate the holiday together in No Man’s Land (and to inspire a Paul McCartney song and video, of course). The character provides the perfect element of humanity required for a Doctor Who story, and by the time we get to the bottom of who he really is - an ancestor of longtime Who ally the Brigadier - “Twice Upon a Time” really locks into place as a series classic. Also along for this adventure in the South Pole is Doctor Who writer/actor Mark Gatiss, who plays a World War I captain who is more literally out of step with time. In particular, the First Doctor is portrayed as a particularly old-fashioned sort, which at times feels like Moffat commenting on the fans who are resistant to the incoming Thirteenth Doctor who is… gasp… a woman. And while the bigger themes and problems facing the Doctors(s) are quite serious, Moffat and his actors still manage to have a lot of fun in the interaction between the two. Serving as a sequel, of sorts, to the partially lost last story for the First Doctor, 1966’s “The Tenth Planet,” the special uses brief snippets from that half-century old tale in a seamless fashion that unites Twelve with his predecessor. Bringing in David Bradley (Game of Thrones) to play William Hartnell’s First Doctor is certainly a stroke of brilliance and the kind of narrative legerdemain that only a few shows could pull off, and what could’ve been a mere gimmick actually works very well, combining the original Doctor with the latest to inform and strengthen both versions of the character as well as both of their final stories. The episode suffered dramatically because the Doctor’s motivations in this regard weren’t very well fleshed out, but fortunately Moffat completes the thought in this special as he contends with not one, but two different Doctors who don’t want to give in to the inevitability of their end. When we last saw Twelve in the Season 10 finale, “The Doctor Falls,” he had essentially been “killed”… but was fighting regeneration.
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