A Silent Night (Poster)
"A Silent Night" is a Christmas episode of the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who, written by Steven Moffat and directed by Jamie Payne, first broadcast on Christmas Day 2013. It will feature the final regular appearance of Jenna Coleman as Clara Oswald. It will also feature the final regular appearance of Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctorand the first regular appearance of the new companion.
This episode is the first Christmas Special to feature multiple monsters including the Cybermen, Silence, Daleks, and Weeping Angels. The episode addresses numerous plot threads developed over the course of Smith's tenure, including the prophecy of the Silence and the Doctor's fate on the planet Trenzalore. "A Silent Night" is also the 800th individual episode of Doctor Who, the ninth Christmas special since the show's 2005 revival, and Jenna Coleman's second and final Christmas Special as Clara in Doctor Who.
Plot[]
The Doctor is among thousands of aliens orbiting an unknown planet, from which a message that no one can translate is being broadcast continually across time and space. With the assistance of a modified Cyberman head nicknamed "Handles," which he uses as a personal assistant, the Doctor briefly visits two of these ships, before leaving to Earth to pick up Clara and briefly meeting her family. On returning, Handles identifies the planet as being Gallifrey, the lost planet of the Time Lords, a statement the Doctor vehemently rejects. The Doctor and Clara are invited on board the first ship to arrive at the scene — the Church of the Papal Mainframe, a space church headed by Mother Superious Tasha Lem, an old acquaintance of the Doctor. Tasha states that the Church has secured the planet with a force field and that the message instills fear into all who have heard it, then asks if the Doctor wishes to be the first to explore the cause of the message. On arriving on the planet, The Doctor and Clara are attacked by Weeping Angels, but using the key under his wig, The Doctor materializes the TARDIS around them. Now using the TARDIS as transport, The Doctor and Clara find a town called Christmas, that is surrounded by a truth field that prevents anyone from telling a lie. The message's origin is quickly identified as a crack in reality in the church tower; this crack is "scar tissue" from the cracks originally closed when the Doctor rebooted the universe ("The Big Bang"). Handles identifies the language of the message as Gallifreyan and with the Doctor's help, translates the message as a question: "Doctorwho?" (the 'first question' in "The Wedding of River Song"), repeating endlessly. It is a request that the Doctor should speak his real name and thereby confirm it is truly he who is there.
The Doctor concludes that his people, the Time Lords, are using the crack in the universe and calling to him for help, from the pocket universe in which Gallifrey was trapped ("The Day of the Doctor"), from which they wish to escape. If the Doctor answers the question and speaks his real name, the Time Lords will know they have found the right place and come through to their home universe. However, this would also trigger a renewal of theTime War as the alien species gathered above descend to destroy them, and Tasha states this will not be allowed to happen: the planet will be destroyed first at whatever cost. The Doctor asks the name of the planet, and she states "Trenzalore", the planet where the Doctor knows he will one day die and have his tomb ("The Name of the Doctor"). The Doctor tricks Clara into plugging a device into the TARDIS which transports her home, and remains on Trenzalore to defend the planet from incursions by the aliens overhead, creating a stalemate where he cannot leave without sacrificing his home planet and its people, nor can he be removed for fear he will speak his name and let them return.
Immediately after landing Clara home, the TARDIS begins to return to Trenzalore, but Clara manages to hold on to the outside of the ship and join it on its return trip. However, to protect her from the time vortex, the TARDIS is forced to increase its shields, consequently slowing down the return journey. Arriving back at Christmas, Clara meets a visibly aged Doctor who has spent 300 years defending the town. He reveals to her that, although he is known as the Eleventh Doctor, he has already used all of his twelve possible regenerations, once his incarnation who fought in the Time Warand the Tenth Doctor's aborted regeneration ("Journey's End") are counted. He is therefore in his final body and can no longer regenerate. He and Clara are then brought to the Papal Mainframe—now the Church of the Silence. Here, he learns that during this protracted stalemate, a chapter of the Church broke away and tried to avert these events by killing off the Doctor in the past: by destroying his TARDIS ("The Big Bang") and engineering a child to kill him ("A Good Man Goes to War"). Additionally, Tasha and her crew have been taken over by Dalek consciousnesses, converted into 'Dalek puppets'. The Doctor taunts Tasha, awakening her anger, and allowing her to resist the Dalek consciousness within her. They all escape the ship and return to the planet, as the Dalek fleet receives reinforcements and masses for war.
Despite promising never to send Clara away again, the Doctor does so and she returns to Earth as the siege of Trenzalore becomes an all out war. As the centuries pass, most of the races depart or are destroyed, leaving only the Silence (with whom the Doctor puts aside his differences and allies himself) and the Daleks. Later the same day (from Clara's perspective), the TARDIS reappears; Clara enters to find Tasha piloting the TARDIS. Noting that "flying the TARDIS was always easy, it's flying the Doctor that I've never quite mastered", Tasha returns Clara to Trenzalore, as "no one should die alone", sending her to meet with the now old and frail Doctor at the point when the Daleks finally win control of the town. With nothing left, the Doctor goes out to face the Daleks in a final stand.
Clara, unable to watch what will follow, returns to the time crack and through it, begs the Time Lords to somehow save the Doctor, urging that it is owed to him for all he has done in his lives. The Doctor is preparing to die outside, when the time crack vanishes from Clara's sight in the tower, to appear across the night sky.
Regeneration energy flows from the crack and into the Doctor: the Time Lords have granted the Doctor a complete new regeneration cycle, thereby saving him from death and changing his future.
As his thirteenth regeneration starts, the Doctor uses the excess energy to destroy the Daleks facing him. In the aftermath, Clara finds the Doctor, young again, back in the TARDIS. He states that this rejuvenation is a 'reset' for the new cycle of regenerations to begin and that he has postponed his regeneration.
The Doctor returns to Earth, where Clara decides to leave the Doctor to care for her family and continue teaching. She tells him she will always remember him and give her a ring sometime. The Doctor pilots the TARDIS away and contemplates events.
In the post credits, a month later, Clara saw a brother-sister twins in age five at the orphanage's window, so she decide to adopt them as her adopted son and daughter.