Okay, I haven't seen it....but based on comments here, it's made me rethink the title "End of Time". I know the Master comes back, and when I've heard the title, I've generally thought of the Master at the end of the time in his first NuWho appearance. But from what's been said about changing a fixed point.....I wonder if it means the end of time itself because something so fundamental has been changed?
Or maybe I'm just slow and that's been the general feeling all along? I'm wondering if we don't get a kindof Trek 09 thing going.....what if the Tardis looks new, not because it regenerated, but because certain elements have been altered\reset and we're back at the begining. Smith could be the first doctor in this altered reality....it also solves the problem the Doctor being near the end of his regenerations (they've never mentioned the 12 limitation IRC in the new series, so who knows if it even exists now).
And it also allows the slate to be wiped clean, while like Trek 09, still acknowledges what came before.
I've thought, for a
really long time that, when Davies' era is said and done, he's going to push the giant fucking reset button and bring back Gallifrey and the Time Lords. At this point, I'm
still rating that at about a 70 percent probability.
The reason has to do with toys.
If you think of
Doctor Who as a toybox, Davies has played with a lot of toys. He hasn't damaged the toys, but he's showing us different
pieces of the toys. The one toy that Davies hasn't played with is Gallifrey and the Time Lords. He showed us that toy wasn't in the box anymore.
But it's not Davies' toy to take out of the box
permanently. The toy still exists. It's just not in the box.
Davies is passing his box of toys to Moffat. Davies has added a couple of new toys to the box, like Captain Jack and Martha and the Slitheen, but it's not his place to take a toy away and keep it. Davies has to put the Gallifrey/Time Lords toy back in the box, so that Moffat is getting all the same toys to play with that RTD started playing with Philip Segal's toys or that Segal started playing with John Nathan-Turner's toys.
Maybe RTD will be ambiguous about
how he puts the toy back in the box, in the way that Lance Parkin and Justin Richards were ambiguous about the way the Gallifrey/Time Lords toy got put back into the box for "Rose" in
The Gallifrey Chronicles. And yes, there's an outside chance that the toy won't be put back into the box, because it's not a toy that Moffat wants to play with
right now, or that he has no intention of playing with.
But the toy
is going to get put back. It's just a question of how and when.
And I'm rating RTD as putting the toy back into the toybox at about 70 percent. Maybe, once I've seen "The Waters of Mars," I'll revise my estimate.