GOODBYE PETER CAPALDI: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH AS THE TWELFTH DOCTOR SAYS ‘FAIRWELL’

The Twelfth Doctor has left us. It’s time for our collective mourning period, Whovians.

And this was one heck of a way to say goodbye.

Recap

The Twelfth Doctor runs into his first incarnation at the South Pole, both of them refusing to regenerate. As they are meeting, they come across a World War I captain who has stumbled into their timeline.

A glass entity shows up and to collect the captain; it is part of a group from the far future called Testimony, who harvests something from people in the past, moments before their deaths. They must return the captain to his death or disrupt the timeline. When the Doctor refuses to give him back, they claim that they will return someone to him in exchange: Bill Potts. The Doctor isn’t sure that he believes that the person in front of him is the real Bill, as he believed her to be dead. He decides that they will all leave in the First Doctor’s TARDIS so that he can learn more about Testimony and stop them if they turn out to be awful.

He goes to the center of the universe, a general hellscape overrun by daleks. At that center is Rusty, the dalek the Doctor met in “Into the Dalek,” who is spending the ages murdering every dalek who tries to approach. The Doctor asks Rusty to tap into the dalek hivemind on his behalf for information on Testimony.

He’s surprised by what he finds; Testimony is a project from New Earth created to briefly lift people directly before their deaths and round up all their memories into a living archive. Once the memories are forever stored, Testimony delivers the person back to their death with no memory of what happened.

Both Doctors agree to bring the Captain back to the moment of his death, but the Twelfth Doctor can’t resist fussing with the timeline; he finagles it so that the Christmas Truce interrupts the Captain’s death and he lives after all. (They also find out that the Captain is, as many fans suspected, the grandfather of the Doctor’s dear friend—Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.)

After the ordeal, the First Doctor realizes why he must regenerate and bids the Twelfth Doctor goodbye. Bill arrives to see the Doctor off, but he’s still not sure of her. Bill insists that people are the sum of their memories, hence, she is truly Bill. In order to prove to the Doctor how important memory is, Bill restores the Doctor’s memories of Clara. The Doctor bids a tearful goodbye to Bill and Nardole, telling them that he has to make the choice about whether or not to regenerate alone. The TARDIS seems to be pleading with him when he gets back on the ship, and he finally decides that he might as well keep going for one more round. Before he goes, he gives advice to his future self, ending with “Be Kind.” Then he lets go—

—and the Thirteenth Doctor arrives. She utters the words “Oh, brilliant” before the TARDIS proceeds to explode and she falls out the doors.

And, oh. She’s so happy to be there.

And… she crashing. Well. Some things never do change.

Overall, this episode was a perfect summation of Steven Moffat’s era as Doctor Who show-runner–the story itself was often creaky and underwhelming, but the actors were all superb and when the emotional scenes and monologues really hit, all the creaky bits just fell away.

Fans knew from the moment they set eyes on Mark Gatiss in the trailer that he would be related to the Brigadier. While David Bradley is delightfully uncanny as the First Doctor, and it’s so enjoyable to watch he and Capaldi bounce off of one another.

With the revelation of Clara and her reintroduction back into the Doctor’s memories, the Twelfth Doctor gets a beautiful gift that very likely informs his regeneration into a woman. After all, he now remembers Clara Oswald, the woman who he taught to be her very own Doctor. And she took that knowledge from him and literally ran with it. She’s already out there with Me, doing the good work for him. It makes perfect sense that remembering her would stick with him as he prepared to change.