The Day of the Doctore Review Thread (Spoilers?)

[ROBE]

There is the theory the Second Doctor was used for secret missions by the Time Lords before he was forced to regenerate. This explains why he told the Brig in the 5 Doctors he shouldn't be visiting him and how he ran into number 6 when doing work for the Time Lords.

 

[Skellington]

Well, accept the Second Doctor clearly remembered Omega and the Third Doctor in The Five Doctors. Perhaps in some cases the memory loss is gradual?

No wonder he was so nonchalant about facing a WWI execution squad in The War Games.

And if the Doctor had been working on the calculations to save Gallifrey since his first incarnation, he would have to have remembered it all up to his current self....except he didn't appear to, as it was clearly new to him.

I think it was the TARDIS that was running those calculations. (Maybe it commandeered the chameleon circuit's processing ability to do it.)

There is the theory the Second Doctor was used for secret missions by the Time Lords before he was forced to regenerate. This explains why he told the Brig in the 5 Doctors he shouldn't be visiting him and how he ran into number 6 when doing work for the Time Lords.

It also explains why he is aware in The Five Doctors (itself thirty years old around now) that an older Jamie and Zoe shouldn't remember their travels with him, their memories having been wiped at the end of The War Games.
To his credit, Terrance Dicks (who co-wrote TWG and wrote TFD) explicitly recognised the season 6B explanation when he wrote the novel World Game.

 

[Haggis and tatties]

How?

That wasn't the fourth Doctor, it was the Nth Doctor.

What about the Valeyard? Technically also a "Doctor" according to the Master. Or we have to wait for Smith to become Capaldi before we talk about him? Lol jk


I thought the episode was great. However that Zygon subplot though.... Uh a resolution would've been nice. Or was it just filler to pad out the episode?

Who Knows?

HA, it's funny how we all see diffrent stuff, i took that bit as a refrence to Pertwee's DR, and the whole nose thing. lol.

 

[Lonemagpie]

So the timeline I worked out is.
Eight becomes Warrior

Warrior end the Time War alone using The Moment

Regens into 9th (Eccleston) for series 1

9th becomes 10th(Tennant) for series 2 -specials that ended in 2010.

10th and the Master prevent Rassilon and the Timelords from escaping the timelocked events of the Timewar. This includes preventing the Timelords from carrying out their mad plan to extinguish all life in the universe and become pure energy/conscience.

Actually, Ten is obviously from between Waters Of Mars and End Of Time Part 1 - he talks about Queen Elizabeth in the latter, and is travelling alone - which means that by End Of Time he knows that Gallifrey wasn't destroyed, but locked into the last day of the war for all eternity.

Which in turn retroactively makes that episode make sense, since prior to it Gallifrey had been referred to as destroyed.

Whether the War Doctor ever actually did destroy it originally, or whether the Moment's conscience always did this to avoid it, we can never know - but in either case Nine thinks he did destroy it, until Ten finds out otherwise between Waters Of Mars and End Of Time. Eleven then "half remembers" bits of the events, but only really the bits interacting with Ten - partly because of the timey wimey mindey wipey effect, partly because Nine and Ten spent time trying to forget, and partly because Ten regenerated so soon after learning the truth, which always scrambles him a bit.

 

[Venardhi]

I think your interpretation of The End of Time is a little wonky there. The council was trying to find a way out of the time lock because they knew they were possibly moments away from the Doctor unleashing the moment on them and destroying the planet and all of them. The moment hadn't yet happened to them, but the events were still time-locked either through the natural forces of the universe or by The Doctor intentionally. It just meant they couldn't change their fate the way they normally do by going back and eliminating a threat before it became a threat, not that they were already in the hidden pocket Gallifrey-verse established in the 50th.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

I like the idea that Ten remembered the events of The Day of the Doctor as suggested by Lonemagpie, and I'd add that during the regenerative process (the goodbye tour), he gradually allowed temporal amensia to sink in.

As flawed as End of Time is, it works both as a story before the events of the 50th's special, and afterwards. Its strangely continuity-proof.

 

[Lonemagpie]

But since the earlier Doctors' memories of the crossover were erased, the last memory the Doctor has is of himself standing over the Moment with his hand on the button. And then he would've come back to himself and found himself in a universe where Gallifrey and the Daleks were assumed to have mutually destroyed each other. So he would've assumed he'd pressed the button and blacked out from the effects of the Moment.

Which nicely ties in to previous Time Lord weaponry having that effect on the user - i.e. the Demat Gun in Invasion Of Time.

 

[Christopher]

Well, accept the Second Doctor clearly remembered Omega and the Third Doctor in The Five Doctors. Perhaps in some cases the memory loss is gradual?

Well, Eleven did say he vaguely remembered the business with the time vortex and the fez. But it was an unclear memory.

Ultimately there's no way to make perfect sense of Who continuity. Any explanation is going to have gaps.

And if the Doctor had been working on the calculations to save Gallifrey since his first incarnation, he would have to have remembered it all up to his current self....except he didn't appear to, as it was clearly new to him.

I think it was the TARDIS that was running those calculations.

That was what I assumed as well. On top of which, having 13 copies of the TARDIS able to network their computers and work the problem simultaneously would've accelerated the work considerably -- kind of like using a quantum computer.

(Maybe it commandeered the chameleon circuit's processing ability to do it.)

Oh, that's clever.

Actually, Ten is obviously from between Waters Of Mars and End Of Time Part 1 - he talks about Queen Elizabeth in the latter, and is travelling alone - which means that by End Of Time he knows that Gallifrey wasn't destroyed, but locked into the last day of the war for all eternity.

Which in turn retroactively makes that episode make sense, since prior to it Gallifrey had been referred to as destroyed.

Whether the War Doctor ever actually did destroy it originally, or whether the Moment's conscience always did this to avoid it, we can never know - but in either case Nine thinks he did destroy it, until Ten finds out otherwise between Waters Of Mars and End Of Time. Eleven then "half remembers" bits of the events, but only really the bits interacting with Ten - partly because of the timey wimey mindey wipey effect, partly because Nine and Ten spent time trying to forget, and partly because Ten regenerated so soon after learning the truth, which always scrambles him a bit.

Hmm... I was going to argue when I started reading your post, but that actually makes a lot of sense.


By the way, somebody check my memory. Did the Time Lord general quote the Brigadier's line "Three of him -- I didn't know when I was well off"? Or am I remembering an Easter egg that wasn't there?

 

[MacLeod]

^Well The Doctor was reading a book on Advanced Quantum Mechanics at the start of the episode

 

[The Wormhole]

Something else which has been getting me about this. We're told the War Doctor is a darker incarnation, the darkest in fact. What he did is so shameful that the other Doctors shun him and suppress the memory of being him. But we don't really see that. Throughout the episode he acts essentially the same as any other Doctor, just older and worn out. Sure, we see him wield a gun, but that's only to carve graffiti on a wall. Other than that the darkest and most un-Doctor thing he did was contemplate genocide. Which we had already been lead to believe the Doctor had already done so it's hardly all that shocking.

 

[DWF]

[Ugh, no. This should be a celebration, not a funeral dirge. Doctor Who is about fun and adventure, not endless war and death and anguish. The problem with genre fans -- and creators -- today is that we've become so obsessed with getting the genre taken seriously that we're no longer willing to just have fun. Even Superman gets a grim, depressing movie where he never really gets to be a hero.

There's little to celebrate the Daleks and Time Lords still exist and can start the war back up again in the future. The Nestines, Zygons and Gelth among others all lost their homeworlds during the war and billions are dead. And Man Of Steel might;ve been depressing to you but Superman did save the planet and yes he was the hero.

 

[DWF]

Something else which has been getting me about this. We're told the War Doctor is a darker incarnation, the darkest in fact. What he did is so shameful that the other Doctors shun him and suppress the memory of being him. But we don't really see that. Throughout the episode he acts essentially the same as any other Doctor, just older and worn out. Sure, we see him wield a gun, but that's only to carve graffiti on a wall. Other than that the darkest and most un-Doctor thing he did was contemplate genocide. Which we had already been lead to believe the Doctor had already done so it's hardly all that shocking.

We have very little knowledge of the Doctor's actions during the war and much of that came from the Master.

 

[Photoman15]

I just hope that Eccleston is home kicking himself in the ass for not being involved.

 

[Captain_Amasov]

It's nice that there's now a way for The Master to appear again, though what are the chances he's now Lord President of the High Council of Time Lords by now?

No, this doesn't allow the Master to reappear again -- at least, not in the sense you're suggesting. Gallifrey was frozen at the final moment of the Time War. This does not change any of the events of the Time War itself. It merely reveals that at the final moment, Gallifrey wasn't destroyed but was actually shunted off to a pocket universe. Everything that happened in the Time War is in Gallifrey's past at this point, so none of it was affected. So the Master would already have fled and disguised himself as Professor Yana.

So wasn't The Master not trapped on Gallifrey fighting Rassilon when The Doctor whisked it off at the end of this episode, since the events of "The End of Time" and "The Day of the Doctor" seem to happen at about the same time? Or am I recalling this differently:

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfyye1rTfdg[/yt]

 

[JRoss]

@The Mirrorball Man: Read the thread again. Notice all of the comments that contain things to the effect of "I went into this with low expectations, bit..." and you will see that he has been a disappointment tolots of folks.

 

[JoeZhang]

Earlier in the thread, people were mentioning that the timing for this must be far enough out so that Clara could get a teaching degree - you don't actually need one in the UK anymore to teach in many of our schools so it's not a problem...

 

[sonak]

I thought it was good, but not great. The build-up to the "warrior doctor" turned out ultimately to be a cheat, and I'm therefore curious about what the need for a "new" in-between doctor was. Paul McGann would have worked out fine for the role. I did enjoy the humor, it was one of the funniest Doctor Whos in a long time, especially all John Hurt's jokes about pointing the sonic screwdrivers.

Billie Piper is still hot. And the Tom Baker cameo was awesome! I'm so glad I avoided spoilers on that one.


Tom Baker! Tom Baker! Tom Baker!

 

[shivkala]

I haven't seen anyone mention this, but I thought there might have been something to Clara seeing the picture of Susan on the board in the Black Archive. Was that just coincidence, that she sees the picture right before her chat with The War Doctor? Wasn't there a fan theory that we'd find out that Clara was Susan? And now she's working at the school where we first met Susan, the same school that then teacher, now headmaster Ian Chesteron works at.

I wonder if they are going to do something with Susan or if that was just a way to feature Susan in the special while also doing a wink at those who thought Clara was Susan?

 

[The Laughing Vulcan]

Spectacular!

Felt like a kid again for 85 minutes yesterday. Loved every second of it.

My fave bit...

"Geronimo!"
"Allon-sy!"
"Oh For God's Sake!"

The Five(ish) Doctors reboot was hilarious.

 

[Lonemagpie]

I wonder if they are going to do something with Susan or if that was just a way to feature Susan in the special while also doing a wink at those who thought Clara was Susan?

More likely it's a reference to the pre-credit of The Name Of The Doctor...