You know, I had the same thought; Matt is more than adequate as the Doctor, he won me over quicker than I thought he could, but I can’t help but thinking Tennant would have absolutely tore up the scenes where he realized this crazy woman was actually the TARDIS (see the scene in Silence in the Library where River Song told him his own name), and then had to say good bye to her at the end. This was a great episode, but it would have been just that much better.
I have a question. I have been watching Who since the Tom Baker days, but missed a few of the later doctors. Have they ever touched on the fact that even though the time lords are extinct, because they are “time lords” they should still be running into one another. Heck the doctor has run into himself a few times, so theoretically there should still be all sorts of time lords running around from the past. Has this ever been explained?
IIRC, The Doctor resolved the Time Wars by locking the Time Lords and Daleks outside the universe, so that they never existed. Of course, this creates all sorts of paradoxes that can easily be explained by…
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a little. His other selves have gone to Gallifrey throughout various points in the past and present, so how can he claim to be the last Time Lord?
Certainly from the time of the war onwards you could say that Gallifrey no longer exists, but why he claims it doesn’t exist even before the war…
The writers would probably say something about his time stream, which, if I understand right, means his personal time-line. For him, personally, from the time he destroyed Gallifrey and put a time-lock on it, he is now the last one (except for the master. And maybe the meddling monk, and maybe the Rani).
Apparently one of the effects of whatever the Doctor did was to make it as if the Time Lords (and the Daleks and the Time War) never were. History was re-written, which is why when the Doctor travels to the future nobody remembers the Dalek invasion of Earth in the 22nd century. Some very few advanced races and etc. vaguely remember there once being Time Lords, but then they also vaguely remember the Time War as well. The Doctor doesn’t meet up with any Time Lords because of this. Also, I think there must have been some sort of mechanism to stop Time Lords from encountering each other non-chronologically, as I don’t believe this ever happened in the show other than the Doctor meeting himself (and that in very specific circumstances and always with Time Lord interference).
I actually liked the McCoy years. What you’re saying is true, but I’d argue that there were other factors to generate interest then:[ol]
[li]There was a general sense of mistery and confusion to most of those stories, so we had to keep guessing what was going on at all times.[/li][li]It was a novelty. (So we hadn’t tired of it yet.)[/li][li]Ace was in danger. The new series doesn’t seem to kill companions, but the old one did.[/li][li]The show was canceled before we could tire of it.[/li][/ol]
I wonder how much of a Time Lord (Lady?) she can actually be considered, since she has never had the opportunity to gaze into the heart of the Time Vortex or whatever it is they do with their young’uns.
It’s not just called a war, it’s called a “time war”. It wasn’t (isn’t/won’t be/pick tense) about blowing things up. It is/was/will be about rewriting time. It was started by the Time Lords when they asked Tom Baker to ensure the Daleks would never be created.
The Doctor “ended” the Time War. No more Time Lords - past, present, or future. He didn’t just shoot them. He ended a TIME war.
This is something we (a) have been told very little about, (b) involves concepts of time beyond our understanding and (c) means he’s the only Time Lord ever*. We don’t, and likely won’t, ever know the details, how it works, why he remembers, or anything wake. We just have to accept that’s how it is/was/will be.**
*except for when they make dramatic exceptions, like the Master.
**showing the Clone Wars ruined them. Better the Tine War remains a question, IMO.
In The Two Doctors, with Collin Baker and Patrick Troughton, Baker’s version explained to Peri that when you travel though space and time as much as he does, you’re bound to run into yourself eventually.
I’m not sure what you mean by the other three points, but for the first one, for me the mystery was figuring out what the heck was going on. Some of the stories like Ghost Light and Survival had me scratching my head. I mean, I get the overall stories, but a lot of the details
I suspect that that doesn’t add up - preventing a species from ever having existed is a good move in a Time War, but hardly the only possible tactic, and not one that would really be available to a rogue member of the species - I don’t think there can be a stable timeline in which a person like the Doctor exists, but didn’t have parents of his own kind and a society that educated him.
He may well have rewritten Time Lord history, given it an end, and ‘locked’ it in place so that the other Time Lords could not rewrite his changes. Then, he can’t encounter other Time Lords because his own lock gets in the way.
Except that he didn’t take the Master into account because he was presumed dead, but had actually survived, something like that.
Actually, I thought of another twist on Candyman’s Time war theory. If it’s possible in the Whoniverse for people to travel out of an alternate timeline without ceasing to exist in paradox, then that could be what happened to the Doctor. He changed history away from the timeline that the Time Lords had ever existed in, and then escaped that timeline himself. Other Time Lords would have had to deliberately escape that timeline too, (as they all did in "The end of Time,) or they would never exist. Not quite sure how this explains the Master. Rewriting his biology wouldn’t save him from non-existence if his Time Lord parents were never born.