After a spectacular reintroduction that almost – but not quite – wiped the slate clean, Doctor who spun around to do the exact opposite: underline how much the previous era mattered. In fact, that happened in a wonderfully tight, self-contained thriller, with a driving riff on it The thing that will serve nicely as a perfect episode to introduce new viewers to how great the show can be at solving twisty sci-fi mysteries.
“Wild Blue Yonder”, the second 60th anniversary special starring David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor and Catherine Tate as his companion Donna Noble, immediately picks up where “The Star Beast” left off, with the TARDIS going haywire and sending them through time and time launches. room. Things quickly get worse from there: the TARDIS drops The Doctor and Donna onto an abandoned spaceship and then disappears.
Most of the episode revolves around The Doctor and Donna's attempts to solve the mystery of what happened to the ship and its crew, while also trying to figure out how to bring the TARDIS back. As mentioned, the episode is a wonderfully twisty hour that's best left unspoiled — but the most surprising thing about “Wild Blue Yonder” isn't the solution to the mystery, but the way it references the show's previous incarnation.
Something 21st century Doctor who what writers have often returned to is The Doctor as an ancient being, and what a person is who has seen it so much can do with your mind, your soul, your perspective. Usually this manifests itself in The Doctor being a very strange person, but a recurring theme in Davies' original tenure (and Moffat's after him) was how The Doctor's functional immortality had a downside: it could make him mean. This is why a companion was always needed, because they kept The Doctor grounded and under control.
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In 'Wild Blue Yonder' this moment comes when The Doctor and Donna talk briefly about the last 15 years of his life – or put another way, what he's been up to since current head writer Russell T. Davies left the show and these two characters were like last together. Specifically, they bring up 'The Flux', the crisis that was central to the final season of the Thirteenth Doctor (Jodie Whitaker). Doctor whoand the anger he feels at being responsible for the loss of “half the universe.”
Later, the two talk about whether he is okay. “I will be,” says the Doctor, in “a million years,” a sentence that is both slippery and painfully true.
It's a beat that echoes another of Davies' decisions from 2005, reworking the Doctor's history and hinting at an off-screen time war that dramatically changed his status quo and gave the character an undercurrent of darkness and tragedy which would characterize much of the subsequent events. decade. This time, however, the “Time War” isn't a convenient retcon, but “The Flux” – the final major crisis facing Whitaker's Thirteenth Doctor, putting her disappointing career as another instrumental player firmly in the grand tradition of Doctor who.
In the context of these anniversary specials – which, unlike most previous anniversary specials, don't feature another previous incarnation of The Doctor (at least not yet) – this is a great little moment. It implies that Russell T. Davies returns to Doctor who is interested not only in regression and returning to what worked last time, but also in how to move forward and think about who The Doctor could be now, taking into account everything the character has been through over the last fifteen years.
The Doctor is an incredibly elastic character, one that can be whatever a writer or artist needs in a given story, as long as a handful of core principles remain intact. But what makes it unique is the way The Doctor can acknowledge his own history when called upon to do so, and all the crazy, excellent and even misguided stories can be re-contextualized in a way that resonates. Everything is important. Everyone lives.