It took 13 iterations of the Doctor combined to put the whole Time War clusterfuck back in its box, and allow future script writers a bit more freedom.
Or, basically, run!
Peter Capaldi’s eyebrows were the final ingredient.
Well, other than that, and what the Doctor remembers or not being based on the need of the script, I thought it was a pretty good special. I thought it would have something to do with trenzalore, but I guess it will be dealt with later, or else Moffat has lost interest in it.
I have to admit, it was pretty interesting watching that Dalek dying in the beginning. The one demanding an explanation of what “No More” meant. That scene almost humanized it.
Also, I’ve seen a lot of classic Who, but I didn’t watch Terror of the Zygons, so it was nice to see an old enemy for the first time. And I thought it was nice seeing Eccleston, but while searching how to spell his name I ran across this which said, “The immediate reaction is going to be, “But Eccleston was there!” While that moment with all of the other Doctors was wonderful, it was little more that a clever re-purposing of “Doctor Who” archival footage.” Oh well, footage is still better than nothing.
I loved it. I’m sure that there were a lot of references that flew past me but quite a few call backs made me very happy. And call forwards! So now the next regeneration is officially the 13th.
Gallifrey could have saved its people using the Star Trek solution. Escape back into time. Each family could research and select whatever time period they wanted to live in.
In face, maybe that was Gallifrey’s Library the Kirk and Spock visited?
Hmmmm.
You think an advantage of living on a planet of people who mastered time travel would be that they could look ahead into the future, see future conflicts, and then avoid them, or make preparations to quickly win. But I know, then there wouldn’t be hardly any stories to tell.
So the Doctor’s going to try and restore Gallifrey. Funny, the reason it was removed in the first place…
Wikipedia
I guess enough time has passed they don’t consider it baggage any more.
Time Lords might have been baggage collectively but I think one at a time can be pretty good. I would love a well written story that showed Susan again. I’ve wondered if the lady Time Lord that advised Wilfred Mott in the Tennant final episode was suppose to be her or maybe Romana. Either way, an interesting thread to follow up on.
I have no understanding how Gallifrey and the Time lords were excess baggage. It wasn’t too often an episode had to do with either. What would have made me happy would have been if RTD and Moffat hadn’t turned his sonic screwdriver in a deus ex machina.
And back to the special, I thought John Hurt was supposed to be the warrior Doctor. He seemed more like a polite, well mannered, gentlemen Doctor to me.
That’s actually part of what caused it in the first place, they foresaw a future where the Daleks destroyed the universe, told The Doctor to go fix it, and then the Doctor’s meddling cocked it up and ended up with a race of time aware, time travelling Daleks.
Or at least that’s how I understood all the summaries I read.
In the original Doctor Who shortly after the first Doctor met the Daleks they gained time travel capability somehow.
The one sent back to destroy or delay their development was the fourth Doctor, who couldn’t bring himself to destroy them because at that stage they hadn’t done anything yet. By the end of the episode he figures that he set them back by about 1,000 years. Yeah, Davros had him record all of their defeats so that the Daleks could avoid them, but he destroyed the recording.
He said warrior, not barbarian.
I remember reading a comic once - can’t think which one, maybe a really old issue of Mad - about a war between two nations with time travel. One nation loses a battle, so it goes back in time to the day before the battle, and ambushes the other side. The other side then goes back a day further, and ambushes the ambushers, who then go back again, and so on, until… well, I forget how it ends, but I don’t think it turned out well for anyone.
For the first few seasons of the new Who, my head canon for the Time War went something like that, with both sides reaching further and further back, until the war ended with both sides annihilating each other at the dawn of time, effectively eliminating themselves from history, except for a few odd myths and strange artifacts scattered around the universe.
The problem with this type of time travel snowball is it’s a bit too linear. For instance, if somebody attacked you yesterday, and you’re both time travellers and can recognize that Time Travel was involved, the other option is to send a strike team to take out their time travel force before they time travelled (“before” in their personal timelines).
So you don’t get a nice linear regression back in time, you get a bunch of time travel spaghetti where people are going back to destroy your ancestor’s ancestors while you go to the future and try and kill their archaeologists who are mapping out your long defunct military installations. And in turn they send a covert agent back to when you discovered Time Travel and have them present fake research which sets the discovery back 100 years and so on.
It can get really silly when history and paradoxes get involved. You can cause a hell of a paradox by, say, going to the future in order to read their history books to find out the identities of their time travelling heroes that defeated your civilization, then go back in time and prevent their heroism from occuring.
Yeah, I guess since the Daleks have time travel it complicates things.
If the Daleks were a bit more clever, I think the Time War could make an interesting series on its own with the stated rules of Nu-Who. Well, okay, there aren’t really any rules, but I think a war between two time travelling races with the “fixed point in time” premise could be cool. Especially since it’s a big point that fixed points can be manufactured by forcing a time traveller to read about something happening in their personal timeline. It would allow for a lot of really crafty pseudo-assassinations.
Onr thing occurred to me. There were 13 Tardis’ around when freezing Gallifrey, yet they also imply the Doctor has enough future regenerations to start going back through old faces. Why were they not 14 Tardis’ involved? Or 114?
Has anyone seen The Five-ish Doctors? Bloody brilliant. Funny and touching at the same time.
I’m one of the few people who didn’t enjoy **Day of the Doctor **but then I’ve never been a fan of Moffat’s writing so that’s no surprise.
I did love An Adventure in Space and Time though. My husband is a huge Doctor Who fan (to the extent that he has contributed to the Fifty Years of Doctor Who Fans exhibition at the National Media Museum). Hartnell is his favourite doctor and there was definitely some tears at that ‘But I don’t want to go’ line. Well done, Mr Gatiss.
I enjoyed Day of the Doctor as a story, but I’m not entirely sure it was adequate as a good episode for the 50th anniversary. It was focussed on post-2005 stuff and the final 10 minutes had past Doctors show up purely as past footage on tiny images.
But An Adventure in Space and Time and The Five (ish) Doctors - Reboot! were fantastic, and I’ll take these as the proper tribute to the past 50 years.
My WAG: any post-Smith Doctors would remember that the conflict was resolved with only the up-to-Smith doctors, so no need for them to get involved.