Synopsis from: en.wikipedia.org on October 26th, 2013:
[i]The Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler will return in the special alongside the Eleventh Doctor and Clara Oswald. The Zygons and Daleks will also feature in the special as the enemies. When asked about the special on The Jonathan Ross Show, Matt Smith teased the word “paintings”.
The exact plot of “The Day Of The Doctor” is the subject of speculation and conjecture. Steven Moffat has stated, “Most things that have been said about the 50th are not true… Normally I am responsible for the disinformation and the rubbish rumors - I usually put them out myself, but I haven’t needed to for this one.”[/i]
Synopsis from: en.wikipedia.org on December 1st, 2013:
[i]At Coal Hill School, teacher Clara Oswald receives a message from the Eleventh Doctor and returns to the TARDIS, which is unexpectedly airlifted to Trafalgar Square. Kate Stewart of the paramilitary organisation UNIT shows the Doctor preserved instructions from previous wife Elizabeth I of England, along with the Under-Gallery, a secret vault of forbidden art housed at the National Gallery. The vault includes several works of Time Lord art: preserved moments of time with the appearance of “3-D pictures”. One such work, called either No More or Gallifrey Falls, shows the fall of Arcadia on the last day of the Time War, an event believed to have ended with the obliteration by the Doctor of both his own race - the Time Lords - and Daleks, from the universe. The glass of several of these pictures has been broken from within and figures in the paintings have disappeared. It transpires that the shape-shifting Zygons, preserved in stasis in the pictures, are invading, taking the forms of UNIT members. To defeat them, Kate plans to detonate a nuclear warhead in London from within UNIT’s “TARDIS-proof” Black Archive of Time Lord and other alien artefacts. The detonation would will wipe out London but save the rest of humanity.
In the midst of the Time War, the War Doctor—a hitherto-unknown “hidden” incarnation of the Doctor loathed by his future selves for his eventual killing of billions when he acts to end the War—watches Gallifrey falling to the Dalek invasion. He decides to trigger an ancient weapon of mass destruction called “the Moment”, a “galaxy eater” which will destroy both races completely. The Moment, however, is sentient and possesses a conscience. Its interface manifests with the form of his future assistant Rose Tyler in her Bad Wolf persona, to challenge whether mass killing is his best option and to show him the future personal consequences of his actions.
The Moment opens fissures in space and time between these two points in the timeline and Elizabethan England, depositing the Eleventh Doctor and the War Doctor near the Tenth Doctor and a young Elizabeth I under threat from Zygons, who are using the time period to secret themselves into the stasis of the Time Lord paintings as to invade in the contemporary future. All three Doctors are captured and imprisoned in the Tower of London, where the Moment encourages the War Doctor to form an escape plan involving calculations which would take “centuries”, but which, being begun on the War Doctor’s sonic screwdriver, are therefore now completed on the Eleventh’s screwdriver, four hundred years in its future. The Eleventh Doctor, meanwhile, inscribes in stone the code necessary to activate a vortex manipulator stored in UNIT’s Black Archive. Found by his allies in the present day, it allows Clara to both escape the Zygons and free the Doctors, by travelling into the past. Using the same technique to “travel” to the present via the Time Lord paintings as the Zygons, they gain entry to the Black Archives despite its TARDIS-proof defences. They use the Black Archives’ mind-wiping facilities to erase the memories of the humans and Zygons present, causing them to forget who is human and who is Zygon in human form, and forcing them to cancel the detonation and discuss peace.
The War Doctor, now convinced that detonating the Moment will result in saving many more lives in the longer term, is returned to his time by the Moment. His other two present incarnations appear with the intention of detonating the device alongside him so as to share his burden. The Eleventh Doctor offers their changed view of the War Doctor incarnation, that far from being unworthy of the name, he had in the end been the Doctor “more than anyone else”. However Clara, reminding them of the choice of name “Doctor”, implores that he seek a different solution. The three Doctors finally think of an alternative solution, suggested by the same works of art, to place the entire planet Gallifrey in stasis in a moment of time, leaving the Daleks surrounding the planet to be obliterated by their own firepower; to the rest of the universe it would still appear that both sides wiped each other out. The three work with the consent of the desperate Time Lords and summon all of the Doctor’s other past incarnations – as well as the next to come – to successfully execute this plan.
The three Doctors and Clara return to the Gallery, unsure whether it is possible to return Gallifrey from stasis. The War Doctor is content to think that he failed in doing the right thing, rather than succeeding in doing the wrong thing. He realises that neither he nor the Tenth Doctor will remember what happened, and will continue shouldering the guilt for centuries. After departing, the aged War Doctor finds himself beginning to regenerate within his TARDIS. The Tenth Doctor also leaves, having persuaded his successor to tell him about his impending death on the planet Trenzalore.
The Eleventh Doctor, now alone in the Gallery, is joined by its mysterious curator who appears to resemble an aged version of the Fourth Doctor, who enigmatically hints that he may be a future incarnation. The Curator comments that the painting’s actual name is neither No More nor Gallifrey Falls, but Gallifrey Falls No More. The Doctor surmises that his plan to save Gallifrey was successful. In closing, the Doctor describes a recurring dream, in which he and his eleven previous incarnations are looking together upon Gallifrey. The Doctor vows to find and restore Gallifrey.[/i]
Discuss