Doctor Who!!~

[Ⓐaron]

He played a part in "The Fires of Pompeii" and he also played a major role in Children of Earth. Time Lords regenerating into other people's forms is not unprecedented; Romana II is an example. Colin Baker also appeared in one of Five's stories.

And Tres you're not sincerely suggesting that the devil wouldn't lie, I hope?

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

No, but I am suggesting The Doctor didn't go all "what the fuck are you on about? I never did that." The Beast's whole schtick in that scene was taunting everyone with who he was and demonstrating the knoweldge he had about them, proving his identity.

 

[Ⓐaron]

He might have just been too stunned to respond or have assumed the devil was counting permanent stasis as death or who knows what. I didn't take it literally at the time.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Except The Doctor did respond after momentarily being stunned into silence at what was said, and he did so without denying the claim. No one else had spoken yet, so it's not like anyone else changed the topic either.

Anyway, he had previously referred to the Time Lords as dead anyway (e.g. "The Parting of the Ways"). There's also the direct analogy drawn between what he had to do at Pompeii and what had to happen to Gallifrey. He referred to them as dead there too.

Whether Gallifrey burned, whether the Time Lords were dead and whether The Doctor did it have literally never, ever been in question.

You're taking Moffat Apologist to a wacky new level here, brother.

 

[Ⓐaron]

Well, as I said repeatedly, if the Time Lords were actually literally dead then the entire plot of The End of Time would have been completely impossible. So Moffat definitely didn't start the inconsistency here.

 

[Dana Scully]

@aaron: But the Time Lords weren't killed until after The End of Time. The entire point of EoT was them trying to not die.

Spoiler: the 50th vs a selection of quotes from series 1-4: an exercise in FUN

Bad Wolf:
The Controller: "I hid you inside the games. [The Daleks], they fear the Doctor." (to the Daleks) "You can kill me now. I have brought your destruction." (I guess she's counting on him vanishing the Game Station while the Daleks miraculously kill themselves, FOOLPROOF)

Parting of the Ways:
The Emperor: "You destroyed us, Doctor. The Dalek race died in your inferno but my ship survived." (I particularly like this quote, coming from the Emperor himself, who was not only there but the leader of a highly advanced and intelligent race. I can totally believe he mistook the crossfire of his own ships and Gallifrey winking away as 'the Doctor's inferno'.)

Bad Wolf: "The Time War ends." (Considering Rose could at this point see the past, the present, and the future(s), you think she could've been like, "Btw, Doctor, the Time War ended with you not slaughtering 2.47 billion children and their maypoles, just don't forget to show up at Gallifrey 400 years from now to complete the remarkably convenient time loop and save them! Here I will mark it in your calendar so you don't forget.")

The Satan Pit:
The Beast: "Killer of his own kind." (I mean, I guess he could've been lying, just to fuck with the Doctor's unnecessary guilt complex, but considering he told the truth about everyone else...)

Doomsday:
Dalek Sec: "[The ark] is all that survives of [Gallifrey]." (So the Doctor transported the entire planet into a pocket universe...except for this ONE PIECE OF TECHNOLOGY. Man thank god it wasn't a child or something he accidentally left floating in space, that would've been awkward.)

Last of the Time Lords:
...The episode is called Last of the Time Lords. I guess they figured "Last of the Time Lords Except for the Billions of Them That Are Hiding Somewhere in Stasis" was too wordy for the TV guides.

The End of Time:
Time Lady: "He still possesses the Moment, and he'll use it to destroy Daleks and Time Lords alike."
Time Lord: "The Visionary confirms it."
The Visionary: "Ending. Burning. Falling. All of it falling. The black and pitch and screaming fire, so burning."
Time Lord: "All of her prophecies say the same. That this is the last day of the Time War. That Gallifrey falls. That we die. Today."
The Visionary: "End, ending, ending."
(Clearly they need to hire a new prophet this chick is terrible if she mistakes being stasis'd safely away into a pocket universe with dying in flames)

I decided not to include the, you know, dozens of times the Doctor mentions his own recollections of destroying Gallifrey and watching the Dalek ships burn and his planet being dust and being the last of his kind because that, of course, can all be explained by the Doctor forgetting/making his own do-it-yourself adventure book (or better yet, the Doctor lying! Because everyone knows the Doctor lies and everyone loves an utterly unreliable narrator especially when it's the hero of the show).

Anyways, I'm done participating in this debate. I could handle the arguments claiming the retcon made sense/wasn't really a retcon but tbqh you lost me the moment you claimed that the Doctor's genocide was "indefensible" when it's been irrefutable canon since 2005.

Cya guys in a couple weeks when the Christmas special airs.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

When you get back, Y, know I'll love you as much then as I do right this moment.

 

[Ⓐaron]

@aaron: But the Time Lords weren't killed until after The End of Time. The entire point of EoT was them trying to not die.

But the point is that if they escaped in EoT, they can escape again. If the Time Lords prove any threat whatsoever in this episode, then their death is not a foregone conclusion. If it is a foregone conclusion, then the entire episode would be completely bereft of dramatic tension.

The Controller: "I hid you inside the games. [The Daleks], they fear the Doctor." (to the Daleks) "You can kill me now. I have brought your destruction." (I guess she's counting on him vanishing the Game Station while the Daleks miraculously kill themselves, FOOLPROOF)

This... isn't really changed by the 50th? I'm not even sure what you're bringing this quote up for.

The Emperor: "You destroyed us, Doctor. The Dalek race died in your inferno but my ship survived." (I particularly like this quote, coming from the Emperor himself, who was not only there but the leader of a highly advanced and intelligent race. I can totally believe he mistook the crossfire of his own ships and Gallifrey winking away as 'the Doctor's inferno'.)

Again this isn't changed by the 50th either. The Daleks (except the ones that survived) were still killed in the 50th. In fact the 50th honestly is a somewhat more credible explanation of how some of the Daleks managed to survive for me. The idea that the Doctor, using the most powerful weapon in the universe, could fail to destroy some Daleks is a lot less plausible than that he left them to destroy each other when they thought they were destroying Gallifrey and somehow missed a few.

The Moment is depicted as the most powerful weapon in the universe so it's probably possible to use it to create an inferno after Gallifrey winks away to make it look like Gallifrey burned.

Bad Wolf: "The Time War ends." (Considering Rose could at this point see the past, the present, and the future(s), you think she could've been like, "Btw, Doctor, the Time War ended with you not slaughtering 2.47 billion children and their maypoles, just don't forget to show up at Gallifrey 400 years from now to complete the remarkably convenient time loop and save them! Here I will mark it in your calendar so you don't forget.")

If Rose can see all possible futures then perhaps she knows that telling the Doctor what really happened would have undesirable consequences. Perhaps it would drastically alter his personality and prevent him from doing things he needs to do, or perhaps without his guilt he would get so up his own ego that he becomes Time Lord Victorious on a permanent basis, or who knows what. As the War Doctor points out indirectly towards the end of DotD, his own suffering made him into a better person.

The Beast: "Killer of his own kind." (I mean, I guess he could've been lying, just to fuck with the Doctor's unnecessary guilt complex, but considering he told the truth about everyone else...)

Putting someone into an inescapable stasis from which they will never escape could certainly be considered killing them in a way. Indeed, if they remain in stasis until the end of the universe, it literally is killing them.

Beyond that, it's entirely possible that the pocket universe solution put Gallifrey beyond the Beast's potential for knowledge, and more likely the only reason the Beast even knew about Gallifrey is because he read the Doctor's mind (this appears to be what he's done with the other characters as well).

Dalek Sec: "[The ark] is all that survives of [Gallifrey]." (So the Doctor transported the entire planet into a pocket universe...except for this ONE PIECE OF TECHNOLOGY. Man thank god it wasn't a child or something he accidentally left floating in space, that would've been awkward.)

Again, "survive" sort of implies that it's accessible and in this universe. Remember how Rose said "This is the day that I died" in "Doomsday"? And it turns out her "death" turned out to be being quarantined in an alternate universe without the Doctor? This kind of thing is not exactly unprecedented in Whoniverse canon.

For that matter the Daleks have no way of knowing what actually happened to Gallifrey. The whole point of using the pocket universe was that it fooled them into thinking Gallifrey was destroyed, thus ending the Time War.

...The episode is called Last of the Time Lords. I guess they figured "Last of the Time Lords Except for the Billions of Them That Are Hiding Somewhere in Stasis" was too wordy for the TV guides.

As far as anyone in the episode knows, the Doctor and the Master are the last of the Time Lords. The whole point behind the 50th was making everyone think Gallifrey had been destroyed. Even if they were planning the return of Gallifrey eventually (which admittedly Davies probably wasn't), why the hell would they give that away in an episode title literally five years before it happened?

The End of Time:
Time Lady: "He still possesses the Moment, and he'll use it to destroy Daleks and Time Lords alike."
Time Lord: "The Visionary confirms it."
The Visionary: "Ending. Burning. Falling. All of it falling. The black and pitch and screaming fire, so burning."
Time Lord: "All of her prophecies say the same. That this is the last day of the Time War. That Gallifrey falls. That we die. Today."
The Visionary: "End, ending, ending."
(Clearly they need to hire a new prophet this chick is terrible if she mistakes being stasis'd safely away into a pocket universe with dying in flames)

Or else the prophecy was just misinterpreted, as literally hundreds of prophecies in other sci-fi and fantasy works have been. It's practically a foregone conclusion in fiction involving prophecy that it is metaphorical and usually doesn't mean what people think it means. The number of times a prophecy is played straight and turns out to mean exactly what people expect it to mean is so greatly outweighed by the number of times it's subverted that it was honestly a shock when Doctor Who appeared to play it straight.

Anyways, I'm done participating in this debate. I could handle the arguments claiming the retcon made sense/wasn't really a retcon but tbqh you lost me the moment you claimed that the Doctor's genocide was "indefensible" when it's been irrefutable canon since 2005.

Except that out, basically none of these quotes clearly states that the Doctor killed all his people, and the ones that do are mostly from characters who have no reason to know better.

I accepted the characterisation at the time because I hadn't seen any of the Classic Who episodes when I watched series one through four, but after watching and thinking about Genesis of the Daleks I realised how stupid and inconsistent a case of characterisation it was. I figured, however, that the explanation for what actually happened in the Time War when it arrived would be a lot more complicated than anything we'd been shown thus far, and lo and behold, it was.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Except that out, basically none of these quotes clearly states that the Doctor killed all his people, and the ones that do are mostly from characters who have no reason to know better.

"Killer of his own kind" doesn't do it? Even presuming that The Beast was going purely off reading The Doctor's mind, that means Ten believed he had killed them. Which is quite a different thing from putting them in stasis.

And, again: "The Fires of Pompeii." Conversation between Donna and The Doctor. They talk about Gallifrey burning like Pompeii and The Doctor says he would go back and save his own people too if it were possible.

So, yeah. He killed them. Not stasis-ed them. Burned them alive.

Hell, one of the people in that episode with the ability to see through time speaks of visions of Gallifrey burning.

It's firmly, inescapably part of the way things were before.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

So, X, you do feel that Gallifrey originally burned? I want to believe that, and it would fix everything if it did, but in the quote Y linked, Moffat does say he decided that it never happened in the first place and The Doctor only thought it did because he couldn't remember (due to future incarnations being there, presumably).

Sorry, went on hiatus from this thread for a little bit. Aaron's done a kick-ass job saying all the things that I would've (and frequently much better and more clearly as he usually does), but I don't think that this's been addressed.

Idgaf what Moffat says in interviews. Anything that's not immediately in the show itself isn't to be trusted, and even things in the show are only somewhat trustable (as Aaron pointed out with The Impossible Astronaut).



Yes. Gallifrey totally burned at one point in one timeline.




Sorry this is going to be hella long, and overly in-depth about time-travel mechanics, but time travel as a storytelling device is a TINY BIT of a scifi obsession of mine.




Doctor Who isn't like Looper, where overwriting a timeline completely negates it, but it's also not at all like Terminator where each timeline just keeps branching out, and people from other timelines step in. It's... something almost inbetween. This is cleared up by having Timelines and Timestreams. A Timeline is just that. It's the shortest point from A to B, or Past to Present. A TimeSTREAM is something that happens when you travel through time, and that's what allows anyone to follow the progression of events that your PERSONAL history took in, through, and around the linear A to B. Easy way to look at it: Lines are straight & efficient, Streams bend and twist.


NOW.

This gets EXCEPTIONALLY messy when you affect your own personal history, because now you're not just making changes to a Timeline, you're also crossing into your OWN TimeSTREAM. This means that if you do it in a way that's too noticeable (because we don't have branching Terminator-like multiple timelines that prevent this) you can generate a Paradox that can cause any NUMBER of fucked up consequences: see Turn Left. This is because space-time in Doctor Who has rules to correct itself that manifest in any number of ways, but there are some rules that are explicitly defined:

There are Fixed Points, and Time Locks. Time Locks prevent you from Ctrl+Z'ing your way out of every scenario with Time Travel and especially surrounds particular events that have been HEAVILY FUCKED by excessive time travel through a single point in Space/Time (essentially Izanagi & Izanami in Naruto). This is why New York with the Angels is locked, ditto with the end of the Time War. Essentially everything is too damaged there to keep using time travel as an opt out. Imagine taking a line on a piece of paper and just drawing a loop to direct the line differently, and then undoing that change with another loop. Now keep doing that. When everything starts turning into too much of a mess, that area gets time locked. (Hence why the Doctor almost burned all of Manhattan just trying to LAND the TARDIS in New York in The Angels Take Manhattan). That's why at some point, the High Council said - if we can't win, and there's no more time traveling to correct it - fuck 'em all, we'll just stop the line here.

Now, Fixed points keep changes fluxuating within a certain degree of the point that you're at. You can still get around that if you're doing something TOTALLY fucked, like collapsing the universe, or blowing up Earth before Pompeii happened or something. Fixed POINTS matter DURING that point. That's why Jack Harkness keeps not dying, because the fixed point of him being alive in each moment of his death happens in his own timeline so the rule tells his death event to fuck of, and reverses it. Time fixes itself according to at LEAST those set rules. What makes this different from Looper is how it affects (or rather doesn't affect) the time traveller themselves.


NOW.

DotD starts because there's a trans-spacetime entity (The Moment) who's capable of "bending" these existing rules, but also not. If you don't exist within spacetime in a linear fashion, you aren't limited to traveling through it in a Timeline or a Timestream. The Moment's interface, Bad Wolf Rose, & the TARDIS exist across all of space and time at once. They're basically in a TimePLANE, which is as different as a line is to a plane. You're looking at a MUCH higher dimensional being. What's time locked to everyone in the universe, is capable of being bypassed by means we'll never have access to from within those constraints. That means that even events that are time locked to linear time travel can still be changed.

Now, re-imagine that line on a paper with the gigantic mess of fucked up loops around it that're so complicated that you can't draw any more to it. What those fancy-looking rifts that The Moment creates are the equivalent of lifting something UP off of the paper, and setting it down. There's nothing in the way UP OR DOWN, but the limitations of the timetravel that makes you travel on the paper means that it's not anything you'd be able to do.

This is ESSENTIALLY how you get the Doctor into a timelocked event, but now you have to contend with the fact that this is not ONLY an attempt to make a change to the existing TimeLINE in a way that's small enough that nothing's disrupted, it ALSO crosses into his own TimeSTREAM.

When The Eleventh Doctor is picked up off the paper and set down, back in the latest Present of his TimeStream. He retains all the knowledge of what happened that got him here, and what he changed. The other previous Doctors don't, because they all NEED to keep travelling through that line on the paper to get to that "Present" of his timeline. That's why he "kind of" remembers things as they're happening (this is a lot like what's seen in Looper with memories autocorrecting themselves when the past is changed, but this effect is localized ONLY to the individual passing into their own timestream in Doctor Who once they're made aware of it, and not ANY change in the past). The other Doctors are basically stuck at being fixed points of Eleven's own past, so they can't retain the information once they leave being together. They all snap back into place.



NOW.

Personal TimeLINES are straight. No zig-zagging from Point to Point. If Eleven looks back into his own TimeLINE - he'll be able to see back to where he and the other 12 Doctors hid Gallifrey Away, because it's only as of the Present moment that that became true. This is the same for if 10 could look back into his own timeline, he doesn't see it, but Gallifrey is just gone, not burned. This is just like Clara looking back in her own timeLINE - she never died in the depths of the TARDIS.

However, from the perspective of both the audience, as well as from the time travellers once they're able to non-paradoxically encounter the information they no longer HAVE timelines. Amy wonders why she remembers having parents and not having parents - this is because she has a timeSTREAM. She both did and didn't have parents. That's why when the world is rewritten without the Doctor, her memory interrupts the timeline during her wedding. She's essentially forcing the Whoniverse rules of time travel to self-correct and allow both of her pasts to exist simultaneously merging at that point. You now have a line with a little line segment going off and away, but they both meet at a single point: Amy's past WITH parents continues through in a line, however, the POINT at her wedding where it self corrects has a non-parallel line segment of her not having parents, but bringing her to the same place. That timeline ends, because the FUTURE that continues is one where she has parents, but her timestream allows her to have experienced both in a non-linear fashion via timetravel.

This is the same with burned Gallifrey. It's there, but it's around the corner in a timeline now, which means it didn't happen ANY MORE. If you look at it in the Doctor's TimeSTREAM, it's still very much there. I always look at the SHOW Doctor Who as the Doctor's Timestream AKA, his "scar tissue of [his] journey through the universe" because we're following him, not drawing a new timeline every time things change. We follow him along the loops, so we're not someone in the future of that universe who can say, "Gallifrey never burned, the Doctor saved it!" both as an audience and the Doctor can say, "Gallifrey DID burn, and that's WHY the Doctor saved it."


Also, this took WAAAAAAYYYYY too much time to write, and I swear that - if requested, I will draw every single linear/non-linear analogy that I made, and upload them all to help this all make sense.



@ ALL your quotes: They're all going TO versions of the Doctor where, if they change who Eleven becomes and the event doesn't play out that way (why Bad Wolf Rose doesn't just tell him), as well as coming FROM individuals within a point in a timeline where that's currently the reality: It's like people telling Amy she had no parents when she still didn't.



X

 

[Ⓐaron]

@Tres: All of these examples state at most that the Doctor thinks he killed them (or, in the one case, that the Daleks think he killed him), except the prophecy, and I already addressed how prophecy in fiction almost never actually means what people think it means.

But all of this is irrelevant because The End of Time proved that if the Time Lords managed to escape once and pose a credible threat, then even if they did in fact burn this status was not set in stone (in other words, the destruction of Gallifrey was not a fixed point in history but merely time-locked). As it turns out the explanation was simply that no one saw what they thought they saw, which, again, is far from unprecedented in Whoniverse canon (see, again, The Impossible Astronaut or, to a lesser extent, The Key to Time).

 

[Tennyo]

I'll accept that we may not have to rely upon Moffat's remarks as definitive since, as you say, Aaron, Moffat is a certifiable asshole (we wouldn't be having this conversation if he wasn't) and since his description of what happened in "The Day of the Doctor" doesn't match what was shown on-screen (The Doctors ready to kill Gallifrey and its people, which would undoubtedly have happened without intervention), but I do have to take issue with this excuse for the development:



It was clearly established long before "The End of Time" that The Doctor killed the Time Lords. For an obvious example, in "The Satan Pit," The Devil refers to The Doctor as "killer of his own kind."

Stasis was never a suggested possibility.

And Tres you're not sincerely suggesting that the devil wouldn't lie, I hope?

No, but I am suggesting The Doctor didn't go all "what the fuck are you on about? I never did that." The Beast's whole schtick in that scene was taunting everyone with who he was and demonstrating the knoweldge he had about them, proving his identity.

He might have just been too stunned to respond or have assumed the devil was counting permanent stasis as death or who knows what. I didn't take it literally at the time.

Except The Doctor did respond after momentarily being stunned into silence at what was said, and he did so without denying the claim. No one else had spoken yet, so it's not like anyone else changed the topic either.

Anyway, he had previously referred to the Time Lords as dead anyway (e.g. "The Parting of the Ways"). There's also the direct analogy drawn between what he had to do at Pompeii and what had to happen to Gallifrey. He referred to them as dead there too.

Whether Gallifrey burned, whether the Time Lords were dead and whether The Doctor did it have literally never, ever been in question.

You're taking Moffat Apologist to a wacky new level here, brother.

Well, as I said repeatedly, if the Time Lords were actually literally dead then the entire plot of The End of Time would have been completely impossible. So Moffat definitely didn't start the inconsistency here.

I am so confused.

1.) The 50th made a big show of telling us that both Ten and the War Doctor do not remember the events that took place. Most likely neither do any of the Doctor's other past incarnations. Only Eleven and probably Twelve/Capaldi will. This means that seasons 1-7 happen the exact same way and The Doctor believes that he really did burn Gallifrey.

2.) End of Time IS consistent because the High Council was trying to escape the time lock from a point BEFORE The Doctor used The Moment. They hadn't been burnt yet.

3.) Somewhat completely unrelated but I just realized this all means

Spoiler

The Master isn't dead, either. RTD pretty much effectively killed him off for good in End of Time because The Master got sucked back behind the Time Lock with the rest of the Time Lords, meaning that he would have been present on Gallifrey when it got roasted. Now he's still there, and presumably taking out the High Council, which will make things easier for The Doctor, I'm sure. lol

Imagine

Spoiler

The Doctor finds Gallifrey and The Master is now in control.

looooooooooool

 

[Ⓐaron]

3.) Somewhat completely unrelated but I just realized this all means

Spoiler

The Master isn't dead, either. RTD pretty much effectively killed him off for good in End of Time because The Master got sucked back behind the Time Lock with the rest of the Time Lords, meaning that he would have been present on Gallifrey when it got roasted. Now he's still there, and presumably taking out the High Council, which will make things easier for The Doctor, I'm sure. lol

Imagine

Spoiler

The Doctor finds Gallifrey and The Master is now in control.

looooooooooool

oh god you have no idea how much I hope this happens

 

[X-SOLDIER]

That'd be rad, except

Spoiler

Gallifrey is frozen in a single moment, "like a painting" so no one's doing anything, otherwise the High Council would be douching up the whole planet.

X

 

[Ⓐaron]

Spoiler

You just have to crush everyone's dreams don't you Realistically though, I guess there's a possibility the Doctor can remove it from stasis before he finds it. Maybe.

 

[Tennyo]

That'd be rad, except

Spoiler

Gallifrey is frozen in a single moment, "like a painting" so no one's doing anything, otherwise the High Council would be douching up the whole planet.

X

Semantics.

Sim!Master for President!

 

[Roger]

I expect we'll see the Master again sooner then we'll see Gallifrey.

 

[Tennyo]

I don't think that would be possible. How would he escape from stasis?

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

@Tres: All of these examples state at most that the Doctor thinks he killed them ...

Exactly. He thinks he disintegrated them, not put them on ice.

So, coming back round to your original claim that Moffat traded one form of stasis for another: nope.

But all of this is irrelevant because The End of Time proved that if the Time Lords managed to escape once and pose a credible threat, then even if they did in fact burn this status was not set in stone (in other words, the destruction of Gallifrey was not a fixed point in history but merely time-locked).

Whether someome could plausibly Houdini their way out of this thing wasn't what we were debating. You argued that past references to the end of the Time War had left ambiguous whether the planet burned and whether the Time Lords died. These quotes are explicit, not ambiguous.

I'll take your point that Moffat can't be trusted as far as I can kick him, but I'm going to have to come at you tooth and nail if you want to excuse his shenanigans with the assertion that "killer of his own kind," "your world was lost in fire," "your inferno," "the Time Lords died for nothing," "screaming fire" and "Ending. Burning. Falling" are ambiguous.

And what about this exchange in "Dalek"?:

The Doctor: "Your race is dead! You all burned, all of you! Ten million ships on fire! The entire Dalek race wiped out in one second!"
Dalek: "YOU LIE!"
The Doctor: "I watched it happen! I MADE IT HAPPEN!"

Case closed.

As it turns out the explanation was simply that no one saw what they thought they saw, which, again, is far from unprecedented in Whoniverse canon (see, again, The Impossible Astronaut or, to a lesser extent, The Key to Time).

You know, even if a soothsayer from Pompeii wouldn't know what a world drowning in fire might actually look like, you'd think the Emperor of all Daleks might know the difference between that and a planet pulling a Nightcrawler after he had been carrying on a long-term war that saw the destruction of many worlds. And iust maybe he might pick a different wording than "your inferno" if The Moment was never used, what with him otherwise knowing nothing about The Moment.

 

[Ⓐaron]

The quotes are not ambiguous that the Doctor and the Daleks think Gallifrey burned. However, a central theme of Doctor Who throughout its run has always been that things are often more complicated than they seem, especially in a universe full of perception filters and time travel and all kinds of other science-fiction goodies. If you take the Daleks and the Doctor as reliable narrators, then certainly the show isn't ambiguous about what happened, but we all know that the Doctor has never been a reliable source of information and the Daleks are a race of omnicidal maniacs so they're probably not the most reliable source of information either. So I guess how big of a retcon this this qualifies as to you depends on whether you ever thought the Doctor and the Daleks were reliable sources of information. The events certainly were not depicted firsthand.

You know, even if a soothsayer from Pompeii wouldn't know what a world drowning in fire might actually look like, you'd think the Emperor of all Daleks might know the difference between that and a planet pulling a Nightcrawler after he had been carrying on a long-term war that saw the destruction of many worlds. And iust maybe he might pick a different wording than "your inferno" if The Moment was never used, what with him otherwise knowing nothing about The Moment.

That's exactly why I said the Moment evidently still was used. The difference is it was used after Gallifrey was whisked away to safety, making it appear that Gallifrey was consumed in a ball of fire.

 

[Novus]

What is everyone's thoughts on 'The two doctors'?

It's quite accessible unlike some of the older serials and is in the 45-minute format (although has a few parts).
The reason I'm bringing it up is because we get a very different Doctor to the one Moffat is describing.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

After watching the 50th again just now with the assumption that The Doctor's history is changing and that Gallifrey's fate is being altered, it's actually surprisingly easy to see it in those terms.

Ten: "All those years, burying you in my memory."
Eleven: "Pretending you didn't exist. Keeping you a secret, even from myself."
Ten: "Pretending you weren't The Doctor, when you were The Doctor more than anyone else."
Eleven: "You were The Doctor on the day it wasn't possible to get it right."
Ten: "But this time ..."
Eleven: "You don't have to do it alone."

Ten: "You're not actually suggesting we change our own personal history?"
Eleven: "We change history all the time."

Eleven: "Because the alternative is burning."
Ten: "I've seen that."
Eleven: "And I never want to see it again."

Whatever Moffat said in that interview, I feel like he did write this with the destruction of Gallifrey being a definite event in The Doctor's personal past. Ten and Eleven do speak of it as though they remember it clearly.

And I suppose The Doctor really did come to accept what he did before and realize he could have moved on from it without changing it. Ten and Eleven offered The War Doctor their forgiveness/support/respect and acknowledged that this murderer of billions was still The Doctor. The best one, in fact. The one who made the tough, necessary choice that was the only one he could make that day under those original circumstances. I think he really would have been okay if he'd had to do it again. He did forgive himself.

I think what threw me off on the first viewing was that Eleven said he was starting to remember this series of events when that time distortion appeared in front of him. I initially assumed that meant nothing new was happening for him. But time being the weird thing it is on occasion, maybe he would still get that hazy bit of recollection even with his personal timeline about to be re-written. The same distortion had "just" appeared in front of Ten and TWD too, after all, so even as time was in flux, that was technically still already an event in Eleven's past.

Shit, I think I actually liked the 50th this time around. How did that happen?

 

[X-SOLDIER]

@Tres: This makes.me quite happy to hear.



The trailer for The Time of The Doctor is out…

TT___TT




X

 

[Carlie]

I don't like seeing Daleks in Moffat episodes, he has ruined them in his era.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

I don't like seeing Daleks in Moffat episodes, he has ruined them in his era.

The Daleks have only REALLY shown up in four episodes in his run, and of those, they've only been the completely featured enemy in TWO: Victory of the Daleks & Asylum of the Daleks. (They're present with everyone else during Pandorica Opens and kinda dangerously present in Big Bang but they're not really the sole conflict to overcome). So Asylum of the Daleks is really the only episode that he's specifically written all about them by Moffat. I'm not sure how you feel that they've been ruined, but I'd be interested to hear how/why.



I feel that they've been significantly improved. The Daleks during Moffat's run haven't ever really been defeated during ANY of their encounters (which I'll address shortly), and at best their interactions can be considered a stalemate. Asylum in particular I found to be really enjoyable - you get to see a lot of the really creepy inner workings of how they spread their ranks, and the use of subjects as remote controlled spies felt like they were still the enslavers shown back in old episodes like The Dalek Invasion of Earth when it suits their immediate objectives.

When I started NuWho the Daleks were pretty intimidating - ESPECIALLY at first, but as the RTD Era progressed, they ended up being pretty ridiculous to me. By the time there were whole armies of them pouring out of the Genesis Ark, I found them to be quite laughable, because they suffered SO heavily from the same thing that General Grievous did during the early parts of the Star Wars Clone Wars show. Moffat has even avoided using them to address this exact issue and said, "There's a problem with the Daleks. They are the most famous of the Doctor's adversaries and the most frequent, which means they are the most reliably defeatable enemies in the universe." so I think that he's done quite well with them when he has decided to use them.

I've been feeling that way about the Cybermen as well. Nightmare in Silver ALMOST overcame it with the platoon being pretty fucked against the couple of them, but then they totally undid that when they've got a whole army at the front gates, suddenly all of their terrifying lightning-speed superpowers are gone, and they're back to sort of lumberingly stomping around and pretending to be dangerous until they get defeated.



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