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.
Yeah, I agree with all that. I don't see the War Doctor as being a stand-in for Eccleston, and it surprises me that people think that.
That being said, I think his absence is keenly felt. I really would've liked to have seen him in there - I bet the 2,7 billion lives line was line but then given to Tennant (works still, just speculating). He could've worked as the older brother of the three, and maybe Hurt would've recognized him as the Doctor and the next two as his companions.
Ah, the possibilities...
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.
By the same token, there's little reasoning behind the stunt casting that John Hurt was. It could just as easily have been McGann, who would've devolved from his TV Movie self to a worn-ou, tired old man. Imagine the reaction, and the potensity of such a decision. Far bolder than anything Moffat actually did in the special itself.
And it'd make for a nice round-about for McGann - began life in a special, and ended his life in another. Alas...
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.
I really, really don't agree to that. It added gravitas and a sense of real responsibility for him, to be able to take a decision this cataclysmic. As a man of his experience, he's seen so many things, travelled to many worlds, and experienced every facet of life imagineable. And yet, he STILL couldn't but destroy the Time Lords and the Daleks. It doesn't diminish the character, it accentuates his importance and uniquenees, and showcases a reality that, if we look at DW as a children's show (which I find kinda condescending an argument, as if to shortchange any attempt at dramatic storytelling in favor of a fairytale-like saga), is an important truth: Good guys don't always win. They may have all choices in the world, but in the end, there's only one to make, and its the hardest one. Genocide for his people, or may heavens fall. I don't see how is that
bad.
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.
It shortchanged the Doctor's arc, because I faily to believe the Doctor didn't think of the children*. In fact, the Tenth in fact notes that he still remembers how many they were.
But thats mute, because the children concept likely wasn't on Davies' mind when he was on the show - as someone who did work in the New Adventures novels, its likely that he respected the Cartmel Masterplan concept slyly, unlike Moffat, who resented the said novels in an infamous conversation with Paul Cornell et al.
My point is, I think your reasoning "well, retconning the Time Lords' destruction is good because, well, the Doctor is just too good to actually do that" is both flawed and condescending, and largely driven by your own perception on the matter.
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.
But he
did resolve it. Before the second half of series seven, the Doctor had pretty much moved past it. But I don't see child-like being immature, mainly because a behaviour is very different from an attitude. "Don't take yourself seriously, but take your responsibilities seriously," someone said, and thats very much part of the Doctor. He loves life, and doesn't want to die because he does. But Moffat saw it fit to consider his behaviour as being synonymous to his attitude, which clashes with his own storytelling - and as he was the guy that decided to make River Song into Amy and Rory's daughter, probably
the most contrived, convoluted and just plain wrong decision he's ever taken
for his own material, I'm not a bit surprised.
And really, the only way to resolve it is to whitewash it? I don't understand the logic to that.
Serious and dark is overrated. It's not automatically better than anything else -- it's just more fashionable.
Its about execution.
Waters on Mars is one of the darkest DW tales, and its also one of its best.
Midnight is one of the best episodes
ever, and its as dark as it can get. Unless you think these stories aren't "real" DW.
This is Doctor Who, not Game of Thrones. It's a children's show.
No, it isn't.
The Sarah Jane Adventures was a children's show. Doctor Who is a family show that shouldn't, and hasn't shied away from emotions and dangerous situations.
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.
I guess I'm directly opposed to this fairytale version of Doctor Who. As much as I appreciate Steven Moffat's writing, I find his version a touch too much.
Because he's still the Doctor -- just as this is still Doctor Who. It's made to entertain us, not depress us.
Oh, so Doctor Who should just not do drama, then? I suppose Adric's death back in the '80's was too much, then. And that morality decision the Doctor had in
Genesis of the Daleks was naff.
As far as I am concerned, DW is a strong enough show to stretch the extent of storytelling to whatever its possible to handle. It works as a fairytale, as a gothic horror story, even as post-war drama.
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 Doctor pretty much said so about the Ninth. In
Journey's End he told Rose that the Meta Crisis Doctor is pretty much like the Ninth - one born in battle with the blood of many people in his hands, in need of console like she did for the Ninth/Tenth.
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.
That doesn't mean the High Council hasn't survived though. It means, in fact, that the Time Lords are still as dangerous as ever.
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.
But The Doctor didn't make that distinction when Rassilon tried to force Gallifrey next to Earth's orbit. In fact, the first thing he did was grab Wilf's gun and race as fast as he could to stop the Time Lords from emerging.
Maybe the Gallifreyans didn't deserve to die, but the Doctor knew they had, because the Time Lords were gonna destroy them anyway when they'd become beings of pure consciousness at the expense of reality. When he destroys the white star, he exclaims "Back in the Time War. Back into Hell!"
Really, the Doctor was prepared to make the same decision, to stop the Time Lords once again.
But what would have been the point of that? We've had eight years of tragic.
Not really. Thats a rather overt statement, since the Eleventh's era largely
didn't deal with the Time War, but with the Silence and River Song.
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?
Come on, wouldn't it surprise if
all Doctors stood next to Hurt's Doctor and, at the end of the day, all of them pressed the Moment and destroyed Gallifrey? It'd be a dark ending, but it'd be bold - it'd mean that it wasn't the Warrior's decision alone. That it was made in the Name of the Doctor.
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.
I dunno, at this stage, I'd have prefered if it were McGann. The only reason its John Hurt as the War Doctor is because Moffat wanted a stunt casting, and because he felt the idea was "kewl". And by his own admission.
That being said, I utterly loved John Hurt as the Warrior. He more than stood his own against Ten and Eleven.
It's a story we're talking about, it's entertainment: rationality is just one of many elements necessary to create that kind of thing, and it's not the most important. Your argument that the Eighth Doctor may have filled the same role as the War Doctor is, in my opinion, defeated by the fact that they're not the same character, do not behave in the same way, don't have the same past or the same place in the show's mythology. That alone teaches us that you can't just put one in the place of the other without getting very different results.
