Barn Trilogy (image grid)

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Exquisite Corpse (The Name of the Doctor)

It’s no new observation to suggest that Name of the Doctor is an extended trailer for the 50th anniversary. But it might be prudent to note how that materialises within the plot itself. This is an episode entirely structured around setting up/stalling until the moment we follow Clara and the Doctor into the Doctor’s timestream – at which point the narrative seems to completely dissolve.

They mill about for a bit in an empty set with a smoke machine, while some actors in Doctor Who Experience costumes dart past the camera. This is supposed to be a deadly space in which nobody can maintain their own existence, and the Doctor entering is supposedly crossing his own timeline in the worst way possible, but there are no perceivable consequences once 11 has coaxed Clara to walk about five feet over to him. He just walks out again with her…somehow…despite there being no visible exit (a brief CGI effect of an entrance having vanished one second after appearing) – and thanks to Matt Smith’s knee injury on set, the next episode resumes without it ever being addressed how this escapade wrapped up, which raises the amusing Mind Robber-esque question of whether or not they ever actually left the timestream at all.

The final frame in the episode to contain the Eleventh Doctor and Clara.

The 50th anniversary, still vague at the time of Name‘s transmission, is promised to be a celebration of the past, and the early promotion for it runs with that aggressively. Throughout Name, the function of the Doctor’s timestream is to provide trailers for the anniversary. Showcases of the past. Clara’s two montages of interacting with all the Doctors are undoubtedly this. The timestream displaces her – a NuWho viewer whose only experience is with 11 – across a gallery of previous Doctors, digitally stitching her into new engagements with old material. (It may be worth recalling the gravestone of Victorian Clara which listed her birthday as November 23, tacitly linking the character with the material existence of both Doctor Who and its viewership.)