I spent a good part of the holidays laid up in bed, and while that sucked in general it at least gave me the chance to watch a lot of my Doctor Who DVDs. Having been introduced to the show at the beginning of the Matt Smith run, I had missed a lot of it, seeing only bits and pieces of the Tenth era, no complete episode of the Ninth, and none of the Eleventh/Clara era.
So now I’ve seen pretty much all of NuWho. Of particular interest to me, and the focus of this thread, are two of the specials: “The End of Time,” ending Tennant’s run, and “The Day of the Doctor”, with the Tenth & War Doctors guest-starring with Eleventh & Clara. To my surprise I found myself liking the former more than than latter, even though I generally prefer Smith to Tennant. What made the difference for me was the story. I found the version of the Doctor’s history in which he had had to choose to commit genocide on his own people rather than let the Time War ravage out of control all over creation to be more compelling than the retcon that the various incarnations had technomagicked their way out of the dilemma.
But that’s just me. What do y’all think? Aesthetically, which version of the story do you prefer?
At the time I wasn’t super pleased about The End of Time, although I was partly cranky about losing Donna as a Companion and I was working my way through S2 of Torchwood and the season finale of that left a bad taste in my mouth as well.
However, I thought the Day of the Doctor stuff was very visually interesting and a total snoozefest dramatically. It was clearly written to appeal to the tumblrites who fell over themselves about Tennant and Smith, Rose (not really rose but I can’t remember the actress’s name) was just painful, McGann and Hurt were criminally underutilized and I was so so tired of “ooh clara is so special” and if the priestess lady isn’t River Song somehow, how can she fly the stupid tardis?
I think Gallifrey was always kind of an inconvenience for the Dr. Who makers. If they have all this technology to traverse time, why don’t they just go back to the point where the Daleks were created and prevent that from happening? blah blah blah
Eliminating Gallifrey from NuWho altogether got rid of that crutch, but it was too integral to the Doctor’s existence to ignore forever, so they came up with a way for it to still be around but unreachable. The Master/Mistress is presumably the only one who knows how to get from there to here, and they can always have trickles of “Timelord Technology” leak from the nooks and crannies of the universe for future storylines.
Look at it this way, if they don’t keep Gallifrey around, we’ll get more stories about egg moons and planet-saving trees.
NuWho has never been all that good at dealing with the ramifications of time travel.
Take the oh-so-scary Silence, whose big plan was “let’s kill the time traveller so he won’t be able to interfere with our plans anymore!” (ignored 5-year old in the corner: “You dumbass, he probably already has.”)
I thought a fixed point was one that couldn’t be changed, not one that couldn’t be traveled to?
I waffle on Day of the Doctor. On the one hand, the feel-good is that he’s freed from that weight of guilt and rage and despair. On the other hand, thinking he’d killed off his entire race shaped who he was through several regenerations. What would the Ninth Doctor be without that barely suppressed rage, especially since committing genocide on his own race didn’t also get rid of the Daleks (even if it did save the universe, for one flavor of apocalypse).
I like to think that both happened, and that was what the Moment did. It literally burnt up Gallifrey and spared the Doctor in order to seed the guilt that would save Gallifrey by overwriting that same event. It is an intelligent time aware superweapon with a conscience.
So are we going to be getting to the search for Gallifrey when the new episodes start coming out? I was a little confused when they trotted out the stuff about Missy and the Nethersphere because I kind of assumed Gallifrey was going to be Peter Capaldi’s first big mission as the Doctor. Now seems like a good time to start. I’d kind of think the Doctor’s appetite to go looking would be whetted after Missy teased him with those phony coordinates.
I think he should avoid the place.
If he brings it back, the time wars start up again.
If he goes there, he’ll probably find out that
a) he’s VERY unpopular there and
B) there was a good reason he left the boring, stuffy place to start with.