Timecrash

Starring David Tennant & Peter Davison

Written by Stephen Moffat

What can you do in five minutes, aside from REALLY hard boil an egg? The answer, if you're Stephen Moffat, is quite a bit based on this special scene written for the BBC's Children in Need appeal. Set 'within' the closing moments of Last of the Time Lords it sees David Tennant's 10th Doctor come face to face with a very old, very familiar face; namely, Davison's 5th Doctor. The only problem is, well, 5 doesn't quite believe that that's what's happened...

Moffat has been behind some of the new series' best episodes, most notably last season's fantastic Blink and everything that made those episodes great is on display here. He writes 10 as a fantastically intelligent, fantastically enthusiastic man whose mouth runs significantly faster than his brain and his razor-sharp dialogue suits David Tennant's energetic delivery to a tee. There are some glorious one-liners crammed into this tiny space and many of them are given to Tennant, with good reason (Watch out for the Master's beard joke, which I'm amazed they got away with.)

However, it's not all Tennant's show.

Davison was a magnificent Doctor and that fact is acknowledged here both in the lines he's given and in a genuinely touching moment at the end of the scene. 10 has a wonderful monologue about how much he loved being 5, how much he enjoyed that time in his life and you can tell that it's a sentiment which is shared both by Moffat and Tennant. The moment where 10 says 'You were MY Doctor', you can almost hear Stephen Moffat and you're almost certain he's smiling.  It's a lovely way of acknowledging the show's past, highlighting the very definite continuation between the two eras and introducing new fans to one of the old series' finest hours.  The fact that it's both very funny and very touching is just the icing on the cake.

Rounded out with an elegant piece of temporal problem solving and the return of the best piece of techno-babble ever ('Timey-wimey!'), this is both a wonderful tribute to a deservedly loved period in the show's life and a neat little addition to the canon before Christmas' Voyage of the Damned. It's fast, it's incident heavy, it's funny as all hell and it grabs you by the heart strings. This is, in short, Doctor Who at it's very best.