Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.5

Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time Blu-ray Movie Review

Happily Ever After.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 4, 2018

Note: This title is available as either a standalone product or as part of the 14 disc set Doctor Who: The Complete Peter Capaldi Years. If you don't already own the other titles in the Capaldi set, it's considerably cheaper to get that rather than all of the individual titles.

Can you name all of the actors who have portrayed the inimitable Doctor Who since this venerable series first took to the airwaves way back in 1963? For those who might need a little help with this perhaps arcane parlor game, here’s a list: William Hartnell (1963 - 1966), Patrick Troughton (1966 - 1969), Jon Pertwee (1970 - 1974), Tom Baker (1974 - 1981), Peter Davison (1982 - 1984), Colin Baker (1984 - 1986), Sylvester McCoy (1987 - 1989), Paul McGann (1996), Christopher Eccleston (2005), David Tennant (2005 - 2010), Matt Smith (2010 - 2013), Peter Capaldi (2014 - 2017), and, now, Jodie Whittaker, whose tenure in the role has yet to be determined. William Hartnell passed away back in 1975, but fans of this franchise will probably already know that David Bradley portrayed Hartnell in the 2013 drama An Adventure in Space and Time, an interesting feature which documented the creation of this now legendary series. In a bit of cheeky casting, Bradley is back in Twice Upon a Time, the 2017 “Christmas Special” (a longstanding Doctor Who holiday tradition) playing the First Doctor, who in this enjoyable if probably too brief and underdeveloped piece, keeps insisting he’s The Doctor (as in the only Doctor). That perhaps chafes against the sensibilities of Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor, as both Doctors team up to solve a mystery involving not just their failure to “regenerate”, but the sudden appearance of a World War I soldier at the same South Pole location that both Doctors have found themselves.

Doctor Who 12 (i.e., Capaldi) has more or less crash landed at the South Pole as he goes through some psychological agony over what would seem to be his impending regeneration. His angst is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Doctor Who 1 (i.e., Bradley), who has taken severe (if obviously tongue in cheek, per this series' tendency) umbrage that there's someone else around claiming to be him (in some form or the other). Just as suddenly, though, the nascent bickering between the two good Doctors is itself interrupted by an obviously confused World War I Captain (Mark Gatiss). Both the Captain and the two Doctors have already experienced a rather strange phenomenon of time stopping. The two Doctors had noticed that the South Pole's snowfall had suddenly frozen (no pun intended) in midair, and even more bizarrely, the Captain had found everything around him stopped at a critical moment when both he and a German soldier were facing each other, guns drawn, in a huge hole caused by a mortar explosion.

The British soldier’s “transportation” to the South Pole came courtesy of a bizarre wraith like glowing entity he sees at the battle zone, and the middle section of Twice Upon a Time revolves around investigative efforts by the two Doctors to determine what exactly is going on. In a teleplay that only lasts a couple of minutes over an hour, there is probably simply too much content stuffed into this enterprise to make it as emotionally powerful as it seems to be aiming for, something that’s especially notable when none other than Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie) unexpectedly pops up in the proceedings. (For those who wonder why this would be “unexpected”, some salient information can be had in my Doctor Who: Series 10 Part 2 Blu-ray review, though it unavoidably probably is spoiler material.)

There’s some wonderfully zany stuff in this special, albeit kind of compressed and never developed fully enough. This includes a brief moment with errant Dalek Rusty, whom Doctor Who uses as a kind of “database” to figure out what kind of entity delivered the British Captain to the South Pole, and why. There is also some typically fun wordplay and conceptual lunacy wafting through the piece, with one especially wonderful quote from Capaldi as the twelfth doctor where he confesses he doesn’t know how to handle things when it turns out there isn’t some “evil plot” to undermine.

This is in fact a kind of sweet and even kind of saccharine entry in the Doctor Who canon, leading to a denouement about the Captain’s identity (even some diehard Whovians may need to do a little research in that regard), as well as the upshot of his being transported out of the battlefield. But there are all sorts of logical lapses in this abbreviated special, and I kept wishing even a few more minutes had been devoted to more fully detailing the “secret” behind the glowing alien type being and what exactly happened to the Captain, since the explanation given in the teleplay doesn’t really line up with the denouement very well. There's some highly enjoyable banter between both Doctors and Bill, but the emotional payoff of this special actually has more to do with the Captain's tale than either Bill's bittersweet fate, or either of the Doctors' impending regenerations.

Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of BBC with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer (mostly) in 1.78:1. There are some brief but very fun snippets from a very old Doctor Who episode that are intentionally in an even narrower ratio than Academy (see screenshots 18 and 19), and which are obviously from a fairly low grade interlaced source. The bulk of this presentation is quite winning, though it suffers from a surplus of heavily blue graded sequences, many of which tend to at least slightly tamp down fine detail levels on elements like costume fabrics or even things like downy hair on the faces of some of the performers. There's also a prevalence of almost overly brightly lit material, especially with regard to the admittedly fun journey in the first Doctor's TARDIS, where whites tend to come close to blooming territory on a couple of occasions. In more natural lighting conditions, detail levels and sharpness are typically excellent. As tends to be the case with this series, some of the CGI, notably the "alien" entity, can look fairly soft.

Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that derives considerable if sporadic surround activity from elements like the whipping winds at the South Pole or the sounds of various encampments of soldiers surrounding the isolated duo of the British Captain and his German cohort trapped in the mortar hole. There are also a couple of well done moments where the sonics are quite robust, including the "hijacking" of the TARDIS by the alien entity mothership. There is, however, a lot of "talky bits" in this special, and here all elements are delivered cleanly though there can be only occasional noticeable surround activity. Fidelity is fine throughout the presentation, and there are no issues with damage or dropouts.

Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Doctor Who Extra (1080p; 23:19) is a fun piece documenting the Christmas episode, with good interviews and some fun behind the scenes footage.

Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time is a lot of fun, but I couldn't help wishing it had stuck around for a little longer, not just because parting is such sweet sorrow, but because several elements in the basic plot design are just kind of plopped down for the viewer to accept, rather than having things adequately contextualized and explained. The pairing of the putative First and actual Twelfth Doctors is a really fun conceit, and even that could have been pushed a bit more than it is here. This was therefore to me a bit of a lackluster sendoff for Capaldi, but longtime fans of the franchise are probably going to be more than willing to overlook any perceived shortcomings. Recommended.