SPOILERS LIE AHEAD.

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We kick off proceedings with footage from William Hartnell’s final serial The Tenth Planet, which aired from 8-29th October 1966 and was also notable for the introduction of the Cybermen – specifically the ‘Mondasian’ variety last seen in Series 10 finale The Doctor Falls. The four-part adventure contained episodes 131-134 of Doctor Who, while Twice Upon A Time is episode 840 – so the figure of 709 seen on screen refers only to the first part of the serial. The recap contains footage from the first two episodes but nothing from Part Four, as it is one of 97 episodes still missing from the BBC’s archives. The snippet of regeneration footage seen towards the story’s end only exists because of its use in a 1973 edition of children’s magazine programme Blue Peter. The copy of the episode lent to the Blue Peter offices was never returned, so if somebody can have a word in Lesley Judd’s ear… A line written into the original script for The Tenth Planet had the Doctor refusing to give in (to his regeneration). However, director Derek Martinus elected not to film the line as he was running short on time, and as a result the first Doctor’s final dialogue is the rather more lacklustre “Thank you. That’s good, keep warm.” This is presumably why Steven Moffat felt able to craft new final lines for this Doctor, something he’d deliberately avoided doing for David Tennant in 2013’s The Day Of The Doctor. Said final line, with its mention of “the long way round”, is a reference to that 2013 special, with the eleventh Doctor defining his destination as “home, the long way round”. The first Doctor’s companions Ben and Polly appear briefly. Originally played by Michael Craze and Anneke Wills, seaman Ben Jackson and personal assistant Polly (who was given no surname on screen, though ‘Wright’ – initially used at Wills’ audition for the part and adopted by the novels of the 1990s) were introduced two stories prior to The Tenth Planet, in 1966’s contemporary London tale The War Machines. They stuck around through the transition from William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton before departing in his sixth story, 1967’s The Faceless Ones. The twelfth Doctor points out that his earlier self is suddenly a lot stronger than he had been a short time ago, and he’s not wrong. William Hartnell’s health was deteriorating considerably by 1966, and he was written out of Part 3 of The Tenth Planet entirely; in a case of art mirroring life, the first Doctor was said to be suffering from exhaustion and spent the episode convalescing in bed. By the time his regeneration rolls around (Something missing entirely from an early draft of the script unearthed in 2013), the first Doctor has very little fight left in him – the character certainly wouldn’t have been able to manage an adventure with his future self were it not for a bit of creative hand-waving.

What is it good for?

This is the first time Doctor Who on television has visited the First World War proper, but the second Doctor did encounter a group of British and German soldiers who had been plucked from the war in his final story, 1969’s The War Games. The Christmas truce of 1914 is a real historical event, as pockets of soldiers fighting on both sides of the Western Front met in No Man’s Land to exchange gifts and play football. The truce was neither official nor adopted everywhere – in many areas, Christmas Day was just another day of fighting. The Doctor is not entirely correct in saying that it never happened again – the following year several smaller, shorter truces took place as soldiers went against the orders of their generals, but there would never again be such a significant ceasefire. Of course, being a real historical event, and one that in many ways embodies the spirit of Doctor Who, the truce has been depicted numerous times in spin-off media, taking into account all of the books and comics based on the series, the fifth and ninth Doctors are also wandering around in No Man’s Land at this point – as is another version of the first. It is revealed that Mark Gatiss is playing Captain Archibald Hamish Lethbridge-Stewart, an ancestor of both Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, the popular recurring character played by Nicholas Courtney between 1968 and 2008, and his daughter Kate Stewart, who has been played by Jemma Redgrave since 2012. Archibald’s relationship to the Brigadier is not made explicit, but given the year and the actors’ ages it seems likely he is his grandfather (though if this is the case, it will contradict several print stories, in which the Brig’s grandfather has always been named Alistair, but it could be worse – you’re still faring a lot better than the Star Wars fans). The middle name ‘Hamish’ alludes to the Lethbridge-Stewarts’ Scottish ancestry, which the Brigadier explains to the fourth Doctor, Sarah and Harry when pulled up for wearing a kilt in 1975’s Terror Of The Zygons. The idea of the Captain being lifted out of his moment of death and being granted extra time is reminiscent of the 1946 David Niven film A Matter Of Life And Death, in which a World War II pilot misses his appointment with the afterlife and must then fight to be allowed to stay on Earth. More pertinently, it also closely resembles the fate of Clara in 2015’s Hell Bent; having died in Face The Raven two episodes beforehand, Clara is plucked out of time by the Time Lords between her final heartbeats and ends up embarking on a new life of adventure with the immortal Ashildr.

You’re talking to yourself again

The twelfth Doctor comments that he can’t remember refusing to regenerate; this is because the timelines are “out of sync”, as first explained in 2013’s The Day Of The Doctor and most recently covered in the multi-Master Series 10 finale, The Doctor Falls. The first Doctor is right to be suspicious when he realises the twelfth is a fellow Time Lord; at this point he is very much on the run from his people, a plot thread that will be left dangling until they catch up with him in The War Games. The Doctor also picks up on his younger self referring to the TARDIS as “the ship”, although by the time of The Tenth Planet this quirk of the first Doctor’s had been phased out – the last occurrence was in the final episode of The Daleks’ Master Plan, the third story of the previous series. The first Doctor refers to Earth being a “level five civilisation”, a fact which has been mentioned several times in the modern series, first in 2007’s Voyage Of The Damned and then in 2008’s Partners In Crime and 2010’s The Eleventh Hour. However, the designation actually dates back to 1979, when it was used in Douglas Adams’ classic fourth Doctor tale City Of Death. The twelfth Doctor then mentions that the planet is “protected”, something which was first established in The Eleventh Hour (Steven Moffat’s first story as showrunner) and later reiterated in twelfth Doctor tales Flatline and Before The Flood. The eleventh Doctor also makes the same claim about the planet Trenzalore in his final story, The Time Of The Doctor. Though the first Doctor tries to subvert it, we get a ‘bigger on the inside’ moment from the Captain when he enters the TARDIS for the first time. We’ve covered the history of this one before, most recently in Series 10’s The Pilot, but it’s never not fun to watch this supercut of ‘bigger on the inside’ moments. The first Doctor complaining that he thought his future self would be younger is a riff on the fact that Peter Capaldi and William Hartnell were both 55 years old when cast as the errant Time Lord. Capaldi was technically younger than Hartnell when he took on the role – he was 55 years, 7 months and 9 days old when his eyebrows debuted in 2013’s The Day Of The Doctor, while the William Hartnell of 1963’s An Unearthly Child was 55 years, 10 months and 15 days. However, Capaldi has been the incumbent Doctor for longer than Hartnell was – Hartnell was 58 years, 9 months and 21 days when he bowed out in Part 4 of The Tenth Planet, but Capaldi is nearly a year older at 59 years, 8 months and 11 days. That said, David Bradley is significantly older than both of them, as he’s 75 years, 8 months and 8 days old at the time of transmission. Happy Christmas, gents! The line “I’d say ‘Don’t be an idiot,” but I know what’s coming” is a nod to the fact that Patrick Troughton’s second Doctor was a marked contrast to his predecessor, with far more whimsy and a sense of fun – indeed, in The Three Doctors the first Doctor even refers to his second and third incarnations as “a dandy and a clown”. This was an intentional trick to differentiate the two characters; to quote Patrick Troughton in a 1973 interview with Pebble Mill: “Billy had made him this crotchety old gentleman. He was very serious, and I had to be very serious too. But the way I made him serious was to make him a bit of a clown to start with, a sort of offbeat thing. We started rather wild, and we mellowed as the time went on.”

Please stop saying these things

And so we reach probably one of the more controversial aspects of the episode, even in the pre-publicity: the casual sexism of the first Doctor weaved unsubtly throughout this story and played for laughs. It is certainly true that the first Doctor, and indeed some of the show’s writers, exhibited chauvinist values in the 1960s – it would often be the case that the Doctor and Ian (or later the Doctor and Steven) had the lion’s share of the action, and the first Doctor was often far more protective of his female companions than his male ones. But in compiling this article I’ve found it hard to find any examples of sexism as egregious as the ones shown here. It is true that the Doctor did once tell companion Susan “What you need is a jolly good smacked bottom!” – but as Susan was the Doctor’s granddaughter it is difficult to establish whether this was a grandfatherly act or purely a sexist one. The Doctor did once slap his companion on the backside on screen, though – in 2013’s The Time Of The Doctor (written by Steven Moffat), as the Doctor pretended to be Clara’s boyfriend in front of her family. As for the Doctor’s reference to Polly cleaning the TARDIS, there is no evidence of this having happened on screen. She did find herself making coffee for the men of Snowcap Base in The Tenth Planet – however, this was in Part 3, in which the Doctor did not feature. It would take the Cybermen’s return in the following year’s The Moonbase for the Doctor – the second Doctor – to actively send Polly off to make the coffee. This, again, was an isolated incident. If any Doctor could be said to deserve this treatment it’s the third, who was frequently patronising to everyone, but nobody more so than his assistant Jo Grant… But that’s another article for another time. If you have examples of the first Doctor behaving badly (outside of Richard Hurndall asking Tegan to make refreshments in The Five Doctors) please do leave them in the comments below! The TARDIS’s brandy supply was first mentioned by the fourth Doctor in 1975’s The Ark In Space, when Harry suggested some for Sarah Jane after she nearly suffocated. Behind the Doctor’s bottle is a bottle of Aldebaran brandy (Itself a reference to The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, and possibly also Star Trek), which was placed there by River Song as revealed during The Husbands Of River Song in 2015. The Doctor’s life has indeed been ‘rock and roll’, but never more so than in his current incarnation; the twelfth Doctor’s guitar seen here was introduced in Series 9 opener The Magician’s Apprentice, as the Doctor spent part of his ‘final day’ hiding out in the Middle Ages. The running joke of the TARDIS windows being the wrong size is a direct lift from Doctor Who fandom – though not all of us here are old enough to have been involved in discussions whenever pre-2005 TARDIS revamps were revealed, both the 2005 and 2010 TARDISes have drawn no end of criticism from certain quarters for their lack of accuracy, with a particular focus on the size of the windows (We look forward to Chris Chibnall’s TARDIS being wrong in completely different ways). The Captain comments on how marvellous police boxes are, and given his heritage it is possible that he’s come across the idea before – the first boxes in the UK appeared in Glasgow towards the end of the 20th century – but he wouldn’t be familiar with the blue design, which was introduced by architect Gilbert Trench in 1929. It’s no surprise that the TARDIS interior comes as a shock to the first Doctor – the clean white look established in 1963 lasted (with updates and variations) for much of the show’s original 26-year run – the only exception being a brief period from 1976-1977 when the wood-panelled secondary console room was utilised. However, every console room from the 1996 TV Movie onwards has departed from this template – though it did return in the ‘missing’ John Hurt era, as shown in The Day Of The Doctor.

Waking the dead

The Doctor’s companions who have died during their travels can still be counted on one hand, but this isn’t the first time others have taken on the appearance of one – in 1982’s Time-Flight Tegan and Nyssa are confronted with a mental projection of Adric, the fifth Doctor companion who had died at the end of the previous story. The notion of Testimony ‘taking the faces of the dead’ could be seen as a nod to Game Of Thrones, in which Arya Stark (played by Maisie Williams, otherwise known as Ashildr in Series 9) learns to take on the faces of her victims. The TARDIS being airlifted to the Chamber of the Dead is reminiscent of the introduction to The Day Of The Doctor, which saw the Doctor and Clara literally being picked up by a UNIT helicopter whilst on board the ship. Similarly, the Doctor using his sonic on the mechanism holding the TARDIS echoes the tenth Doctor tale Partners In Crime, where he uses the sonic to control a window-cleaning cradle. The tenth Doctor also springs to mind when the twelfth tells Testimony that if he doesn’t approve of what they’re doing he will stop them – he made the same promise to Mr Finch in 2006’s School Reunion. In the montage that follows we see snippets including the tenth Doctor from The Waters Of Mars, the fifth Doctor from Arc Of Infinity, the eighth from Night Of The Doctor and multiple incarnations from The Day Of The Doctor, plus Davros from Journey’s End, the seventh Doctor from The Happiness Patrol, the ninth Doctor from The Parting Of The Ways and what appears to be the third Doctor from Invasion Of The Dinosaurs. We hear a number of the Doctor’s nicknames – the Oncoming Storm (from The Parting Of The Ways), the Imp of the Pandorica (a reference to The Pandorica Opens), the Shadow of the Valeyard (the Valeyard being the villain introduced in 1986’s The Trial Of A Time Lord season and said to be an amalgamation of the Doctor’s darker impulses), the Beast of Trenzalore (referring to the time the eleventh Doctor spent protecting that planet in The Time Of The Doctor), the Butcher of Skull Moon (based on an event from the Time War mentioned by Gastron in Hell Bent – it is also Gastron who introduced the phrase ‘Doctor of War’, though John Hurt’s incarnation was already known as the War Doctor by this point) and the Last Tree of Garsenon, which appears to be a new one. He is also referred to as the ‘destroyer of Skaro’, which is a bit iffy – the seventh Doctor certainly helped engineer Skaro’s destruction in 1988’s Remembrance Of The Daleks (Though it was not he who pressed the trigger), but nowadays Skaro is still very much intact, as we saw in 2015’s The Magician’s Apprentice. That said, the Doctor did leave the Dalek city in an incredibly bad state at the end of that particular encounter… Once aboard the first Doctor’s TARDIS, the twelfth Doctor tries to distract him from more of his hilarious sexism by pointing him towards the astral map. This was used during two stories in 1965: The Web Planet and Galaxy 4. The TARDIS databank, meanwhile, is an invention of the fifth Doctor’s era, first appearing in Castrovalva (and officially named the ‘TARDIS information system’) and popping up a few more times before his penultimate story, Planet Of Fire. Steven Moffat revived it for 2010’s The Lodger, and it was used again by Handles in The Time Of The Doctor.

Have a banana

The Doctor’s decision not to use the Matrix on Gallifrey on the grounds that he needs something bigger is at best a change of heart since 2015’s Hell Bent, in which he referred to it as ‘the biggest database in history’. The Dalek hive mind, meanwhile, is a new creation for this story; in 2012’s Asylum Of The Daleks it was revealed that the Daleks have a ‘path web’ which allows them to share information, but the converted Oswin explicitly said that it was “not a hive mind”. The first Doctor is surprised that his older self can pilot the TARDIS properly, as the Doctor’s complete inability to control it was a constant through most of the series’ original run, with both the first and fifth Doctors having running plots involving trying to get their companions home. This started to change by the late 1980s, though, with Sylvester McCoy’s scheming Doctor usually able to get to exactly where he needed to be. These days, it is rare for the Doctor to struggle with getting the TARDIS to its destination, though it didn’t stop him from bringing it up when he had the chance to talk to the TARDIS in 2011’s The Doctor’s Wife. In response to this the TARDIS explained that whilst she didn’t always take the Doctor where he wanted to go, she always made sure he got to where he needed to go. The planet Villengard was mentioned in Steven Moffat’s very first Doctor Who story. In 2005’s The Doctor Dances, the ninth Doctor notices that Captain Jack’s sonic blaster is from the weapons factories on Villengard, before revealing that he was responsible for their destruction and the placement of a banana grove where they once stood. It is unclear whether the Dalek infestation is pre- or post-bananas, but the twelfth Doctor is correct when he tells the first that the Kaled mutants have evolved over the years – you can see this in more detail here. It appears the mutants have now developed a talent akin to a ‘Facehugger’ from Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien. At the heart of Villengard the Doctor finds Rusty, who is something of a surprise as returning characters go. Rusty’s only previous appearance was in 2014’s Into The Dalek, where he was introduced as a Dalek soldier who had sustained severe damage and seemingly developed morals. The Doctor and Clara were miniaturised and sent inside Rusty to try and fix the damage, but in doing so they restored his original programming. Linking telepathically to Rusty in the hopes of showing him the beauty of the universe, the Doctor instead managed to instil in Rusty his hatred of the Daleks, causing Rusty to turn on his own species and to declare that the Doctor himself would make a good Dalek. Professor Helen Clay is from New Earth, the planet first visited by the tenth Doctor in the 2006 episode of the same name and again in 2007’s Gridlock. Helen’s appearance is dated to 5,000,000,012, eleven years before New Earth and 41 years before Gridlock. The latter story revealed that a deadly virus wiped out almost the entire population of the planet – only those within the underground transport system were saved. As such, it is likely that Clay herself perished during these events. Helen is played by Nikki Amuka-Bird, whose credits include Silent Witness, Survivors and NW, for which she won a BAFTA. She also appeared as Beth Halloran in the Torchwood episode Sleeper.

Every time we say goodbye…

That staple of post-2005 Doctor Who plot devices, the perception filter, rears its head once more. The idea was introduced in both Torchwood and Doctor Who in 2007, and it was most recently seen in The Doctor Falls as Bill created her own perception filter to avoid acknowledging the fact that she had become a Cyberman. The Doctor references the rug Bill bought him as a Christmas present in her first episode, The Pilot. In that story it was the fact the TARDIS had been placed on top of the new rug that clued her into the fact the box wasn’t nearly as immobile as the Doctor had made out. This time round her present is the Doctor’s memories of Clara, which he voluntarily removed so that the pair, who were becoming too reckless, would be able to let one another go. A returning Nardole (hooray!) tells the Doctor that if he dies, he believes everyone in the universe will go cold. This echoes a joke made by the eleventh Doctor in The Sarah Jane Adventures story Death Of The Doctor, as he tells his old companions Sarah and Jo “I think if that day comes, the whole universe might just shiver.” Knowing that Steven Moffat is a big fan of the Peter Davison era, it is entirely possible that this former companion coming back to implore the Doctor to choose to live is inspired by Davison’s swansong The Caves Of Androzani, in which the fifth Doctor had visions of all of his companions trying to deter him from giving up (and the Master goading him into dying). The Doctor tells Testimony (via Bill and Nardole) that the sheer volume of his memories would “shatter” them. However, this isn’t the first time he’s believed that, and when he attempted to sate the Old God in 2013’s The Rings Of Akhaten with the weight of his experiences he was shocked to discover that it still had room for more (in the end Clara fed him a leaf, or something). Twice Upon A Time is heavily rumoured to be Murray Gold’s Doctor Who swansong, and this may be why it contains quite so many of his greatest hits, from the ethereal Doctor’s Theme and the bombastic All The Strange Strange Creatures to the melodic Clara’s Theme and the triumphant piece that plays as all thirteen Doctors turn up to save Gallifrey in The Day Of The Doctor. Why not see how many others you can spot and let us know in the comments? The twelfth Doctor’s final speech, which was worked on by both Steven Moffat and Peter Capaldi, contains several elements from dialogue past. “Never be cruel, never be cowardly” is a doff of the cap both to The Day Of The Doctor and to 70s script editor Terrance Dicks, who would often cite the Doctor’s lack of these two traits as one of his greatest virtues. “Never eat pears” is a reference to Paul Cornell’s novel Human Nature, in which the seventh Doctor expressed a dislike for pears before taking on human form. A similar line was cut from the 2007 tenth Doctor adaptation with the same name. In Hell Bent the Doctor told Clara never to eat pears, as “they’re too squishy and they always make your chin wet”. “Be kind” is what the Doctor begged of the Master and Missy back in The Doctor Falls, but it was also said by the tenth Doctor to the Vashta Nerada in Forest Of The Dead. “Don’t tell anyone your name” likely refers to the kerfuffle caused by the Doctor’s name in Matt Smith’s final year, when it was revealed that saying his name on Trenzalore would have reignited the Time War. However, the Doctor did seemingly tell River Song his real name on the occasion of their ‘nuptials’ in 2011’s The Wedding Of River Song – but then, as we’ve been told, ‘the Doctor lies’… The part about the stars and one’s heart being in the right place appears to be the invention of Peter Capaldi, who expressed a similar sentiment at a special screening earlier this year. As in The Doctor Falls, the TARDIS cloister bell rings out its ominous tones. First heard in the fourth Doctor’s final tale Logopolis, the bell marks the gravest of moments for the Doctor and the universe. This is the first time the cloister bell has rung ahead of a regeneration, but perhaps the TARDIS is just worried about what’s coming; the standard shafts of glowing orange light introduced in 2005’s The Parting Of The Ways (and now seemingly established as the standard for regeneration) have been growing increasingly explosive, with the previous two efforts bringing down destruction upon the tenth Doctor’s TARDIS and an entire Dalek fleet respectively. It’s going to be interesting to see what – if anything – is left of the universe come 2018. And with that, the twelfth Doctor goes out as he came in: his surprise first appearance in The Day Of The Doctor was as a close-up on his eyes (and those famous attack’ eyebrows, as established in Deep Breath), and his final shot is the same – albeit from a different angle.