So, all of time and space,
everything that ever happened or ever will.
Where do you want to start?
Time Lord?
Do I have to explain what that is?
You have really come unprepared to this TV show.
[ "Doctor Who" theme plays ]
Um. Doctor Who.
This is probably the coolest superhero
that you could ever wanna meet.
Don't ask you the questions, and don't wander off.
The Doctor is smart, sassy.
That's really someone I would want on my side.
Has anyone ever told you, that you are a bit weird?
They never really stop.
He goes adventures, fighting aliens and monsters.
The Doctor is possibility.
He's, "come with me
if you want to see everything."
♪ Dr. Who Special 1x01♪ Matt Smith Original Air Date on August 13, 2011
== sync, corrected by elderman ==
Who are you?
I don't know yet. I'm still cooking.
If you're a "Doctor Who" fan, as I am,
a Whovian, you get very attached to doctors.
And so it's hard when the Doctor regenerates,
because you're like, "I don't know.
I've -- you know, I gave my heart to
this last Doctor and it's happened to me so many times."
Soon as that new face arrives, you think,
"Oh, who's this jerk?"
So we first meet the eleventh Doctor
when he crashes into Amy's house when she's just a child.
He instantly needs to eat, 'cause he's just regenerated
and he's starving.
Can I have an apple?
All I can think about, apples.
I love apples.
Maybe I'm having a craving!
That's new, never had cravings before.
Oof!
When a Time Lord regenerates,
they have the guts of being the same person
but they're not the same person.
He has no idea what is going to taste good
to his newly-born Time Lord taste buds.
That's disgusting. What is that?
An apple. Apple's rubbish. I hate apples.
You said you loved them.
No, no, no, I like yogurt.
Yogurt's my favorite. Give me yogurt.
I hate yogurt.
It's just stuff with bits in.
You said it was your favorite.
New mouth, new rules.
It's like eating after cleaning your teeth.
Everything tastes --
What is it? What's wrong with you?
Wrong with me? It's not my fault.
Why couldn't you give me any decent food?
You're Scottish. Fry something.
- Ah. - In trying to figure out
who he is, he starts with what kinds of foods does he like,
and he keeps trying various things
and spitting them out, and I'll tell you something --
that scene could have gone on for ten more minutes,
as far as I'm concerned.
It was really -- for some reason,
it was really enjoyable to me.
I kept wishing
that there would be more food.
Almost disappointed when he actually
found something that he liked.
I need...I need...
fish fingers and custard.
Is there a more disgusting combination
of food than fish fingers and custard?
It sounds fine.
Honestly, it doesn't -- it sounds fine.
It's kind of like a silly kid combo.
You know, it's like,
"I like fish fingers and custard.
It's really delicious."
Is fish fingers
a worse or better term than fish sticks?
Fish fingers sounds a little different.
Not creepy, but different.
Fish fingers doesn't sound not appetizing,
because we all know that fish don't generally have fingers,
unless you count the small bones in their fins,
which are, you know, pre-evolutionary fingers.
But whatever the Doctor says pertaining to food,
I'll generally think is very appetizing.
Funny. Am I?
Good.
Funny's good.
I'm saving the world.
I need a decent shirt.
To hell with the raggedy.
Time to put on a show.
We really get to know
our eleventh Doctor when he's confronting the Atraxi
for wanting to destroy the Earth,
and it's when we get the fact that he's confrontational
and he has more anger in him than our previous Doctor.
Come on, then!
The Doctor will see you now!
Is this world important?
Important? What's that mean, "important"?
Six billion people live here. Is that important?
Here's a better question.
Is this world a threat to the Atraxi?
There's this awesome stand-off
between the two of them,
and he kind of lets them know, like,
"not going to mess with me.
This is it, like, I'm not going anywhere.
Remember? Remember? Remember? Remember?"
Is this world protected?
You're not the first lot to have come here.
Oh, there have been so many.
What the Doctor asks is
to look through the history of the Earth
and see how many times the Doctor has defeated people.
And when you do that, you get really nervous.
You're like, "Ooh,
he beat all those people. I'm just a big eye."
There's this great moment where you finally
get an homage to all the previous doctors,
all the way from our first to David Tennant,
our most recent.
To see the history of the Doctor's incarnations
was really a genius way to say,
"This was the old Doctor, this is the new Doctor."
And then he emerges through David Tennant's face,
and that's when
he's solidified.
Hello.
I'm the Doctor.
And you're like, "Ah, there he is.
He's introduced himself. We're here.
Let's go on this adventure again.
Where is he going next?"
I think he's one of the best Doctor Whos
that's ever been.
Choice for a bow tie
and suspenders and crazy hair.
It just makes sense.
Well, I just saved the whole planet
for about the millionth time, no charge. Yeah, shoot me.
I kept the clothes.
Including the bow tie.
Yeah, it's cool. Bow ties are cool.
I always say to people now, "bow ties are cool."
And a lot of times they don't know what I'm talking about.
Are you from another planet?
Yeah. Okay.
So, what do you think? What?
Other planets. Want to check some out?
I think the Doctor does a pretty good job
confronting the Daleks,
considering how much he fears them
and he killed his own entire race to destroy them.
When we see the Daleks in World War II
and they're buddy-buddy with Winston Churchill,
we're thinking, "What is going on here?
The Daleks are good.
Is Winston Churchill bad?"
We don't know what's happening.
First we're not quite sure of the time line.
Maybe human beings developed and invented Daleks
in that reality.
Maybe they are just machines that were, like,
picked up by an idea.
At this point, as a fan,
you've also grown with the Daleks.
You want to have a moment where you're like,
"Can't we all just get along?"
Would you care for some tea?
That would be very nice, thank you.
We get it, we're both in this Universe.
Neither one of us are going anywhere.
Even though we think we're the last
of the one or the last of the other,
we're not disappearing.
Would you care for some tea?
Stop this! What are you doing here?
What do you want?
We seek only to help you.
To do what? To win the war.
Really.
Which war?
I do not understand.
This war, against the Nazis,
or your war, the war against the rest of the Universe,
the war against all life forms that are not Dalek?
I do not understand.
I am your soldier.
All right, okay, okay.
Okay, soldier -- defend yourself.
Hey -- what --
What the devil!
You do not require tea?
Prime Minister, please!
Now, come on! Fight back!
You want to, don't you? You know you do!
It's almost kind of titillating
when you get angry, Doctor.
Our tenth Doctor learned and grew so much
over the course of his lifetime that we didn't get the rage,
and then all of a sudden we get our brand-new Doctor
and the rage is back.
He's also weirdly fearful
when he's doing it, too, because you're like,
"What are you doing?
Why is the Doctor not being the Doctor?"
But usually the Doctor has a reason why
the Doctor is not being the Doctor.
He hates them, but he also knows that
he's not going to really be able to do
much damage to them, so he's mostly
just provoking it to react.
He seems to be a very practical, pragmatic being,
so anything that he's doing
is a calculated move.
I am the Doctor, and you are the Daleks!
Here's what it is.
The Daleks are being very passive-aggressive.
They know they're evil.
They just won't admit it.
Come on, we've all been in arguments like that,
where the other person just will not admit
that they're evil squid-like creatures
inside a robot shell who are bent on destroying the Earth!
The British have a Dalek
that they think this guy built,
but actually Daleks built the robot
to pretend he built the Daleks.
It's a little confusing, but welcome to time travel.
So our faithful Doctor is once again
stuck in a situation where it's
destroy his worst enemy ever or save Earth.
No, this is my best chance I have
at the last of the Daleks.
I can rid the whole Universe of you
once and for all.
It's a classic time-traveller joke.
If you can go back in time to kill Hitler, you do it.
It's essentially what they're talking about with the Daleks.
It's the choice he wishes he really has.
He never has that choice. There is never a choice.
He's always protected our little planet
before destroying the Daleks,
but he's always regretted it, and I think the Doctor
carries the scars of not having destroyed the Daleks.
His personal code precludes committing genocide.
Confronted with these grand decisions,
you always see the Doctor struggling with the greater good
and then trying to make a humanist decision.
And the Daleks use that against him.
The Daleks know that he's going to do that.
The Doctor to Danny boy,
the Doctor to Danny boy, withdraw.
But then again, he's a smart guy,
so he's like, "I'll get another shot at it.
I'll save the Earth this time.
I bet this won't be the last time I'll be in this position.
I'm willing to roll those dice."
You will never defeat us, Doctor!
We will return!
I did not open the crack.
Somebody did.
The cracks in the skin of the Universe.
Don't you know where they came from?
The Universe is cracked.
The Pandorica will open.
Silence will fall.
The Pandorica.
What is it? A box,
a cage, a prison.
It was built to contain
the most feared thing in all the Universe.
The Doctor and the Pandorica
is the Doctor's worst nightmare.
It's every single one of the monsters
who hates his guts in the whole Universe
come together to face him.
When all those ancient enemies and the Doctor get together,
it does give Matt Smith
the opportunity to give one of the great
Saint Swithun's day speeches where he is able to
bluff them into not blowing up the Earth
basically just by saying, "do you know
who you're dealing with?"
Hello, Stonehenge!
Come on, look at me!
No plan, no backup, no weapons worth a damn.
Oh, and something else I don't have --
anything to lose.
So, if you're sitting up there in your silly little spaceship
with all your silly little guns and you've got any plans
on taking the Pandorica tonight,
just remember who's standing in your way.
Remember every black day
I ever stopped you, and then --
and then...
do the smart thing.
Let somebody else try first.
With "Doctor Who," it's never quite as
black and white as you think it is
as to who is evil and who's not evil,
especially in "Pandorica," when you have
all the villains coming together,
their goal is actually strangely selfless,
where they feel like the Doctor might destroy the Universe,
and the Doctor, from a certain perspective,
is kind of a death machine.
Even though his intentions might be true,
he could be the reason all the cracks
in the Universe are appearing,
and it's an interesting moment that makes you go,
"Wait a minute.
Maybe the good guys are the bad guys
and the bad guys are the good guys,
and we've just been looking at the picture
from one way for too long."
All of the villainous creatures that we've seen
throughout "Doctor Who,"
they all came together
to imprison the Doctor
because they were afraid that he was going to destroy time.
It's a great scene to look at and go,
"Oh, that's the Justice League.
That's not the league of evil.
They see themselves as the heroes in this story."
And that's -- the best bad guys always do.
The best bad guys always think they're the hero of the story.
All reality is threatened!
And you've come to me for help?
No! We will save the Universe from you!
From me?
All projections correlate,
all evidence concurs the Doctor will
destroy the Universe.
No, no.
No, you've got it wrong.
Seal the Pandorica.
No! Please, listen to me!
The TARDIS is exploding right now and I'm
the only one who can stop it!
Listen to me!
He gets out, spoiler alert.
'Cause it's the Doctor,
and what, is he going to not get out?
Rory! Listen, she's not dead.
Well, she is dead, but it's not the end of the world.
Well, it is the end of the world.
Actually, it's the end of the Universe.
Oh, no, hang on.
Doctor?
Doctor!
You need to get me out of the Pandorica.
But you're not in the Pandorica.
Yes, I am. Well, I'm not now, but I was back then.
Well, back now from your point of view,
which is back then from my point of view.
Time travelling. You can't
keep it straight in your head.
I really love
all the really great time-bendy episodes where
you see cause and effect and you see that some things
have to be a certain way for it to work out
rather than just going to a place
and having a linear story arc.
Right.
Let's go.
What is that?
How are you doing that?
Vortex manipulator.
Cheap and nasty time travel. Very bad for you.
The vortex manipulator is his quick
and dirty time machine, and he's going
back and forth and giving people information
they need having just got it in the future.
So he gets information in the future,
goes back in time and delivers it, and they tell him,
"Wait, you had the fez and were carrying a broom."
Do I get confused watching the show sometimes?
Yes.
That's why I love the DVR feature on the television
so you can actually go back and watch
and try to piece together what's going on
so you can play it again over in your mind.
I love the paradoxes and the solves
that come from the complexities of time being not linear
and lateral and multi-dimensional.
Now I don't have the sonic.
I just gave it to Rory 2,000 years ago.
And when you're done,
leave my screwdriver in her top pocket.
Right, then.
Off we go.
Nope!
Hang on. How did you know...
to come here?
Ah, my handwriting.
Okay.
It is another one of those time-travel moments
where the only way the Doctor knows to do it
is that he did it, and the only reason he did it
is that he knows he was supposed to.
In physics, information is neither created nor destroyed.
In time travel, happens all the time.
He doesn't do that stuff with the TARDIS very much,
but when he had the little wrist thing,
I guess the temptation was too great.
He starts bouncing around up and down the stairs
and comes down and dies before he goes up and leaves.
If you're the sort of person who likes to
diagram time travel stuff -- which, who isn't, really? --
there's plenty there to diagram.
Would I rather have a vortex manipulator
or a TARDIS?
It's a tough call.
You know, the TARDIS has a pool.
Vortex manipulator, portable.
I guess I'd go with the pool just because I'd be
worried about the tan line.
Do you mean hot tub pool or just like, you know,
cool, relaxed pool?
Because if it's the hot tub pool,
that changes the game immensely.
I would rather have a TARDIS.
I would rather have a much more powerful,
living being that is a time machine.
What in the name of sanity have you got on your head?
It's a fez. I wear a fez now.
Fezzes are cool.
I think the fez actually
was a good choice, 'cause you're like,
"a bowler? No. You couldn't do that."
The fez.
It's a very specific hat.
I sort of think there's a reason we don't see it so much anymore.
That hat was not flattering at all.
Just keep the hat off your head and just
go with what's been working for you so far.
Oh!
Wakey-wakey! Rise and shine.
Breakfast is served in the courtyard.
Whoa!
What a morning.
I think you can't ever know
what motivates the Doctor.
He's like the cosmic Santa Claus.
He's there to create
impossible situations that can do
emotional work that's otherwise impossible.
Hello, I'm the Doctor.
I knew it.
Sorry?
My brother's always sending doctors.
But you won't be able to help.
I'm not that kind of doctor.
I really like the episode with Vincent van Gogh.
They kind of went dark with it.
He really was in a lot of pain,
but he was able to express
the pain on canvas like no other artist.
He sees the Universe in a different way,
and that enables him to see something
that most people cannot see.
I thought I'd brighten things up to
thank you for saving me last night.
Ah.
I thought you might like, you know, possibly to
perhaps paint them or something?
Might be a thought.
There's this great emotional moment when he brings
van Gogh to the museum so van Gogh can hear
how important his art is, what his art
actually means to people in the future.
It did seem to me that that was not
the sort of thing the Doctor would do.
It's a total violation of every rule they talk about
when they're talking about the rules for time travel.
I think it was just a decision of just going,
"You know what? Screw this, and let's just show him,
'cause this is amazing.
He's got to see this."
The moment they walked
into that museum
and Vincent van Gogh saw his artwork on the wall
and the whole thing, I just...
tears.
So many times in history
you have these brilliant artists who can never know
the reverberating effects of their artwork
on humanity, and that just, like --
killed me.
Your art is kind of your child,
and so sometimes you don't know
what your child does and you don't know how
people are going to respond to it,
so as an artist,
it's very emotional to see
it does something good in the world.
To me, van Gogh is the finest painter of them all.
Certainly the most popular great painter of all time.
He transformed the pain of his tormented life
into ecstatic beauty.
To my mind, that strange, wild man
who roamed the fields of Provence
was not only the world's greatest artist,
but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.
Vincent?
You want Vincent to know that his work is important
and he's embedded in the psyche of human culture.
It's one of the most beautiful moments in "Doctor Who."
But it does bring up an interesting question,
which is, you're Vincent.
You take him out of his timeline,
bring him to the future.
He sees all the paintings.
He goes back and then he paints more.
So the question is, how creative is that?
Because he didn't come up with them.
He saw them on the wall
and thought, "Oh, you know what would be great,
if I painted the night sky with swirly stars.
That looked really good. I guess I'll paint that."
I suppose it's possible that the Doctor was
putting the timeline right, but screwing up
the actual authenticity of the paintings --
although because it's time travel,
he wasn't screwing up the authenticity
of the paintings, he was ensuring it,
because without him doing that, those paintings
wouldn't have existed, which means that nobody
actually has any authorship of those paintings.
Vincent van Gogh saw paintings on the wall,
copied them, and those paintings ended up on that wall
so that Vincent van Gogh could see them
and go back to his own time and copy them.
Time travel is complicated.
You've turned out to be the first doctor ever
actually to make a difference in my life!
I'm delighted. I won't ever forget you.
When the Doctor brought Vincent van Gogh to the future,
I think he did it to be like, "look, you're
very appreciated," but also he did it
to show that you can't change time,
that even Vincent van Gogh, knowing that he becomes
maybe the most celebrated artist,
he still kills himself several months later.
So you were right. No new paintings.
We didn't make a difference at all.
I wouldn't say that.
The way I see it, every life is
a pile of good things and bad things.
Hey.
Good things don't always soften the bad things,
but vice versa, the bad things don't
necessarily spoil the good things
or make them unimportant.
And we definitely added to his pile of good things.
What turns a lot of people off
and away from Sci-Fi is that it doesn't have enough heart
or enough emotional content to really suck you in,
and "Doctor Who," in its most brilliant moments,
manages to have this perfect balance
of the backdrop of Sci-Fi
but then to get, like, right into
the core of the human experience,
which is why everybody loves it.
It's why it works.
I've been running,
faster than I've ever run,
and I've been running my whole life.
Now it's time for me to stop.
Sometimes to the audience it's unclear
why the Doctor can go back
and change some things and why he can't
change other things, and he always just explains it like,
"there are some fixed points in time that can never be changed,
and then there are other things that can be manipulated."
The rules of a Time Lord,
you're never allowed to cross your own line,
so, like, he can't go back in time
and tell himself, "be nicer to River,"
and that's his thing all along anyway, right?
Is there's this notion that he always knows what's coming,
and that's what's really upsetting him all the time.
He's always going to be bummed out.
No one saw
the astronaut coming out of the lake
and then just laying him out
with a laser blast.
Doctor!
Amy! Stay back!
The Doctor said stay back!
No! No! You have to stay back!
As an audience member, you're like,
"all right, Moffat.
I have been with you a long time.
I know you can write your way out of stuff,
but how the...
are you going to write your way out of this?"
No! Doctor!
Doctor, please!
I was shocked.
I was appalled.
Is this
our tax money at work?
Is this what the space program is for?
No wonder we stopped those shuttle missions.
I thought, "Well, this is easy to fix.
There's going to be some reveal.
The astronaut's identity will fix the whole situation."
But then they set him on fire and burned the body.
And that's a dead end, literally.
To start a season by killing the Doctor
in a way that we know
he can't come back, how do you solve that?
When the Doctor was first killed,
I was shocked that they ended the season
so soon into the first episode,
but then, luckily, he reappeared in that diner.
And then you were like, "Oh, I bet he'll figure this out.
He's really good at this stuff."
- Explain it again? - The Doctor we saw
on the beach is a future version,
200 years older than the one up there.
But all that's still going to happen.
He's still going to die.
We're all going to do that, Amy.
Oh! You win again, Steven Moffat!
You win again!
They masked what should have been a huge red flag
to the audience as just a kind of trite,
like, "Oh, okay, well that's just, you know,
we know he travels through space and time.
Of course he can be 1,100 years old now. Why not?"
And then you're left at the end of the episode
still not really knowing how they're going to get out of this
and where in the Doctor's timeline does that happen?
"Who" is excellent at paying off arcs
no matter how long it takes.
It's fun to watch the sort of Rube Goldberg machine
that Moffat sets up with the story lines,
and then you're like, "how are you going to
make this pay off, Steven?"
We're in the middle of the most powerful city
in the most powerful country on Earth.
Let's take it slow.
Hello?
Who is this?
This is President Nixon.
Who's calling?
The TARDIS appears in the Oval office.
Nixon keeps getting these calls from this child
who Nixon thinks is telling him his name.
It shows the power that the Doctor has
where he can just really appear anywhere
in history at any point.
It's a very interesting time
in America, too. If you think of '69,
between the Cold War, the arms race,
and the space race, I mean, everything
is just moving so fast, and to drop
the Doctor into that is just amazing.
The Doctor doesn't get
any social rules, including, like,
"It's the Oval office. I want to talk to those guys."
Okay by him.
Mr. President, that child just told you
everything you need to know,
but you weren't listening. Never mind, though,
'cause the answer's yes, I'll take the case.
Fellas, the guns, really?
I just walked into the highest security office
in the United States
and parked a big blue box on the rug.
Do you think you can just shoot me?
They're American! Don't shoot, definitely don't shoot.
Nobody shoot us either.
Very much not in need of getting shot.
The Doctor is more dangerous
because he does so much without a gun,
which is scarier.
Like, well, how does someone get through
all these dangerous situations
by essentially figuring out things
in a scientific manner or negotiating?
I love the idea that Nixon never questions, like,
"Wait a minute. You're -- how did you --"
he's just like, "all right.
Clearly you have this thing. Why not?"
How'd you get it in here?
I mean, you didn't carry it in.
Clever, eh? Love it.
Do not compliment the intruder!
Five minutes?
- Five. - Mr. President,
that man is a clear
and present danger.
Mr. President, that man walked in here
with a big blue box and three of his friends,
and that's the man he walked past.
One of them's worth listening to.
Five minutes.
I'm going to need a SWAT team ready to mobilize,
street-level maps covering all of Florida,
a pot of coffee, 12 jammie Dodgers, and a fez.
Get him his maps.
The Doctor never stops for a second
to let you question what he's doing.
He just starts moving ahead, and you can either
jump on the train or get run over.
The Doctor essentially influences Nixon
into recording everything.
It's -- it's -- it's beautiful.
Safe? No, of course you're not safe.
There's about a billion other things
out there just waiting to burn your whole world.
But if you want to pretend you're safe just so
you can sleep at night, okay, you're safe.
But you're not, really.
I like that Nixon became
probably a worse President than he would have been,
which is odd, because the Doctor usually makes people better.
He made Nixon a little worse.
Dare I ask -- will I be remembered?
They're never going to forget you.
Say hi to David Frost for me.
David Frost?
One of the smartest things
the Doctor's ever done
is tricking the Silence.
The Silence can get you to do
anything they want you to do
while you're looking at them, and it's kind of
a hypnotic thing they've got going, so...
If they tell you to turn around, as soon as you
look away from them, you'll turn around.
You just saw an image of
one of the creatures we're fighting.
Describe it.
I can't. No.
Neither can I.
How do you remember something
you can't remember when you're no longer seeing it?
It is just an amazing problem for them to solve.
And it puts you in the same place,
because, essentially,
you don't remember them unless you see them,
but maybe you have seen them but we don't know.
And then the fact that
the Silence say that they've been
with humanity since its evolution,
since the wheel and fire.
They don't make
anything themselves. They don't have to.
They get other life forms to do it for them.
So they're parasites, then.
Super parasites, standing in the shadows of human history
since the very beginning. We know they can
influence human behavior any way they want.
If they've been doing that on a global scale
for thousands of years...
Then what? Then why did the human race
suddenly decide to go to the Moon?
The Doctor is at his best with intricate plans.
Those are the most fun, to try to understand
what pieces he's putting in place with
very little clue what the resolution --
how are you going to beat these guys?
This man here, code named "the Doctor,"
is doing some work for me personally.
Could you cut him a little slack?
Uh, Mr. President, he did break into Apollo 11.
Well, I'm sure he had
a very good reason for that.
It is unclear what the Moon landing
is going to have to do with the silence
up until almost the very end.
Oh! Hello, sorry, are you in the middle
of something? Just had to say,
have you seen what's on the telly?
Oh, hello, Amy.
Now, do you know how many people
are watching this live on the telly?
Half a billion. And that's nothing,
because the human race will spread out among the stars.
You just watch them fly,
billions and billions of them for billions
and billions of years, and every single one of them
at some point in their lives will look back at this man
taking that very first step,
and they will never, ever forget it.
That's one small step for man...
You should kill us all on sight.
The Doctor hates guns.
He can't kill people directly, so he gets
the Silence to order their own extinction subliminally,
and it's genius the way it plays out,
because you just know what will unfold
are people confronting the Silence,
killing them, and then forgetting about.
It is pretty strange when you think about the Doctor
getting all of us to become murderers.
I lie awake at night wondering
how many living, breathing, thinking beings
I have murdered
without knowing.
He's always generally trying to find
a diplomatic solution to allow the species to continue,
because, in a way, he understands
'cause he's the last of his kind.
He has this connection to humanity,
and he knows that it's
an impossible situation for them,
so he goes to extremes to kind of
use a surrogate killer.
It kind of goes against what the Doctor is like,
so it's creepy on both levels.
I feel like the TARDIS is sort of
an extension of the Doctor.
There's something magic about how the Doctor
just psychically knows this instrument.
And you have miraculous things happening,
and yet still it's slinkies and buttons
and super-old-school instruments.
I think "The Doctor's Wife"
was a fantastic way
of exploring what the TARDIS really is.
The opportunity for the TARDIS to become embodied
in a woman is really beautiful,
because the TARDIS never had a voice until now.
This episode called "The Doctor's Wife"
was written by Neil Gaiman,
who is most famous for writing "The Sandman."
Gaiman is really good at personifying ideals,
so it's cool to see him do that with the TARDIS,
to take at least that notion and say,
"What's the TARDIS like?"
I go --
The TARDIS?
"Time and relative dimension in space".
Yes, that's it. Names are funny.
It's me.
I'm the TARDIS.
No, you're not. You're a bitey madlady.
The TARDIS is up-and-downy stuff
in a big, blue box.
Yes, that's me. A type 40 TARDIS.
I was already a museum piece when you were young,
and the first time you touched my console, you said --
I said you were the most beautiful thing I'd ever known.
Then you stole me, and I stole you.
I borrowed you.
"Borrowing" implies the eventual intention
to return the thing that was taken.
What makes you think I would ever give you back?
Who picked who? "I picked you, you picked me."
I love that, that --
"what is fate?" Is the question.
It really is a romance, you realize, that they've had,
but a very comfortable, lived-in
relationship together.
He's just never seen her.
The idea of making the TARDIS a woman
and then watching him actually spend time with her
and get to fight with her,
you kind of always want to do that
with every inanimate object.
You know, I think I've earned the right
to open my front doors any way I want.
Your front doors? Have you any idea
how childish that sounds?
Oh, you are not my mother.
And you are not my child.
You know, since we're talking,
with mouths -- not really an opportunity
that comes along very often -- I just want to say,
you know, you have never been very reliable.
And you have?
You didn't always take me where I wanted to go.
No, but I always took you where
you needed to go.
You did.
It's almost beautifully sad to know
that he is riding around with this being
that can never express itself to him
in any more of a way than just taking him to places
that it thinks he needs to be.
It can never tell him -- it's so sad!
It can never tell him that it loves him
until Gaiman gave us that episode and we got to see
that they actually do care about each other.
They got to have a moment together,
and then it's taken away,
so that's tragic, too, at the end.
There's something I didn't get to say to you.
Good bye.
No.
I just wanted to say...
hello.
Hello, Doctor.
It's so very, very nice
to meet you.
Please...
I don't want you to...
leave.
It's such a bittersweet story to know
that the Doctor's real companion is the TARDIS.
That's the creature that's been with him the longest.
I mean, it is love, but it's also beyond love.
It's also a part of him.
I think that the people that he finds along the way,
they come and go to a certain extent,
but the Doctor is the TARDIS and the TARDIS is the Doctor.
Are you there?
Can you hear me?
I think it would be terrible if the TARDIS could
actually talk all the time and that became the,
you know -- that can't stay.
Then it's "Knight Rider,"
the TARDIS talking and giving snarky comments about
hitting turbo boost or something.
I like the implied
and inferred relationship going on there.
Okay, the Eye of Orion or wherever we need to go.
Those are the best episodes,
the ones that make you rethink everything that you thought.
It makes it that much more exciting to go back knowing
that the soul of this creature is in there
and watching, you know, his interactions
with the TARDIS up until that episode and then beyond.
You think he's raising an army?
You think he isn't?
If that man is finally collecting on his debts,
God help you, and God help his debtors.
We're wasting our time here.
Agreed.
The asteroid.
Where you've made your base.
Do you know why they call it Demon's Run?
Some old saying.
A very old saying.
The oldest.
Demons run when a good man goes to war.
With the eleventh Doctor,
you see a lot of that real deep rage and sadness
bubbling underneath the surface in a kind of a,
"oh, hello, what's all this, then?" package.
It's like if you have a friend and you're like,
"oh, he's a good guy all the time!"
And then one time he just snaps and you're like,
"that was the most insane display I've ever seen."
I think the angriest we have ever seen the Doctor
is when he goes to war
at the end of the season.
It's almost terrifying.
The people he loves are in danger,
and the fact that people are coming after him
by going through his loved ones
is the worst thing that could possibly happen at this point,
so he gets really vicious.
Colonel Manton, I want you
to tell your men to run away.
You what?
Those words, "run away."
I want you to be famous for those exact words.
I want people
to call you "Colonel Run Away."
I want children laughing outside your door
because they've found the House of Colonel Run Away
and when people come to you and ask if
trying to get to me through the people I love --
Is in any way a good idea...
I want you to tell them your name.
Oh, look, I'm angry. That's new.
I'm really not sure what's going to happen now.
Near the end, when you do see the rage
finally come to the surface, you see, like,
"Oh, yeah, this is the guy that exterminated his entire race
and the Daleks and has killed countless people,
and this is the thing that you never want to see."
I've seen the Doctor get that angry,
but not that vicious.
It's a little unsettling,
because maybe the Doctor is getting a little...
darker.
The anger of a good man is not a problem.
Good men have too many rules.
Good men don't need rules.
Today's not the day to find out why I have so many.
The fact that the Doctor's enjoying
kind of belittling this general is disturbing,
and I think it's meant to be.
I think we're supposed to think,
"this is not who we fell in love with.
He's turning into a different guy now."
So thank God river shows up.
Well, then, soldier, how goes the day?
You think I wanted this?
I didn't do this.
This -- this wasn't me!
This was exactly you.
All this. All of it.
You make them so afraid.
When you began all those years ago
sailing off to see the Universe,
did you ever think you'd become this,
the man who can turn an army around
at the mention of his name?
Doctor.
The word for "healer" and "wise man"
throughout the Universe.
We get that word from you, you know?
But if you carry on the way you are,
what might that word come to mean?
Nothing is black and white.
I mean, you think you're doing this,
but to a lot of people, it's perceived this way,
and so maybe you're not as awesome as you think you are.
The Doctor originally stole the TARDIS.
He wanted to explore the Universe
and enjoy the wonder and majesty of creation,
and what he quite often ends up doing
is leading armies
and fighting battles
and inspiring civilizations to fend for themselves.
The result is that
a lot of civilizations around the Universe
don't think of him as this avuncular old man
kind of wandering around the Universe.
He is, as River says, a mighty warrior.
Not a great thing to be for a man of peace,
which is what he says he is.
Death is sort of a tool that he uses sometimes,
even though he never seems to want to,
but I think that's something that Moffat loves to play with,
is just the idea of screwing around with your emotions, like,
"oh, maybe he is a dangerous person to be around."
The child, then. What do you think.
What is she?
Hope.
Hope, in this endless,
bitter war.
What war? Against who?
Against you, Doctor.
I don't think the Doctor is the greatest threat
to the Universe, though I could see why
aliens would think that, and I can see some of
the arguments for him being so dangerous.
But ultimately I think that he's more helpful than not.
I think River's right.
I don't think the Doctor should be
"the oncoming storm," is what the Daleks call him.
I think he would just like to be
the funny old man with the blue box.
The Doctor isn't human,
but is the most human.
He has deep, profound emotions.
Otherwise he wouldn't be
motivated to do anything he's doing.
Doctor!
As a viewer, there seems to be a long game here,
there seems to be a long story here,
which fascinates me, especially in season six
and the things that have been shown through
in season five that has given us hints
as to what is to come,
is the sense that the Doctor knows
more about our future than we do
and that there's something worth saving.
== sync, corrected by elderman ==