NuWho Review: 2007 Children In Need Special "Time Crash"

By: Steven Moffat

**Spoilers**
If you have not yet seen this, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU DO SO AT ONCE!

          My Doctor, Doctor 5, coming back for a special? Not just in recycled footage but an honest-to-God cameo? SQUEEE! Yes the fifth Doctor, Peter Davison, is my Doctor and I will always hold a special place in my heart for the celery-wearing, cricket-playing, blond incarnation of the Time Lord.

        And apparently Tennant shares my sentiments, because there's actually something we have in common....who knew, right? (Yes. You may all start singing 'Lame Claim to Fame' now.) This minisode just works so well on SO many levels!

         First you have the writing. Whatever else you can say about Steven Moffat, you can't deny that he is scarily good at short, contained bursts of wit and hilarity that often have a surprising amount of heart beneath the surface. Here it is no different as he takes you from laughing madly at the inevitable antics that always occur whenever two regenerations meet to sobbing with joy and reaching for your ice cream as Tennant/10 says farewell to Davidson/5...it's a real feelsy episode, for all that it's barely ten minutes long.

           Then there's the actors. Good golly gracious has Peter Davison barely aged a day since we last saw him on the show, dying in Peri's arms. Okay, sure, he's gotten older. But he still exudes the same energy and charm that he held all throughout his run and he steps back into the role like he never left it. David Tennant, on the other hand, is in equally fine form (and has obviously stepped up his game still higher in the presence of his Doctor) and is trading barbs and spewing technobabble at an alarming rate. The chemistry and respect between these two actors is apparent throughout the short, but especially in the last few minutes whenever it turns from 10 talking to 5 into Tennant talking to Davison in a speech that is both heart-warming and tear-jerking.

         The technobabble is fantastic too. There's definitely an art form to striking just the right balance between hilariously absurd and possibly plausible and Moffat, much as he claims to hate it, is usually quite good at coming up with funny yet not totally unbelievable explanations for things. (This is the man who coined the term "Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey" after all.) My personal favorite is whenever The Doctors are going on about their temporal anomaly punching a whole in the fabric of space and time exactly the size of Belgium...and then being disappointed at how undramatic that was.

        Of course The Doctor taking a look at the back of his own head was funny too. Several multi-Doctor stories down, and he hasn't thought to do that yet? Tsk tsk!

         Stories where two or more regenerations meet are always a lot of fun. If you ever get a chance to check out the Classic special The Five Doctors, I highly recommend that you do so. Davison is in that one too.

       Maybe I'm just biased because Davison is my Doctor, but I honestly think that this can be regarded as the best episode Moffat has ever written. Yes. I said it...better than Blink or The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang. Why, you may ask? Well it's a lot shorter, for one. It's fairly easy (Ha! 'Easy' I say...) to fit everything you need to into a lot of space. Like how sometimes a 2,000 word essay is infinitely easier to write than a 200 word one. Here, though, Moffat has managed to fit in a ton of character study, a lot of humor, plenty of heart, and an actual plot line. It's just stupendous to watch as it manages to showcase all of the best things about both actors and the writer. I don't normally rate minisodes, but this one DEFINITELY gets a 10/10!