The Time of the Doctor
special episode of Doctor Who
"The Time of the Doctor" is an episode of the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who, written by Steven Moffat and directed by Jamie Payne, and was broadcast as the ninth Doctor Who Christmas special on 25 December 2013 on BBC One. It is Matt Smith's fourth Christmas special and his final regular appearance as the Eleventh Doctor and the first full appearance of Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor following his brief cameo in the previous episode "The Day of the Doctor".
The episode also features Jenna Coleman as the Doctor's companion Clara Oswald, plus several enemies of the Doctor, including the Daleks, Cybermen, Silence and Weeping Angels. The episode addresses numerous plot threads developed over the course of Smith's tenure, while also dealing with the regeneration limit established in the 1976 serial The Deadly Assassin.
"The Time of the Doctor" was the most-watched episode of the show in the United States, and obtained a 30.7% viewer share in the UK. It received positive reviews from critics, many of whom called the episode "great". Smith was particularly lauded, and his exit was characterised as graceful and beautiful.
Plot
Thousands of aliens orbit the planet Trenzalore, from which a message, "Doctor who?", is continually being broadcast across time and space. The Church of the Papal Mainframe constructs a force field around Trenzalore. The Eleventh Doctor and Clara are offered the opportunity to explore to find the source of the message on the planet by the church's head, Tasha Lem.
They discover the message is coming from a human settlement called Christmas.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Time of the Doctor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.