10 Doctor Who Moments IMPOSSIBLE To Watch The Same After This

One of the key themes of Deep Breath is identity.

We see this most clearly through the idea of Madame Vastra’s veil, one of the smartest metaphors for regeneration ever devised. “I wear a veil as he wore a face,” she tells Clara. “To be accepted.”

Despite a new outward appearance and a rather rocky regeneration, the Doctor is, at hearts, the same person, and nowhere is this idea more reinforced than in the story’s penultimate scene, which sees the Eleventh Doctor appear one last time.

But that’s not the only time he crops up in this episode.

In fact, the Eleventh Doctor’s face can be glimpsed much earlier, when the Twelfth Doctor unmasks himself in the Half-Face Man’s lair – removing a mask that was clearly made for Matt Smith.

Remarkably, this wasn’t actually done deliberately. The story goes that the production team just picked a mask at random, only later realising what they’d done.

Fortunately, it ties into the episode’s themes perfectly: a moment of the Doctor literally shedding his old face, while proving that he’s still the same person underneath.