Doctor Who: Steven Moffat's Timey-Wimiest Episodes

10. The Time Of The Doctor (2013)

The Time of the Doctor had a lot of work to do. It was Matt Smith's last episode, and had to wrap up many loose ends from his era as the Doctor. This meant filling in the gaps with the Silence, and playing fast and loose with time by showing how a question posed in the present had traveled back to the distant past and impacted the Doctor's life into the far future.

But The Time of the Doctor was also a Christmas episode, and had to deliver the holiday cheer appropriate for the occasion. Again, it did this by playing with the way time factors into the story.

Specifically, the episode is set in two parallel timeframes. In one, the Doctor spends centuries saving a town called Christmas from an endless parade of attacks and threats. Simultaneously the episode shows Clara's Christmas dinner with her family. Clara goes between both sequences, which run side by side, covering the same screen time.

The episode isn't completely successful at bringing all these ideas together, but it does its best, and is a lot of fun. Along the way, it offers some inventive approaches to time travel-related storytelling--certainly a suitable way to celebrate the end of an era for the Doctor.