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And lo, it’s time for another Doctor Who compilation video. This time, it’s generically titled “Best Moments” but it’s really a compilation of some of the best moments from Series 9 of the new show. Not all the best, but certainly enough to fill out 51 minutes. It’s showrunner Steven Moffat and the Twelfth Doctor Peter Capaldi‘s penultimate season, and companion Jenna Coleman‘s final season. The video reveals that the season featured some of the show’s finest Science Fiction stories and revealed Moffat’s grandest themes in the show.
By his second season, Capaldi was starting to settle into the role and the scripts seemed to course-correct the flawed eighth series that flirted with just how dislikable Moffat could push the Doctor to be. Capaldi’s hair had grown out and he re-emerged at the top of the season as a more playable, Rock and Roll kind of Doctor. His chemistry with Coleman was also settling in and their easy rapport was pushed to the hilt as Moffat’s arc had their relationship feeling like an increasingly unhealthy co-dependency between an older man and a younger woman. You could read it as an allegory for an older man’s late-life crisis affair with the younger woman’s growing overconfidence to be like him to a destructive end. It’s one of the darkest adult themes the show ever explored. This video compilation leaves out that aspect of the season and concentrates on the high concept Science Fiction ideas and exposes Moffat’s biggest themes in the show: how the fear of death here is the fear of losing a loved one.
As the video shows, we have Davros lamenting the end of his life; the loss of Ashilda (Maisie Williams); the Doctor’s fear of losing Clara’ and the stories of the week that nearly all involve the death of loved ones, from “The Zygon Invasion”; the funereal ghosts in the flood of “Under the Lake”. “Heaven Sent” is one of the finest Science Fictional explorations of grief ever written – the Doctor repeating the same day over and over again is a metaphor for how life feels frozen under the shadow of grief. It also deals with one that happens when The Doctor refuses to accept that loss: he resurrects Ashilda and Clara in twin thematic instances and everyone is forced to face the consequences. Immortality becomes a curse. Ashilda loses her empathy. Clara is left in a state of grace, suspended before her death that she will have to return to eventually. Series 10 became a thematic supplement to this season. Moffat and Capaldi’s finale season has The Doctor dealing with his impending death and what he would leave behind. These two seasons were some of the most nuanced and poignant seasons of Doctor Who and any TV show.
Doctor Who has always been about death. All stories are. Under Russell T. Davies and Moffat, the show became more explicitly about teaching children to accept Death and Loss, and Life always continues after.
Doctor Who is now streaming on HBO Max.
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