“The universe generally fails to be a fairy tale. “You were right, you know,” his older self replies. Just for a moment, he can see in his future incarnation what Bill says everyone who meets the Doctor can see: that this is the person who knocks around space and time, making sure good triumphs over evil, against all the odds. “So that’s what it means to be a Doctor of War,” the 1st Doctor says, realizing his role will not be to make war, but to stand and protect those whom the war comes to claim. Two small, unimportant lives saved, that’s all.īut it also serves as the answer to the question the 1st Doctor tells Bill he left Gallifrey to find, and it allays his concerns when Testimony showed him the kind of person he would become in the future.
If we want to track what the Doctor actually accomplishes here, it may not seem like much: He returns Mark Gatiss’s World War I captain to the Ypres battlefield a couple hours later, in time for him and his German foe to both be saved by the Christmas armistice. “I don’t really know what to do when it isn’t an evil plan.” “It’s not an evil plan,” a shocked Doctor observes when he learns what Testimony actually is. The Doctors’ mutual refusal to regenerate creates a paradox, but the monstrous aliens are neither monstrous nor alien, the spy in the camp really is just the Doctor’s best friend back for one final adventure, and there’s no grand plot to foil. Set against that final sacrifice, the ultimate stakes of “Twice Upon a Time” are remarkably small.
The Doctor can live on if it means the universe continues to be saved, but he still has to die. The only reward he could hope to have is the hard-won knowledge of who the Doctor is, and there’s no guarantee his next self will see things the same way. As he tells Bill and Nardole – or their memories, at least – his endless life is like an empty battlefield, one where only he is left to keep fighting. It makes sense then, even if it’s never entirely dug out of the subtext, that the Doctor would be so unwilling to die and be reborn all over again. Read More: Jodie Whittaker’s First ‘Doctor Who’ Scene is Explosive Capaldi grew to play the Doctor’s kindness as the most urgently honest expression of himself, and in doing so made his Doctor vulnerable and open in a way none of his predecessors ever really attempted. The early 12th Doctor carried over aspects of that character, but he gradually warmed up as he came to realize showing his true self – the stated reason for his older face, per his debut story – didn’t mean being remote and brusque, but meant being unashamedly, unreservedly kind.
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A lifetime ago when he was first cast in the role, he was best known as Malcolm Tucker on the political TV comedy The Thick of It, where he played a profoundly amoral, profoundly profane spin doctor for whom the only thing more terrifying than his scowl was his smile. It also underscores the defining brilliance of Peter Capaldi’s performance. That the incarnation who began his existence so prickly and aloof would end it as the champion of kindness speaks to just how much this Doctor grew and developed over this three seasons. It’s what moves him at the Christmas Armistice in Ypres, and it’s part of his final advice to his next self. “Kind” is the defining word for the 12th Doctor. I do what I do, because it’s right! Because it’s decent! And above all, it’s kind. It’s not even because it works, because it hardly ever does. It’s not because it’s fun and God knows it’s not because it’s easy. I’m not doing this because I want to beat someone, or because I hate someone, or because, because I want to blame someone. More than anything, “Twice Upon a Time” feels like further expansion on the Doctor’s big speech to the two Masters in “The Doctor Falls,” in which he laid out why he does what he does. It’s also a sequel – or interquel, if we want to get technical – to the 1st Doctor’s 1966 departure story “The Tenth Planet,” which the opening recap reminds us was a whopping 709 episodes ago. The story is a direct follow-up to the past season’s finale, “The Doctor Falls,” in which a dying Doctor refuses to regenerate on the grounds he just can’t face being someone else all over again. Spoilers ahead for the Doctor Who Christmas special, “Twice Upon a Time.” More epilogue than grand finale, “Twice Upon a Time” is about as quiet and contemplative as a multi-Doctor regeneration story could hope to be, and it gives star Peter Capaldi the ideal stage to say farewell to a role he has made his own these past four years. But also, as the latest Doctor Who Christmas special underlines, long live the 12th Doctor too – and the 1st Doctor, and all the Doctors. The 12th Doctor is dead, long live the 13th Doctor.
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