Given the amount of ingredients that Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat had decided to pack into the show's Christmas offering, it was perhaps inevitable that many viewers would end up with stomachache.
In the space of an hour, Moffat had to end the run of the eleventh Doctor, Matt Smith, and introduce the twelfth, Peter Capaldi. He had to write a Christmas-themed episode that would be accessible to the widest possible audience of Brits tucking in to their turkeys.
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On top of that, he had decided to (spoilers ahead!) tie up multiple loose threads from every story in the Smith era, squeeze four major villains in the same show, use a Cyberman's head as a sidekick, spend time with the family of the Doctor's companion, Clara, introduce a psychotic space nun as a love interest for the Doctor, age him by 300 years, and address a long-standing fan debate about whether the Doctor can regenerate more than thirteen times.
That Moffat came up with something even vaguely coherent out of all of that is something of a Christmas miracle. But it's also not surprising that many fans found the result tasted like overcooked turkey:
Why did Moffatt choose Matt Smith's last episode to phone it in? Just utter bollocks. #DoctorWho
— Hayden Black (@haydenblack) December 27, 2013
What the frick frack diddily dack patty wack snick snack did Moffat do? #Christmasspecial #DoctorWho
— Tóth Anita (@NitaSajtkukac) December 27, 2013
I read a recap of last night's Doctor Who and I couldn't even make it through that, what even happened to this show
— Noelle Stevenson (@Gingerhazing) December 26, 2013
It's so boring I'm not even paying attention anymore. #DoctorWho
— Steph (@Radgryd) December 27, 2013
I had a quick look at the TV listings for tonight's #doctorwho. It makes a lot more sense now. pic.twitter.com/fmhIt5Neep
— Tom Scott (@tomscott) December 25, 2013
Meanwhile, many other fans (and some reviewers) saw in it a splendid send-off for Smith, an appropriate summation of his time in the role. So are the detractors just being Grinches, or are the proponents blinded by their love for a good leading man? Here's my take.
For outsiders, what happened to the viewing figures for The Time of the Doctor in the UK may seem astonishing: Roughly 8 million people were watching at the beginning of the show, but 10.2 million tuned in for the last five minutes. (I challenge you to find another show, outside of a sporting event, where that happened.)
That's because the Doctor's regeneration — for Britain, an event akin to a coronation — always happens at the end of the show. Two million viewers wanted to skip the preamble and get right to the long-live-the-king bit. Here's what they got:

That made for a nicely surprising change — no pillars of light shooting out of the Doctor's head and hands (that happened earlier — long story), but one sudden whip-crack of the neck. Hey, presto, Peter Capaldi, with the maddest stare seen in Who history since Tom Baker's departure. It's going to be a long wait until the show restarts in fall 2014.
Also effective was the aging of the Doctor leading up to that moment. He spent 300 years defending the town of Christmas from the assorted evil of the universe. Without access to the healing energies of his time machine, the TARDIS, that meant some serious wrinkles for the thousand-and-something year-old. The makeup wasn't bad, but what really sold it was Smith's masterly portrayal of an aging Time Lord, walking stick and all.
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For his final trick, Smith got to deliver one of the 50-year-old show's more philosophical speeches, right before his regeneration, about how we all change from moment to moment, but it's important to remember the people you were. He bid farewell to a ghostly image of his longtime companion Amelia Pond, dropped his signature bow tie, and there wasn't a dry eye in the house.
Steven Moffat is an incredibly smart, skilled storyteller. He understands how to convey the essence of a character in a few lines; he fizzes with intriguing concepts and snappy soliloquies. But he also seems to exist in a constant state of fear that the audience will get bored, or that he'll be found out as an intellectual.
And so the story of his reign has been one of ever-increasing speed, as Moffat insists on packing more into a single episode than used to fill an entire season of Doctor Who. The stories suffer, even those not penned by him. When the venerable Neil Gaiman wrote a two-part story called Nightmare in Silver, Moffat insisted on cutting it into one. That's like sending a Da Vinci back to the workshop because it's a painting rather than a sketch.
There was a certain hubris at work in the Christmas Special. The Robert Zemeckis movie Castaway (2000) took two hours to make us care about a beach ball called Wilson, Tom Hanks' only companion on a desert island. Moffat evidently thought he could pull the same trick with a Cyberman's head, affectionately called Handles, within a few minutes of on-screen time.
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With more time, Handles' death might have been more affecting. With more time, we might have cared about Clara's family, seen in a couple of scenes; for that matter, we might have cared more about Clara herself. With more time, it would have been easier to explain the various plot strands that got tied up, and not simply hand-wave over them. The ending, which saw the Doctor receiving a brand new set of regenerations, might have seemed less deus ex machina.
This is storytelling for the ADD generation — or at least, that seems to be the intention. But it was interesting to note how many of the tweets from that generation used the word "boring" to describe Time of the Doctor, frenetic pace notwithstanding.
That's because boredom ultimately has nothing to do with the pace of a story; it's a reflection of how emotionally invested we are in it. Explosions can be very boring indeed if they signify nothing.
Perhaps Moffat's strangest storytelling decision was to pack yet one more thing into the hour: a nudity gag. For reasons never explained, the Doctor has to approach the Church of the Papal Mainframe (don't ask) in the altogether. For a good portion of the show, he and Clara are walking around with mere hologram projections of clothes on. It was intended as funny; for the most part, it came off as creepy.
Given that this "nude" scene reaches peak creepiness, it's probably for the best that it was left on the cutting room floor:

Speaking of church, there was a little too much Time Lord veneration going on in this episode. We were constantly being told how loved the Doctor is — which is true, but far more effective if shown rather than told.
The Doctor always had a big head, but increasingly Moffat is telling us that it's justified — the entire universe is as fascinated by the Time Lord as he is with himself. And so we have the faintly ridiculous spectacle of him standing on a church belfry screaming at spaceships, then destroying them with an Elvis impression and regeneration energy used, for the first time, as a weapon.
This portends a troubling direction for the Doctor. He has become a benign dictator, a demigod in a show that is too ADD to really examine the flaws inherent in that position anymore.
We can only hope that Capaldi, an accomplished director in his own right, will help redress the balance and reduce the scale. As soon as he's comfortable with the color of his kidneys, of course.
Image: BBC America