Doctor Who Recap - The Name of the Doctor

By Edwin Davies

May 21, 2013

She's getting ready for her honeymoon night. I'd tell you more but...SPOILERS!

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This is all sounding incredibly negative, so it's worth pointing out that I really did enjoy this episode as a standalone episode. It had some fun dialogue, crackling pacing, Strax, some very cool effects and a neat reverence for the history of the show which it managed to work in a manner that was only slightly clunky. It was an incredibly polished piece of storytelling that had the misfortune to also be the culmination of some rather lacklustre storytelling, and to serve as basically a tease for something that looks a lot more promising.

Rating: 8/10
Half-Season Rating: 6/10

Miscellanea

- One of the things that I thought was really interesting about the resolution to the Clara mystery was that it seemed to suggest that part of Clara existed in all previous Companions, but then it also seemed to pull away from it at the same time to suggest that she just happened to inhabit the bodies of people who met The Doctor. I personally would have found it a lot more intriguing if they had explicitly pursued the former, if only because it would have subtly altered the nature of The Doctor/Companion relationship by making them more like protectors or partners.




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- While I like The Whisper Men a great deal - they reminded me a lot of Buffy's The Gentlemen [shudder] - I have to say that it felt like they wasted an interesting villain in The Great Intelligence, who never felt as big of a threat or presence as The Silence did in Season Six. It seems like they might have been better off leaving him alone and coming up with someone else to be the villain this year.

- Supposedly John Hurt is playing the version of The Doctor who fought in the Time Wars and basically destroyed the Time Lords, which would place him between Paul McGann and Christopher Eccleston (who declined to reprise his role as the Ninth Doctor in the anniversary special) and would make Matt Smith's the 12th incarnation of The Doctor, rather than the 11th, which is pretty major since it means that the character only has one regeneration left (before they come up with some way to ignore the 12 regeneration rule).

- I know I said that the final scene felt like such an obvious and manipulative tease, but I can't deny that it made me feel excited about seeing what's going to happen next as soon as it happened. Curse you, Moffat!


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