Fifty Years in Time and Space - THE DAY OF THE DOCTOR

And so the big event came and went and it certainly didn't dissapoint - The Day of the Doctor reinvented Doctor Who, remained faithful to the history of the show and yet left us with a show that is forever changed. For instance forthcoming Doctor Peter Capaldi will now be the 13th and not the 12th Doctor, and it seems we've been counting wrong ever since the 9th Doctor. WARNING IF YOU'VE NOT SEEN DAY OF THE DOCTOR then major spoilers follow.


All I can say after watching the lovingly crafted 50th anniversary special episode is - wow, pass me another jelly baby.

The story was close to perfect - we already knew it would deal with the Time War but it played out in a way that nobody expected, and the climax was punch your hand in the air exciting. Through clever editing every Doctor turned up to put the plan into action that would save Gallifrey and the Doctor's soul -


'Oh no,' a Time Lord quips. 'All twelve of them.'

And then all of a sudden Peter Capaldi, the next Doctor, turns up and says, 'all thirteen of them.'.

This episode may have started the biggest ever Wikipedia editing session in history.

Showrunner Steven Moffat gave us one of the best ever Doctor Who stories - this was an epic and truly moving story. The frantic action scenes, showing a full scale war, were as grand as anything we've seen in the cinema and we could even make out what was going on - Michael Bay should watch this episode several times before churning out his next SF yawnfest.

For a fifty year old show Doctor Who is incredibly full of life and youthful - this special 75 minutes episode to my mind tops both of the recent big screen Star Trek movies and for a fraction of the budget. In fact the 50th anniversary special may be one of the best SF productions in recent years, and proved beyond a doubt that Doctor Who is simply awesome. We even got to see John Hurt regenerate into the 9th, no 10th Doctor, which means that, including the recent mini episode Night of the Doctor, we've now seen every regeneration of every Doctor to date.

The episode left us with enough possibilities to fill another fifty years of the iconic show - the return of the Time Lords,  the black archive and UNIT's TARDIS proof room will all, no doubt, be explored in future episodes and for now we have just over a month to go before the next Doctor Who mega episode when the 2013 Christmas special is aired and Peter Capaldi finally takes over as the Doctor - I can't wait.

Doctor Who, fifty years young and still the best SF concept there ever was.