Thoughts on "The Day of the Doctor"

If you haven't seen "The Day of the Doctor", the following will contain spoilers. I will put in a series of line breaks then try to mask the text so it appears when highlighted in a browser. Hand-helds are SOL. Sorry. Stop reading if this is a concern.































Still there? Okay...

I've now watched "The Day of the Doctor" three times. The OCD nerd that inhabits the place where my soul would reside feels a need to sound off: First of all: Ian Chesterson is now the head-honcho at Coal Hill School? HELL YEAH! Wonder what happened to Barbara Wright? Awesome sound off to the First Doctor's era. And I'm curious what happened to the Dalek time machine they used to get home.

Now that my squee is out of the way, let's deconstruct the episode a bit:

So UNIT snags the TARDIS out of an open field. Just like that. What the hell? Since when does UNIT go about stealing the TARDIS? What if the Doctor needed it? Hell, why didn't the Doctor just dematerialize from the helicopter's grasp?

Kudos to explaining the Elizabeth I references re: the 10th (Tennant?) Doctor, but it felt... forced and weird. I would have been happier if they'd never tried to explain all that. And Elizabeth I had a hidden gallery of subversive art that lasted into the 21st Century? Um...?

So, the War Doctor was present for the Fall of Arcadia. Yeah, okay. So this is the "Warrior" Doctor. He's got no gun. He's wearing an empty bandoleer and sounds like a flavor of the First Doctor with his crotchety behavior. If he's been fighting in the Time War, why isn't he armed with something? Grenades? Demat gun? I mean, just some kind of token weapon would have set him apart as the "Not-Doctor" he was built up to be. And using the TARDIS to smash Daleks doesn't count.

While on that topic, why the hell aren't there more TARDISes or Gallifreyan war-vehicles in-play around Gallifrey? I mean, c'mon! The Doctor's got an antiquated TARDIS. It's not armed. He's dicking around on Gallifrey during the final fighting and nobody's touching him in an obsolete bit of technology. You'd think up-to-date Time Lord TARDISes would be in better shape to mess-up the Daleks.

Hell, the entire "final day" was a disappointment. All this talk of the Time War being such a huge thing and all we see is Daleks blasting Gallifreyans. We never see the evil the Time Lords do. All we see are Gallifreyan soldiers firing "pew-pew" guns at Daleks or running around and getting blown up. If Gallifrey can master multi-dimensional technologies and time-travel, I'd expect more surreal and weird crap being hurled-about.

On the topic of multi-dimensional things, so how the hell did the Zygons get the dimensional art thingie in the first place? What, were Gallifreyan artists dinking around on the Zygon homeworld before it was destroyed? And how did those Zygons get out of the art? If it's so easy, why hasn't Gallifrey just popped-out of its alternate universe? Hell, why didn't Gallifreyan refugees and/or Daleks pop out when the Doctors and Clara popped out in the Black Archive?

WTF happened with the Zygons at the end? What kind of negotiations were even possible at the end?

So shout-outs for having the Moment take the form of Rose Tyler as "Bad Wolf". It was ridiculous fan service, but made a vague connection to Rose's tie-in with the Eye of Harmony make more sense. Kinda. Maybe.

Loved Oswald's scarf. That was improved upon with "The Curator", though that made so much of no-sense that I just shut my brain off at that point.

And kudos for having Capelli do a cameo.