Doctor Who!!~

[Ryushikaze]

As for the older doctors not remember the events of this episode- you're going to have to lay the blame for THAT one firmly on the oldschool Dr. Who, as it's a recurring theme with these crossovers from the very first one, when 1-3 met up in the three doctors, from when 1, 2, 3, and 5 met in the 5 doctors, when 2 and 6 met in the two doctors, and even in Time Crash when 5 and 10 met up. Only the most recent of the incarnations actually remembers events once the event is over, and partially while the event occurs.

Also, End of Time DID happen, and does still matter, because 10 was foiling a plot by the High Council to wipe out all reality in a bid to save themselves because they feared he WAS going to use the moment.

As for 'Doctor getting more regenerations,' can I just say I'm utterly sick of people talking about breaking the 13 limit and the ways Moffat will get around it, because getting around the limit isn't anything new.

The limit was introduced IN ORDER TO GET AROUND IT. The master had used all of his up, got a new set. That happened in the 70s, with the 4th doctor.

Hell, the Master's gone through at least three whole sets of regenerations by now.


Unrelated to that, there are a shitton of shoutouts both to RTD era and all of oldwho, including Kate's line about 'in the 70's or 80's to make fun of the rather odd and slightly confused chronology of the 3rd and 4th doctor's time with Unit.

 

[Roger]

Spoiler

What you seem to be missing is that Ten is still furious about the whole thing,

Uh, yeah. I certainly missed that. That he still has problems with it sure, but FURIOUS about what they were doing? Didn't see that.

Why was Billie piper in it?

I say this in the kindest possible way: when The Moment had to chose an interface of someone who affected the Doctor the most that NuWhu fans are gonna recognize, it's Rose or River. Suffice to say, they made the right choice.

Obviously the question was whether it was neccesary for the Moment to manifest as such at all. Yeah if you accept that as a given then Rose becomes the right choice over River. River has already been overused as **** and then some. For that same reason you can really only pull this Bad Wolf thing off so many times. Ditto for David Tennant coming back. So yeah, I have mixed feelings about it happening in a story that didn't leave them time to share a single scene too.

 

[Ⓐaron]

Spoiler

I think the fact that none of them have ever even acknowledged the War Doctor's existence is testament to how furious they are about his actions. Which of course is ironic because he's arguably actually more responsible for Gallifrey's fate not being annihilation than any of them.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

@Minato:

Spoiler

Ten's reaction to Eleven over forgetting the number of children who died on Gallifrey in just 400 years? I think that qualifies as furious.

X

 

[Roger]

@Minato:

Spoiler

Ten's reaction to Eleven over forgetting the number of children who died on Gallifrey in just 400 years? I think that qualifies as furious.

X

Spoiler

Yeah then, the idea that by the end of Day of the Doctor he's still furious about the whole thing. I didn't see that. His stance on massacring Daleks and bringing back the Time Lords has been expressed elsewhere. I don't think he'd be as excited about it as he seems here.

 

[Dana Scully]

Spoiler: @X

Sorry, my title was unclear - I know the entire Time War wasn't retconned, just that final part on Gallifrey.

except that doing that completely shits all over everything about Eleven's character development

And here we come to the crux of my issues with it, in that retconning the destruction of Gallifrey complete shits all over Nine and Ten's character development. Their entire arcs are based on a lie/selective amnesia. You can argue that it doesn't matter because they don't know it's a lie but ugh, it does matter, it completely invalidates all their struggles to come to grips with everything, as well as Rose/Martha/Donna's roles in helping them overcome all their issues.

And this idea that the Doctor isn't really the Doctor if he gets his hands dirty...he kills people all the time?? Usually indirectly, but he is constantly responsible for people's deaths and he hates that and that's what makes him the interesting, morally complex hero he is.

Anyways, I think we're just gonna end up agreeing to disagree on this one X.

 

[Dana Scully]

Spoiler

I think the fact that none of them have ever even acknowledged the War Doctor's existence is testament to how furious they are about his actions. Which of course is ironic because he's arguably actually more responsible for Gallifrey's fate not being annihilation than any of them.

Spoiler

Well their not acknowledging his existence might also have to with the fact he didn't exist as a character until Name of the Doctor

 

[Tennyo]

Spoiler: HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS CONTINUITY!!!!!

 

[Ryushikaze]

Allowing someone to die through inaction or allowing their own schemes to misfire back on them is different than activating a weapon to deliberately do the same to billions, including innocent civilians and children.

Also, it doesn't change 9, 10, or 11s arcs at all, since he's still got to live with the guilt of what he THOUGHT he did. Even learning you are innocent of a crime doesn't change all the time you feel guilt for having done it.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Remember how "Spider-Man 3" made the whole thing with the "shooter" in the first movie just feel emotionally empty on subsequent viewings? Yeah, that. But it's not surprising Moffat would take a shit on things RTD established with the Daleks. In "Asylum of the Daleks," he couldn't even keep continuity straight on the fact that Skaro was destroyed (mentioned in "Daleks in Manhattan").

Agreeing with everything Y said about the Time War and Moffat taking a dump. X: no. Just no. No.

 

[Super Mario]

I was wondering how they rebuilt a fucking planet, let alone re-establish their species so quick after Victory of the Daleks. o.O ;;

 

[Carlie]

Almost every time the Daleks appear in the Moffat era the episodes are bound to be terrible IMO. Victory of the Daleks was horrible and wtf was the different colors for the new Daleks? Where they supposed to be the Psycho Rangers?

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Psycho Rangers were cooler.

 

[Ⓐaron]

Spoiler

Doctor Who is a show about time travel and people are really confused about how Skaro can show up again? I didn't think that even needed to be explained. It's also worth pointing out that the Daleks also have a history of making planets they've conquered into "New Skaros". See the TARDIS Wiki.

Also, I'm not really sure why the Time War being altered makes the Doctor's struggles empty. He genuinely thought the planet was destroyed for over 400 years and there was no one else around to correct him. Not only that, but even if he'd known it was destroyed, he still wouldn't have known how to resurrect it, which still means that it might as well have been destroyed for all he could do about it for those 400 years. Also anyone who thinks he's just going to find Gallifrey immediately hasn't been paying close attention to this show. It'll probably take all of series eight at the bare minimum.

Finally I'm pretty sure there is a huge difference between killing a few people and killing, you know, billions. So I can't really see how anyone would be confused about why the Doctor would be way more troubled about the latter than the former.

 

[Ⓐaron]

.gifs (spoilers)

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

As for the older doctors not remember the events of this episode- you're going to have to lay the blame for THAT one firmly on the oldschool Dr. Who, as it's a recurring theme with these crossovers from the very first one, when 1-3 met up in the three doctors, from when 1, 2, 3, and 5 met in the 5 doctors, when 2 and 6 met in the two doctors, and even in Time Crash when 5 and 10 met up. Only the most recent of the incarnations actually remembers events once the event is over, and partially while the event occurs.

I'm not so sure that's accurate. The premise of the solution in "Time Crash" came from Ten remembering watching himself through Five's eyes, and apparently there have been similar plot devices involving Five used in other-non-TV installments.

 

[Ⓐaron]

According to this piece the Christmas episode will deal with the regeneration limit directly.

 

[Ⓐaron]

Review of the Big Finish audio special The Light at the End. They liked it.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

Allowing someone to die through inaction or allowing their own schemes to misfire back on them is different than activating a weapon to deliberately do the same to billions, including innocent civilians and children.

Also, it doesn't change 9, 10, or 11s arcs at all, since he's still got to live with the guilt of what he THOUGHT he did. Even learning you are innocent of a crime doesn't change all the time you feel guilt for having done it.

Spoiler: ^THIS!

It's like if you fired a disintegrator beam at your best friend to stop a war, and lived with the shitty guilt of doing it for years. Then a long time later when you'd finally moved on from being the sort of person who would ever make that choice again, you found a way to go back in time and secretly swap out the mechanics of the device with a stasis teleporter that tossed them into another dimension. You haven't changed anything from your own perception, nor did you change the gravity of the action that you took at that time, because you still did what you did for the same reason, and lived with the same consequences. That action changed you, and will have always changed you. It made you a better person for understanding the severity of the mistake that it was to use a solution like that - and that's what's happened here. All it does is give future you some real hope of finding them again now that you understand that.

X

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

... the mistake it was to use a solution like that ...

I think that this might be where we're disagreeing. It's a fundamental difference in how we view the decision and what we think the character is about.

It was a horrible, impossible choice -- but life doesn't let you make easy choices. Sometimes you have to burn someone to do the right thing or for the sake of someone else. And you aren't then handed by life absolution for those choices. You have to find it within yourself.

What would have been more valuable -- what has always been more valuable -- is that The Doctor makes the hard decisions, but always for the right reasons. For others and not for himself, even if it means damning himself and taking away his own ability to look himself in the eye (sometimes literally). He's like the sci-fi version of George Bailey.

He chose to do what he did and to live with those consequences, wanting redemption, but always knowing deep down that he did what he had to do and would do it again, even if he couldn't forgive himself for it.

That's The Doctor. The guy who takes responsibility and wants the best for everyone while knowing life will force choices about deciding what's best for the most people possible.

Why did people hate the "One More Day" Spider-Man story (sorry to use another Spidey analogy, everyone)? Because it took away what was fundamental about the character. It had him run away from responsibility and make cosmic, life-altering choices for other people just so that he could feel better about a relic of an old woman taking a bullet because he had chosen to make a stand against oppression.

And that same sort of character derailment is the reason I hate what Moffat did with the 50th.

According to this piece the Christmas episode will deal with the regeneration limit directly.

Can't wait to see what Moffat takes a big Christmas goose shit all over next so he can show off how fucking clever he thinks he is

 

[Dana Scully]

goddammit tres that was beautiful

But seriously, everything Tres just said. Giving the Doctor a magic way to not kill everyone just feels like a copout and, at least in my eyes, lessens his character. I'm not interested in a hero whose decisions have no consequences because he can just ~timey-wimey them away later, it cheapens everything he does.

 

[Carlie]

science fiction is all about rules, you can't just casually break them.

lol doesn't Moffat do that himself all the time on Doctor Who?

 

[Ⓐaron]

But that's a completely mistaken understanding of what actually happened. He didn't "timey-wimey" anything away. There is no timeline in the history of Doctor Who in which the Doctor killed all the Time Lords. He mistakenly believed that he did so for the entire run of the show until now, but he only believed that because of his own faulty memory. The only source of information we had for the Doctor's actions during the Time War was the Doctor himself, and the Doctor himself was mistaken. What we have here isn't an alteration of past events in any sense of the word; indeed, such an alteration may very well have been impossible because the fall of Gallifrey is important enough that it is probably a fixed point in time. What we have instead is a stable time loop.

Moreover, killing all the Time Lords obviously wasn't the best possible option available to him, as the episode itself makes clear. His actions in this episode don't contradict any of his previous characterisation; he's always been about thinking outside the box and picking a new solution no one has previously thought of. Which certainly describes what happens here to a tee.

I also really don't see how this cheapens the Doctor's internal character development. Believing that you committed genocide against your own people resulting in billions of deaths for over four hundred years isn't something you're going to get over immediately even if you find out finally that you didn't do what you thought you did.

I also don't know why people are expecting the way the regeneration limit will be dealt with to be a huge retcon. When the regen limit was introduced it was with The Master being given an extra set of regenerations, which clearly indicates it was never intended to be a hard-and-fast limit. There are a number of ways the Doctor could get a new regeneration cycle without breaking past continuity.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

But that's a completely mistaken understanding of what actually happened. He didn't "timey-wimey" anything away. There is no timeline in the history of Doctor Who in which the Doctor killed all the Time Lords. He mistakenly believed that he did so for the entire run of the show until now, but he only believed that because of his own faulty memory. The only source of information we had for the Doctor's actions during the Time War was the Doctor himself, and the Doctor himself was mistaken. What we have here isn't an alteration of past events in any sense of the word; indeed, such an alteration may very well have been impossible because the fall of Gallifrey is important enough that it is probably a fixed point in time. What we have instead is a stable time loop.

Moreover, killing all the Time Lords obviously wasn't the best possible option available to him, as the episode itself makes clear. His actions in this episode don't contradict any of his previous characterisation; he's always been about thinking outside the box and picking a new solution no one has previously thought of. Which certainly describes what happens here to a tee.

I also really don't see how this cheapens the Doctor's internal character development. Believing that you committed genocide against your own people resulting in billions of deaths for over four hundred years isn't something you're going to get over immediately even if you find out finally that you didn't do what you thought you did.

You focused on the "timey wimey" part of Y's comments, but the rest of it were the important bits. It's entirely irrelevant to this particular issue whether the internal consistency of the show's events was compromised. That's not even what we were talking about.

This is an-out-of-universe beef.

I also don't know why people are expecting the way the regeneration limit will be dealt with to be a huge retcon. When the regen limit was introduced it was with The Master being given an extra set of regenerations, which clearly indicates it was never intended to be a hard-and-fast limit. There are a number of ways the Doctor could get a new regeneration cycle without breaking past continuity.

I'm not sure if this is in response to what I said, but I imagine part of the reason people keep acting like it's a big deal is because Moffat keeps acting like it. I've been saying for a while now that the regeneration limit is a non-issue.

lol doesn't Moffat do that himself all the time on Doctor Who?

"It's magic. We don't have to explain it."

Wait, that was a different dumbass who ruined a great character.

 

[Dana Scully]

He didn't "timey-wimey" anything away.

The Doctor didn't, no, but Moffat certainly did.