'Doctor Who' Christmas Special Sneak Peak Has 12th and 1st Doctors Bicker
And there's a very confused WWI soldier.
The first sneak peak for the upcoming Doctor Who Christmas Special “Twice Upon a Time” is here and it’s everything you could hope for in a 1st and 12th Doctor team-up: Two old men bickering inside a box as Mark Gatiss’s WWI soldier gawks at them.
Released on Friday to help support Children in Need, the clip shows David Bradley playing the 1st Doctor, barging into the 12th Doctor’s TARDIS with Mark Gatiss’ “The Captain.” The original Doctor thinks it’s his ship and is utterly confused and totally surprised by the futuristic interior. Thankfully, Peter Capaldi’s 12th Doctor is there to make sense of it all. Amidst some kind of snowstorm, it looks like the 1st Doctor wandered into the wrong TARDIS.
The clip is a lot of fun, and offers a light tease at what we can expect from the two Doctors before 12 dies and regenerates into Jodie Whittaker’s 13th Doctor.
Watch the clip right here:
The 12th Doctor lets slip a bit about the plot of the episode in talking to The Captain: “You’re an officer from World War I at the South Pole being pursued by an alien through frozen time.” The soldier is distracted more by the implication that there are more numbered world wars to come. As we know, the “war to end war” failed to do just that, but it’s enough to shock the soldier. “Sorry, spoilers,” the Doctor says, echoing his wife’s favorite line.
Notably, it appears as if time itself is frozen, which could explain how and why the first and latest Doctors meet up to mark the end of an era. That fails to explain how The Captain wound up there or why the alien threat is pursuing him, but I’m sure we’ll get there.
Throughout the encounter, the 1st Doctor pretends not to know what’s going on. After all, he’s never regenerated before. But when 12 reveals the bristling regeneration energy in the palm of the hand, he begins to catch on. Hilariously, he’d hoped he’d “get younger.”
By the end of the special episode, the Doctor will get younger … and swap genders as the 13th.
The Doctor Who Christmas Special airs this Christmas, which is December 25, 2017.
