- AKA
- The Man, V
Doctor Who!!~
- Thread starter Mantichorus
- Start date
- AKA
- The Man, V
They have to be aware of it, I would think. Whether it's intentional isn't entirely clear.
Io9 ranked all the Doctor Who episodes from An Unearthly Child to "The Name of the Doctor" from best to worst. You can read it here.
Probably a good starting point for debate, this.
Also, found this on tumblr, which is a pretty good point.
Io9 ranked all the Doctor Who episodes from An Unearthly Child to "The Name of the Doctor" from best to worst. You can read it here.
Probably a good starting point for debate, this.
Also, found this on tumblr, which is a pretty good point.
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- AKA
- Minato
I can't comment on the older stories, I'm still going through my first watchthrough of Classic Doctor Who but Doctor's Wife really wasn't that brilliantly executed, should be lower and Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways is too low. Given it's disproportionate critisism compared to the stories below however, I sense the writer probably feels it should be even lower.
- AKA
- TresDias
I've been thinking more about the 50th (yes, I'm determined not to let it ruin DW for me), and I've determined that the Bad Wolf/Rose headcanon *must be* accurate since The War Doctor met Bad Wolf before he met up with Ten and Eleven.
If that had always been the case, one would think Nine would still recognize Rose as having the same appearance of a temporal entity he met on the defining day of his life, even if his head was a little foggy (from meeting his future incarnations) about when he actually used The Moment.
What do you peeps think?
If that had always been the case, one would think Nine would still recognize Rose as having the same appearance of a temporal entity he met on the defining day of his life, even if his head was a little foggy (from meeting his future incarnations) about when he actually used The Moment.
What do you peeps think?
- AKA
- YACCBS, Legato Bluesummers, Daenaerys Targaryen, Revy, Kate Beckett, Samantha Carter, Matsumoto Rangiku
ngl I hate the idea that the Doctor started traveling with Rose because he remembered her in some way, even subconsciously. God forbid he brought her along because he was drawn to her bravery/compassion etc.
- AKA
- TresDias
Yeah, that would be another reason Gallifrey Never Burned would ruin it for me.
- AKA
- Chloe Frazer
They have the best chemistry of any duo in the new series IMO.
I can't really speak about the classic series episodes since I haven't seen any of them but I basically stopped taking the list seriously when it ranked "The Eleventh Hour" as the 26 best episode. About the only good thing I can say from that episode is that Matt Smith showed he was going to be a good Doctor.
- AKA
- X
Eh... I'm not too sure how I feel about it, but I need to see a lot more classic Who to be entirely sure. It's a good way to prioritize some viewing material from my list anyway. (The Sensorites was a lot more enjoyable than many other episodes listed, and doesn't deserve to be as far down as it is, imo).
Realted: Ryu's post about the First & Second Doctor serials worth watching: http://thelifestream.net/forums/showpost.php?p=325088&postcount=238
X
- AKA
- YACCBS, Legato Bluesummers, Daenaerys Targaryen, Revy, Kate Beckett, Samantha Carter, Matsumoto Rangiku
Ok I know I said I'd shut up about the 50th and I don't want to restart a debate that won't go anywhere but I just wanted to link this post because it's very well-written and looks at the issues both from an in-universe and out-of-universe perspective and it's just a good read and RUN-ON SENTENCE BATMAN.
also
also
- AKA
- X
@the whole first section of In Universe:
So many people seem to miss that DotD does NOT feature the Time War. It features the very last day of the Time War, which is HUGELY different. This was the day that the High Council of the Time Lords decided to end time, and that's why all of the Daleks are converging on the single location, and just attempting to totally wipe Gallifrey off the map with sheer overwhelming force. This is late enough in that time that we see Gallifrey's second largest city, Arcadia falling in the opening. You're literally witnessing the last... 15-20 mins of a war that ripped across planets through all of space and time.
This is like comparing the Rebel alliance 's single fleet tearing through the second Death Star, and saying that you thought that the empire was bad and the wiped out all of the Jedi in these huge insane conflicts during the Clone Wars, and devastated the populations of entire worlds as the Empire spread. It did. That all still happened. You're just looking at the very smallest slice of the final day, and thinking that somehow it means that everything else before it never happened, and that's just a flat out poor understanding of the events being portrayed.
@the whole last section for out of universe:
The whole purpose of DotD is clearly establishing the Doctor as someone who's different from other warriors/heroes. Moffat is sometimes successful and sometimes not, and there're very clearly people who feel one way or another about this, but for me this also comes down to the quote from Marcus Aurelius that Clara says in the opening, "Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one."
As I've said before, literally ALL of Eleven's story arc from the very start of Series 5 have all been about the implications of being the last of the time lords, and being notorious for your actions, and the name "The Doctor" coming to mean something different and that name and definition of who the Doctor is being altered because of it, and how above everything else it's that promise that he made to himself - who he defines himself as and why that's important.
The super crash-course version of this is really simple. Go watch The Pandorica Opens, The Big Bang, A Good Man Goes to War, The Name of the Doctor, The Night of the Doctor, The Day of the Doctor. That's Eleven's character arc, and represents everything that Moffat wants to say about who the Doctor is - which is even MORE important because of who he became because of the Time War (more on that at the end of the next paragraph).
Lastly, I'm still never of the "I know something you don't know, lol" crowd when rewatching those scenes. As stated before, I think that he's learning a lesson for a decision that the man he was at the time was still completely determined to make, and it's only the man that he became as a result of that decision that refused it as an option.
/end counter rant
X
- AKA
- The Man, V
That essay was didn't read lol (it's too late and I don't need the rage) but I want to point out that the people arguing the Doctor doesn't need to carry guilt over his actions anymore are ignoring that but for the intervention of Clara and Rose/the Moment he would've still pushed the button. So he still has to look at himself as a person who would've committed genocide against his own people if outside forces hadn't stayed his hand. The idea that this somehow he can suddenly clear his conscience because of the 50th is just asinine.
- AKA
- Minato
As the essay points out, that's not what Moffat thinks. "He wouldn't. So obviously he didn't do that." was his very mission statement in writing this special. As I've said before, yeah, he put his hand on the button, so what? He's put his hands on plenty of buttons. He wouldn't be able to do it in the end. Only question is whether we count the War Doctor in that thinking.
I don't think that's fair, Rassilon's plot is a quickly referenced afterthought here. The focus when they are portraying this battle is on how desperate the situation is because the Daleks are coming close to destroying Gallifrey anyway. I realise that this doesn't neccesitate that the entire Timewar was a conventionally fought laserwar with the Daleks being the clear agressors but I am disappointed in it's portrayal.
- AKA
- The Man, V
The only way you can look at the events of that episode and actually say "he wouldn't" is by assuming that by his very nature he keeps companions around to keep him grounded. Which is a fair assessment of the Doctor's character, actually; we've seen what happened when he didn't have companions in The Waters of Mars and it wasn't pretty. But regardless, the idea that he's completely absolved of responsibility for what he was ready to do because his companions rescued him is pretty silly and if that's actually what Moffat thinks then I'm not sure what he's on about. I suspect that there's more to what he's said than that because it's a lot more simplistic a take on the character than the episode actually presented but I don't really care enough to go research it.
My co-worker taped the Day of the Doctor but hasn't seen it yet. I'm going to pester her until she does. 
- AKA
- YACCBS, Legato Bluesummers, Daenaerys Targaryen, Revy, Kate Beckett, Samantha Carter, Matsumoto Rangiku
Yes, I get that. The OP of the article gets that too. And considering it's a war that "ripped through all of space and time" doesn't it seem just a little bit odd that there weren't even a handful of Daleks or Time Lords scattered about, stranded or wounded somewhere not on Gallifrey and therefore not around when the planet gets vacuumed into a pocket universe?
Anyways, in EoT that final day on Gallifrey doesn't sound like a laser battle with only the Daleks and the Time Lords partcipating, it sounds all Lovecraft-esque with multiple nightmare-enducing participants and it's disappointing that we didn't get to see them or even get a reaction to their off-screen appearance or just a mere mention of them.
It's funny, because I don't even disagree with you - it's just that I think we see the defining characteristic of the Doctor as two very different things. To me he's always been the man who makes the difficult choicesto save as many people as possible. That's the Doctor that resonated with me, that I found compelling to watch. Basically, this:
op said:
It's not that he saves Gallifrey that I have an issue with. I'm perfectly okay with the Time Lords returning, with the Doctor's search for them being the next major arc in the series. It's the fact that he never destroyed it in the first place, a move which for me completely undermines what makes the Doctor the Doctor (the aforementioned hard decisions).
All those episodes you listed - the Doctor not wanting to be known as a warrior. Great, I agree, that's totally Eleven's arc. But pushing that button wouldn't have made him The Warrior, it would have made him, imo, the Doctor. See my issue? I realize that you feel differently, that it all comes down to how you view the character, but this is why I had to make up a headcanon that allows for the button to be pushed and Gallifrey to return - otherwise I honestly could not continue watching the show, because the Doctor's character would have been so ruined for me.
on an unrelated note
i might have just bought a tardis mini-fridge
and a tardis blanket
and tardis socks
(the fridge makes sound effects when you open it and can also be used as a microwave TELL ME THAT'S NOT AWESOME)
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- AKA
- X
The space battle at Gallifrey being all lasers and not Lovecraft was addressed when they said that they'd already used ALL of their weapons but one, and the High Council decided to end time rather than attempt to use the Moment. You're looking at the last, desperate, worn out, bruised punches being thrown before the universe grinds to a halt.
The ONLY reason that Gallifrey burning held any meaning in who the Doctor was and is, is because he was alone, was the only one to make that choice, and literally had no other options available to him. As I've stated previously, he's STILL that person. That hasn't changed. Not even a little. That trait that made him who he was for burning Gallifrey is still EXACTLY the same. The second he made that decision, and put his hand on the big red button, he became the same man who burned 2.47 billion innocent people out of time to save the universe.
Picture it this way, from the War Doctor's perspective he remembers nothing where there were multiple Doctors present in DotD. So, he remembers obtaining the Moment, deciding definitively to activate it, placing his hand on the button, and regenerating in his TARDIS. If he checked after he regenerated, the Time Lords and the Daleks have all been utterly wiped away from the universe, the Time War is over, and he's suffering MASSIVE PTSD. All still the same.
Imagine you decided to drop the bomb to end WWII, placed your hand on the big red button to fire it, and woke up after being blacked out and everything's burned, gone and the war is over. Then many years later you discover that you entered your own past and changed the firing mechanism to teleport all the victims in that moment somewhere and froze them. So you were now responsible for finding where that lost moment was, else wise you'd be subjecting them all to the same fate you'd originally thought you had.
Why/How does that somehow change your PAST self into being someone who didn't drop the bomb? If you'd hit that button and it turned out to just freeze them anyway but let you see the explosion, it's still the same - which is basically what happened. Hell, even if you'd hit the button and nothing happened, you're still the same person, (you just suffer different consequences).
He's still the same person, who made the same decision, suffered the same consequences, and is now dealing with a different version of those same consequences, where failing to find them is equivalent to him killing them again (Schrödinger's Gallifrey).
To further elaborate, the SECOND he has knowledge of his own future and more than one of himself there, that's no longer the same scenario that we were presented with for 9's history OR the scenario where he didn't have any choice. Pushing the button AGAIN after all of that DOES make him the Warrior and NOT the Doctor, because HERE - he has a CHOICE to find another solution. This is the whole point behind his character development since those events. He ISN'T someone who ever chooses xenocide again if there are ANY OTHER OPTIONS and The Day of the Doctor WAS another option. If he treated it like it wasn't that would have been the complete antithesis of everything that his character has become since, which is why I still totally don't buy a shred of that argument.
…but that mini-fridge does sound amazing.
X
The ONLY reason that Gallifrey burning held any meaning in who the Doctor was and is, is because he was alone, was the only one to make that choice, and literally had no other options available to him. As I've stated previously, he's STILL that person. That hasn't changed. Not even a little. That trait that made him who he was for burning Gallifrey is still EXACTLY the same. The second he made that decision, and put his hand on the big red button, he became the same man who burned 2.47 billion innocent people out of time to save the universe.
Picture it this way, from the War Doctor's perspective he remembers nothing where there were multiple Doctors present in DotD. So, he remembers obtaining the Moment, deciding definitively to activate it, placing his hand on the button, and regenerating in his TARDIS. If he checked after he regenerated, the Time Lords and the Daleks have all been utterly wiped away from the universe, the Time War is over, and he's suffering MASSIVE PTSD. All still the same.
Imagine you decided to drop the bomb to end WWII, placed your hand on the big red button to fire it, and woke up after being blacked out and everything's burned, gone and the war is over. Then many years later you discover that you entered your own past and changed the firing mechanism to teleport all the victims in that moment somewhere and froze them. So you were now responsible for finding where that lost moment was, else wise you'd be subjecting them all to the same fate you'd originally thought you had.
Why/How does that somehow change your PAST self into being someone who didn't drop the bomb? If you'd hit that button and it turned out to just freeze them anyway but let you see the explosion, it's still the same - which is basically what happened. Hell, even if you'd hit the button and nothing happened, you're still the same person, (you just suffer different consequences).
He's still the same person, who made the same decision, suffered the same consequences, and is now dealing with a different version of those same consequences, where failing to find them is equivalent to him killing them again (Schrödinger's Gallifrey).
To further elaborate, the SECOND he has knowledge of his own future and more than one of himself there, that's no longer the same scenario that we were presented with for 9's history OR the scenario where he didn't have any choice. Pushing the button AGAIN after all of that DOES make him the Warrior and NOT the Doctor, because HERE - he has a CHOICE to find another solution. This is the whole point behind his character development since those events. He ISN'T someone who ever chooses xenocide again if there are ANY OTHER OPTIONS and The Day of the Doctor WAS another option. If he treated it like it wasn't that would have been the complete antithesis of everything that his character has become since, which is why I still totally don't buy a shred of that argument.
…but that mini-fridge does sound amazing.
X
- AKA
- TresDias
X said:
This one teeny parenthetical notation in your post was what Y's whole post was about. The two ideas are not remotely similar.
The people of Gallifrey were either going to die to end the Time War because of the Time Lords, because of the Daleks or because of The Doctor. What happens in DotD is saving them from all of those other fates by moving them out of the line of fire. To say that is the same as killing them if they are never found is nonsense.
A more accurate analogy would be a doctor (ha) inducing a coma in a trauma patient in the hope they can be saved and resuscitated later. If that fails, we aren't going to say the doctor might as well have pulled the plug or shot them. We're going to say they saved them for a little while longer, but it just wasn't enough.
You're still trying to come at this thing from an in-universe perspective where The Doctor's perception of events is the only consequence that matters when what's important to fans for whom Gallifrey Never Burned would ruin DW is that the consequences for people other than The Doctor is utter annihilation at his hands and what that allows DW to say as a metaphor for real life.
It's still fine for myself and Y and Minato if Rose changed history such that at one point Gallifrey was still space ash. It being saved is then reward for how The Doctor lived his life after. That's awesome. What's not is if there was never anything valuable to take from it as commentary on real life in the first place.
- AKA
- YACCBS, Legato Bluesummers, Daenaerys Targaryen, Revy, Kate Beckett, Samantha Carter, Matsumoto Rangiku
No, no it's not. Not at all. Failing to find them is failing to save them, not succeeding in killing them. It's two very different things.
I completely agree - given the option to save people he would make always that choice. It's the fact that the choice exists at all - that one was time-magicked into the story when before it never existed, that not only was Gallifrey saved but it was never destroyed in the first place - that ultimately damages the narrative and the character.
- AKA
- X
Yeah... except if you read the tiny little bit of sentence-specific context BEFORE that quote, it doesn't actually apply to the scenario of what happened in DotD. and by responding to it as if it did, you're missing the whole point.
X-SOLDIER said:
THAT was my WWII analogy for DotD. Consequences of those actions = same.
X-SOLDIER said:
THAT was referring to a hypothetical scenario where you press the button to drop the bomb, and it's a dud, so nothing happened - you're still the same person who would have & did make that decision to kill a bunch of innocent people for the greater good.
There's a reason that I keep calling it Schrödinger's Gallifrey, and your analogy isn't quite an apropos comparison.
It's more like you were to suddenly cryogenically freeze someone in a device that had to be manually re-activated, and then hurl the device containing them (which somehow was capable of remaining functional and avoiding the spaghettification of being drawn in to a singularity) into a randomly selected black hole. Your job is to then find this black hole, figure out a way to breach the event horizon, and THEN still be able to recover them from the device. If no one ever found their location, reached it, and then saved them, please explain how what you did is different than killing them.
Hell, the father, mother, & son from The Family of Blood are subjected to fates are a FAR less extreme scenario to overcome, and THEY even have the potential of escaping them on their own (however EXTREMELY unlikely that may be). Their fates were created as torturous punishments though, whereas Gallifrey is also lost and everyone on it is also frozen in time. It's like Sleeping Beauty >9000. At its kindest, you're damning them if not directly murdering them.
Except that I'm not. I'm looking at the events of how the mechanics of time travel work, and it seems that the REAL issue that everyone's having is completely misunderstanding how bootstrapping and "re-writing" an event in the past works in Doctor Who.
The Moment is a trans-temporal consciousness, and the whole point is that she already knew what would happen to the Doctor if he burned Gallifrey as the War Doctor (just like we do as the audience at the time of The Day of the Doctor's airing). The Moment exists out of time in its perspective of the events - much like the TARDIS consciousness does. The Moment is to the Doctor in The Day of the Doctor, what The Doctor is to Clara in Heart of the TARDIS, but even moreso. Gallifrey DID burn. Saying that it never burned is the same as saying that Clara was never in the heart of the TARDIS, because that time was bootstrapped and rewritten for her from her timeline. Time was re-written for the Doctor by an even more powerful temporal consciousness than him, because of what what he became as a result of making that choice for the greater good, and because he's NOW the person who won't do that ever again. At the very last second, it even dragged in the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors INTO A TIME LOCKED EVENT. I don't think that there's any more clear indication that Gallifrey had previously been burned out of all of time and space by the War Doctor. You're staring into the very pretty face of the most powerful lovecraftian horror weapon that the Time Lords ever built, that introduces itself by sarcastically mimicking him with the words, "no more" which is what the entirety of the scenario that it creates. That scenario ISN'T, "Gallifrey Never Fell" it's "Gallifrey Falls. No More." Something can't be made to occur "no more" if it never happened in the first place.
X
- AKA
- Minato
Again, Gallifrey hasn't been found yet, we don't know anything at all about how difficult the quest will actually be. I'd make an adequated quess that Clara, a mere human, will have everything to contribute and further more that a good chunk of clues will be found on Earth early 21th century if Gallifrey isn't just found in a cupboard in London straight up. It may not be down to the Doctor alone. I'm sure Moffat will surprise us so I don't see any reason to already look at it like that the Doctor pretty signed their death warrants anyway.
- AKA
- TresDias
X said:
I didn't miss any point there because I wasn't responding to it. I quoted you saying "different consequences" because I was calling attention to the fact that consequence is what Y's post was about. You're not getting that.
X said:
X, I never thought I would facepalm at you, but I just did. =P
Yes, suddenly cryogenically freezing someone and subjecting them to all that you described would be tantamount to killing them. Only that's not what The Doctor did. Had he done nothing, they would have died. What he did was prevent their imminent, definite deaths by gambling with the possibility that they would never wake up.
Certain death or saved by risky sleep? That's not killing them. That's not the same thing as suddenly ambushing someone, freezing them and chucking them in a black hole for what I can only assume is shits and giggles instead of an attempt to save their life.
So, yes, what The Doctor did is like an induced coma for someone who would have otherwise died.
X said:
And what part of "the mechanics of how time travel works in DW" doesn't sound like an in-universe perspective to you? That's what you're' discussing.
We get how time travel works in the show just fine. What we're discussing is literary value.
- AKA
- X
Now you know how I feel every time I read something in this thread now.
So... what you're saying is:
• Disentegrating someone = killing them.
• Cryogenically black hole trapping someone = the equivalent of killing them.
• Cyrogenically black hole trapping someone about to be disentegrated = ...somehow NOT the equivalent as still killing them in a different way, because the underlying motivation is different?
That I would... sort of agree with. The whole purpose is that what he's doing he's doing for a different reason (because of the 400 years of experiences that he's had since burning all of Gallifrey and killing them directly) but to meet the same end - stopping the Time War. Again, this is all about Eleven's character development as the current Doctor being the prime story driving element here. (This is covered when the Doctor talks to the other Gallifreyan chap about this being the option for having hope).
banishing Kryptonians to the Phantom Zone vs. snapping Zod's neck to prevent him from destroying everybody on Earth, because this seemed to be the last story-related thing that people got vehemently up in arms about whose general situation comes closest to what's being discussed here.
I'd say that yes, his killing Zod added a lot to his character, and helped to establish why Superman doesn't just turn Lex Luthor into a stain on the pavement. Were he to go back in time by flying around the Earth really fast, and use a device to trap Zod helplessly and chuck him in the Phantom Zone (without changing who he became because of it), I don't really see the big issue.
I'd say that yes, his killing Zod added a lot to his character, and helped to establish why Superman doesn't just turn Lex Luthor into a stain on the pavement. Were he to go back in time by flying around the Earth really fast, and use a device to trap Zod helplessly and chuck him in the Phantom Zone (without changing who he became because of it), I don't really see the big issue.
The mechanics of time travel change the way that the mechanics of the story work. As a quick example, Looper, Terminator, & Doctor Who all deal with adjustments to past timelines VERY differently, and understanding how that works is a key to understanding why changes to a characters past do or don't invalidate things about the story that'd been built up to that point.
You're all bent out of shape because "Gallifrey Never Burned" so everything is rubbish, but the headcanon that Bad Wolf Rose un-burned Gallifrey somehow made everything ok for you.
The point I was making is that because of the mechanics of how the consciousness of The Moment exists across space-time and how adjustments to a single individual's timeline work in Doctor Who (examples given), Gallifrey STILL ALWAYS BURNED, and thus that argument that DotD was rubbish for making it so that "Gallifrey Never Burned" is completely and utterly incorrect, so that stance isn't even a valid argument against the actual story's literary value.
Bad Wolf Rose exists in a space-time frame of reference that is literally identical to that of The Moment in The Day of the Doctor. They both witness him across all of space and time, and in DotD The Moment's intervention only works because of who the Doctor becomes over the 400 years (with a little help to remember that because of Clara), which is at least equivalent (if not superior) to the Rose Tyler headcanon version of the events from the perspective of the story being told.
X