The Day of The Doctor! (With No Doubt Massive Spoilers, So Don't Click Until You've Seen It.)

Right.

This is going to be loaded with spoilers, so I will provide plentiful whitespace and meaningless blather to prevent burning the eyeballs out of anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

For the love of God, please don't read this without watching it first.

As a spoiler-less soundbite review, Day of the Doctor was amazing.

I was not disappointed.

For further spoiler-free information, this episode demonstrated that it had been in planning for a very, very long time.

After watching the episode, and looking back, there have been clues salted through the show, leading to this episode, as far back as the end of David Tennant's time on the show at an absolute minimum.

Is that enough blather to prevent spoilers showing on Facebook?

We shall see.

So, as far back as Christopher Eccleston, the Doctor has referred to the day when he "destroyed" the Time Lords and the Daleks.

And yet, Gallifrey was put into a Time Lock, a frozen instant in which it continues to exist outside the continuity of Time, and while that's absence, that's certainly not destruction... Is it?

That's a bit of dialogue ambiguity that's been ongoing in the show since the very beginning of the new series, and the element of the Doctor's regret for the destruction of his people...

...Which doesn't make sense if they were trapped in a Time Lock...

Watching the show, I didn't catch it.

Maybe you didn't either.

Maybe you did, and I'm a doofus; it happens. (12.7% of the time. That's just science.)

So, here comes the build-up towards The End Of Time, and we get the drums, we get the Master, we get the whole reincarnation plot, we get Rassilon...

...We get a massive, orchestrated subterfuge designed to draw attention away from the inconsistency between the continued existence of Gallifrey, and the "I destroyed my own people," angst.

And that's been a theme all through the Eleventh Doctor's time, hasn't it? Cracks in the universe, inconsistencies, paradox; literally every plot involving Amy and Rory revolved around inconsistencies in one way or another, and Clara is the "Impossible Girl," whose entire existence is a flaw in the universe...

...Because they've been playing a giant "hide in plain sight" gambit with the fact that Doctor Who cannot have simultaneously destroyed Gallifrey and saved it.

It's an inconsistency that they specifically warned us about; the whole episode of The End Of Time was a huge clue.

When these factors are brought together, they point to a contradiction: in the life of the Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Doctors, they've carried both realities within them - Gallifrey exists, Gallifrey was destroyed; the Time Lords exist, all the Time Lords were killed at the hands of the Doctor.

Which means that the showrunners have been planning this moment, this resolution, for at least 8 years.

I admire craftsmanship, when I can find it.

And to see them resolve it, to see them tie those threads together, with the heart they demonstrated there - "This time, you don't have to do it alone."

I could not be more satisfied. This was all I could have asked for, and more.

I can't wait to see how they explain Clara.