Yeah, same time as we see the actual regeneration into the Curator - btw surprised nobody picked up on the “wearing a bit thin” line?
Uhh, no, Hurt regenerated into Eccleston. He's a
past incarnation of the Doctor, not a future one -- that's the whole point of the story. That's also the point of Hurt's line about hoping his ears would be less prominent -- Eccleston had very prominent ears, and this line ties in with Eccleston's reaction to seeing his ears in the mirror in "Rose."
We are told the Daleks killed themselves completely in the crossfire.
And we know that those events were time locked.
How does that jive with what we learned about the Dalek's fate during Parting of the Ways and Stolen Earth?
So the Time War is STILL time locked, even though it ends differently than we thought?
It ends with the Daleks and Gallifrey both being removed from the universe -- it's just that Gallifrey went somewhere else and only
appeared to be blown up.
Surely the Doctor will find some way around the limit, but it won't be a given. I suspect Capaldi's Doctor's personality will be shaped by his awareness that he's the last
Eh? he knows he's not - that's the whole point of the scene with Tom Baker.
Hmm, maybe. But if he was crossing his timestream there, who knows if he'll remember it?
He may be accpeted as part of them as a 1200 year old + lifespan but he will never truly be one of the Doctor's.
That's not what his later selves said. They said he was more the Doctor than any of them.
I'm more interested in the daleks that weren't blockading Gallifrey. Are they alive now that the moment wasn't used?
There were none. The Time Lord generals said that the Daleks were throwing everything they had at Gallifrey.
See, this doesn't change anything. This is the way things always happened -- it's just that what
looked like Gallifrey's destruction was actually its removal to a pocket universe.
Well, that was a blast to watch, although at the same time I feel kind of let down. The episode felt like a rush job, we start off with Clara now a school teacher with no explanation of what the hell happened after the cliffhanger scene in Name of the Doctor. That kind of annoyed me.
That wasn't really a cliffhanger. We know the Doctor had arrived to bring Clara home, and we saw them turn and start to walk away. So that problem was essentially solved, even if we weren't shown the payoff.
I've been trying all summer to "correct" people who claim John Hurt is just a replacement because Christopher Eccleston turned things down, feeling that with the way the cliffhanger scene played out they would have had Hurt there anyway, but now I'm not so sure. Yes, Hurt was awesome and perfect for the role but it really kind of felt like it was originally written for Eccleston.
I don't see that. It felt like it was written for this Doctor, an older man who was nonetheless not yet haunted by the guilt of a choice he hadn't made yet. This Doctor was scornful of the others' quirky mannerisms and speech, but Eccleston's Doctor had a similar fast-talking, pop-culture-referencing style. This Doctor was distinctly his own man.
Doesn't this sappy "think of the children" reset button kind of ignore the fact that the Time Lords posed just as much a threat as the Daleks did? For that matter, isn't everything we just saw in The End of Time now undone?
Not necessarily. I don't think it's sappy to want to avoid punishing children for the sins of their leaders. I think that now that Gallifrey is frozen in time in a pocket universe, the Doctor has an opportunity -- and plenty of time --to think of a better way to deal with Rassilon and the corruption of the Council, a way that won't sacrifice the innocent.
And finally, a question. They aren't exactly too clear but is John Hurt's regeneration supposed to be the result of natural causes?
Old age, same as his first regeneration. Hence the reuse of the line "wearing a bit thin."
Frankly, as nice as it was to get a glimpse of the Time War and a war-ravaged Gallifrey, I was a bit disappointed, too. The mystery of the Time War, fought by "two almighty civilizations" as the Master put it, was that we really couldn't comprehend what that kind of war would be like. But apparently it's just a bunch of Daleks shooting at soldiers.
Could've been any war from any era. Took a lot of mystery out of it.
Well, we only saw its final battle. This wasn't a story about the Time War, it was a story about the ending of the war.
- How did the older doctors knew to come, did they use the Moment to break the timeline there as well?
I'd assume that the Doctors, with the help of the Moment/Bad Wolf, contacted their past selves and recruited them to participate in running the computation. Capaldi probably showed up because he remembered these events from his previous life, although the first eleven, Hurt included, no doubt forgot about the event afterward.
And I never thought Eleventh forgot about the Time War... just that he moved on, as all people eventually do when given the space and the time to do so (no pun intended). Sure, its great that he wanted to do that, but really, it was just forced.
If you avoided thinking about something for 400 years, you'd probably be foggy on its details too. It was never said that he'd literally forgotten the whole thing, just that he'd avoided facing the memory for a very long time.
And to me, it undermined completely the Hurt Doctor. Here's the Doctor at his darkest, and when he makes the decision that will haunt him for three more incarnations. At the very least, I was hoping he'd sacrifice himself for his future selfs, so that they and his past selves can save Gallifrey effectively while preventing the Daleks (or anyone else) from finding out the truth of Gallifrey's dissapearence. That way, he could still have a redeeming (for his wartime activities) ending.
He
did[]/i] have a redemptive ending. He participated in saving billions of lives. This isn't Battlestar Galactica or Game of Thrones or one of those fashionably dark and dismal franchises. Davies let the show become a little too dark, and I'm glad to see Moffat taking a more optimistic approach, where a hero can redeem his past mistakes without having to die in the process.
His regeneration in his TARDIS doesn't really make sense.
I think it works fine. People close to death often cling to life until some final goal is reached and then seem to let go and die soon thereafter. The War Doctor probably willed himself to keep going until he ended the war, and once that was resolved, he stopped fighting and let himself go.
Its wonderful, until the Zygon threat is dealt with (offscreen, sadly).
It's not offscreen. The Doctors deal with the threat by forcing the Zygons to conduct peace talks with UNIT. Everything after that is just long, dry negotiations which we wouldn't want to have onscreen.
And the absolute fankwank that is all the Doctors around Gallifrey was fantastic (which reminds me, was the First Doctor's dialogue newly recorded material from John Guilor?).
I hope so.
that being said, I don't see why we needed her back
