Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor (2013)

Anniversary specials exist to flatter the faithful, and this one flatters them at feature length, in 3D, across ninety-four countries simultaneously. Three Doctors bicker in a forest, a Zygon plot unfolds in Elizabethan England, and a war criminal with a conscience debates whether to press the button. The machinery is elegant. The sentiment is sincere. It is, by any measure, a competent piece of television built for a specific audience on a specific night in November 2013.

On the matter of social consciousness, the record is thin. The cast is overwhelmingly white, with a handful of non-white performers in functional supporting roles, and no effort is made to comment on the arrangement. Race goes unmentioned. Queerness goes unmentioned. The economy goes unmentioned, which is notable given that the plot hinges on a military organization hoarding alien technology beneath the Tower of London. Women do hold authority here: Kate Stewart runs UNIT, Osgood does the science, Elizabeth I governs, and Clara supplies the moral spine of the climax. That is competent casting, not a program. Four women with jobs is not an argument.

The moralizing arrives in the final act, when the Doctors speechify about war, genocide, and the possibility of a better ending. These are the old humanist pieties, delivered with the confidence of a series that has been doing this since 1963. Nothing here lectures the viewer about contemporary politics, identity, or consumption. It is a heritage production, fond of its own history, mildly sentimental, and largely innocent of the cultural preoccupations that would dominate the decade to come. We file it accordingly.