[Ed. Note: After the success of Speed Me Deadly, our weekly Breaking Bad recap series, we're pleased to welcome our friend and colleague Scott "Famous Inker" Williams on-board to talk about Doctor Who. As always, there are spoilers abound in these articles and you should watch the episode in question before reading beyond the header. Geronimo etc!]

Doctor Who, 50th Anniversary Special:

The Day of the Doctor

“I’ve changed my mind.”

Over at ComicsAlliance, Chris Sims recently wrote a fairly scathing (and totally deservedly so) write-up on DC’s “75^th Anniversary of Superman Celebration” collection, in which most of the stories feature Superman losing, crying, or otherwise helpless, and generally devoid of the spirit of high adventure and fun that should characterize much of Superman’s history. In comparison, the BBC and the fine folks at Doctor Who got their tribute to the Doctor’s 50^th birthday absolutely correct. Being that this is a story that deals with the hardest and most regrettable decision the Doctor ever made, it would have been really easy to make this a dour, glum, depressing story, instead not only is it positively inspiring, it’s fun as all hell.

Arguably the defining facet of the Doctor’s revived series has been the Time War backstory. Much of what we have seen since 2005 has been characterized by the knowledge that at some point between being Paul McGann and Christopher Eccleston the Doctor had to make a very difficult decision to end a catastrophic war between his own people and the Daleks, leaving him as the only Time Lord left in existence. The memory of this day is what motivated the Ninth Doctor to be merciful to the Daleks in “Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways,” and has cropped up in regular intervals through the tenure of Ten and Eleven, although as we see in this episode, Eleven is a lot quieter about it. And while it has made for a really compelling, motivational backstory for The Doctor since 2005, I am frankly ecstatic that we are able to close this chapter of the Doctor’s history. There is probably no better way to celebrate that long past than to begin anew.

The story begins in high Whovian fashion, with Eleven being called in by UNIT to investigate mysterious paintings whose subjects appear to have broken out of their glass, when a portal opens. The portal leads to early Elizabethan England, where Ten is cavorting about in an attempt to suss out a shapeshifting Zygon. This is the first high mark of the episode, as during Ten’s years we would occasionally get references to some offscreen incident with Elizabeth I, and this story incorporates that perfectly. Ten is in classic Ten mode, constantly mistaking the Queen for the shapeshifter, stifling his embarrassment at basically just finding a rabbit, making a machine that goes “ding,” etc. etc. I’d say it was The Greatest Hits, but he doesn’t tell anyone he’s “so sorry” or ask, “What? What? WHAT?”

It’s actually the second high point, pardon me for jumping around, because meanwhile in the Time War, the War Doctor, John Hurt, has absconded with a weapon of mass destruction called “The Moment.” This is the most feared of all Time Lord WMDs because it has developed sentience and a conscience, and is determined to stand in judgment of anyone who would use it. The Moment takes the form of Bad Wolf Rose Tyler, complete with club night hair and torn stockings. Rawr. Billie Piper, as the all-knowing, time-manipulating ultimate weapon with a soul, actually gets to stretch her muscles a bit more than she usually did when she was a companion, and I’m really glad this was the way they decided to include her.

Moment Rose provides the conceit for the episode, showing the War Doctor his future selves who live lives of regret and remorse for the action he is considering. She brings him to meet with his two other selves and here the fun begins, as this older-looking-but-younger, war-ravaged, rather stern doctor meets his young-looking-but-older, energetic , immature selves and asks, “Am I having a midlife crisis?” I don’t need to ruin the jokes for you when I say that the episode is loaded with great moments of Eleven and Ten jabbing at each other, and War Doc getting in on it by wondering what the hell he turns into. The best exchange is possibly his response to learning he takes to saying things like “Timey-wimey,” and Ten’s response. The overall dynamic is an interesting one, because although Ten and Eleven seem like two of the most similar incarnations, their differences really come out. Ten has that effortless chic and dashing presence [Ed. Note: After all, he did describe himself as “a little bit foxy” in “The Christmas Invasion, his first full episode], Eleven has all the gangliness and quirk. They both regard War Doctor like a racist uncle at Thanksgiving, though. After all, he did commit a double-genocide that still weighs on their conscience.

The real meat of the episode, though, comes from seeing the Doctor in these three different phases. Ten can cite the exact number of children who died on Gallifrey that day, Eleven claims to have never bothered. They’re the man who regrets and the man who forgets. There’s always been that difference between Ten’s openness about the Time War and Eleven’s guardedness: in one of his early appearances, he merely said it was “a bad day” and left it at that, in a wonderfully loaded line.

The Zygon situation evolves into a somewhat small-scale version of the crisis the War Doctor faces, as Ten, Eleven and War Doctor race against a nuclear countdown to find a way to make humans and Zygons negotiate a peace treaty. War Doctor is so proud of the men he becomes that he decides that maybe pushing that button is the only way to become that man, to be motivated never to have to take such actions again: “Great men are forged in fire. It is the privilege of lesser men to light the flame.”

And the weird thing is, Ten and Eleven are almost there to back him up. They all put their hands on the big red button, having regained sympathy for the impossible choice he must make, and they’re there to show him he doesn’t have to do it alone. And I’m sitting on my couch screaming “NO! NO! DON’T!” until at last, Clara convinces them that there has to be another way. Because they’re the damn Doctor, and finding the other way is what he does. Or what they do.

So they do. And wouldn’t you know it, they use a whole bunch of stuff they learned earlier in the episode, from the Zygon’s plan and from allowing their shared sonic screwdriver to spend the centuries between War and Eleven to calculate a subroutine, in order to perform the massive calculation needed to save Gallifrey.

Conveniently, for a celebration of the Doctor’s history, all twelve – no, thirteen of them (Peter Capaldi’s eyebrows make a cameo) work together to create a stasis thingy that makes it look like Gallifrey was destroyed. And then, because of the loopy timey-wimey thing the Moment did, none of them remember it, until Eleven. So all that regret is still there in the backstory, until he happily discovers he never destroyed Gallifrey at all. (He obviously doesn’t need to feel much remorse about letting the Daleks all kill each other, since they keep coming back.)

This all makes the episode extremely effective as a celebration of everything Doctor Who is supposed to be. Instead of justifying a massive genocide by saying, “Hey, you’ll feel better later, champ,” he uses his every resource to find a better way. And that’s the thing. Although there are plenty of examples in history of actual humans making hard decisions like the one The War Doctor did, the point is for him not to sink to our level, but for us to aspire to his. It’s the fantasy he embodies, and that Superman is supposed to embody, the promise the Doctor makes to himself with his very name: “Never cruel or cowardly. Never give up, never give in.” And while mopey, baggage-laden Doctor has made for some great stories, I’m perfectly fine with it being lifted from his character. They did it amazingly. With a cameo from an old-future possible face (simply called “The Curator,” and whose nature is left ambiguous, but wink wink he’s played by Tom Baker) the Doctor is set on his new direction.

And now the search for home begins. Geronimo!