Fridge / Doctor Who 50th AS "The Day of the Doctor"

WARNING! THERE MAY BE UNMARKED SPOILERS!

Fridge Brilliance

• The War Doctor's TARDIS:
  • His control room is smaller in design compared to later versions. As the War Doctor, he wasn't accepting any companions.
  • It also has the old-style walls with the "round things", but augmented with Nine's curved columns. Since the exterior of the TARDIS shows some battle damage, it's implied that the War Doctor started out with the traditional control room, but the TARDIS suffered enough damage in the Time War to need that kind of reinforcement (and only "healed" it when it got a full revamp in "The Eleventh Hour.")
  • The size is also a Shout-Out to the classic series control rooms, which tended to be much smaller than the sprawling TVM and new series console rooms.
• The final scene with the Curator. There's a lot of Leaning on the Fourth Wall mixed with a heady dose of Angel Unaware, but if one accepts that the Curator is a long long distant regeneration of the Doctor, then there's a lot more significance to the "Round Things" along the gallery walls next to the painting.
• The Ninth Doctor believed all sides had perished in the Time War, yet the Emperor Dalek (and others) survived the final battle, which shouldn't have been possible. Now we know how: his ship was damaged, but not destroyed, in the friendly crossfire after Gallifrey vanished, and wasn't burned by the Doctor because he didn't do it, something Nine couldn't possibly have known. Suddenly the Daleks' apparent Joker Immunity makes far more sense. We also see a single Dalek pod being flung into space by the sheer force of the explosion after the Dalek fleet destroys itself. It's possible that this pod contained one of these Daleks mentioned above, and that the others were similarly scattered survivors flung far apart from each other — hence how they kept showing up despite the fact that they should all have been dead.
• Upon first meeting Ten and Eleven, the War Doctor mistakes them for companions. Now, what do companions do? They stop the Doctor from going too far. What do Ten and Eleven do in this episode? They stop the War Doctor from destroying Gallifrey.
• On top of all the other alien tech in the Black Archive, UNIT now has a Bronze Dalek to cannibalize. On the flip side, though, the Doctors had plenty of time to go through and take away or deactivate any tech they don't want UNIT to have.
• At the climax, Ten, Eleven, and the War Doctor summon all the previous incarnations of the Doctor to battle to help save Gallifrey. But how does Twelve know where to go, given he doesn't exist yet? Because he remembers these events from Eleven's perspective, and knew that he would be needed. And he's the only future Doctor to show up, because it just happened to have needed that many versions of him to complete the calculations, not a fourteenth or later one.
• The big red button that can destroy Gallifrey and the Daleks mirrors the exact the same dilemma faced by the 9th Doctor with using the Delta Wave to destroy the Dalek Emperor and burn the Earth during the events of "Bad Wolf". It also looks like a rose.
  • It could also potentially foreshadow the Doctors' decision to not burn Gallifrey. Despite all that happened in the Time War and the fact that he did not consider himself the Doctor, he was the Doctor, "more than anybody else... on the day it wasn't possible to get it right". And the Doctor would always find a way to save everyone if he can. And he did.
  • It's also reminiscent of the Osgood boxes, which the Doctor(s) had just set up as part of the human/zygon peace treaty.
• The War Doctor is basically a classic series Doctor / viewer transplanted into the new series and offering a commentary on it. A lot of the things that exasperate or annoy him about his new series incarnations are things that tend to arise when criticisms of the new series when compared to the classic series appear; the tendency to wave the sonic screwdriver around like a magic wand or a gun instead of the scientific tool it used to be, the younger (in appearance and attitude) Doctors of the new series compared to the (generally) older classic series Doctors, the increased reliance on catchphrases ("Geronimo!" and "Allonsy!"), the Doctor kissing people, and so on. Even better; he's a crotchety old man at a point in his life where he's in many ways far removed from what the contemporary viewer understands the Doctor to be, and who has to gradually learn to become this character. He's basically William Hartnell's Doctor brought forward in time to comment on how he ended up.
• Some fans have already begun to argue that the significance of Eleven's new mission to find Gallifrey and return home is a bit of a hit-and-miss as most people interpret it as his finally being able to go home after the Time War. But the reason why it's such a significant statement is that, after all those years ago when the Doctor stole a broken TARDIS and ran away from Gallifrey to go on adventures, he finally gets to go back. Imagine, leaving home, with no fixed intention to ever go back, at least permanently. And then the Time War happens, and because of what you've done, you'll never be able to go back again. Imagine going on a journey, only to return home to find your house has been destroyed and your family dead. Suddenly the ending's Heartwarming is magnified up to eleven. Gallifrey stands. The Doctor gets to go home again.
• Eleven being the one who realize how to save Gallifrey by tricking out time makes a lot of sense, since it's not the first time he's done it.
• Clara doesn't believe that the Doctor has a job at UNIT, despite having travelled through his timestream. Why? Because she entered a time-scar that was the result of his time-travelling, and he did very little time-travelling during his UNIT years.
• Of course it would be Eleven who uses the analogy of Cup-a-Soups to describe the stasis cube. He's a lover of processed foods since his favorites are fish fingers and custard.
• "'Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.' —Marcus Aurelius." This is the first thing said in the special, by Clara, and boy does it foreshadow the climax. The "good man = the Doctor" parallel is back, and since the Time War the Doctor's never considered himself to be a good man. But he's always been a good man, because Clara was there to teach him a lesson ^note Which makes her and the Doctor's earlier conversation before UNIT picked them up fairly ironic. She gets all of the Doctors to stop insisting that saving Gallifrey is impossible and to just save it.
  Clara: We've got enough warriors. Any old idiot can be a hero.
  The Doctor: Then what do I do?
  Clara: What you've always done. Be a Doctor.
• The War Doctor and the Tenth Doctor are clearly very taken with Clara, and the Eleventh Doctor has reached a point where she is clearly very special to him. Which is only understandable considering that she threw herself into time so that copies of her would be helping him out all throughout his life, to the point where one of her copies even suggested the TARDIS for him to take when he first left Gallifrey; even if he doesn't actually recognise her, subconsciously he probably identifies her as a very good friend to him.
• The three Doctors use the phrase "Gallifrey stands" to represent their plan to stasis lock Gallifrey in a pocket universe. Why is this significant? Because in "The End of Time", the High Council believe that there are two possibilities - either Gallifrey falls, or Gallifrey rises. The Tenth Doctor and the Master managed to push Rassilon and the High Council back into the Time War, ensuring that Gallifrey did not "rise" in the way that Rassilon had intended. Although at the time, it seemed as though Gallifrey was doomed to fall, we learn in "The Day of the Doctor" that this is not the case either, because the three Doctors managed to work out an alternative to destroying Gallifrey. Thanks to the efforts of the Doctor, Gallifrey neither rises nor falls. It just... stands. Frozen in an instant of time.
• Elizabeth doesn't react to the revelation that the Tenth Doctor can change his face - leading him to mistakenly suspect she's a Zygon imposter. She uses this apparent willingness to go along with things when she poses as the Zygon Commander. In real life, Elizabeth took part in so many plots and was subject to so many assassination attempts that she probably learned to keep a level head and never rule out any possibility, however daft.
• The Doctor's age discrepancy finally makes sense. The War Doctor identifies as eight hundred, which could very well be how long he fought the Time War. He started counting again from Karn, throwing away his age as well as his name. It makes perfect sense for the War Doctor to do it, and the next Doctors just kept count from there.
• This one's equal part Fridge Horror; Nine emerged believing he destroyed Gallifrey, because he would only remember himself in the shack with the Moment due to the limitation effect. He probably didn't think too much of being able to remember because in the comic The Forgotten he mentions that the Moment is made of DeMat technology, which removes the short-term memories of the user. His memory would be distorted even without the paradox.
• McGillop seems to be a fairly intelligent and reasonable member of UNIT's science department, and he seems to know when Osgood breaks out her inhaler that something's wrong, so his statement that he finds it hard to believe that creatures can break out of paintings seems a little odd. Then comes the scene where the Doctor phones him and tells him to move the "Gallifrey Falls" painting to the Black Archive so he and his other selves can break into the TARDIS-proof base. It could very well be that he was in on the plot the whole time and knew the Doctors would save the day, so his line in the Under Gallery could simply be him Obfuscating Stupidity.
• Less seriously, Ten's comment that Zygon!Elizabeth, who is actually the real Elizabeth, has "breath that could stun a horse." Usually, one would think he's just trying to insult the Monster of the Week, but one remembers that people valued personal hygiene much less back then, so her breath would really be that bad. Martha made a similar comment about Shakespeare in "The Shakespeare Code" (which also featured Elizabeth I).
• The Doctor keeps getting younger and younger because the War Doctor was the oldest looking regeneration, and he was thought to commit a terrible genocide. Of course he didn’t want to look that old again, it reminded him of the Time War! It was after he discovered he had saved Gallifrey, that he could regenerate into an older form without feeling an overwhelming sense of guilt!
• Nine's absence from the story (aside from the blizzard of stock-footage at the climax), as well as that of any of Ten's companions or of any later Doctors, is explained by one of the Moment's early lines: she wasn't showing War just any of his future selves, she was showing him the men he'd become as a consequence of Ten calculating how many children must have been on Gallifrey when he ended the Time War. Presumably Nine was still too shell-shocked to bring himself to perform that calculation, and Ten didn't become depressed and self-repulsed enough to run those numbers until the "one terrible night" which the Moment mentions ... probably the same "terrible night" when he'd just seen Adelaide Brooks kill herself to preserve the timeline. At that point, Ten had gone without companions for quite a while. As for the later Doctors, they knew that War hadn't actually killed the children, so didn't pose a suitable example for the Moment's demonstration.
• The appearance of an apparent future Doctor near the end (the man played by Tom Baker) does not violate the continuity of the next episode, in which Eleven assumes he is the final Doctor. That's because a few moments earlier it's confirmed that a past Doctor cannot retain knowledge acquired from a future self. Meaning Eleven likely forgot his encounter with the Curator soon after.
• The Doctor's infatuation with Rose takes on a new light due to this episode: the Moment appeared as her Bad Wolf persona and even mentioned her by name, indicating to the War Doctor that "Rose Tyler" is someone who will come to mean a great deal to him one day. Even though his memories of exactly what happened were erased, he might have at least some recollection on some level of what the Moment had looked like, the name it had mentioned, and its rationale for taking that particular form, which could turn into a fixation on Rose on the Doctor's part due to her connection to the Moment. Running into Rose herself so soon after ending the Time War in his previous incarnation must have triggered something, even if just on a subconscious level, that prompted the Ninth Doctor to take her on as a companion. In this interpretation, Rose is at least another symbol of the Ninth and Tenth Doctors' inability to move beyond what they think they did in the Time War, and possibly even their subconscious memory (from their time as the War Doctor) of how they had actually saved Gallifrey and how "Rose" had guided them in doing it, trying to resurface to alleviate their overwhelming feelings of grief and guilt over what they consciously believe they did.
• The War Doctor's regeneration is a whole lot of Fridge Brilliance. The Moment said his punishment for killing of all the Time Lords and Daleks was living. Since he didn't do it, his reward was "dying". Basically, the War Doctor was punished for not killing the Daleks and it allowed him to regenerate into Nine; his reward for failure was dying... which, indirectly, saved him, with the Moment giving him a Pet the Dog Moment.
• War chides Ten and Eleven for pointing their sonic screwdrivers at him like they were weapons, yet teams up with them in directing the screwdrivers at a Dalek in exactly the same way. This seems like Hypocritical Humor, until you recall that while a sonic screwdriver isn't a weapon against organic creatures, its actual function is to manipulate machinery. The screwdrivers were indeed useless against War because he's an organic life form, but the collective power of all three was enough to override the Dalek's control of its travel machine and kill the mutant inside while sending its chassis crashing through the picture-glass.
• Want another early clue that the Moment is actively manipulating events to give the War Doctor an alternative to burning Gallifrey? It's her that nudges him towards the idea of loading the door-opening algorithm into the sonic screwdriver. Given how perceptive and future-aware the Moment seems to be, it's very likely that she knew the door was unlocked all along: she just wanted to drop a hint about how the various Doctors could collectively pull off their Cup-A-Gallifrey stunt.
• The Under-Gallery is established to house the most dangerous works of art in Britain and is designed to protect the country from unusual dangers? So why is one of the objects stored within it a decidedly non-dangerous and non-unusual fez? Consider that the way the Doctor is (a) nominated as the curator of the Under-Gallery and (b) tests the time fissures that open up is by throwing the fez through them. He probably ordered one to be put in there at some point before-and-after the events of the episode in order to make sure that time kept on track.
• Eleven no longer recalling how many children died can be explained by him subconsciously recalling that the answer is "None", because Ten was present when he changed his mind and they figured out how to save Gallifrey.
• It has been pointed out that the Time Lord's plan in The End of Time has major parallels with Davros' plan in Journey's End. Now another parallel has emerged, a traitor to his race that sees the monstrous crimes their race has committed and decreed "No more." That description, down to the words, could describe the War Doctor, or Dalek Caan.
• When the Doctors were freezing Gallifrey, it's noted by High command that he Daleks have increased their firepower, assuming they know what's going on. The novelization reveals that the Doctor was there thousands of times. To the Daleks they are suddenly faced with a legion of their greatest enemy arrived. As the novel notes, some Daleks outright fled, but not all of them, what is the classic response to danger? Fight Or Flee. The Daleks that couldn't flee went on the aggressive against their greatest enemy.
• The Moment chose to draw Ten and Eleven out of their timelines to meet War and Take a Third Option at the exact time(s) she did because both Ten and Eleven were already getting involved in the Zygons' plot with the stasis cubes - after the Doctors dealt with this threat first, they would be inspired to save Gallifrey using similar technology as a result. Had she pulled them out of their timelines at any other point, the same idea may not be in the back of their minds and they might not have succeeded as she wanted. In-Universe, this may also be the reason why she chose Ten and Eleven, and not, say, Nine (War's immediate successor, the most obviously traumatized by his past choices, and the one who chose to be a coward over killer again) or Twelve (he of the speech from "The Zygon Inversion") - while Nine and Twelve would certainly give War more reason to hesitate (and would've been fun additions for the audience), Ten and Eleven were the ones who'd be tied up in the Zygon stasis cube plot that turned out to be vital to saving Gallifrey, the only two the Moment needed to help War actually figure out the solution.
  • Also, when Ten and Eleven come to the War Doctor to help him pressed the button, they do it not just because they know the grief that he's going through (as they believe they've destroyed Gallifrey before they come to the realization of Take a Third Option). It's a bit of heartwarming when you realize that Ten went though something similar recently with "The Fires of Pompeii", where he had to choose to set off Vesuvius in order to save the world. Donna put her hand on the lever to set it off, so that he wouldn't have to do it alone. That feeling of grief and the kindness that Donna shared with him at that moment would be remembered by Ten, which would be remembered by Eleven as well. So, believing that the War Doctor will be going through grief for activating The Moment, both Ten and Eleven choose to join him so he wouldn't feel solely responsible, much like how Donna did for him.
• And with a bit of Fridge Heartwarming to cap it all off; each incarnation of the Doctor is on death's door in some way shape or form during this time. War's body is within hours of giving out (even setting aside his Death Seeker tendencies), Ten is painfully aware he hasn't got long left thanks to the Ood, and Eleven knows (or at least believes) he's had his final regeneration. And as the plan to save Gallifrey begins to form, it's not the ethereal and mysterious "Doctor's Theme" or "I Am The Doctor" that plays in the background, but "The Shepherd's Boy", a song that belongs to Twelve. As they ensure their homeworld has a future, Murray Gold gently reminds us that the Doctor will as well.

Fridge Horror

• The Omega Vault contains all the most dangerous and forbidden weapons of mass destruction that the Time Lords have come across in their history… and, except for The Moment, they have already used them all.
  "At least I'm not a Dalek."
  "Who can tell the difference any more?!"
• Ten basically left Elizabeth at the altar, or at least shortly thereafter. No wonder when she ran into him again a few decades later, she referred to him as her "sworn enemy". Heck, he's probably the reason she never married anybody else: she was waiting for him to return.
• The guard at the Black Archive has been working there ten years, but, because of the mind-wipe, thinks every day is his first in a new job. Just think about the implications of that... One can only hope the Doctor's actions will lead to a bit of reevaluating on that policy. That's is, unless he just demands they change it, or breaks their mind-wiping device himself.
• The survival of Gallifrey is Fridge Horror on the worst possible scale. How so? In "The Ancestor Cell", Eight destroyed Gallifrey. In "The Gallifrey Chronicles", he learned of the possibility of recreating it. Now, history repeats. How many more times throughout his lives will he destroy his home-world?
• The Doctor has always hated the Time Lords, for being lazy and then corrupt. He felt guilty about wiping them out, but who's to say the saved people on Gallifrey won't go back to their old ways? The Doctor never was looking for a home, he left because he wanted to see the universe. The Time Lords wanted to control it. And now they're back.
• While Gallifrey's time freeze may mimic a time lock, it still implies that Rassilon is in the pocket dimension, too, just waiting to be freed.
• The Tenth Doctor helps save Gallifrey from the Time War and forgets, only to leave "The Day of the Doctor" and go to "The End of Time", where he gets to see the horror of the Time Lord High Council's plan to destroy Gallifrey and the rest of the universe. All things considered, kind of a damper on his success.
• This episode shows how powerful the Doctor's tools are when weaponized. (1) Three sonic screwdrivers can take out a single, combat-ready Dalek. Imagine what one can do to a human. (2) The TARDIS itself can take out several Daleks at once through ramming, and that was a Type 40 museum piece. Imagine what a state-of-the-art Time Lord warship can do.
  • As noted above in brilliance, the point about the sonic is likely nulified in that it wasn't affecting the creature, it was serving it's function as a machine manipulating tool to manipulate the Dalek's travel machine, and would not have such an effect on a human.
• The War Doctor has considerably aged in appearance since "The Night of the Doctor". It may not be due to time. In "The Daleks Master Plan", there was a weapon called the Time Destructor. One of the effects is rapid aging. It may also have been one of the weapons from the Omega Vault used during the Time War.
• The Time Lords were about to lose the Time War to the Daleks. All of the Time Lords in all of space & time were called back to Gallifrey to fight, and all the Daleks in the universe converged on Gallifrey. If the Doctor hadn't done what he did, there'd be living in a Dalek-controlled universe right now - if there'd be living at all.
• The Time War was dreaded not because of the Daleks, who are causing just as much trouble outside of the Time War as they did when apart of it, but the weapons from the Omega Vault used to fight back against them unsuccessfully were causing reality to tear apart at the seams. What would happen if a Card-Carrying Villain Evil Overlord got his hands on the weapons in Omega Vault while reproducing and perfecting the Moment as a weapon and used it and the other weapons to cause his own Time War?
• All Time Lords are Gallifreyans, but not all Gallifreyans get to become Time Lords. It could easily be that Rassilon sees non-Time Lord Gallifreyans as second-class, and therefore disposable, citizens. He could very well be using them as meatshields during the Dalek invasion of Gallifrey to buy himself enough space to hold the final meeting of the Time Lords to ratify his use of The Final Sanction.
• The last thing the War Doctor ever does before regenerating is gleefully laugh. Now, we know that this is because he just saved Gallifrey from the Time War. But he doesn't remember that. At all. Now picture that from the perspective of the Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors, who also don't remember why he was laughing. They all thought that the last thing the War Doctor ever did was laugh ecstatically after committing genocide against their own race... No wonder they were so scared of him.
• All the Doctors unite to save Gallifrey from the Daleks at the last minute, by performing a multi-TARDIS operation that it took their entire combined lifespan to figure out how to do. One of those Doctors was Four, who, back in "Genesis of the Daleks", had had the opportunity to (and in fact had explicitly been ordered to by the High Council of Gallifrey) exterminate the Daleks within days of their initial creation by Davros, but spent so much time dithering at the critical moment about the ethics of pre-emptive genocide of a race that had already expressed a willingness to exterminate everything and whether the accidental good the Daleks engendered among the races defending themselves from extermination that the decision was taken away from him. How many centuries did the Doctor spend across ten regenerations knowing that he could have prevented the catastrophe he's spending the rest of his lives trying to avert from happening in the first place?
  • This gets even harsher when one considers "The Mind of Evil", which reveals that the Doctor's greatest fear is watching a world burn, and that all the Doctors up to partway through his Thirteenth regeneration spent all their lives working on how to prevent that from happening to their homeworld.

Fridge Logic

Fridge Logic

On the Headscratchers page.