Without giving away any actual spoilers, there is a thread tying many of the episodes together, and some characters and creatures get second showings. And some of the dialogue is definitely for adults.
There are some very good episodes to come.
Oh, all right: a teensy spoiler:
Exterminate!
Actually, I don’t know why I bothered. There were a whole load of threads in CS last year.
I don’t think mentioning a cast change is a spoiler, since it’s usually announced long before it happens. How the change was made would be one, though. To my mind, a spoiler is talking about plot points. (For example, when Buffy died, everyone knew Sarah Michelle Geller was contracted for another year with the series, so she’d be back the next year.)
The Master did get his 13th regeneration by stealing Tremas’s body, so maybe a Time Lord needs a new body to have additional ones. However, in “The Brain of Morbius,” the Doctor specifically states that the Time Lords limited themselves to 12 regenerations to prevent them from becoming decadent by being immortal. This would imply that the limit is legal/voluntary rather than biological.
So there’s plenty of wiggle room for an indefinite number of Doctors.
Has it ever actually been established (in The Five Doctors, maybe?) that Hartnell was actually the Doctor’s first body?
I haven’t watched Dr. Who since Tom Baker, so my memory is pretty fuzzy. In The End Of The World was there a reason why
The Doctor couldn’t hop into the TARDIS after the spiders were discovered, and just hop back in time a few hours to stop the sabotage before it started? Aside from the filmmakers wanting to create drama.
I thought Rose was an interesting take on the old inanimate objects controlled by alien intelligence story (cf.: Trucks/Maximum Overdrive).
The TARDIS was impounded as an illegal teleporation device.
If she’s ever blinded in an accident – I’m marrying her.
And this is my only full exposure to the good Doctor and I found it fun!
Is the newest Dr. Who in continuity with the old series, or is this a “re-imagining” along the lines of the new Battlestar Galactica?
The current history of The Master:In “The Deadly Assassin”, it was established that the Master had burned through his twelve regenerations prematurely. At the end of that episode, he gained enough energy to prolong his last life in an extremely decayed state. In “Keeper of Traaken” he took over a non-Time Lord’s body. In the Fox TV movie, he was caught and executed by the Daleks, but managed to preserve his essence in an ectoplasmic form that took over a human body. While trying to steal the Doctor’s body he was swallowed/ absorbed by the TARDIS. Chance that he is truly finally dead? Infinitesmal.
While the Doctor can participate in history, he apparently cannot or must not “cheat” by using the TARDIS to retroactively alter anything he himself has taken part in. For example, he let his companion Adric die rather than try for a “but we went back and saved him at the last second” rescue.
The Doctor’s future: In the “Trial of a Time Lord” arc it was revealed that the Valyard was either the last of the Doctors or a sort of manifestation of all the suppressed evil in the Doctor’s personality, I’m unclear as to which. In one of the seventh Doctor stories he is supposed to someday become the Merlin of Arthurian legend, though whether he will end up sealed in a tree for eternity isn’t necessarily certain.
Well, they’ve pretty much tossed out the continuity by having this guy be “The Last Doctor”, and by indicating that the Time Lords and Gallifrey are gone…Or am I missing something?
As far as he knows, he’s the only one who survived, likely by not being on Gallifrey at the time. There could be others that he’s not aware of.
The Time Lord known as K’anpo is likely still around, if he hasn’t used up all his regenerations.
From Wikipedia about the fate of Gallifrey:
[spoiler]In the BBC Books novel The Ancestor Cell by Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole, Gallifrey was destroyed as a result of the Eighth Doctor’s desire to prevent the voodoo cult Faction Paradox from starting a war between the Time Lords and an unnamed Enemy. This also apparently (and retroactively) wiped the Time Lords from history. It is unclear what the attitude of the new Doctor Who television series is toward the information in the novels and audio plays, the latter produced by Big Finish Productions. However, a number of writers of the novels and audio plays are also writing for the new television series.
In the last regular Eighth Doctor novel, The Gallifrey Chronicles by Lance Parkin, it was revealed that while Gallifrey was destroyed, the Time Lords were not erased from history. However, the cataclysm set up an event horizon in time that prevented anyone from entering Gallifrey’s relative past or travelling from it to the present or future. The Time Lords also survived within the Matrix, which had been downloaded into the Eighth Doctor’s mind, but their reconstruction required a sufficiently advanced computer. At the novel’s end, the question of whether or not the Time Lords would be restored remained unanswered. However, it can be assumed that both they and the planet were restored at some point before the start of 2005 series if the novels are to remain consistent with the new series’ continuity.
In the 2005 season episode The End of the World, the Ninth Doctor stated that his home planet — not mentioned by name, but presumably Gallifrey — was destroyed in a war and that he is the last of the Time Lords. However, the episode also indicated that the Time Lords are remembered in the far future.
Subsequently, in Dalek, it was revealed that the last great Time War was fought between the Time Lords and the Daleks, ending in the obliteration of both sides and with only two apparent survivors; the Doctor and a lone Dalek that had somehow fallen through time and crashed on Earth. At the conclusion of that episode, that surviving Dalek self-destructed, leaving the Doctor believing that he was the sole survivor of the Time War. However, as the Daleks returned in the two-part 2005 series finale, The Parting of the Ways, the fate of the Time Lords may not be as definitive as well.
[/spoiler]
It doesn’t do any good to box spoilers if you don’t tell us what episodes they’re from! Please don’t combine spilers from multiple episodes.
Hugh Jass’s post includes spoilers from two novels about the eighth (McGann) Doctor: The Ancestry Cell and The Gallifrey Chronicles in the first two paragraphs, and spoilers for the episodes Daleks and Parting of the Ways, yet to be aired here, in the fourth paragraph.
The third paragraph is about The End of the World. Spoilers about episodes that have aired here do not need to be boxed.
In the Third Doctor story “The Day of the Daleks,” the Doctor’s companion asks basically the same question about a time-traveling opponent: if they failed in their mission the first time, why not go back to an earlier point in time and try again?
The Doctor explains that that would never work owing to “the Blinovitch Limitation Effect.” He’s interrupted before he can go into detail (darn the luck!). So basically, the answer is, “We [the makers of the show] know it isn’t logical, but we’d have no drama otherwise.”
That fact hasn’t been mentioned again, but it’s never been contradicted either.
Not quite. Spoilers for “The Trial of a Time Lord” and “Logopolis”, from the old series:
The Doctor is put on trial by the Valeyard, who is revealed to be a kind of projection or distillation of the Doctor’s dark side, who somehgow gained independent existence, somewhere between his twelfth and thirteenth incarnations. Presumably, much like the Watcher in “Logopolis” was a projection from between his fourth and fifth incarnations.
The new series is definitely in continuity with the old series. They’ve never referenced Eccleston’s Doctor as being “The Last Doctor”, only the last Time Lord. And Gallifrey seems to have been destroyed just recently before the new series started.
The question of why the Doctor can’t go back and change events he has participated in is actually addressed later this season. Spoilers:
In the episode “Father’s Day”, they actually do go back in time to try and correct something. The Doctor and Rose are supposed to just watch their former selves from a neaby hiding spot until a certain point before they can take action. But Rose interferes too early, and changes her own past, causing time-eating monsters to be unleased upon the universe, which is no good for anybody.
… but luckily its brought up again in the fifth Doctor story “Mawdryn Undead”, where:
there are a past and future Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart running around, and the Bliovitch Limitation Effect causes a huge explosion when they run into one another.
I can’t believe I know this shit.
What’s the fannon on this? Is it mentioned in novels, fanfic, etc? Has a non-cannon explanation been worked out? Or are the fans waiting for official explication/pretending it didn’t happen?
I didn’t understand the stuff about repeating memes either. Can anyone explain?
I am late to the thread. I finally got time to watch the 2 episodes today. I enjoyed them quite a bit and I had the advantage of watching it with my 5 year old son. I find good kid’s show are better when watched with kids. I really enjoyed it.
I like this Doctor better already than any since Baker. I guess I am not a Diehard fan. Baker is the only Doctor I really enjoyed. I’ll be recording next Friday’s, I don’t know when I can watch it. How many Episodes will be in this run? I thought I saw 26?
Jim
I can hardly wait for Barrowman!! 
It’s British. There’s 13 episodes.