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kerravonsenYes, I'm a week late. At least I've seen it now!
(Also saw the two prequel minisodes, too)
Oh, I like, I like.
There's a lot in there to munch over.
Are we going to have to renumber the Doctors now?
That's the trouble with time travel... the past isn't always as fixed as you think it is...
I didn't think that they could put yet another twist on the Time War, but wow!
The purpose of a companion is to remind the Doctor who he is.
Was that the Peter Capaldi Doctor that we saw a brief flash of? When the General said "all thirteen Doctors"?
Okay, let's figure some chronology of the Time War, after this additional go-around...
1. On the last day of the Time War, Arcadia fell.
It is this event that Eccleston!Doctor refers to in "Rose", that he was "there at the fall of Arcadia". (Mind you, I'd always thought, until I saw "The Last Day", that Arcadia was some planet somewhere else, not The Second City of Gallifrey). (ref "The Last Day")(+)
2.The night before, At some point before(#), McGann!Doctor is begged, by the Sisterhood of Karn, to save them all by ending the war, and he regenerates into "a warrior", "the Doctor no more", the Hurt!Doctor. (ref "The Night of the Doctor")
3. He arrives at Arcadia and carves "No More" on a wall.
4. In the meantime, the High Council are in closed session, planning to destroy time itself, expecting to survive as disembodied intelligences. (ref "The End of Time")(++)
5. Hurt!Doctor steals the Galaxy-Destroyer, the only Ultimate Forbidden Weapon that hadn't been used in the war. (Because "the operating system was so complicated it developed a conscience"... a weapon that refuses to be used. Love it.)
6. The Galaxy-Destroyer appears to Hurt!Doctor in the form of Rose Tyler (hence people mentioning Billie Piper being in it). Faux!Rose asks Hurt!Doctor if he really really wants to do it. And chucks him into the future to see his future selves (Tennant!Doctor and Smith!Doctor).
7. Who are trying to thwart a Zygon invasion which is happening simultaneously in the present, and in Elizabeth I's time. Much running around ensues. Plus the seeds of things that happen later.(+++)
8. Hurt!Doctor decides to go ahead with his original plan. Complete with considerately-supplied Big Red Button.
9. Tennant!Doctor and Smith!Doctor arrive (even though the war is time-locked, presumably Faux!Rose let them through). With Clara in tow. To give Hurt!Doctor moral support. Because "there isn't another way". (Shades of "The Fires of Pompeii")
10. Clara shakes her head (performing the Companion!Purpose of reminding the Doctor who he is). And the Doctor suddenly realizes that he can Take A Third Option.
11. Which consists of making Gallifrey vanish into a frozen moment of time and/or a pocket universe (not entirely sure which). Which is only possible because (a) the calculations for doing so have been going on for hundreds of years (*) and (b) all twelve (or thirteen) of the Doctors, with their TARDISes, are doing the deed. Making it look like Gallifrey had been destroyed, and the Daleks firing on each other instead. A form of Deadly Dodging.
12. However, even though the Doctor changed the war, he didn't change what appeared to have happened.
a) The Daleks are mostly gone.
b) The War is Time-Locked.(**)
c) Gallifrey is gone.
d) Hurt!Doctor, Eccleston!Doctor and Tennant!Doctor still think they destroyed Gallifrey. Only Smith!Doctor remembers what actually happened.(***)
13. The Curator... who may be a future Doctor with the face of the Fourth Doctor... gives Smith!Doctor the clue that Gallifrey may stand after all.
14. So we have a new quest, the Hunt for Gallifrey! Cool.
(+) In "The Last Day", Arcadia is referred to as the safest place on Gallifrey. This is why, I think, there were so many children there; they'd been evacuated to Arcadia for safety.
(#) It has been pointed out that it could well have been much earlier, not the night before the fall of Arcadia, because the blurry face in the mirror after McGann!Doctor regenerated, didn't look old. And that Hurt!Doctor tried for years to end the war, and it wasn't until he was old and weary that he became desperate enough to consider the Ultimate Weapon. This makes more sense, I think now. Because it doesn't make a lot of sense to regenerate into someone old if one is asking to be a Warrior.
(++) The timey-wimeyness of "The End of Time" is even more confusing in light of the events of "The Day of the Doctor". Did the Doctor know what the High Council were planning, or not?
(+++) Such as performing feats of infeasible calculation by using time travel to give one enough time for said feats to have been performed.
(*) Not clear whether it was 400 years (Eleven saying "I've had a LONG time to think about it") or all of the Doctor's lifetimes.
(**) It has to be, or else various bits of history will break. The events of "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End" depend on Dalek Caan having broken through the Time Lock with Davros in tow. Also "The End of Time" depends on it too, I think. Maybe. It's confusing.
Did the Doctor time-lock the war afterwards, or had it been done as part of the war?
(***) Multi-Doctor episodes wouldn't really work if earlier Doctors remembered what happened. The only exception that I can think of was "Time Crash", which involves an ontological paradox.
More thoughts:
The Zygon plot could have been a whole separate episode in itself, IMHO.
I did like the twist that Elizabeth had actually offed the Zygon duplicate. Ah, Ten, hoist on his own petard because he assumed that Elizabeth wouldn't be so girly as to be infatuated with the face of Casanova... (smirk)
I also liked the "everyone forgets whether they're a Zygon or a human" resolution, though it was rather too easy in a way.
I liked the gesture with the fangirl scientist duplicate and the inhaler.
Indeed I liked the fangirl scientist (Osgood). Moffat's answer to Malcolm Taylor from "The Planet of the Dead".
I think I'm going to have to throw away all my partly-done ideas and drabbles related to the Time War. (sigh)
(Also saw the two prequel minisodes, too)
Oh, I like, I like.
There's a lot in there to munch over.
Are we going to have to renumber the Doctors now?
That's the trouble with time travel... the past isn't always as fixed as you think it is...
I didn't think that they could put yet another twist on the Time War, but wow!
The purpose of a companion is to remind the Doctor who he is.
Was that the Peter Capaldi Doctor that we saw a brief flash of? When the General said "all thirteen Doctors"?
Okay, let's figure some chronology of the Time War, after this additional go-around...
1. On the last day of the Time War, Arcadia fell.
It is this event that Eccleston!Doctor refers to in "Rose", that he was "there at the fall of Arcadia". (Mind you, I'd always thought, until I saw "The Last Day", that Arcadia was some planet somewhere else, not The Second City of Gallifrey). (ref "The Last Day")(+)
2.
3. He arrives at Arcadia and carves "No More" on a wall.
4. In the meantime, the High Council are in closed session, planning to destroy time itself, expecting to survive as disembodied intelligences. (ref "The End of Time")(++)
5. Hurt!Doctor steals the Galaxy-Destroyer, the only Ultimate Forbidden Weapon that hadn't been used in the war. (Because "the operating system was so complicated it developed a conscience"... a weapon that refuses to be used. Love it.)
6. The Galaxy-Destroyer appears to Hurt!Doctor in the form of Rose Tyler (hence people mentioning Billie Piper being in it). Faux!Rose asks Hurt!Doctor if he really really wants to do it. And chucks him into the future to see his future selves (Tennant!Doctor and Smith!Doctor).
7. Who are trying to thwart a Zygon invasion which is happening simultaneously in the present, and in Elizabeth I's time. Much running around ensues. Plus the seeds of things that happen later.(+++)
8. Hurt!Doctor decides to go ahead with his original plan. Complete with considerately-supplied Big Red Button.
9. Tennant!Doctor and Smith!Doctor arrive (even though the war is time-locked, presumably Faux!Rose let them through). With Clara in tow. To give Hurt!Doctor moral support. Because "there isn't another way". (Shades of "The Fires of Pompeii")
10. Clara shakes her head (performing the Companion!Purpose of reminding the Doctor who he is). And the Doctor suddenly realizes that he can Take A Third Option.
11. Which consists of making Gallifrey vanish into a frozen moment of time and/or a pocket universe (not entirely sure which). Which is only possible because (a) the calculations for doing so have been going on for hundreds of years (*) and (b) all twelve (or thirteen) of the Doctors, with their TARDISes, are doing the deed. Making it look like Gallifrey had been destroyed, and the Daleks firing on each other instead. A form of Deadly Dodging.
12. However, even though the Doctor changed the war, he didn't change what appeared to have happened.
a) The Daleks are mostly gone.
b) The War is Time-Locked.(**)
c) Gallifrey is gone.
d) Hurt!Doctor, Eccleston!Doctor and Tennant!Doctor still think they destroyed Gallifrey. Only Smith!Doctor remembers what actually happened.(***)
13. The Curator... who may be a future Doctor with the face of the Fourth Doctor... gives Smith!Doctor the clue that Gallifrey may stand after all.
14. So we have a new quest, the Hunt for Gallifrey! Cool.
(+) In "The Last Day", Arcadia is referred to as the safest place on Gallifrey. This is why, I think, there were so many children there; they'd been evacuated to Arcadia for safety.
(#) It has been pointed out that it could well have been much earlier, not the night before the fall of Arcadia, because the blurry face in the mirror after McGann!Doctor regenerated, didn't look old. And that Hurt!Doctor tried for years to end the war, and it wasn't until he was old and weary that he became desperate enough to consider the Ultimate Weapon. This makes more sense, I think now. Because it doesn't make a lot of sense to regenerate into someone old if one is asking to be a Warrior.
(++) The timey-wimeyness of "The End of Time" is even more confusing in light of the events of "The Day of the Doctor". Did the Doctor know what the High Council were planning, or not?
(+++) Such as performing feats of infeasible calculation by using time travel to give one enough time for said feats to have been performed.
(*) Not clear whether it was 400 years (Eleven saying "I've had a LONG time to think about it") or all of the Doctor's lifetimes.
(**) It has to be, or else various bits of history will break. The events of "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End" depend on Dalek Caan having broken through the Time Lock with Davros in tow. Also "The End of Time" depends on it too, I think. Maybe. It's confusing.
Did the Doctor time-lock the war afterwards, or had it been done as part of the war?
(***) Multi-Doctor episodes wouldn't really work if earlier Doctors remembered what happened. The only exception that I can think of was "Time Crash", which involves an ontological paradox.
More thoughts:
The Zygon plot could have been a whole separate episode in itself, IMHO.
I did like the twist that Elizabeth had actually offed the Zygon duplicate. Ah, Ten, hoist on his own petard because he assumed that Elizabeth wouldn't be so girly as to be infatuated with the face of Casanova... (smirk)
I also liked the "everyone forgets whether they're a Zygon or a human" resolution, though it was rather too easy in a way.
I liked the gesture with the fangirl scientist duplicate and the inhaler.
Indeed I liked the fangirl scientist (Osgood). Moffat's answer to Malcolm Taylor from "The Planet of the Dead".
I think I'm going to have to throw away all my partly-done ideas and drabbles related to the Time War. (sigh)
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no subject
Date: 2013-12-01 02:04 pm (UTC)And, I suppose, if you wanted to regenerate into a warrior, you'd want to be young and strong, not necessarily 70+ years old.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-01 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-01 10:36 am (UTC)If you haven't already seen it, I can recommend "The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot", a very funny piece of whimsy about Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy attempting to wangle themselves roles in "The Day of the Doctor": http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01m3kfy
no subject
Date: 2013-12-01 01:26 pm (UTC)Thanks.
If you haven't already seen it, I can recommend "The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot", a very funny piece of whimsy about Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy attempting to wangle themselves roles in "The Day of the Doctor"
Seen it now. (grin)
no subject
Date: 2013-12-01 02:47 pm (UTC)I haven't seen Night of the Doctor or The Last Day yet.
However, I have seen Adventures in Time and Space", which was really a good dramatization of trying to get Doctor Who on the air. I'm sure it's no more historically accurate than most such, but there were a lot of things I'd never known about it.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-01 09:40 pm (UTC)I know Hurt!Doctor is called "The War Doctor" in credits, so that's Official.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-01 09:29 pm (UTC)(I quite liked the episode, particularly the twists and the new quest.)
no subject
Date: 2013-12-01 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-02 01:29 am (UTC)All those Daleks firing on Gallifrey remind me of the end scene in "Blake".:¬)
Some of the Zygon bits were a bit silly and it did rather end with a whimper.
Considering the war between the Time Lords and Gallifrey was referred to as "The Time War" I tend to think the war was time locked by one of the two main protagonists rather than the doctor, primarily to prevent any time meddling. However the Ultimate Weapon seemed capable of getting round that.
I do like the paintings being frozen moments in time. (Rather Sapphire and Steelish!)
I also like the playing about with the title of the painting depicting Gallifrey falls no more.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-02 11:55 am (UTC)I'm not sure. I can think of a few reasons why that wouldn't be the case:
1. If one side made a time-lock, the other side would break it in retaliation. Tit for tat, whether it made sense or not.
2. This is Total War. These opponents would never agree to a time-lock to limit the war. They would never agree to limit the war at all; that's made clear by the fact that the universe was being ripped to shreds as "collateral damage".
3. It's a Time War. That implies that time travel is being used as a weapon as well as more conventional things. There must surely have been attempts at time meddling. And from the horrors that Ten described in "The End of Time" there must have been a certain amount of time meddling and paradoxical warping that had "succeeded" (for some measure of "success").
4. Given point #1, it probably wasn't possible to time-lock the war until both sides had been taken out of the picture. I can imagine the Thirteen Doctors working together to make the time lock after the Daleks had blown each other up.
5. Both sides tried to break out of the time-lock - Dalek Caan in "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End" (it succeeded, but the effort drove it mad), and the High Council of Time Lords in "The End of Time" (they failed). That implies that the time-lock was not put in place by either side, but by a third party.
6. Indeed, it may not have been possible to have created a time-lock from inside it, only from outside it.
I do like the paintings being frozen moments in time. (Rather Sapphire and Steelish!)
Oh my yes! That's a S&S episode waiting to happen, isn't it?
I also like the playing about with the title of the painting depicting Gallifrey falls no more.
Indeed. I love it when a surprise is foreshadowed by breadcrumbs that one didn't notice at the time.