If we’re being quite honest, I was expecting this to go very, very poorly. An hour-long special written by Steven Moffat (whose time as showrunner on Doctor Who has produced some of my least favorite story arcs) focusing almost entirely on the “new Who” Doctors and throwing in John Hurt as the not-Doctor-who-screws-up-the-numbering-system — it could have gone ridiculously bad. I was bracing myself for Moffat to screw it up royally, is what I’m saying. I was prepared to sigh and go, “Well, that was … something.”  I was prepared for disaster, but hoping for something decent.

And what did we get? We got pretty freaking good … and that might be the most surprising thing about this special full of surprises.

I can appreciate just how restrained Moffat was with the plots. He tends to write convoluted twists and turns in his regular episodes that sometimes work but often just kind of fall apart (remember the Statue of Liberty in “Angels in Manhattan”?). Even with balancing the Queen Elizabeth I’s alien clone, the present day painting mystery and the Time War, the special slowly but surely connected them together well. That in itself was a relief as someone who has been watching the last couple seasons.

Even now I wonder if removing that great sin of the Doctor was a mistake, but it doesn’t change the Doctor’s past guilt — both Warrior-Doctor and 10 don’t remember any of this, so everything he’s felt in past seasons is still how he felt and part of his legacy. I’m a stickler when it comes to time travel paradox stuff (I know, ironic considering I love a show that plays loose with paradoxes all the time) but I was relieved they didn’t just erase the Doctor’s past guilt over l, which has been such a huge motivator for so many past storylines. At the same time, I’m also trying to figure out if this ties in with “The End of Time” or retcons it.

It’s not a perfect special — while I’m glad we finally got some details on 10’s disastrous romance with Elizabeth, they played the Queen as a bit ridiculous and 10 not super interested in her. I’m also on the fence about Billie Piper’s appearance — on one hand, it would have been far too easy for them just to shove Rose Tyler right into the story just for the heck of it and kudos to them for not doing that. I enjoyed how the entity tried to take on a figure the Warrior-Doctor would remember and accidentally pulled from his future — she actually reminded me of the TARDIS in “The Doctor’s Wife” in that regard. Still, there’s a part of my fan heart that wishes 1o could have seen the Bad Wolf entity. It works fine without that moment, but I kept waiting for it and it didn’t happen.

The special was never going to be perfect. The show started  50 years ago this weekend — even taking away the years the show was on hiatus/sort of cancelled, Doctor Who has decades of story that the special celebrated in just an hour. They couldn’t fit in everything, but there was a surprising balance of old and new — perhaps that’s best represented by the Brigadier’s daughter Kate Stewart, who was introduced in the show last year and is one of the key players in the museum mystery storyline during the special.

Most fans I’ve talked to (both those who started with the older series and the ones who found it through Eccleson’s or Tennant’s or Smith’s runs) were seriously worried that this was Moffat celebrating Moffat. Everything considered, The Day of the Doctor was about the Doctor, in all his personifications. It was about where he’s been and where he’s going and why five decades of fans have come to embrace him.

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I didn’t have very much to say about “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” last week except for minor things like the guest stars were fun and that I wondered how Nefertiti would be able to talk to the hunter after the Tardis left. All in all though, it was a strong episode and a good sign for the rest of the season. There was one other thing that struck me about the episode — the Doctor didn’t save Solomon. He had the chance to (the dirty old man even begged him to) but the Doctor chose to leave him to be killed in the explosion. I saw some comments after the episode that this seemed too apathetic for the Doctor’s character, but I had a feeling this was a very deliberate choice by the writers. That was confirmed in this week’s episode.

In “A Town Called Mercy,” the Doctor is forced by his own set of rules to protect a doctor who experimented on soldiers during a war on his planet at his military’s request. After confronting the alien, he becomes enraged and fervently pushes the guilty man towards his executioner. Like the last episode, the Doctor is getting tired of being merciful:

But they keep coming back, don’t you see? Every time I negotiate, I try to understand. Well not today. No, today I honor the victims first. His, The Master’s, the Daleks’. All the people that died because of my mercy!

It’s a powerful statement (one of the best moments from Matt Smith so far in his run on the show, in my opinion) and it harkens back to several other moments in earlier season of the show. Even as early as the Daleks’ introduction in the 2005 series, we see the Doctor full of rage towards his enemy, actively mocking the thing until Rose shows it some small kindness. 10 is so full of fire during Donna’s Christmas episode that we discover later he would have died if Donna hadn’t pulled him back to sanity. And don’t forget “The Waters of Mars” when he slips into as “the Time Lord Victorious.” It was only when Adelaide sacrificed herself to maintain the timeline that the Doctor once again remembered why he has to do the things he does and why the rules he has for himself are so important. And in “A Town Called Mercy” it takes the sheriff dying to protect the guilty alien for the Doctor to know he can’t waver from mercy.

Amy says it best: “This is what happens when you travel alone for too long.” The Doctor has been weaning himself off the Ponds either because he knows they need to find their own lives or because he knows that the pair will keep getting older and older and he can’t handle seeing that happen. Either way, the Doctor is spending more and more time alone and as we’ve seen, these times in between companions is when he starts to falter. I mean, he’s actually pointing a gun at someone … he’s actually holding a gun. He’s actually a second away from using the gun. That’s how far he’s gone being alone for so long. He needs his companions there to remind him who he is and what he needs to be lest he slips into the madness that comes with 1,200 plus years of life. And with Amy and Rory leaving (one way or another) soon, how will Jenna-Louise Coleman‘s companion fill that so very important role?

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