Matt Smith leaving Doctor Who at the end of this year

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JediTricks
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Re: Matt Smith leaving Doctor Who at the end of this year

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andersonh1 wrote:50th anniversary episode: all we're getting is Smith and Tennant, with John Hurt as a previously unknown Doctor? I'm going to be disappointed if the older Doctors aren't included in some way. Yeah, they don't look like they did 30 years ago, but give them a vocal role or something. And they may be in the episode, it's not like everything about it has been revealed. But it's hardly a 50th anniversary celebration if all we get are characters from 2006 to the present.

It is amusing that Matt Smith has to wear a wig for his last episode since he shaved his head for a movie. Ask Paul McGann how he feels about wigs. :mrgreen:
I'm hoping for surprises, but not expecting them. Moffat has shown his disdain for pre-21st century Doctor Who even as he's also its biggest fanboy, so I can't imagine he'll work hard to include things he looks down upon.

The poster is out, it focuses as much on Tennant as Smith, pretty basic really. Smith's hairpiece is laughable, I saw photos the other day, his hairline is the real TARDIS apparently. Considering Rose and 10th are in this, I'm guessing this will take place in the alternate dimension where the TARDIS cannot go (except when convenient for anniversary specials) which wouldn't include other Doctors, Tennant playing the Rose Tyler sextoy clone guy.
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Re: Matt Smith leaving Doctor Who at the end of this year

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I'm more interested in the current "omnirumour" than I am in the 50th anniversary episode. Not that I really believe they've found 90 episodes/3 stories/whatever, because it's just too good to be true, but it would be nice to be wrong about that.
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Re: Matt Smith leaving Doctor Who at the end of this year

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So, have we all seen Day of the Doctor and Time of the Doctor yet? What'd you guys think?

Without spoiling anything, I was really surprised by how much I liked both. While, like I said, I like Matt Smith as the Doctor, I haven't really been as into the Moffat era of DW as I'd hoped to be. But dude was apparent'y playing a long game, because...especially this last one, it really made a lot of things I didn't care for about the last couple of seasons work.
Spoiler
Especially a lot of the vague, goofy-sounding prophecies we've heard bandied about, it was interesting seeing how that stuff came to pass. And how well it all fit together. Here I was thinking there was no way that the Doctor's last stand on Tranzilor (or whatever) could possibly happen on TV, and even if it did, surely not with Matt Smith's Doctor. And yet, they pulled it off. The "Oldest question in the universe, the one hidden in plain sight? Also super well done. I was just enjoying the hell out of seeing all those pieces just click into place and all work pretty well.
Oh, and
Spoiler
Given that the tenth Doctor's first regeneration didn't exactly happen, and the War Doctor was created under kind of different circumstances, I wouldn't have been surprised at those regenerations not counting. Hell, I was sure they wouldn't count, exactly, just so they wouldn't have to count, say, Eccleston as the tenth or whatever. But then Moffat, that crazy bastard, goes and counts those regenerations, making Smith the last of the Doctors, the end of his natural lifespan, and gives us the Doctor spending what he thinks is going to be the end of his life in one tiny town on one tiny planet just hanging out to prevent a new Time War? That's good stuff. It makes this regeneration seem like a way bigger thing, and I'm really excited to see how this new set of lives plays out.
Spoiler
Oh yeah, oh yeah. We all saw "Night of the Doctor", right? Nice to see Paul McGann again, even if it was brief. I never felt like I needed to know how the Eighth Doctor regenerated that badly, since I figured it happened during the Time Wars and the Wars were better left to our imaginations. But, hell, I was happy to see the guy show up again.
Spoiler
All that said, and as much as I enjoyed both episodes, I stand by my opinion that the Time Wars were better off left to our imaginations after all. All the crazy stuff that's been implied about it, all the things that made that conflict need to be time-locked, and what does the final battle amount to? A bunch of dudes shooting at some Daleks with lasers. I mean, I really dug Day of the Doctor, like I said, but the war itself being such a...normal looking thing was kind of a disappointment.
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Re: Matt Smith leaving Doctor Who at the end of this year

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Saw Time of the Doctor this evening. Not as epic as it tried to be, but it did tie just about all the storylines up very nicely I thought. Though I'm sure I could pick a few plot holes out if I really wanted to. : )

Don't want to spoiler tag everything, so I'll leave some space. JT, don't read if you haven't seen the episodes!!!!!!














So, some thoughts:

Night of the Doctor: Absolutely delighted to see Paul McGann again, though he's still criminally short of screen time as the Doctor. The guy is great in the part, and I love a lot of the audio stories from Big Finish, but McGann deserves more tv episodes. Still, we got to see his last adventure, got to see him change, and heard him name a lot of the audio friends and companions. And they kept it a secret, making it a nice surprise. Good mini-episode.

Day of the Doctor: I was prepared to be very disappointed in the "anniversary" episode, because Doctors 10, 11 and the Hurt version didn't seem like much of a celebration of 50 years. More like New Series only. However, I was pleasantly surprised by just how much I enjoyed the story, and it all comes down to the fact that I've always hated the idea of the Doctor killing all the Time Lords and everyone else on Gallifrey, and this story changes that. Honestly, it looks like what we saw happen in Day of the Doctor is what always happened, and the Doctor was never a mass murderer, though he thinks he was. All the nods to the history of the show were welcome, and Tom Baker's cameo made up for a lot. He's always been my favorite. The sad thing about the appearance of all 13 Doctors on the Time Lord monitors is that I could pick out the episodes that the clips of every Doctor was taken from. How nerdy is that? :P

Time of the Doctor - just watched it tonight, so I'm still thinking it over. I liked it, but as I said, not as epic as it wanted to be. I'd like to have seen more foreshadowing about this being the Doctor's last life prior to the episode, and the regeneration was still a bit drawn out (though not as much as Tennant's, thank goodness! By the time he was about to change I was yelling "shut up and regenerate already! Quit whining!"). But the episode did a nice job of wrapping up those dangling plot threads going all the way back to The Eleventh Hour, and I enjoyed the appearance of the Seal of the high council as a nod to the Five Doctors, when the Time Lords offered the Master a new regeneration cycle. Which, of course, they do here for the Doctor as well. Kudos to Moffat for not ignoring the limit, as I've heard some suggest he should do.

So, a nice little trilogy of episodes, and I'm sorry to see Matt Smith go, but he didn't outstay his welcome. And the new guy looks interesting. Finally, an older Doctor again! It's about time.
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Re: Matt Smith leaving Doctor Who at the end of this year

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Scourge wrote:So, have we all seen Day of the Doctor and Time of the Doctor yet? What'd you guys think?

Without spoiling anything, I was really surprised by how much I liked both. While, like I said, I like Matt Smith as the Doctor, I haven't really been as into the Moffat era of DW as I'd hoped to be. But dude was apparent'y playing a long game, because...especially this last one, it really made a lot of things I didn't care for about the last couple of seasons work.
I saw them both, I really liked Day of the Doctor, so much that I rewatched it on DVR and kept it to watch yet again.

Time of the Doctor though is more complex, as Matt Smith's swansong it works pretty well, it gives him a range to do. As a Christmas episode it's a mixed bag as it loses that focus halfway through and seems a tad forced. As a Doctor Who episode it's a complete failure, it deus ex machinas the hell out of the thing and it retcons and changes things willy-nilly and just feels wrong thanks to Moffat's clumsiness and inability to put a real story together. There weren't any characters that mattered, no situations that felt real in any way, they were just set dressing for the "feeling" of Matt Smith doing something.
Especially a lot of the vague, goofy-sounding prophecies we've heard bandied about, it was interesting seeing how that stuff came to pass. And how well it all fit together. Here I was thinking there was no way that the Doctor's last stand on Tranzilor (or whatever) could possibly happen on TV, and even if it did, surely not with Matt Smith's Doctor. And yet, they pulled it off. The "Oldest question in the universe, the one hidden in plain sight? Also super well done. I was just enjoying the hell out of seeing all those pieces just click into place and all work pretty well.
Yeah, this didn't feel remotely like it was connected to those, it felt like a wrap-up of forgotten ideas. The Silents definitely seem to have changed gears. The crack in the universe is total nonsense and steps on both the original statements that idea made and the timing of saving the Time Lords. Trenzilore really felt like a miss. This didn't feel like Bad Wolf, a lead-up planned in advance, it felt like "oh yeah, we have all these incomplete parts that don't fit together, let's see if we can just hammer them into place".
Given that the tenth Doctor's first regeneration didn't exactly happen, and the War Doctor was created under kind of different circumstances, I wouldn't have been surprised at those regenerations not counting. Hell, I was sure they wouldn't count, exactly, just so they wouldn't have to count, say, Eccleston as the tenth or whatever. But then Moffat, that crazy bastard, goes and counts those regenerations, making Smith the last of the Doctors, the end of his natural lifespan, and gives us the Doctor spending what he thinks is going to be the end of his life in one tiny town on one tiny planet just hanging out to prevent a new Time War? That's good stuff. It makes this regeneration seem like a way bigger thing, and I'm really excited to see how this new set of lives plays out.
This is another one of those "oh, really, you really thought that Steven Moffat?" things. Why have the Doctor not age that much in Impossible Astronaut and The Snowmen? Why not mention that in the regeneration scene of Impossible Astronaut and The Wedding of River Song? Because Moffat isn't scheming, he's flying by the seat of his pants and making it up as he goes along, and not doing all that well IMO.
Oh yeah, oh yeah. We all saw "Night of the Doctor", right? Nice to see Paul McGann again, even if it was brief. I never felt like I needed to know how the Eighth Doctor regenerated that badly, since I figured it happened during the Time Wars and the Wars were better left to our imaginations. But, hell, I was happy to see the guy show up again.
Loved Night of the Doctor, loved having McGann back, and was very disappointed to learn why Moffat didn't end up using McGann for the part (he just "couldn't see that Doctor doing it" once he realized Eccleston wasn't coming back and it wouldn't make sense for Eccleston to play that part anyway... lame).
All that said, and as much as I enjoyed both episodes, I stand by my opinion that the Time Wars were better off left to our imaginations after all. All the crazy stuff that's been implied about it, all the things that made that conflict need to be time-locked, and what does the final battle amount to? A bunch of dudes shooting at some Daleks with lasers. I mean, I really dug Day of the Doctor, like I said, but the war itself being such a...normal looking thing was kind of a disappointment.
Agreed on that sentiment! Moffat is very Hollywood, he likes the big ideas but doesn't actually know how to dream that big.

Anderson wrote:Night of the Doctor: Absolutely delighted to see Paul McGann again, though he's still criminally short of screen time as the Doctor. The guy is great in the part, and I love a lot of the audio stories from Big Finish, but McGann deserves more tv episodes. Still, we got to see his last adventure, got to see him change, and heard him name a lot of the audio friends and companions. And they kept it a secret, making it a nice surprise. Good mini-episode.
True dat. After having seen Night of the Doctor and The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot and Day of the Doctor plus the Tom Baker cameo, I honestly feel like sticking with just a single Doctor for a series is unnecessary, every single one of these actors seems like they'd be fun to watch play The Doctor again in full-length episodes, they each still have the step - or actually have even learned a few new steps - and still are recongizable as The Doctor. Plus, Colin Baker looks way better without that stupid crazy curly hair. Moffat should never have turned down Matt Smith and David Tennant's idea to play The Doctor together for a series.
The sad thing about the appearance of all 13 Doctors on the Time Lord monitors is that I could pick out the episodes that the clips of every Doctor was taken from. How nerdy is that? :P
That is REALLY nerdy, especially for a non-Brit. :D



Here's my review on Time of the Doctor which I posted the day it aired over on TV.com:

This episode can be reviewed from three perspectives:
- from the perspective of closing Matt Smith's turn as the 11th Doctor, it does a lot of what it needs to;
- from the perspective of a Christmas special, it lands a general feeling and makes a big splash at the end, but it misses the mark in some ways;
- from the perspective of turning the page on the chapter of the 11th Doctor, it's a miserable failure and a highlighting of most everything wrong with Moffat as showrunner.

Matt Smith gets to play out everything he's got in his arsenal, he plays the Doctor one last time with joy and sadness and regret and even the passage of time as he wears more and more prosthetic aging makeup. Smith says "this is how I was" with every moment, with every twist and twitch, with every speech and every look. There are a few beats where you sort of sense his skills hit the ceiling but overall he keeps the focus on The Doctor as he ages and faces mortality so in that regard this episode works well.

As a Christmas special, the episode tries to fake it and does so pretty well for a while with its bright and light, bouncy feel, not to mention its Victorian town named Christmas. Ultimately though it succumbs to being a hollow shell trying to send Matt Smith off while "things happen". The town makes no sense as a Victorian-style settlement on Trenzalore which is not yet the Time Lord graveyard, the truth-field is a cute idea that feels Christmas-y yet becomes merely an idea set on a shelf after its introduction, The Doctor becomes Santa and protector of the town yet the townspeople don't really exist in the story so there's no weight to it. The latter is ultimately a big Christmas downfall for this episode, the townspeople are just a conceit to allow The Doctor to act like he's a Santa figure and to give him something to fight for, but without investing in their joy and their risks it becomes something less than the ideas behind it are trying to assert. Worse still, having the children come to love and adore The Doctor without any other context, it becomes an ego-trip and tiptoes up to the line of being grotesque - The Doctor brings death and destruction to their pretty little town that feels like Christmas all year round, then he defends the town from centuries of attacks that kill people yet nobody seems to care as long as The Doctor makes things go "boom!", they merely shower him in adulation and he bathes in it to the point of letting his life be defined by it.

As an actual episode of the series, there are shockingly few honest Doctor Who moments buried among muddy, generic, threatening nonsense that traps our hero in impossible situations. People live and die and live again without meaning. The entire universe, maybe 2 universes, hang in the balance and yet feel immaterial. All of time itself comes to respond to a signal for The Doctor that nobody can understand yet all fear and then it's just a generic "Doctor who?". The crack in the universe returns after being forgotten and abandoned, and where it had rules we received previously those are all thrown out to assert a new idea entirely that it's just the ol' Time Lords again behind it all. There's enemy after enemy thrown at it and dropped without thought, even the Daleks feel shallow and forced, and the motivation for each is left unexplored save a line of dialogue or two. The town, the threat, the enemy, the benevolent force, sending Clara home, the truth field, the Christmasness, Trenzalore, none of it feels like it matters because it's just thrown in and dropped after each gets its own tiny, pointless moment. The middle and ending feel like pure Moffat masturbation, with a problem pulled out of thin air for this episode solved by a solution pulled out of thin air yanked from false sentiment. None of it works because none of it matters to the plot, they're all elements dreamed up on the spot or drummed up from the past without suggestion and each one is summarily dropped afterwards, like a kid with too many toys on the floor, moving from one to another trying to dream up meaning but ultimately getting distracted by the next thing, knowing the parent is coming to pick up all the toys in a few minutes. And the ultimate Deus Ex Moffita ending, I suppose.

The plot is impossible to follow for newcomers, and the inconsistencies weigh on longterm viewers - how The Doctor doesn't visibly age a day in the course of 400 or so years yet his downtime in The Impossible Astronaut and again in The Snowmen take up as much time without any aging at all; the double regeneration endings and second snap-regeneration scene; the crack in the universe had weird alien eyeball escapees from an alternate-universe prison yet now are the Time Lords trying to escape by getting a response of The Doctor's name, along with a poem that has passed down the universe a la Bad Wolf but with no payoff; the Weeping Angels get involved despite having no effect and not working the way they're supposed to; The Doctor's final regeneration has already happened and is erased with someone just asking passionately; and on and on like that. The Christmas elements are hit and then very miss. The 12th Doctor's introduction is yet another "amnesia while the TARDIS is crashing for no real reason" scene.

It was a mixed bag entirely, but I'd give it more of a pass than I expected, and I'm not sure why I'm giving it that pass - I don't really like Matt Smith or Steven Moffat's showrunning all that much, but it *feels* like less of a loss, it *feels* like it works better slightly. I loved The Day of The Doctor more than it deserved, but that had weight and this didn't, I suppose. Perhaps it's because when I grew up my grandmother watched Tom Baker as The Doctor on PBS in black and white, and I was aware of it without being attached to any specific Doctor - then again, I do gravitate towards Eccleston and Rose because that's when I started enjoying the show. IGN gave it an 8.4 despite citing most of the same concerns, funny how those sorts of things work.

Kaitlin over onTV.com makes an excellent point that if Clara was enough, why have an Amy Pond cameo? That scene didn't work for me at all, it felt like it was trying hard to be manipulative on the level of the 10th Doctor revisiting his friends without understanding the point of that superior message. To me, Smith's Doctor was too many cartoony gimmicks and ticks and nonsense to land, he was all eccentricities over substance, and this sign-off at least let Smith play the character with more personality and meaning underneath - though not more substance - so it didn't hurt. Then again, he didn't sign off with a frustrating lamentation of regret the way Tennant did.

There seemed like a lot of action to me, just that Moffat has relied so much on that sort of Hollywood action that it's become desensitizing. Lots of explosions and death and whatnot, no real meaning behind it. The action, tension, emotional stakes, a lot of this episode felt cribbed from A Town Called Mercy which was another big letdown episode based around the idea of pushing a theme - this was xmas, that was the old west - through Doctor Who.

Smith's regeneration was different than most, he started regenerating and turned it into a violent weapon (because Moffat seems to think that the answer to everything is either a deus ex machina or violence), then he popped into Capaldi. I didn't think it felt all wrong, just a stylistic choice that I didn't entirely feel said what it was trying to. It really felt like 2 separate regenerations in this episode, plus the snap back to regular Smith felt dishonest to me and felt halfway like a 3rd. I don't care enough about Clara for 12 to not remember her, I would have been happy if Clara had found Capaldi buried in the rubble or wandering around dazed and they didn't recognize each other and that was the cliffhanger.

I wasn't feeling it with Capaldi here, but I'm awaiting judgment for a real turn or several really. I loved Eccleston so if Capaldi can bring that kind of energy, I'll be happy, but here there wasn't much to bite into.

I'm not sad to see Smith go, I didn't remotely tear up when Amy returned.
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Re: Matt Smith leaving Doctor Who at the end of this year

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Still catching up with this series. I'm still working through season 4. Be caught up soon!
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Re: Matt Smith leaving Doctor Who at the end of this year

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JediTricks wrote:That is REALLY nerdy, especially for a non-Brit. :D
What can I say? I've got every episode on DVD or VHS in my video cabinet, and have probably seen them all more than once. Phil Morris needs to come up with some more missing episodes so I can see something new, right? :lol:
the crack in the universe had weird alien eyeball escapees from an alternate-universe prison yet now are the Time Lords trying to escape by getting a response of The Doctor's name,
The eyeball aliens were the Atraxi, I believe, and they didn't create the cracks. Prisoner Zero just happened to use one that was conveniently located. And plenty of other cracks appeared that season that had nothing to do with the Atraxi, so I don't really have a problem with the Time Lords appropriating one of them as well.
The Christmas elements are hit and then very miss.
Agreed, they were very perfunctory.
Smith's regeneration was different than most, he started regenerating and turned it into a violent weapon (because Moffat seems to think that the answer to everything is either a deus ex machina or violence), then he popped into Capaldi. I didn't think it felt all wrong, just a stylistic choice that I didn't entirely feel said what it was trying to. It really felt like 2 separate regenerations in this episode, plus the snap back to regular Smith felt dishonest to me and felt halfway like a 3rd.
Yeah, I get that they wanted Smith to be himself for the final scene, but it didn't quite work I thought. I did like the quick snap regeneration though. I get a little tired of the torrent of energy style change we've seen all through the new series. The only comparable change in the old series might be five to six at the end of Androzani, but generally it's not such a light show when the Doctor changes. Oddly enough, I thought the original Hartnell to Troughton is still one of the most effective, probably because it's simple and basic.
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