The Day of the Doctore Review Thread (Spoilers?)

I still don't see the need for The War Doctor. The Doctor has made no secret of his actions during the Time War. He's talked about killing all the Time Lords on more than one occasion. If he doesn't deny doing it, why deny the existence of the incarnation that actually did it?

It should have been Paul McGann. Him showing up at the end of The Name Of The Doctor saying 'What I did, I did without choice' would have been a much more interesting ending. Since he's the Doctor we know next to nothing about (in terms of on screen appearances) why not give his Doctor a story and make his Doctor the one that fought in the Time War? That could have been his thing.

But no, Moffat needed another, secret regeneration, as well as counting what happened in Journey's End as a regeneration, So that Matt Smith is actually the 13th and final Doctor.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/doctor-who-christmas-spoilers-matt-2847509

Now Moffat gets to be the one to do the 'Doctor at the end of his life' storyline right now with Matt Smith instead of years from now and 2 Doctors later where it should be, because the show would probably have another writer by then, . I really can't wait for him to move on...

 

This is precisely why I suspect that the War Doctor's role was originally meant for Eccelston. I bet the original concept was to have all 3 Doctors of the modern era running around together in one episode.

 

^ Very likely. Eccleston could have delivered most of Hurt's dialogue verbatim and it would have worked just fine, IMHO.

 

Hurt had that world weary look that I think the War Doctor need.

 

Agreed, I think it would have needed some significant rewrites to replace the character with the Ninth Doctor, but nothing too crazy. You do the same "Night of the Doctor" type short with Eight, but have him be the one who fought the majority of the Time War, and have him regenerate specifically to find and use the Moment. That way Nine is still burdened with the act of ending the Time War, but not with having fought the entire thing. It would have been cool to see what Nine was like before he took on the burden of being the last of the Time Lords. The more I think about it, the more right it feels to me that Eccelston was the original plan.

 

I found their characters extremely different. Eccleston's Doctor was just as quippy and pop-culturey, and almost as rambling, as his successors. The War Doctor was a completely different man with little patience for absurdity.

 

Yes, their characters are very different, but you could have plugged in Eccelston's Doctor and still told essentially the same story, with a few tweaks. If you're thinking in terms of fan service, what would have been more fun to the modern era fandom then have all 3 of those guys running around and interacting with each other.

 

I absolutely loved it...

BUT I had some fundamental problems with it.

This story basically undoes the most fundamental aspect of the RTD Era. The Doctor didn't wipe out his own people. He didn't commit genocide. This was the fundamental defining characteristic of RTD Doctor Who. And it's gone.

I guess this explains how so many Daleks managed to survive the Time War... he didn't actually use the Moment! Also, even if this is the final apocalyptic battle... you really expect me to believe that EVERY SINGLE* DALEK shot itself to pieces in the space of a few seconds?! That every single Dalek ship was sitting in a perfect orbit of Gallifrey?!

The Zygon story was... cute... but pretty lightweight. Not exactly what I would have been saving for the big anniversary special. Should have focused more on the Time War and the Moment. But I guess that would have been too serious and dark, enh?

Speaking of. Why in the world is the War Doctor bantering and joking with his future selves?! This man has been fighting a holocaust war for decades and is one moment away from killing billions of his own people (and 2.X billion children) with the push of a big red button. Shouldn't he be a little bit darker? Angrier?

Where was Rassilon? This was the final day of the Time War. We saw him in charge in "The End of Time". (I wanted to bitch about Davros not being there until I checked wikipedia and saw he disappeared in the first year of the war)

They brought back Billie, but she didn't play Rose! That said, I did like seeing more Bad Wolf. But we didn't get the classic "Companions swap Doctors and bitch about one another" schitck. And David didn't get a single scene with her!!!

Remember how in "The End of Time" the Time Lords ended up as monstrous as the Daleks and them coming back was the worst thing in the world? 'Cause now they seem to be the noble victims of a terrible war again and the Doctor can't wait to bring them back into the universe.

Oh and least I forget... at the end of "The Doctor's Name", the Doctor and Clara were trapped inside his own timestream vortex world thing. But here, they're out and perfectly fine without a single explanation! WTF! I thought the ending of Name was a cliffhanger that led right into the movie! That could explain how the Doctors were interacting with themselves. Wasted opportunity. And they didn't even do a internet prequel to explain it away?

How was it that all 13 Doctors were there? Aside from the "rules" (which Moffat never follows anyway), did the present Doctors go back (and forward) to recruit all their past selves? They just popped up and said hey we need your help for a battle? Did they all loose their memories of this? And if they went into the future to take #12... why not get 13, 14, 15, etc, etc?

The ending shot of all 12 Doctors looked really, really, really, really fake. Those faces clearly did not match to those bodies...

I was really hoping that the story was how the War Doctor came to use the Moment as a calculated and balanced decision. It would have been a nice tragic ending and shown us the established event in the pre-existing continuity, rather than rewriting everything RTD had to say about the character.

Okay, onto the positive...

The scene with the Curator was absolutely beautiful. There was such depth and emotion in his watery bulgey eyes. Wow.

I loved Osgood! Bring her back! With the scarf! In fact, let's see a lot more UNIT.

I totally geeked out at actually seeing the Fall of Arcadia. That was awesome!

I saw this in theater and the 3D was gorgeous. They utilized it really well, particularly with the 3D paintings. And seeing Doctor Who on a huge screen in a room full of fans was just really magical.

While raising too many questions, I did like seeing all 13 Doctors working to move Gallifrey, even if their cameos were understandably fake looking. CAPALDI!!!

I did love the bit about being locked in the prison cell.

Queen Elizabeth was fun. (and good continuity!)

I loved "Night of the Doctor" and that totally should have been the opening of this movie. And been longer.

 

Agreed. Much as I love the Eighth Doctor, I have a hard time picturing him as "world weary"-- and that's frankly not how I'd WANT him to be remembered. He deserves to go out being the romantic adventurer we always knew him to be, I think.

And much as I love Eccleston, I'm kinda glad he didn't get saddled with being the Doctor who pushed the button that destroyed Gallifrey either.

To me Hurt was just the perfect choice. Not only did he look the part, but we had the fun of discovering an entirely new Doctor in the process (which is normally the kind of thing fans would be excited as hell about).

 

I hardly considered that the defining aspect of the RTD era. It was a dark moment in the Doctor's past which was occasionally alluded to, but it didn't exactly make the show some grim and heavy BSG-style angst-fest or anything.

Besides, as I think someone else said on another board, the Doctor is fully capable of being an interesting character without the freakin Time War. After eight years, I think they got about as much mileage out of that idea as they possibly could have, and look forward to seeing the Doctor actually have something new and different to strive for from now on.

 

It's funny, when you see the three Doctors in the gallery at the end, the War Doctor states that they'll never know if they were actually successful in saving Gallifrey; suggesting that what they all witnessed was just a gigantic explosion.

So that would still fit, somewhat, with what the previous Doctors mention about watching his planet burn. Presumably The Moment allowed him to remember that part of the event.

However something else from the end is bothering me: what if the painting "Gallifrey Falls No More" is actually Gallifrey itself. No one seemed to know where the painting came from after all, and those paintings were stated to be pocket dimensions.

 

It doesn't work. I thought about this tonight while driving home from the 3-D screening. (The 3-D, by the way, is very nice, but it's not especially necessary.)

There is some dialogue that would make more sense with Eccleston instead of Hurt. I'm thinking especially of how the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors treat Hurt as though he's used the Moment, not realizing that he hasn't. (Or couldn't; if they saw him, then he hasn't done it yet because he would have regenerated immediately after.)

But the ending would make no emotional sense. At the end, the War Doctor knows that he didn't use the Moment and that he's the Doctor. He also knows that he'll forget it and the Doctor will carry the guilt of using the Moment and all the lives it cost for another four hundred years.

I don't think you can do that to Eccleston's Doctor -- absolve him of the guilt, let him be aware that he didn't do it, then take all of that away and make him the PTSD survivor once more. It's cruel enough to do that in the way it happens in the episode, but it would be especially cruel to make Eccleston's Doctor the one to save Gallifrey and never be aware of it.

 

I suspect that the thing the Doctor has been running from "all of my lives" (as he said in the first trailer) -- he's always known, on a subconscious level, that the Time War happens, Gallifrey is destroyed or vanished, and he's a part of making that happen. The calculation has been going since the first Doctor's time. Even if he didn't understand the calculation at first, at some point he would have figured out what it meant; he's the Doctor, he couldn't not.

 

I really, really don't see that. Eccleston's Doctor always came off as having newly regenerated in the wake of the Time War. Go back and read what people have been saying on the Internet for the past 8 years and you'll see that most people assumed it was McGann's Doctor who fought in, and ended, the war, subsequently regenerating into Eccleston. I've never gotten the impression that anyone thought Eccleston's Doctor was the one who blew them all up.

The War Doctor is a character who's been fighting for a long time, is sick of it, and feels he's exhausted every possible option except destruction. He's someone who's been a warrior for a long time. Eccleston has always been perceived, or so it's seemed to me, as the post-war Doctor, the PTSD Doctor, recovering from the horror he experienced in his previous incarnation, and from the cataclysmic events that ended that life and started his current one.

I prefer to think in terms of what serves the story. It would've been nice for completeness's sake to have all three postwar Doctors confronting what the War Doctor had done, but I sure can't see Eccleston being in place of the War Doctor.

And consider this: Moffat has said that he wanted Billie Piper but didn't want to write Rose because her story was finished and was RTD's story anyway. So that means he always intended Piper to play the Moment/Bad Wolf instead. And the Doctor would've been from a point in his timeline before he met Rose Tyler. It wouldn't be a good idea to bring back the actors who played the first modern Doctor-companion pair and have them be strangers to each other, totally unable to build on the relationship they established with each other and with the viewers. It makes more sense if it's a different Doctor.

And that's good. Having the Doctor be the last of his people was an interesting place to take him, but having him be the one responsible for their annihilation always felt to me like going a little too far. And Moffat pinpointed the exact reason why it went too far, the reason Davies glossed over: That the Gallifreyans aren't like the Daleks or the Cybermen where every last one is equally a monster. They have children. They have innocents. We know that the Doctor, for all his claims of pacifism, has a tendency to destroy the bad guys or arrange for their destruction; but as a rule, he doesn't destroy innocents in the process. So destroying the whole Gallifreyan species just to wipe out the corrupt few on the High Council seems hugely disproportionate. Moffat recognized and addressed a conceptual flaw in Davies's premise. And he did it in a way that preserved the emotional arc Davies created for the character, as well as allowing that arc to be advanced and resolved.

And it's a good resolution. Over his past two lives, the Doctor has gotten more quirky and childlike, afraid of being a grownup because of his memory of what his most grownup self did. Now he's free of the need to run from maturity, and that means he can potentially become a very different man, and that could mean we're in for an interesting new journey for the character. That's not a bad thing to me. The Time War stuff mostly worked, but it's been eight years and it's time to resolve it and do something different.

Given the reported intensity of the bombardment, and the sheer concentration of Dalek ships around the planet, I'm willing to suspend disbelief and accept that they were all destroyed, either by direct fire or by debris from neighboring ships. It's certainly no sillier than the cascading, all-encompassing orbital destruction in Cuaron's Gravity, and that was supposedly the result of a single triggering impact.

Serious and dark is overrated. It's not automatically better than anything else -- it's just more fashionable.

This is Doctor Who, not Game of Thrones. It's a children's show. So yeah, it doesn't get too dark. It gets scary, yes; it wants the children to watch from behind the sofa. But it doesn't want to traumatize and depress them and make them see the universe as a morass of endless despair. It wants them to laugh and have fun and perceive the Doctor as a source of hope.

Because he's still the Doctor -- just as this is still Doctor Who. It's made to entertain us, not depress us.

I think by this point he's probably burned out on anger and is more just weary. Remember, he said to Bad Wolf that he didn't intend to survive. People who have resolved to commit suicide are often very calm and relaxed, because they believe their troubles will soon be over.

The general leading the War Council mentioned that the High Council was busy elsewhere carrying out plans of its own -- as seen in TEoT -- but that wasn't going to stop him from continuing the fight. We saw the ruling elite in their ivory tower in TEoT, but here we saw the people actually leading the fight instead.

True, I would've liked to see a bit more companion action. But as Moffat said, this story was, for once, really about the Doctor himself. And that's good. Past multi-Doctor team-ups have really just been exercises in fanservice and Easter eggs, but this was a story where a man meeting different facets of himself was really about the man facing himself rather than just about fan-pleasing gimmicks and references. There were plenty of references, but they weren't the whole reason for the story.

Doesn't bother me. The whole Doctor-Rose thing has been more than satisfactorily resolved, and if anything was dragged on too long. Tennant and Piper have already had one or two reunion scenes, so we didn't need another. And I liked seeing Piper get to show her acting chops by playing a completely different character.

Like I said, they're not monolithic. We've known for decades that not all Gallifreyans are Time Lords; the Lords are just the ruling nobility. So there's no contradiction there, any more than there's a contradiction in any class-based society having both a corrupt nobility and victimized commoners.

No, they weren't trapped. The Doctor went in to bring her back, and he showed her the way: grab onto the leaf. Which she did, and then she found him and they were reunited. That was the resolution. But before he led her back, they lingered a bit because she sensed the "extra" Doctor. We saw them turn and begin to walk away just before we got the reveal of John Hurt. So while it's a little vague, the indication is that they were able to depart. The cliffhanger wasn't "How do they get out?" They had a way out, vague and fanciful though it was. The cliffhanger was "Eeek, there's another Doctor we never knew about? What's the story there, and what's the horrible thing he did?"

I'm sure that's exactly what happened. Although Capaldi's Doctor probably remembered it, just as Smith remembered it. The general rule in these things seems to be that the latest Doctor gets to remember it all, whereas the earlier Doctors lose whatever knowledge they gain of their personal future.

Remember, the War Doctor is the actual #9, so Capaldi is his 13th life. As far as the Doctor knew, there weren't any beyond that one.

It was. But it was also about how the later Doctors had had the advantage of hundreds of years of reflection letting them make an even more calculated and balanced decision which led to a more hopeful outcome.

But what would have been the point of that? We've had eight years of tragic. We already know the established event. What would be the benefit in just rehashing the past and giving us exactly what we expected? Stories' outcomes should surprise us. They should be what we don't expect. The story began with our expectation that the Doctor would push the button and destroy the planet. How lame would it be for the story to end without any surprises? Where would the journey have been?

Moffat said that he felt the 50th anniversary story shouldn't simply rehash the past, but should set the stage for the future. It should take the character and the story somewhere new. And that's what it did.

I agree. I think the War Doctor is a distinct role in his life and it makes sense for him to be a distinct identity, a distinct incarnation.

Indeed. Why the complaints when we have a whole new Doctor to speculate about? Maybe now we'll get books or comics about the Doctor we never knew about before.

I don't think so. The painting/stasis cube was "taken" in the middle of the fall of Arcadia, hours before the end. Besides, it's just too obvious -- surely the Doctor wouldn't overlook the possibility if there were any way it could be true. After all, he's a lot more clever than any of us. So presumably it isn't there.

 

Just got back from the 8:30pm showing. Packed crowd. Everyone laughed at every.single.thing.


-If Tennant twitched one slight way the crowd would just explode in laughter

- "No Sir! All 13!"

Crowd erupts in applause

-Quiet awe and applause as Tom Baker makes his appearance



For the special footage we basically got a mini confidential

"And this is Colin Baker.....the 6th doctor speaking"

"Crowd applauds*

Hot Topic was also selling Fezes. Lots of Matt Smith Cosplayers and Baker Scarves.

 

After hearign some of the stories, I'm starting to wish I'd gone to the theater that was showing it locally. Even though I live in a smallish town and don't think there are that many Who fans in the area.

 

Someone asked Gaiman a question...

I think he's spot on.

I might be alone in this but since Russell The Davies popped up at the end of The Five(ish) Doctors (and hardly anywhere else in these celebrations) I can't help but miss his exuberance and enthusiasm for the show. He always seemed to have boundless energy and playfulness when it came to the show that we rarely see nowadays.

 

Thank you Neil Gaiman. Thank you Bob.

 

Of course maybe he wants to do it now so that the next showrunner doesn't have the whole 12 regenerations limit hanging over his/her head?

Besides if RTD hadn't had his but of fun with a regeneration that never was Moffat wouldn't be able to do this...