The Day of the Doctore Review Thread (Spoilers?)

[RevdKathy]

The other, incredibly minor, thing I noticed is that Osgood's scarf is actually rather different from the fourth Doctor's. The original was knitted with the garter stitch, whereas this one looks like it uses 1x1 ribbing. It doesn't really make any difference; it just seems like an odd decision on somebody's part.

On very close examination, I think it's actually what's known as 'fisherman's rib', which looks almost identical to 1x1 rib. I suspect they used it because it's the easiest way to make something that's been machine knitted fall and fold like a hand knit. So maybe there was no-one to knit them a new one.

(and yeah, that really is a Knit pick!)

 

[DWF]

^Yes, but as I already quoted above, there's another Moffat interview where he says that this is what really happened all along. He's giving mixed messages.

I think the intent is that the Doctor has subjectively changed his past, because he believed it happened one way, and now he knows it happened a different way. So even though the events haven't objectively changed, he is changed as if they had been. The impact his past has on him is now altered.

You often hear it said that some new historical or archaeological discovery will "rewrite history." That doesn't mean there's time travel being used, but it means that the past as a conceptual construct is changed. All we know of the past is what we piece together from memory and evidence, so the case can be made that the past is a concept, an idea, and thus can be changed when we discover evidence we didn't have before.

Except in this case time travel was used and because the Doctor a Time Lord events were changed, even the picture of Arcadia was changed it originally had on Hurt's Doctor in it and now all three of them are in it, but of course from a human point of view they were always there. In a way it's like what happened in The Day Of The Daleks, where the Doctor altered time and prevented the Daleks from conquering the earth in the 22nd century. Of course you could claim that it always happened that way to preserve the events in The Dalek Invasion Of Earth. In truth only a Time Lord is similar beings that exist outside of the normal flow of time could see that time had changed.

 

[Christopher]

Quite right, although my interpretation is slightly different. For me I feel that The Doctor has learned that he can rewrite time, even (and especially) fixed points in time, as long as the observable event appears unchanged.

It is why swapping his own body with the Teselecta worked even though The Doctor's death at Lake Silencio is a fixed point in time. The Doctor still appears to be shot several times and appears to have died. But in actual fact, The Doctor remains very much alive.

But if there's no observable evidence that anything has changed, how can you know that wasn't the way it happened all along? It's an ad hoc assumption that your original perception of the event represented the original reality, rather than simply an incorrect perception based on not having all the facts. If you see a magician seemingly cut a person in half, and then you learn how the trick was done and realize that it was an illusion, that doesn't mean the person was really cut in half the first time. It just means you didn't understand what you were really seeing.

 

[Mr Light]

They didn't change the painting to include Tennant and Smith. They were always there, just hidden behind objects so you couldn't see them.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

The Tenth Doctor said something to the extent that saving Galifrey would be changing their own personal timeline.

Also when the Doctor's are explaining to the Timelords their plan. Both the 10th and 11th state that the alternative to freezing Galifrey in a pocket universe is burning and that they have already seen that happen.

You analyze the Bad Wolf macguffin and it's apparent that she is there to change history and influence the Doctor's.
Bad Wolf opens time tunnels to allow the 3 Doctors to interact. After showing the War Doctor his future selves. The War Doctor still resolves to use The Moment. The Bad Wolf interrupts him and lowers whatever barriers that have the events of the timewar timelocked.

With the timelock no longer a factor. Eleven is allowed to put his plan to save Galifrey with his past and future selves across time. I think it was way back in "Father's Day" where the Doctor addresses why he can't go back and change events of the timewar to even save his family. The events were timelocked and unchangeable.

I recently found this little chestnut, where Moffat affirms that what happened in TDOTD was changing events.
"It was the plan from the start – all the Doctors… all the Doctors will fly in to save Gallifrey and change the timeline"

http://metro.co.uk/2013/11/25/steve...h-anniversary-was-the-plan-all-along-4201331/

Doctor Who plays fast and lose with it's time travel rules. If this was Star Trek we would say that the events of TDOTD created a parallel universe. Where a lot of the events will be the same but different slightly going forward. Sort of like ST09. However, we are not going back to relive the events of 9-10 and 11. I don't think we're supposed to analyze things too closely with regards to Dr Who. Now that we are past TDOTD we can say that (for 11) there was one timeline where he did use The Moment, and another timeline where he did not.

Quite agreed. Ten and Eleven have the experience of the planet's destruction in them, and they want to change that memory. They've seen that, and they never want to see that again.

The Moment, influenced by Bad Wolf, forced the Doctor to change his history. And only Bad Wolf could do that - because she wanted to save the Doctor. Not just from the Daleks in series 1's finale, but his psyche, too. And if rumors are true about the XMas Special, even more so.

They didn't change the painting to include Tennant and Smith. They were always there, just hidden behind objects so you couldn't see them.

I disagree. The very same painting had Tennant's Doctor visibly there the second time we saw the painting - but not so the first time. They clearly changed history there.

 

[DWF]

They didn't change the painting to include Tennant and Smith. They were always there, just hidden behind objects so you couldn't see them.

No, Tennant was standing on Hurt's left and he's clearly not there originally.

 

[Stoo]

They've seen that

They claim to have. We don't know exactly what they saw, or assumed they saw or pieced together in their grief.

 

[Sindatur]

Honestly, I find the whole thing takes away from the threat the Time Lords posed. I'm sure the Doctor always knew there were innocent people on Gallifrey that didn't deserve to die and that contributed to the guilt he's felt. The fact that he, the man who abhors violence death went ahead and committed genocide against two races, one of them his own emphasises just how bad the Time War had gotten and how much of a threat the Daleks and even the Time Lords posed.
But now all that is negated and the Doctor simply only thought he committed the atrocity that has haunted him all this time.

The episode shows how avoiding war can be difficult but worth it. It was obviously an easier solution in the practical sense to just destroy both sides to end the war. However, easier doesn't mean better. In the end, the Doctor found a better solution using his creativity and ingenuity.

Personally, I find that the character in the new series is defined by his guilt and shame over the fact that he can always save the day and find solutions to all manner of problems through "creativity and ingenuity" yet when it came to the Time War the only thing that worked in the end was eradicating his own race. It sells how devastating the Time War was and reflects that war is hell and things that happen to people in war will be with them their whole lives. The man who can save anyone and change anything for the better could not do the same for his own people is a perfect way to sum up the tragic hero figure the Doctor is. And now all that is washed away just so we can have another of Moffat's "Everyone Lives!" endings.

I disagree. Not only did a man have to live a life facing the horror of War and what he had to do, a man had to live 3 lives facing that. nothing has changed for Tennant and Ecceston's Doctor's, they lived their whole life carrying that burden, and Smith's Doctor lived almost his entire life with it. Honestly, how can someone think that Four Hundred years living with that pain and guilt isn't long enough, and that somehow the drama has now been washed away and erased?

 

[ATimson]

But if there's no observable evidence that anything has changed, how can you know that wasn't the way it happened all along?

Before, there were the remnants of a planet there. "It's just dust and rocks now", but enough was left that the Doctor could count the 2.47 billion dead children.

Now that the planet has been shunted aside, there's nothing left for him to investigate. No way to know how many children (would have) burned. No physical evidence left except the Dalek ships.

That certainly seems like an observable change to me.

 

[intrinsical]

Quite right, although my interpretation is slightly different. For me I feel that The Doctor has learned that he can rewrite time, even (and especially) fixed points in time, as long as the observable event appears unchanged.

It is why swapping his own body with the Teselecta worked even though The Doctor's death at Lake Silencio is a fixed point in time. The Doctor still appears to be shot several times and appears to have died. But in actual fact, The Doctor remains very much alive.

But if there's no observable evidence that anything has changed, how can you know that wasn't the way it happened all along? It's an ad hoc assumption that your original perception of the event represented the original reality, rather than simply an incorrect perception based on not having all the facts. If you see a magician seemingly cut a person in half, and then you learn how the trick was done and realize that it was an illusion, that doesn't mean the person was really cut in half the first time. It just means you didn't understand what you were really seeing.

Precisely. You've taken the words right out of my mouth.. er fingers. The Doctor went one step beyond what the magician did. He made the two outcomes look identical in observation. Any observer present cannot distinguish what got killed, The Doctor himself or a 100% accurate facsimile of The Doctor. Its the same thing with Galifrey. Any observer would only see Galifrey seemingly destroyed in a bright explosion before the event gets time locked. There's no way to distinguish between Galifrey being destroyed and Galifrey vanishing. Both outcomes are equally likely, but pretty much everyone assumes Galifrey is destroyed simply because it is the simpler explanation.

 

[Christopher]

Before, there were the remnants of a planet there. "It's just dust and rocks now", but enough was left that the Doctor could count the 2.47 billion dead children.

Anecdotal testimony without corroboration is not evidence of anything beyond what the speaker believes to be true. "Just dust and rocks" could easily be a figurative expression to convey an emotion, rather than a factual report of a direct analysis. Narrators in fiction are often unreliable, just as people in real life are often wrong about their beliefs and assertions. So it makes no sense to cite a spoken assertion as hard proof of anything.

And it makes even less sense to assert that the Doctor counted the dead by visiting the remains of the planet. I mean, think about it. Energies sufficient to tear the planet apart would've pretty much vaporized or pulped any living being, so it would be impossible to tally the dead in that way. Whatever organic remains survived would be only a fraction of the total. Presumably he went through the TARDIS records, extrapolated from its life-form readings, past census reports, demographic calculations, etc. in order to create an estimate of the underage population of the planet before its destruction.

 

[DWF]

The episode shows how avoiding war can be difficult but worth it. It was obviously an easier solution in the practical sense to just destroy both sides to end the war. However, easier doesn't mean better. In the end, the Doctor found a better solution using his creativity and ingenuity.

Personally, I find that the character in the new series is defined by his guilt and shame over the fact that he can always save the day and find solutions to all manner of problems through "creativity and ingenuity" yet when it came to the Time War the only thing that worked in the end was eradicating his own race. It sells how devastating the Time War was and reflects that war is hell and things that happen to people in war will be with them their whole lives. The man who can save anyone and change anything for the better could not do the same for his own people is a perfect way to sum up the tragic hero figure the Doctor is. And now all that is washed away just so we can have another of Moffat's "Everyone Lives!" endings.

I disagree. Not only did a man have to live a life facing the horror of War and what he had to do, a man had to live 3 lives facing that. nothing has changed for Tennant and Ecceston's Doctor's, they lived their whole life carrying that burden, and Smith's Doctor lived almost his entire life with it. Honestly, how can someone think that Four Hundred years living with that pain and guilt isn't long enough, and that somehow the drama has now been washed away and erased?

And whenever you go back and watch the Eccleston and Tennant eras that guilt will always be there, but if the guilt isn't real is that really fair to subject them to that?

And for that matter what about the other worlds lost during the Time War? The Zygons, Gelth and Nestines all lost their homeworlds too not to mention all the other races that suffered because of the war. And for that matter the return of Gallifrey might mean a restart of the Time War itslf.

 

[DWF]

Before, there were the remnants of a planet there. "It's just dust and rocks now", but enough was left that the Doctor could count the 2.47 billion dead children.

Anecdotal testimony without corroboration is not evidence of anything beyond what the speaker believes to be true. "Just dust and rocks" could easily be a figurative expression to convey an emotion, rather than a factual report of a direct analysis. Narrators in fiction are often unreliable, just as people in real life are often wrong about their beliefs and assertions. So it makes no sense to cite a spoken assertion as hard proof of anything.

And it makes even less sense to assert that the Doctor counted the dead by visiting the remains of the planet. I mean, think about it. Energies sufficient to tear the planet apart would've pretty much vaporized or pulped any living being, so it would be impossible to tally the dead in that way. Whatever organic remains survived would be only a fraction of the total. Presumably he went through the TARDIS records, extrapolated from its life-form readings, past census reports, demographic calculations, etc. in order to create an estimate of the underage population of the planet before its destruction.

The Doctor said nothing about finding dead bodies just that there's nothing left of Gallifrey but dust, it's possible he was able to mentially count the dead children. You keep making the mistake of thinking Time Lords are human, they aren't they are mentially superior in a number of ways.

 

[Christopher]

Precisely. You've taken the words right out of my mouth.. er fingers. The Doctor went one step beyond what the magician did. He made the two outcomes look identical in observation. Any observer present cannot distinguish what got killed, The Doctor himself or a 100% accurate facsimile of The Doctor.

You're missing my point. You're assuming that's the case, but since there's no evidence of change, you have no reason to assume that's true. The simpler interpretation, the one favored by Occam's Razor, is that there was no change, that it happened that way all along and we -- and the Doctor -- just didn't know it until then. It's far more likely that we were simply wrong than it is that the whole universe transformed itself along with our perceptions of it.

As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You're claiming that history was changed in a way that leaves no evidence, so it's a claim that's impossible to prove. Thus, there's no legitimate reason to favor it over the simpler interpretation. If the evidence is consistent, the logical conclusion is that the events were consistent, that nothing has been changed except our understanding of what really transpired.

 

[Marc]

It would have been cool to see some random people regenerating in the background during the battle in Arcadia would make it feel more like Gallifrey than some other random planet the Daleks were attacking.

There has to be some life left in order for a regeneration to occur - thing about the Dalek weapons is when the thing hits you, you're dead ergo no regeneration.

Only exception I can think of is when they paralysed Ian's legs in The Daleks. Any other time it's shoot to kill.

 

[The Wormhole]

^^The Tenth Doctor was still able to regenerate after being shot by a Dalek in The Stolen Earth. The Eleventh Doctor didn't even need to regenerate after being shot by a Dalek in The Big Bang.

Although if we assume regeneration is something only the Time Lords can do, than it stands to reason most we saw in the Arcadia scene were just ordinary Gallifreyans.

 

[DWF]

It would have been cool to see some random people regenerating in the background during the battle in Arcadia would make it feel more like Gallifrey than some other random planet the Daleks were attacking.

There has to be some life left in order for a regeneration to occur - thing about the Dalek weapons is when the thing hits you, you're dead ergo no regeneration.

Only exception I can think of is when they paralysed Ian's legs in The Daleks. Any other time it's shoot to kill.

The Doctor's been hit three times by Dalek weapons(Frontier In Space, The Stolen Earth and The Big Bang) survived all three and didn't need to regenerate afterward.

 

[Marc]

^^The Tenth Doctor was still able to regenerate after being shot by a Dalek in The Stolen Earth. The Eleventh Doctor didn't even need to regenerate after being shot by a Dalek in The Big Bang.

Although if we assume regeneration is something only the Time Lords can do, than it stands to reason most we saw in the Arcadia scene were just ordinary Gallifreyans.

Wasn't saying about the need to regenerate after being hit by dalek weapon, - was saying that generally when you're shot by dalek you're dead. If you're dead already there's no regeneration. End result is those Gallifreyans hit when the Daleks invaded Arcadia were killed thus they couldn't regenerate.

 

[Mr Awe]

Honestly, I find the whole thing takes away from the threat the Time Lords posed. I'm sure the Doctor always knew there were innocent people on Gallifrey that didn't deserve to die and that contributed to the guilt he's felt. The fact that he, the man who abhors violence death went ahead and committed genocide against two races, one of them his own emphasises just how bad the Time War had gotten and how much of a threat the Daleks and even the Time Lords posed.
But now all that is negated and the Doctor simply only thought he committed the atrocity that has haunted him all this time.

The episode shows how avoiding war can be difficult but worth it. It was obviously an easier solution in the practical sense to just destroy both sides to end the war. However, easier doesn't mean better. In the end, the Doctor found a better solution using his creativity and ingenuity.

Personally, I find that the character in the new series is defined by his guilt and shame over the fact that he can always save the day and find solutions to all manner of problems through "creativity and ingenuity" yet when it came to the Time War the only thing that worked in the end was eradicating his own race. It sells how devastating the Time War was and reflects that war is hell and things that happen to people in war will be with them their whole lives. The man who can save anyone and change anything for the better could not do the same for his own people is a perfect way to sum up the tragic hero figure the Doctor is. And now all that is washed away just so we can have another of Moffat's "Everyone Lives!" endings.

By Smith's time as the Doctor, we had pretty much completely moved beyond the guilty Doctor anyway, so nothing lost there. No way was the series going to get stuck on that guilt for the entire run any way. It had to move on.

And, as it was pointed out by davejames, this solution took 3 Doctors and hundreds of years to figure out and implement. (And the eventual involvement of all Doctors.) Several Doctors still had to live with the guilt. So, it wasn't just washed away.

I thought it was great!

Mr Awe

 

[Christopher]

^^The Tenth Doctor was still able to regenerate after being shot by a Dalek in The Stolen Earth.

But that was a glancing blow:

http://youtu.be/9q2hRk8vv4s?t=1m12s

Note that the negative-image effect only encompasses part of his body, and the bolt continues past him. No doubt this was done specifically to justify why he wasn't killed instantly.

The Eleventh Doctor didn't even need to regenerate after being shot by a Dalek in The Big Bang.

But that was a long-dead Dalek that was partly restored by the Pandorica and only had limited energy.

Although if we assume regeneration is something only the Time Lords can do, than it stands to reason most we saw in the Arcadia scene were just ordinary Gallifreyans.

I am still unaware of any basis for this idea. It's conceivable -- if there's zero social mobility or intermarriage between the nobility and plebeian class -- but as far as I know, there's no evidence to suggest it. I don't know where the idea came from.