^Fair enough. But from reading your original post, one would have had the impression that he deliberately opted not to include CE and created a new incarnation instead. Probably not what you intended but it read a little ambiguously.
It's on record that Eccleston declined to appear. I thought that was well enough known that it didn't need to be stated again.
I agree that the WD works very well in the context of the story Moffat opted to tell but it was effectively foisted on him by Eccleston's refusal to appear; necessity as the mother of invention etc. But had Eccleston opted to appear, the 'newly regenerated' Doctor thing would apparently have been overlooked and Nine would've been the one to use The Moment.
Which is why I'm glad he didn't agree to appear. The War Doctor works much better. Although it would've been nice if Eccleston had changed his mind late in the game and agreed to do a brief cameo -- maybe he would've been the spokesman for the past Doctors in the climax rather than the First Doctor doing it, and of course he would've done the regeneration scene. (Then we would've had a proper first line for the Ninth Doctor, which I could've added to my "
Doctors' first and last lines" blog post, which for the past couple of weeks has been the most popular post on my blog by an insanely huge margin.)
Having Chris doing it would have given the Bad Wolf appearance of the Moment much much more oomph, though.
I think it worked better this way. It suggests that the reason the Ninth Doctor was so drawn to Rose was because, despite having lost his conscious memory of the last day of the war, he subconsciously recognized her face as that of the Moment, which had saved him from making the worst mistake of his lives.
Well, some people have said that Moffat invented the Hurt Doctor just so he could be the one to solve the regeneration limit problem.
I find it hard to shake that impression.
Whereas I find it a very unlikely interpretation. It's not as if the regeneration limit was ever a real problem; it was always a given that some way would be found to extend the Doctor's life beyond the thirteenth incarnation so long as the show was still going strong. So it's not like there's any great prestige in it. And Moffat's "solution" was incredibly cursory -- Clara makes a brief speech to a crack in a wall, the Doctor inhales some pixie dust, and Bob's your uncle. I think if "solving the problem" had been so important to him that it shaped his whole storytelling agenda, he wouldn't have given us such a slapdash "solution." It seemed less like he had some personal ego stake in achieving this goal and more like he just wanted to get it out of the way and move on with more important stuff.
I think that he did what a series writer does, which is to consider what's been established in the past, see its possibilities, and build on them. We were already on the eleventh Doctor, a twelfth was demanded by the realities of the anniversary, and Moffat didn't think he could just ignore the "fakeout" regeneration that RTD had given Tennant.
Remember, Moffat did say that there would've been no War Doctor if Eccleston had agreed to appear. So then there would've still been one regeneration left. So it can't be true that Moffat shaped everything to lead to this outcome. If Eccleston had made a different decision about "Day of...," Moffat would've had to tell "Time of..." differently.
