Just happened to read an issue of DWM from a few years ago with an article on one of the first BF Time War stories. They discussed the big, strange things RTD's Doctors mentioned about the Time War, then whoever was there from BF said something like, fortunately. Moffat showed us some of the Time War and it was people shooting and things going boom, so that made it easier for us.
It isn't necessary to make the Time War boring by focusing on Moffat's bad take. I liked the John Hurt audios well enough, though they were sometimes rather limited in their conception of a time war, and I'm intrigued by the War Master because Derek Jacobi, but otherwise, some things are best left to the imagination.
Back in March, reading RTD's "Target novelization"
Doctor Who and the Time War, the "extract" felt weird and strange and imaginative, in just a few pages, in all the ways that Moffat's "The Day of the Doctor" was not.
I'm not sure that Moffat
could have writen the Time War in any sort of way that seriously grappled with time changing and its implications, because nothing in his
Doctor Who career suggests he was interested in that. In "Continuity Errors," Moffat plays the seventh Doctor rewrtiing a librarian's life to make her nicer (so he could check out a book) as something out of a sitcom. I recall an interview where he said that, after "The Big Bang," Amy was a different character than she was in Series 5 because she now had a different past, but he never explored the difference that having parents her whole life would make on Amy. Then there's the strange case of "The Wedding of River Song," which is probably what a real Time War
would feel like, and I call it "strange" because I
still don't know what the point of that was, and absolutely none of it was fulfilling. (There's something deeply unsatisfying about an alternate Amy defeating an alternate Kovarian for things that happened to and by different versions of these characters.) As a writer, Moffat was never interested in the implications of his
own ideas (best example of that -- Dalek assimilation nanites in "Asylum of the Daleks"); it's little wonder he wasn't interested in the implications of RTD's.
Basically, for all that Star Trek: Enterprise made a hash of its Temporal Cold War story arc (because the producers never really wanted to do it anyway and only put in the time travel at the insistence of network suits afraid of going backward in the Trek timeline instead of forward), at least it understood what a time war should be -- different factions jockeying to change history in their favor, a chess match in four or five dimensions rather than just a head-on fight. The "Storm Front" 2-parter, where the cold war went hot and the rival factions were actively playing merry hell with history, was a glimpse of what I presume the Doctor Who Time War would've been like.
Sometimes, Christopher, I wish John Ordover had stayed at Pocket a few more years, because I could imagine him doing a summer cross-series mini-series in 2007 or 2008 called "The Temporal Cold War," and we'd have had six books in the summer that showed how the TCW affected Kirk and Picard and Sisko and Janeway, and maybe two other random books that didn't fall neatly in a series designation. But only sometimes.
