Music Videos 3 (C)

Previously on “Music Videos 3” …

Doctor Who

“This Time There’s Three of Us”

In 2013’s The Day of the Doctor a mystery involving paintings whose subjects are missing leads the Doctor to the incarnation he’d rather forget: the War Doctor, the one who fought the Daleks in the Great Time War and who could only “win” by destroying both Daleks and Time Lords¹. The Tenth and Eleventh Doctors end up at that moment with the War Doctor, and decide to rewrite their own history …

This piece starts off slow and moody as they remember the war, picks up as they realize “there’s three of us”, gets militaristic as the Doctors execute their plan, and ends with the Eleventh Doctor’s alternate theme “Majestic Tale of a Madman in a Box”.

“Never Tell Me The Rules”

The Time of the Doctor (Dec 25, 2013) was Matt Smith’s goodbye to the role.

In the show, the Doctor chose to spend centuries protecting the planet of Trenzalore – repeatedly prophesied as the site of his death – against hordes of his old enemies trying to get at a tiny crack in reality leading to his people, the Time Lords.² We also discover that this incarnation, the Eleventh, will be his last: Time Lords only get twelve regenerations, and he used up two of them in an incarnation he didn’t want to remember and in the Tenth Doctor’s use of regernation energy to heal a mortal wound without actually regenerating.

In this climactic scene the Doctor is dying of old age as his enemies are closing in … when the Time Lords apparently head the pleas of his companion Clara.

Anyway, here’s the triumphant scene of the Time Lord Intervention:

Goodbye Eleven

Following the music above is yet another nice medley of three recurring themes.

It played under the scene where Matt Smith, in his true farewell, makes a speech about people setting aside their old selves and changing into new people. (While hallucinating his old companion Amelia Pond, played by Karen Gillen.) And then he changes into a demented Scotsman (Peter Capaldi).

Well, not quite. In Peter Capaldi’s first episode “Deep Breath” Clara gets a phone call thanks to the magic of time travel. (Wibbly wobbly timey wimey.) The theme under the phone call is quite nice but not that memorable.

“The Shepherd’s Boy”

This ended up being effectively the Twelfth Doctor’s theme.³

The title comes from a story Twelve tells while he’s trapped in a strange castle with a murderous creature from Time Lord fairy tales. He comes back every time he’s “killed”, with no memory of previous lives, and must repeat the same day over and over: figure out what’s going on and realize there’s no way out except to make a small dent i a crystal before he dies and repeat …

This also plays under the Twelfth Doctor’s regeneration into the Thirteenth (Jodie Whittaker).