Also along for this adventure in the South Pole is Doctor Who writer/actor Mark Gatiss, who plays a World War I captain who is more literally out of step with time. In particular, the First Doctor is portrayed as a particularly old-fashioned sort, which at times feels like Moffat commenting on the fans who are resistant to the incoming Thirteenth Doctor who is… gasp… a woman. And while the bigger themes and problems facing the Doctors(s) are quite serious, Moffat and his actors still manage to have a lot of fun in the interaction between the two. Serving as a sequel, of sorts, to the partially lost last story for the First Doctor, 1966’s “The Tenth Planet,” the special uses brief snippets from that half-century old tale in a seamless fashion that unites Twelve with his predecessor. Bringing in David Bradley (Game of Thrones) to play William Hartnell’s First Doctor is certainly a stroke of brilliance and the kind of narrative legerdemain that only a few shows could pull off, and what could’ve been a mere gimmick actually works very well, combining the original Doctor with the latest to inform and strengthen both versions of the character as well as both of their final stories. The episode suffered dramatically because the Doctor’s motivations in this regard weren’t very well fleshed out, but fortunately Moffat completes the thought in this special as he contends with not one, but two different Doctors who don’t want to give in to the inevitability of their end. When we last saw Twelve in the Season 10 finale, “The Doctor Falls,” he had essentially been “killed”… but was fighting regeneration.
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