I always got the impression that he really wanted to use him during his era, only for Courtney to pass away before he got the chance. I actually think he used the Brig's legacy well for the most part, but Cyber-Brig was where I drew the line.
That genuinely disturbed me, both in and out of universe, it's just a horrible thing to have happened. I find it so weird when people say it was 'touching', I felt like I was watching exploitation. I get that Moffat was well-intentioned with it, but it's probably my least favorite scene he's ever written. Made worse by how he managed a much more tasteful tribute in *The Wedding of River Song* and there was really no call for another.
I'm sure there are other people too that we know were converted. But the fact that the Brigadier was paraded around was weird.
And this was the Master/ Missy that was redeemed...
Anytime Humanity is revealed to have been guided or controlled by some other alien race throughout history. When taken together with the Silence, the Jagaroth, the Daemons, the Fendahl, and even The Doctor to an extent, it feels like Humans are a perpetual slave race who never accomplished anything for themselves.
Adding that I really didn't like the Earth being created by a Racnoss ship. Something that big and consequential shouldn't be used on a minor, one-off villain imo
See I'll be honest that doesn't bother me too much.
1) Because it's just the initial rock not something that actually effected humanity
2) Because it makes the Dalek Invasion of Earth make more sense as it turns out there was already a device to pilot the Earth at the centre.
>Anytime Humanity is revealed to have been guided or controlled by some other alien race throughout history
I don't know what you're talking about. The Monks have been with us from the beginning. They shepherded humanity through its formative years, gently guiding and encouraging, like a parent clapping their hands at a baby's first steps. They have been instrumental in all the advances of culture and technology. They watched proudly as man invented the light bulb, the telephone and the internet. They were even there to welcome the first men on the moon.
And humans would have been wiped out/enslaved hundreds of times (if not more) if it hadn’t been for the doctor being there to save them. Even though he always says how indomitable they are and how they always survive, that wouldn’t be true without him being there. I always think this is such massive intervention in the timelines, especially given the fact that because he always saves them they go on to create a huge empire across the universe, massively impacting other species & planets
It’s definitely something the Eccleston stories improved upon, as the Doctor’s presence largely inspired the side cast to take charge and save the day themselves.
Kind of cheating since it's pretty much part of the _Timeless Child_ shtick but the re-destruction of Gallifrey felt pretty random and meaningless. The first seven-ish years of NuWho were kind of predicated on it's initial destruction in the Time War, so for the Master to casually mention 'oh yeah i killed it again offscreen LOL' in the last 5 minutes of an episode really just felt kinda cheap.
Honestly, every single flip or flop on Gallifrey seems like a wholly unnecessary tangent. Its like every person that has ever written for Doctor Who has to flip some switch on Gallifrey instead of just either ignoring it or having it matter at any given time like Classic who did. You would go years without anything happening there, then something would, then its years again. That worked fine.
It really showed how little Chibnal cared/understood Doctor Who and good storytelling in general. It still astounds me how bad his series really were with everything they did
Especially as saving Gallifrey felt deserved and epic.
It took all the Doctors and had actual consequences leading to the 11th Doctors death.
It was a big moment for the character to overcome his past and on a very rare occasion get rewarded for his actions.
I miss the reduction of the scientific genius side to the doctor. Like with Pertwee or Troughton you'd get him thinking through a problem, taking time to work it out in a lab, apply logic and brainpower to a situation. That came back a little bit with Capaldi and it's one of the reasons I liked 12 so much
I was excited for a tinkerer Doctor when *The Woman Who Fell To Earth* focused on the Doctor building the sonic screwdriver, but they never really did that very much with 13 again.
Her two most interesting characteristics, her tinkerer nature, and the fact that her 'flat team structure, we're a fam!' bit is an act and whenever shit hits the fan she drops that pretense entirely, are so underutilized. Hopefully someday BF can really make use of them.
it's hilarious they tried to shove in another tinkerer moment during her last episde trying to play it off as like "oh this is one of her character traits, we're doing callbacks!" uhhhh no that is NOT one of her character traits lol you didn't put in the work to make that a character trait
just another "Big Finish will fix it" thing i guess
The TARDIS noise being caused by the Doctor leaving the brakes on. They're never even stayed consistent with that retcon, every TARDIS we've seen since has made the same noise.
I headcannon that River just moved the engines too far away from the console room to hear to mess with the Doctor.
Yeah that was definitely River trolling since, yknow, *the Time Lords* also make that sound every time they use a TARDIS.
Either that or you're *meant* to leave the breaks on for safety reasons and River bypassed it to look cool because she's River.
I mean, don’t people put their brakes on when they’re parking? River materialising without the brakes on is probably equivalent to parallel parking at full speed.
Any explanation of what the Nightmare Child, Horde of Travesties, Could-Have-Been-King, and etc have been. Going further, nearly everything we've seen to flesh out the Time War. I'll give a grudging pass to Day of the Doctor and the War Doctor, but that's it.
(Big Finish, you're on notice)
Honestly there’s no way the TV show in particular could have done the Time War justice.
You’re expecting a war where the weapons, the attacks, the injuries and tragedies etc are all time based. Battles that take place across time using time itself.
Instead what we get in Day of the Doctor is a few flying Daleks blasting lasers as normal. It made the whole thing feel, i dunno, low-rent?
I love Day of the Doctor but if they wanted to centre it around the Time War they should have been way more imaginative or if the budget wouldn’t allow that, find some way to do it without actually showing any battles.
I think that the implication is that it's the last day, they've used all the big weapons. Kind of like the 1000-year war that began the Daleks, where at the end they are using very basic weapons. This is the advanced variant.
I think we saw a lot of what the Time War would look like in season 5 with the Crack in the Wall, people vanishing out of memory etc. It would have been interesting to see new people appear as well, but that would have been more War and less Crack.
To be fair, anything Doctor Who does can be considered optional Lore considering how much retcons and changes and how brittle the lore is (Remember when the Eight doctor revealed he was half human?)
I don't like any example of someone reversing a complete cyberman conversion through sheer willpower, because it implies that other people just didn't care enough. Its one-thing if its only half-finished, but Yvonne in Doomsday shouldn't have been able to completely overcome her inhibitor.
I think the in universe explanation would be they were hobbled together cybernen with the metal bits bolted into their body like that torchwood episode
Later series ended up just copying the Borg nannites and all
Honestly Yvonne is the only one where I give it a pass because I can argue to myself she was a rush job, but yeah pretty much it pisses me off A LOT. Especially with the corpse cybers Missy makes (does not make sense to me at all), it just makes everyone else look like complete bastards who don't care about their loved ones etc.
Its either the whole "Clara goes into the Doctor's timestream and saves him hundreds of times and even is the one who chooses the TARDIS for him" thing, or the stuff Missy did with the Cybermen in *Dark Water/Death in Heaven*
I guess it depends what the limits of "addition to the lore" is. Is everything that ever happened to the Doctor an addition to the lore in some way?
Limited to things about the Doctor's backstory/Gallifrey, the whole "Theta Sigma" thing in "The Armageddon Factor" was pretty dumb. Actually the whole concept and character of Drax was terrible. A renegade Time Lord who travels the universe doing maintenance work? Come on.
I tend to assume that (a) that was a fraternity nickname, and (b) we're only hearing the TARDIS translator circuits' translation of the actual name anyway. I doubt Gallifreyans give people Ancient Greek names - nickname or otherwise.
My theory is this...
Romana is called Romanadvoratrelundar. There are plenty of hints throughout the series that the Doctor's name really is "Who". I think his name is as long as Romana's but the first three letters are "Who".
So, why Theta Sigma? Well, a capital Sigma looks like a W on its side, and a capital Theta looks like an O with an H in the middle.
Now imagine being a bunch of swotty aristocrats, high on how clever you all are and generally enjoying smelling your own farts, studying foreign languages at space Cambridge/Oxford and you find out that in this one language there are symbols that, when put together, form the word "WHO". I mean, you'd have to call your friend Whoversmakealoudnoise Theta Sigma, wouldn't you?
You know... I don't hate that idea. I've always firmly been in the camo of we can never know the Doctors name, both in that it would de-mystify them, and that nothing they ever came up with could be good enough to satisfy everyone.
But for 'Who' to be their actual name, or at least a shortened version of it is something I could completely get behind. Their name was something like Whovernatriscal is something ridiculous enough to be both taken seriously and also completely ignored. Plus it would mean their name has been literally staring us in the face since the very first opening titles in 63.
I actually really like the idea of Drax. Or at least the version of him portrayed in the expanded universe, where he becomes the Time Lord equivalent of Del Boy.
He wasn't a Time Lord tho, was he?
I thought he'd failed the exams, decided 'sod this then' and gone freelance?
I love the idea the a cowboy builder of space and time, tucking his sonic pencil behind his ear, suckling his teeth and saying "Perpetual Motion washing machine? Ooof. Yeah, I mean I can fix it for ya, but it won't be cheep boss..."
The TARDIS becoming the most powerful space and time craft in the universe, with the Doctor having perfect control over it.
I preferred it when the TARDIS was an old, clunky jalopy held together with gaffer tape and bits of string. When other Time Lords openly laughed at the Doctor for flying a clapped out old capsule that no one else would touch. When the navigation didn't work properly and the Doctor's travel plans were at best a suggestion.
I miss the days when moving the TARDIS meant something. Companion left behind when it dematerializes? Hope you enjoy your new home because there's no coming back for you. None of this whip around the cosmos after work and be back home in time to cook dinner. In that aspect, the TARDIS felt more like a traveling home instead of a car. It's lost some of that sense of adventure of not knowing what's over the next hill.
Meta-Crisis Doctor. I think there’s an interesting story there, but it wasn’t fleshed out enough. And Rose ending up with a human clone of the Doctor and just being cool seems a little weird, even if she was specifically attached to Tennant’s Doctor. But that’s more personal preference than actual criticism.
Yeah everything about the Meta-Crisis kinda sucks. Particularly with how it gets used to give Rose a kind of cheap happy ending at the expense of Donna getting a frankly mean ending.
Rewatching Journey's End in hindsight I just felt like he was a way of placating fans who never got over Rose's departure. Aside from that he doesn't really add anything to the story besides keeping Ten's hands clean at the end of the story and being the catalyst for Donna's departure (which as you said is mean/cruel enough to make the contrast with what Rose gets even worse)
Without confirmation, I assume that since he’s not Actually The Same Man (not least because of being also part Donna) their relationship doesn’t work how 10 expected it to. It’s even sadder to contemplate them splitting up, but it’s the healthiest way I see things going down.
It makes sense considering 10’s character flaws, but that doesn’t mean he’s right or doing the right thing.
I still hold out faith (while huffing an industrial amount of copium) that Meta Crisis Doctor will turn out to be the Valeyard. Or at least go bad somehow and become an actually good character. Tennant can play a sensational villain, have him pop back up as a jealous and twisted Doctor, be a good time.
If we are just looking at 9 and forward and ignoring 13 than there's a couple things that always rubbed me wrong. Clara going back through the doctors entire timeline is up there. Worst thing overall if say is 'Me' being immortal so simply and even though it's stated she can die and just won't age they survive until the end of time. Also they take no responsibility for their actions. Just the charecter ME is my answer.
I think Me would have been a better character if she wasn’t included in the finale. I could understand the logic of her avoiding danger for all that time to end up in the 21st century, but the idea she survived until the end of the universe is insane.
it felt to me like the character was given more because of the actor playing her. if it had been some rando i doubt she would have appeared in Hell Bent. (unless Moffat really thought "the hybrid... is Me!" was that clever lol)
I really hate Me, because a dude rez'ed by a time goddes can die of old age (captain jack) but a girl with some weird chip in her head can survive forever... ok
Yeah maybe it's just because it seems like a small change these days but I never really got the backlash. It does a decent job of raising more questions than it answers, while also being a pretty solid explanation for why the Doctor sticks around Earth so much. Maybe people preferred the Doctor being totally alien, but it's not like they haven't still been raised in an alien culture with alien biology. (I'd object to their mother being a significant human, though.)
>The first 8th doctor novel has him stating something like 'I said I was half human. What was I thinking??'
Read them all, this does not happen. They do however make fun of the idea a few times with him showing up as half something else on a scan and then Unnatural History's multiple origins.
War Doctor. For one, haven't seen anything to indicate he was more hardcore than his predecessors or successors, besides almost activating the Moment (which never happened anyway). And I would have preferred the Eighth Doctor being the one to experience the Time War, as it can be an easy way of saying that after countless time, he was worn down by all the war, and loss, and the struggle that seemed to have no end, which drove him to be desperate enough to want to end the war at any cost. I'd find that more intriguing than just another Doctor made specifically for the Time War.
My problem has never been the War Doctor existing, I just think that the conclusion that 'he was just any old Doctor afterall' annoys me. The Big Finish audios have only made this worse. Why does Seven feel darker than War? It shouldn't be like that.
yeah i started the War Doctor audios and found myself growing more disinterested because of this. i was looking for the edge, i was looking for the reasons he doesn't like to be called Doctor but it's just John Hurt kind of doing a First Doctor impression for the most part? kind of a bummer.
even 11 and 12 have better moments of darkness than anything i saw from the first two War Doctor audios. i swapped over to the War Master audios and have been enjoying them more.
It's gutting that Big Finish had JOHN FUCKING HURT and that's all they did with him tbh.
I enjoy them for what they are, but they're just not what I wanted from the War Doctor. Then again, I've since avoided all Time War media cos I've realised its way more impressive in the abstract than when very human writers try and write about something that should be beyond our comprehension.
Strongly agree.
The War Doctor exists solely because they couldn't get Eccleston, and wouldn't get McGann.
The reputation they build up around him and the way the Doctor talks about the time war, just doesn't match up to what we get of the war doctor. Whilst Hurt was obviously an incredible actor, he didn't really bring much to the role, or get much of a chance to shine in it.
I also think there was a real poetry to the idea of McGann's Doctor, a bright eyed romantic, being worn down and forced to commit such a terrible act, to put an end to even greater evils.
Yeah, we should have been very **scared** of the War Doctor. He should have been a very very dark figure. But he's just like a lovable grandpa who cracks jokes. I understand he used to be younger, but still.
I kinda love the idea that the War Doctor - and what was going on in the Time War - was sort of locked up to us, the viewers, as well - like this was the Doctor after McGann during the Wilderness years.
I always want to see more McGann, but I also struggle to see him pressing the button. I'm largely okay with how it played out (and Hurt, regardless, was fantastic).
I think The Day of the Doctor is beautifully done, and I also love the War Doctor being a surrogate Classic Who-only fan in the episode, but there’s absolutely nothing they can do with the character that would actually live up to the idea of what he’s supposed to have been like. I would have preferred McGann, but ultimately I think the War Doctor shouldn’t ever have been seen outside of that episode. We get his redemption, and that’s the whole purpose of the character.
The BBC’s request to keep the character comparatively mild totally neutered the Big Finish version and made the whole series kind of pointless. He goes out of his way to help people and limit the war’s impact on innocents, and then at the end just says “I’m a monster” as if that comment makes it true.
Funny I think it makes perfect sense that the doctor never used the moment. It makes perfect sense to me that the man who imagines himself to be the doctor, who sees “all that ever is, was and ever could be” would stop from himself committing mass destruction. And the fact that, by doing so, as he had, he has no recollection and will forever demonize his past self for it and torture himself for hundreds of years afterward. The doctor’s pretty hardcore, and he is the doctor.
In gallyfrey it's half your number of past regenerations plus 3
Anything that lasts less than a century is the equivalent of a one night stand or a quick summer fling
I've always kind of seen it through the lens of tragedy, where the Doctor probably does desire close relationships (especially with the destruction of Gallifrey; that loneliness would drive people mad), but the reality of who and what he is just makes it simply impossible. That was a lesson I suspect he took away from Rose. By the time of Amy Pond it is clear that, while he has regenerated, the 11th doctor still clearly took that lesson to heart and actively tried to shut down Amy's romance attempt.
That the Statue of Liberty is a Weeping Angel. It lead to a cool shot, but it didn’t make any sense. 😂
I like the idea that an image of an Angel becomes an Angel. It’s scary.
River Song turning out to be Melody Pond.
All of the mystery that made River so compelling got replaced with a dense tangle of lore.
And it was odd how little the realization that they’d never get to properly raise their child affected Amy and Rory.
> And it was odd how little the realization that they’d never get to properly raise their child affected Amy and Rory
The whole divorce storyline in *Asylum of the Daleks* could have been actually not awful if this was the catalyst for it and the stress was visible throughout the latter half of S6, but it's just left unexplored.
I wish Moffat had held some restraint with River. She was a really fun character in her first couple of appearances, but she became overused and her additional lore wasn't that exciting to me (everything should have been kept ambiguous). And as you said, tying her to Rory and Amy was weird.
Moffat has a real problem with "strong female characters" in that they all basically become the same person and that person is so ridiculously one dimensional and over the top that it kinda just sucks the air out of the room. The same thing happened on Sherlock.
Yeah, Moffat tends to write his major female characters as some kind of Catwoman type. Irene Adler in the original short story wins partly because she is intelligent and Holmes underestimates her, but also because she has pure motives and just wants to move on with her life. Moffat made her a dominatrix blackmailer who took advice from a terrorist on how to blackmail the government.
I was fine with the mystery concluding because it's easier to develop a character than a mystery. My problem was how it limited River's character and that any weight it held was contingent to the ponds' continued appearance. Unsurprisingly, in her appearances post-Manhatten, it held no relevance and thus felt rather deflating.
This was addressed briefly when Amy kills Madam Kovarion. Doesn't she say something like "My baby grew up and we're happy now but you took her from me and I didn't get to raise her so I'll never forgive you." Definitely not the exact quote but something along those lines.
I dislike the implication in "let's kill Hitler' that they "raised" River by always taking care of their unruly friend Mel essentially acting like her mom and dad. I was okay with the wobbly wobbly time line up until that point.
Someone else got to "Oh no, Gallifrey isn't actually destroyed after all" first.
So I guess I'll go with Reapers? It made for a neat story, but set a terrible precedent that they've basically quietly ignored ever since.
The reapers are pretty misunderstood.
They're not a hard and fast rule that always happens when you create a paradox, they're more just vultures. They might see a particularly juicy paradox and start feasting.
The events of *Father's Day* are also very specific. It's actually a double paradox. Not only does Rose save her father when he should have died, but she does it in front of a version of her and the Doctor that saw him die, erasing their past selves from history and creating another paradox.
Also if you add on top the whole Bad Wolf scenario.
Rose scatters the words throughout time to lead them to that moment. That’s already established by the time of Fathers Day, so Rose altering her past in a way that could stop her meeting the Doctor would have a massive impact on time.
It’s a big old bundle of paradoxes in one, perfect place for them to be
The Doctor being half-human.
P.S. That's not just something he said - he also demonstrated it towards the end of the film by being able to open the Eye of Harmony, which was stated as something that required a human eye to do.
I thought to myself, ugh the timeless child and wasnt going to even bother commenting that completely unoriginal take, but i thought for just a second and remembered something worse. Me, or Oshielda, to be more obvious. The girl who died and the woman who lived. Theres some interesting aspects to the character, her memories are so full that she just forgets everything eventually. Shes well acted, and has an interesting dynamic with the doctor. But she shouldnt exist.
That stupid tiny little circuit in her head made her completely immortal, beyond civilizations, beyond every other immortal, the doctor can literally make any one he wants at any point immortal, he has that kicking round his tardis and yet several of his companions since have died.
Theres either no stakes when any character can just become immortal at any point and theres no sense that they dont. So i just pretend it never happened.
There's a great short story called The Triple Knife about Ashildr, where all three of her children have the bubonic plague and she's forced to make a choice between them of which she wants to cure with the Doctor's immortality technology. In the end, she realises that it's more of a curse than anything else and chooses to let all three of them die.
That time lapse shot at the end where it goes from happy in tone to slowly melancholic as she comes to terms with her immortality is pretty haunting though
Probably the recent River Song stuff. Classic Doctors was already eh but I came up with a rationalisation. But Post-Darillium River meeting 12, 13 and *Pre-Library 10* really just undercuts literally all of Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead's pathos.
This is a big one for me. What made them scary was that they were basically just parasites. I never got the idea that they were really intelligent beings during Blink. Statues that mindlessly "kill" you when you blink is scary.
As soon as they start talking, it detracts from what made them work. Add to that the snapping of necks, the weird image of an angel thing and it just makes them less effective. With Flux we even establish that some of them have jobs, they work for the Division.
It would have been better to invent a new monster for some of these stories in my opinion.
Also the fact that they were called WEEPING ANGELS because they cover their faces so they can't see each other but then all the way through the two parter they're just shown looking at each other all the time. Like it's literally the entire plot resolution of Blink!
I want to just start by emphasising that this is a lore answer, not a question of quality, because otherwise it looks like Moffat is getting a battering.
The more the show becomes about time travel as a plot device the less sense anything makes. In the old days the Tardis was a magic door that got you to the adventure and events play out. If it's known history, it doesn't ultimately deviate, if not the crew has scope to do as they see best onsite. The ship was unreliable with precise control rendered unlikely so what happened needed to be resolved as is.
Nowadays we have bootstrap paradoxes up the wazoo which is a bit smug perhaps but fine. We also have timelines freely changing, except where they don't. The reason? Fixed points, which basically work on the principle of "trust me mate, can't do that". There's no rule, just sometimes you can and sometimes you can't. Then there's *Christmas Carol* which provides objectively the best answer to every problem in the form of: what if the bad guy was a better dude? Well, we can do that. Except it doesn't ever happen again.
Clara ‘surviving’ and running off with Me. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the Season 9 finale and I do like Clara and wish her the best generally, but I liked the way she died in Face the Raven, because she forgot she wasn’t the Doctor. Bringing her back gave me the feeling they just didn’t have the courage to finish her off.
I started to dislike Clara towards the end. Her story completely overshadowed that of what should have been the main character. Jenna Coleman, for her part, did a good job with what she was given. This isn't a knock against her as an actress, but more of a knock against the character. The writers seemed completely lost over what to do with her.
Clara was originally introduced as a transition character, the one that swaps in before a regeneration to smooth the transition to the new Doctor, before making a graceful exit? Companions don't usually say they're ready to leave and then stick around for another season or three. (other than Tegan, of course) The Doctor was completely unnecessary in some of his stories once they had her go full on Clara Who.
All of that being said, I did think she was given a great death. By bringing her back, it just negated all of that drama and tension leading up to it. It showed that there are really no consequences to any of the characters actions.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the Witches Familiar but the Daleks saying “Exterminate” to reload just seems kinda dumb for me and a pointless thing to explain.
And also if I’m remember correctly in the same episode they say that Daleks have a restriction on what they say. Like both of these just seem pointless additions and just makes the Dalek seem a lot less interesting.
Pretty much all the new dalek lore in those episodes was bad imo, very weird that when Daleks aren’t invading planets or committing genocide they just stand around in buildings on their home planet chilling and doing nothing
> Daleks have a restriction on what they say
It's incredibly silly that these creatures, hatred incarnate, genetically created preciscely to hate and kill, needs to have systems in their metallic shells that prevent them from saying nice things. When would a Dalek ever say something like that in the first place?
Not saying that writing Daleks is easy; there's a lot of Dalek stories that are shite, but Moffat *really* couldn't write them. Eventually he sort of gets there with Enter the Dalek by basically just riffing on Dalek (which was itself an adaptation of a short story, I think?).
The Tardis having holographic projection that sometimes responds to the person speaking and sometimes doesn't. If it does then why doesn't the Tardis _always_ have an interactive holographic interface?
I kinda love that.
He’s all sorts of messed up, and believes that seeing things through the Daleks eyes is the best way to look at the universe. He’s so insanely dedicated to his crazy ideology that he literally blinds himself to what makes him human.
It’s a lovely bit of visual storytelling.
Hot take: River Song.
I really liked her when she appeared in the Silence of the Library/Forests of the Dead 2 parter, but her sporadic appearances during the Matt Smith era in which she spent more time posing in fancy outfits and saying catchy one liners than actually settling down enough to be developed in a natural way wasn't enough to convince me that her and the Doctor had this super special relationship that was uniquely close among companions. They spent more time coming up with new ways to make her look cool than actually developing her and her relationship with the Doctor.
Yeah, I never liked the action hero femme fatale direction they took her character after that first two-parter. And I also feel like they completely blew the initial premise of them being time travelers who met out of order. To me that implied that they kept running into each other by happenstance while on their own adventures, like in Silence of the Library. Instead, River Song seems to be always turning up with the explicit intention of meeting up with the Doctor. So why do it out of order? And her character is a whole lot less interesting for not having any life outside the Doctor, with even her career as an archeologist turning out to be just a way of keeping tabs on the Doctor.
>And her character is a whole lot less interesting for not having any life outside the Doctor, with even her career as an archeologist turning out to be just a way of keeping tabs on the Doctor.
I get why this isn't great, but I started to interpret it in an almost tragic way after AGMGTW and LKH, that once the Doctor knows who she is and why she was created he feels a sense of responsibility to her. She's obsessed with him because she's been built to be that way, and he's gone along with it because like the viewer he was kind of presuming that they an odd couple who kept having meet cutes across time, but once he knows the truth he sees her almost like a victim of his he has to make it up to. I think THORS really sells the idea that without him she's kind of a massive fuck up and Capaldi really sold the idea that he loves her, perhaps not in the way we thought he would in SITL, but loves her nevertheless.
Moffat kinda undermined his own efforts with River due to his characterisation of the Eleventh Doctor.
This is nothing against Matt Smith or his portrayal. But Moffat wrote the Eleventh Doctor as a very alien incarnation who seems to completely misunderstand most human norms. So to continually pair him with a romantic interest felt really odd and it never got better.
Tbf Susan presumably shares DNA with the doctor and she was always intended, at least by the end of S1/mid S2, to have mind reading and sensory powers to some degree even if rarely used. So I don't think it's out there for the doctor to be able to read some of the "simpler" minds.
I started liking it once I realised it’s the inverse to The Master’s mind control.
The Master uses his talent for evils but the Doctor only uses it to help people. It’s a nice contrast between the two.
"The Magician's Apprentice"/"The Witch's Familiar" explaining that it's the Dalek casing that translates anything the occupant says as *"Exterminate!"*
there was no need for that. since daleks are made to be hate. so there will never be.. well anything that would need to "trigger" the exterminate word replacement
I loved Tennant and Smith's performances, but I hated how their season arcs were just one-upping each previous in terms of scale and scope of the peril humanity, the Earth, and eventually all of reality were in. And by Smith the writers turned The Doctor into the most important being to ever exist. That paradoxically diminishes the character. And the whole River Song arc wasn't nearly as interesting to me as it was to the showrunners, but I don't think that's necessarilly a lore problem and just investing a lot of airtime to a particular story. I bailed after the first Capaldi episode and just watch Classic episodes anymore, I like how just about every story is a small scale mystery
And then they didn’t really know how to follow them through. I felt like the resolution of the Doctor’s name and the Hybrid arcs were quite weak. Even River Sing didn’t quite work for me, I think they should have left her as this mysterious event in the indeterminate future.
I'm so with you on that! The only explanation I'd except is that that is how regeneration is supposed to look, but the Doctor, being a sorry excuse for a Time Lord, didn't figure it out until the Time War. However, I still prefer them all looking different.
Yea. I hc that 9th looked like explosion of time vortex because he absorbed it. Thats why the others and retro activily adding it to every timelord ever makes no sense
Absolutely fantastic in silence of the library etc. Then felt like it needed an explanation when it was pretty final. Tenants acting when he realises how much he meant to her was *chef kiss* then she just popped up a lot and kinda ruined it? I love river don't get me wrong but didn't like post 10 river.
There was that period of time where it was sort of the in-thing to retcon various Doctor Who gestalt creatures like the Great Intellgence and the Nestene Consciousness into being Great Old Ones (or derivatives thereof) from the Lovecraft mythos.
Christ that was dumb.
~~I like the Timeless Child addition~~
It was a running thing in the *New Doctor Adventures* (*Millennial Rites, All-Consuming Fire, White Darkness, Conundrum, the Well-Mannered War, Divided Loyalties*, among others) and audios like *Gods and Monsters* and *Beyond the Ultimate Adventure*, and tied in the Intelligence, the Animus, Fenric, the Nestrenes, the Celestial Toymaker, and the Guardians with straight-up Yog-Sothoth, Lloigor, and Azathoth. Post-show Seven tore through *the Call of Cthulhu* bestiary. It died down a bit, but the Intelligence was also called a GOO in the relatively recent short story *Legacies*.
I don’t know if this is “lore” but I hate what the reboot has done with the “sonic” (f/k/a the sonic screwdriver). It has become a lazy plot device, used way too often. It develops new capabilities every time we see it. Since we don’t really know what the “sonic” is and what it’s capable of, there is less tension when the doctor is in a jam. They can just whip out the “sonic”, wave it around, and poof - problem solved. That might be fine in a show about wizards and magic wands. But I don’t like it here.
People had the same complaints in the 80s but tbf its the 45 min format which necessitates some kind of occasional magic wand. Before that we wasted a lot of time with the doctor being imprisoned etc
I always thought it would be great if the 12 regens was just a recommended limit because after that it can lead to problems. Before the Timeless Child stuff my headcanon was the Morbius Doctors counted and Davison was the 13th incarnation, leading to the line "I might regenerate, I don't know... It feels different this time" and the subsequent unstable-ness of Colin's Doctor.
If it was only in Deadly Assassin maybe it could be ignored, but I'm pretty sure it was mentioned too much and too well known subsequently, to change in the 2000s.
That's scene where Davros, a villain that has been built up over years and years, has a little cry and a joke with the Doctor before the writers make it all better by being like its okay, he's really doing it to betray him. Bullshit. Davros would consider such weakness the lowest of the low.
The last of the Time Lords. I absolutely get the reasoning, and it definitely added some worthy character stuff, but ultimately I dislike the importance it gives to the character. I love the idea of the Doctor simply being a wanderer who solves problems that he stumbles across, and the whole thing of him being some near-mythical being always rubs me up the wrong way. The classic series got around the whole Gallifrey thing by making him an exile, and the first few appearances of the Time Lords are minimal and totally tally with that. In fact, I think making him an exile from his own people actually has more character potential than him being the last of his kind.
Everything about the 50th Anniversary, but particularly Gallifrey being saved. I can't get behind that decision when so much importance was put on the tragic choice of the Doctor having to destroy it in the first place. Taking that away, the weight of his guilt, the torment of making the impossibly hard decision of destroying your own people for the sake of the universe, just... makes all the suffering he went through (particularly as Nine) feel so meaningless to me.
I know a lot of people like it, and that's totally fine. I wish I could too! But I can't stand any part of the 50th. It feels like complete character assassination to me.
I am of the same opinion. Timeless Child stuff was awful.
Some meaningless one-off pics in the Brain of Morbius becomes the defining characteristic of the character?
I really don't understand why people keep assuming the point of TTC was to explain the Morbius faces.
The point of TTC was clearly to give the Doctor some investment in an unexplored period of the setting - prior to the First Doctor's infancy - and use that to introduce new mysteries, allies, enemies, etc.
Which, being Chibnall era was all implemented really badly.
But to say that "some meaningless one-off pics in the Brain of Morbius becomes the defining characteristic of the character" really does miss the point of the reveal.
They're one and the same.
People that liked the idea of Morbius doctors, liked it because it means there were adventures and doctors before Hartnell.
It's not like people only cared about a continuity issue caused by some faces in an old serial, they cared about what those faces *meant*. The *Timeless Child* as an addition to lore clearly has the same motivation.
I realise a lot of people love her, but to me she's a violent gun-wielding idiot who most of time would be the bad guy in a Doctor Who story.
I mean, Jo Martin is amazing, but I really dislike the character we were presented with.
It makes sense in context for a distant past version of the Doctor to be nothing like the Doctor now, imo.
She's presumably from before a time where any of the First Doctor's character development happened.
then why is she the Doctor? she's nothing like the Doctor, she has none of the Doctor's character traits, why does this character *need* to be the Doctor?
The Clara splinters being everywhere in The Doctor's timeline. It was a very forced retcon that makes little sense and was very awkwardly introduced and was very confused for the character of Clara going forward especially with how quickly it was forgotten and the S7 arc made her less of a person because it
It was pretty common during the Moffat era to have large life changing events be forgotten instantly.
Amy got her parents back, that should be huge, yet we never see them again.
Amy and Rory lose their baby, and forget it by the next episode. Knowing it's River apparently removes all grief, and regret of not being able to raise their baby.
Clara going inside the time stream, the Doctor casually jumps in and carries her out, never mentioned again.
It would have been nice to see these events have some lasting impact on the characters.
I always thought that 12 should have just been talking to a Clara splinter in Hell Bent after companion-Clara convinced him to let her back to her time-stream to die
Would be a full circle on the narrative of her becoming like the Doctor, because of course they would sacrifice themselves to fix time
That Gallifrey survived the Time War.
Day of the Doctor is a wonderfully enjoyable episode, a fantastic character study of the Doctor, and a worthwhile part of the then-ongoing storylines without being too bogged down to work as a standalone...
But Gallifrey should have stayed gone. The Doctor should have had no better option than to blow it up. That's *the* entire point of the Time War, and frankly even though I *adore* Day of the Doctor, I really don't like that change. Worse yet, once the Time Lords were back, barely anything was done with them anyway. The only reasons to bring them back were because they're conceptually nice to have around, and because "think of the children!"
And yes, I know that the 9th and 10th Doctors still remembered the false memory of them destroying Gallifrey, but that doesn't change the fact that we know different, and it bogs down these earlier stories and takes their teeth away. Some people can use the memory rationale, personally I think that's a handwave people choose to take on to diminish the damage. And for me, it doesn't work at all.
Nah disagree, the 'last of his kind' angst can only be milked for so long. I'm glad they tied up that plot thread so it wasn't hanging over the show forever.
There is such a thing as making peace with your trauma and having the time to sufficiently heal so it no longer constantly hangs over you day to day. The show was already heading that way, and had been for quite a while. Matt's Doctor, even in Day itself, was the Doctor who had "moved on"
I don't think genociding your own people is something you really get over. It's not reconcilable with the character as a permanent part of their identity. Also 11 hadn't moved on, he was deliberately running from it, that's his whole deal.
I'm personally okay with the memory rationale, for me it adds greatly to 9 and 10 during rewatches - it adds an element of "you're grieving and carrying this burden and anguish for hundreds of years, it's your punishment for having the solution".
The trauma is real, there just will be a happy ending eventually. And I agree with those who just can't see the Doctor ever pushing the button.
I feel we got to have our cake and eat it, so to speak.
Gonna go with the Reapers from "Father's Day" since they never get brought up again, even when someone does the exact thing that summoned them in the first place. Plus there's Blinovitch Limitation (aka "shorting out the time differential") *right there*.
The Delgado Master NOT being the dark side of the Doctors id has always been a shame.
I love the character of the Master that followed but the idea that he would have been a Third Doctor only character and his entire existence is tied to the Doctor would have been fantastic.
I don't like that later Masters kill indiscriminately. I liked that while Delgado's Master never hesitated to kill someone, he only ever did so to serve his goals. Between that and his gentlemanly demeanour he came across as a much more controlled, manipulative evil. In much the same way, I think the Daleks were far more effective in the 1960s when they manipulated and betrayed other species rather than simply exterminating them on sight.
I do like how the audio drama “Masterful” spun that as a natural development of the Master’s character. That as they live on, their constant failure builds a resentment that makes them more sadistic and cruel, until they eventually lose all grip on the final scraps of their sanity and become the new who masters.
as much as i loved jodie's doctor. it did feel rather eh. and things were happening "because they had to"
but my leat fav lore thing? probably how the master came back with no explaination of how. She took the masters full laser screwdriver and even the master said "oh lol you cant regenerate i know what i did" and then she regenerates offscreen to give us a cheap rug pull about how the master is back.
(yes im vaugely aware of comics/books/audiobooks, but those feel like alternate media that i wasnt really gonna consume anyway, so from a purely tv perspective. it feels random that missy regnerated)
River somehow using all her regeneration energy to save the doctor? heck, river being a timelord was always weird to me.
do we ever learn who the "hybrid" is? or what it is. or was it just another throw away plotpoint?
What was in the Doctor’s hotel room in *The God Complex*. Originally left nice and ambiguous, and then Moffat felt the need to explain it in *The Time of the Doctor* even though it was the one thing in Series 6 that didn’t need any more context.
Of the revival era -- Moffat's retcon that The Doctor was smart enough all along to engineer a third option to favourably end the Last Great Time War. (Because The Doctor can't be a killer of his own people's children).
Of the classic era -- The Doctor being half-human on his mother's side.
The fact that Amy and Rory probably became cybermen thanks to missy
The fact that the Brig actually did become a cyberman felt tasteless.
Gotta prop Moffat up for sending the brig off like 3 times lol
I always got the impression that he really wanted to use him during his era, only for Courtney to pass away before he got the chance. I actually think he used the Brig's legacy well for the most part, but Cyber-Brig was where I drew the line.
3 times? TWORS, Death in Heaven... does TUAT count?
Phone call with 11 I count where the nurse answers. He wasn't there but was a send off, tuat and death in heaven. Could be wrong but sure it was 3
That genuinely disturbed me, both in and out of universe, it's just a horrible thing to have happened. I find it so weird when people say it was 'touching', I felt like I was watching exploitation. I get that Moffat was well-intentioned with it, but it's probably my least favorite scene he's ever written. Made worse by how he managed a much more tasteful tribute in *The Wedding of River Song* and there was really no call for another.
I remember how controversial that was.
[удалено]
Isn't the whole point of becoming a Cyberman that you stop caring about being a Cyberman?
I thought that invasion only happened in Britain? I might be wrong though.
No, Missy used her phone device to show them Cybermen around the world.
Oh gosh... so many characters must have!
I'm sure there are other people too that we know were converted. But the fact that the Brigadier was paraded around was weird. And this was the Master/ Missy that was redeemed...
Anytime Humanity is revealed to have been guided or controlled by some other alien race throughout history. When taken together with the Silence, the Jagaroth, the Daemons, the Fendahl, and even The Doctor to an extent, it feels like Humans are a perpetual slave race who never accomplished anything for themselves.
Adding that I really didn't like the Earth being created by a Racnoss ship. Something that big and consequential shouldn't be used on a minor, one-off villain imo
See I'll be honest that doesn't bother me too much. 1) Because it's just the initial rock not something that actually effected humanity 2) Because it makes the Dalek Invasion of Earth make more sense as it turns out there was already a device to pilot the Earth at the centre.
>Anytime Humanity is revealed to have been guided or controlled by some other alien race throughout history I don't know what you're talking about. The Monks have been with us from the beginning. They shepherded humanity through its formative years, gently guiding and encouraging, like a parent clapping their hands at a baby's first steps. They have been instrumental in all the advances of culture and technology. They watched proudly as man invented the light bulb, the telephone and the internet. They were even there to welcome the first men on the moon.
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Just like we've always been at war with Eurasia.
Julia who?
And humans would have been wiped out/enslaved hundreds of times (if not more) if it hadn’t been for the doctor being there to save them. Even though he always says how indomitable they are and how they always survive, that wouldn’t be true without him being there. I always think this is such massive intervention in the timelines, especially given the fact that because he always saves them they go on to create a huge empire across the universe, massively impacting other species & planets
It’s definitely something the Eccleston stories improved upon, as the Doctor’s presence largely inspired the side cast to take charge and save the day themselves.
Osirans too
Oh yes, my list wasn't comprehensive, there are many more.
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Kind of cheating since it's pretty much part of the _Timeless Child_ shtick but the re-destruction of Gallifrey felt pretty random and meaningless. The first seven-ish years of NuWho were kind of predicated on it's initial destruction in the Time War, so for the Master to casually mention 'oh yeah i killed it again offscreen LOL' in the last 5 minutes of an episode really just felt kinda cheap.
Honestly, every single flip or flop on Gallifrey seems like a wholly unnecessary tangent. Its like every person that has ever written for Doctor Who has to flip some switch on Gallifrey instead of just either ignoring it or having it matter at any given time like Classic who did. You would go years without anything happening there, then something would, then its years again. That worked fine.
It really showed how little Chibnal cared/understood Doctor Who and good storytelling in general. It still astounds me how bad his series really were with everything they did
Especially as saving Gallifrey felt deserved and epic. It took all the Doctors and had actual consequences leading to the 11th Doctors death. It was a big moment for the character to overcome his past and on a very rare occasion get rewarded for his actions.
I miss the reduction of the scientific genius side to the doctor. Like with Pertwee or Troughton you'd get him thinking through a problem, taking time to work it out in a lab, apply logic and brainpower to a situation. That came back a little bit with Capaldi and it's one of the reasons I liked 12 so much
I was excited for a tinkerer Doctor when *The Woman Who Fell To Earth* focused on the Doctor building the sonic screwdriver, but they never really did that very much with 13 again.
Completely forgot this happened! I really liked that first episode for the problem-solving but it got kind of hand-waved after that
Her two most interesting characteristics, her tinkerer nature, and the fact that her 'flat team structure, we're a fam!' bit is an act and whenever shit hits the fan she drops that pretense entirely, are so underutilized. Hopefully someday BF can really make use of them.
it's hilarious they tried to shove in another tinkerer moment during her last episde trying to play it off as like "oh this is one of her character traits, we're doing callbacks!" uhhhh no that is NOT one of her character traits lol you didn't put in the work to make that a character trait just another "Big Finish will fix it" thing i guess
The TARDIS noise being caused by the Doctor leaving the brakes on. They're never even stayed consistent with that retcon, every TARDIS we've seen since has made the same noise. I headcannon that River just moved the engines too far away from the console room to hear to mess with the Doctor.
Yeah that was definitely River trolling since, yknow, *the Time Lords* also make that sound every time they use a TARDIS. Either that or you're *meant* to leave the breaks on for safety reasons and River bypassed it to look cool because she's River.
The CIA agent who appeared to Three to warn him of the Master's return made the same sound. I didn't see a single brake on him.
I mean, don’t people put their brakes on when they’re parking? River materialising without the brakes on is probably equivalent to parallel parking at full speed.
The Moon is an egg Not an alien Moon, that Moon up there It's like if 42 was set in our solar system
Any explanation of what the Nightmare Child, Horde of Travesties, Could-Have-Been-King, and etc have been. Going further, nearly everything we've seen to flesh out the Time War. I'll give a grudging pass to Day of the Doctor and the War Doctor, but that's it. (Big Finish, you're on notice)
Honestly there’s no way the TV show in particular could have done the Time War justice. You’re expecting a war where the weapons, the attacks, the injuries and tragedies etc are all time based. Battles that take place across time using time itself. Instead what we get in Day of the Doctor is a few flying Daleks blasting lasers as normal. It made the whole thing feel, i dunno, low-rent? I love Day of the Doctor but if they wanted to centre it around the Time War they should have been way more imaginative or if the budget wouldn’t allow that, find some way to do it without actually showing any battles.
That’s the only reason I was let down by Day of the Doctor. I wanted to love everything about it but just did not want to see the Time War stuff.
Even end of time part 2 touched on it better. Day of the doctor was fabulous though. But there again Moffat had to write out Russell's time war.
I thought it was decent with what they could do.
I think that the implication is that it's the last day, they've used all the big weapons. Kind of like the 1000-year war that began the Daleks, where at the end they are using very basic weapons. This is the advanced variant.
I think we saw a lot of what the Time War would look like in season 5 with the Crack in the Wall, people vanishing out of memory etc. It would have been interesting to see new people appear as well, but that would have been more War and less Crack.
Yeah I really didn’t want to know what those things were. I like imagining what they are far more
Playing Devil's Advocate here. Anything Big Finish does can be considered optional Lore.
To be fair, anything Doctor Who does can be considered optional Lore considering how much retcons and changes and how brittle the lore is (Remember when the Eight doctor revealed he was half human?)
I feel like the only medium that could remotely do justice to the abstractness of the time war is books
Books or comics, agreed. I could see some really fun and weird you could do with panels and linear storytelling.
I don't like any example of someone reversing a complete cyberman conversion through sheer willpower, because it implies that other people just didn't care enough. Its one-thing if its only half-finished, but Yvonne in Doomsday shouldn't have been able to completely overcome her inhibitor.
that scene would have been better if it used the normal cyberman voice and we all know it. but i also agree
I think the in universe explanation would be they were hobbled together cybernen with the metal bits bolted into their body like that torchwood episode Later series ended up just copying the Borg nannites and all
Honestly Yvonne is the only one where I give it a pass because I can argue to myself she was a rush job, but yeah pretty much it pisses me off A LOT. Especially with the corpse cybers Missy makes (does not make sense to me at all), it just makes everyone else look like complete bastards who don't care about their loved ones etc.
Its either the whole "Clara goes into the Doctor's timestream and saves him hundreds of times and even is the one who chooses the TARDIS for him" thing, or the stuff Missy did with the Cybermen in *Dark Water/Death in Heaven*
I guess it depends what the limits of "addition to the lore" is. Is everything that ever happened to the Doctor an addition to the lore in some way? Limited to things about the Doctor's backstory/Gallifrey, the whole "Theta Sigma" thing in "The Armageddon Factor" was pretty dumb. Actually the whole concept and character of Drax was terrible. A renegade Time Lord who travels the universe doing maintenance work? Come on.
It doesn't help that Theta Sigma is a stupid name, I'd hate anyone who went by it. (Made even worse if some random numbers were added!)
I tend to assume that (a) that was a fraternity nickname, and (b) we're only hearing the TARDIS translator circuits' translation of the actual name anyway. I doubt Gallifreyans give people Ancient Greek names - nickname or otherwise.
My theory is this... Romana is called Romanadvoratrelundar. There are plenty of hints throughout the series that the Doctor's name really is "Who". I think his name is as long as Romana's but the first three letters are "Who". So, why Theta Sigma? Well, a capital Sigma looks like a W on its side, and a capital Theta looks like an O with an H in the middle. Now imagine being a bunch of swotty aristocrats, high on how clever you all are and generally enjoying smelling your own farts, studying foreign languages at space Cambridge/Oxford and you find out that in this one language there are symbols that, when put together, form the word "WHO". I mean, you'd have to call your friend Whoversmakealoudnoise Theta Sigma, wouldn't you?
You know... I don't hate that idea. I've always firmly been in the camo of we can never know the Doctors name, both in that it would de-mystify them, and that nothing they ever came up with could be good enough to satisfy everyone. But for 'Who' to be their actual name, or at least a shortened version of it is something I could completely get behind. Their name was something like Whovernatriscal is something ridiculous enough to be both taken seriously and also completely ignored. Plus it would mean their name has been literally staring us in the face since the very first opening titles in 63.
yeah, the Seventh Doctor confirmed it was a nickname. Crazy that there was nothing solid against it being his 'real' name for so long though!
Your username provides great comedy here.
I actually really like the idea of Drax. Or at least the version of him portrayed in the expanded universe, where he becomes the Time Lord equivalent of Del Boy.
Yeah, didn't they get John Challis (Boycie) to play one of his regenerations?
He wasn't a Time Lord tho, was he? I thought he'd failed the exams, decided 'sod this then' and gone freelance? I love the idea the a cowboy builder of space and time, tucking his sonic pencil behind his ear, suckling his teeth and saying "Perpetual Motion washing machine? Ooof. Yeah, I mean I can fix it for ya, but it won't be cheep boss..."
looms
The TARDIS becoming the most powerful space and time craft in the universe, with the Doctor having perfect control over it. I preferred it when the TARDIS was an old, clunky jalopy held together with gaffer tape and bits of string. When other Time Lords openly laughed at the Doctor for flying a clapped out old capsule that no one else would touch. When the navigation didn't work properly and the Doctor's travel plans were at best a suggestion.
I miss the days when moving the TARDIS meant something. Companion left behind when it dematerializes? Hope you enjoy your new home because there's no coming back for you. None of this whip around the cosmos after work and be back home in time to cook dinner. In that aspect, the TARDIS felt more like a traveling home instead of a car. It's lost some of that sense of adventure of not knowing what's over the next hill.
Meta-Crisis Doctor. I think there’s an interesting story there, but it wasn’t fleshed out enough. And Rose ending up with a human clone of the Doctor and just being cool seems a little weird, even if she was specifically attached to Tennant’s Doctor. But that’s more personal preference than actual criticism.
Yeah everything about the Meta-Crisis kinda sucks. Particularly with how it gets used to give Rose a kind of cheap happy ending at the expense of Donna getting a frankly mean ending.
Rewatching Journey's End in hindsight I just felt like he was a way of placating fans who never got over Rose's departure. Aside from that he doesn't really add anything to the story besides keeping Ten's hands clean at the end of the story and being the catalyst for Donna's departure (which as you said is mean/cruel enough to make the contrast with what Rose gets even worse)
Without confirmation, I assume that since he’s not Actually The Same Man (not least because of being also part Donna) their relationship doesn’t work how 10 expected it to. It’s even sadder to contemplate them splitting up, but it’s the healthiest way I see things going down. It makes sense considering 10’s character flaws, but that doesn’t mean he’s right or doing the right thing.
The Empire of the Wolf storyline in the current run of Doctor Who comic confirms that Rose and Meta-10 are married and have a daughter.
Huh! Good to know. Wouldn’t have written it that way but I’m glad that they’re sticking by the ‘happy ending’ thing.
I still hold out faith (while huffing an industrial amount of copium) that Meta Crisis Doctor will turn out to be the Valeyard. Or at least go bad somehow and become an actually good character. Tennant can play a sensational villain, have him pop back up as a jealous and twisted Doctor, be a good time.
If we are just looking at 9 and forward and ignoring 13 than there's a couple things that always rubbed me wrong. Clara going back through the doctors entire timeline is up there. Worst thing overall if say is 'Me' being immortal so simply and even though it's stated she can die and just won't age they survive until the end of time. Also they take no responsibility for their actions. Just the charecter ME is my answer.
I think Me would have been a better character if she wasn’t included in the finale. I could understand the logic of her avoiding danger for all that time to end up in the 21st century, but the idea she survived until the end of the universe is insane.
it felt to me like the character was given more because of the actor playing her. if it had been some rando i doubt she would have appeared in Hell Bent. (unless Moffat really thought "the hybrid... is Me!" was that clever lol)
I really hate Me, because a dude rez'ed by a time goddes can die of old age (captain jack) but a girl with some weird chip in her head can survive forever... ok
Right? It never failed?
Half Human
I've honestly always liked the half human idea
Yeah maybe it's just because it seems like a small change these days but I never really got the backlash. It does a decent job of raising more questions than it answers, while also being a pretty solid explanation for why the Doctor sticks around Earth so much. Maybe people preferred the Doctor being totally alien, but it's not like they haven't still been raised in an alien culture with alien biology. (I'd object to their mother being a significant human, though.)
The first 8th doctor novel has him stating something like 'I said I was half human. What was I thinking??'
>The first 8th doctor novel has him stating something like 'I said I was half human. What was I thinking??' Read them all, this does not happen. They do however make fun of the idea a few times with him showing up as half something else on a scan and then Unnatural History's multiple origins.
Doesn’t that same series imply Lela’s Child is thenDoctor
War Doctor. For one, haven't seen anything to indicate he was more hardcore than his predecessors or successors, besides almost activating the Moment (which never happened anyway). And I would have preferred the Eighth Doctor being the one to experience the Time War, as it can be an easy way of saying that after countless time, he was worn down by all the war, and loss, and the struggle that seemed to have no end, which drove him to be desperate enough to want to end the war at any cost. I'd find that more intriguing than just another Doctor made specifically for the Time War.
My problem has never been the War Doctor existing, I just think that the conclusion that 'he was just any old Doctor afterall' annoys me. The Big Finish audios have only made this worse. Why does Seven feel darker than War? It shouldn't be like that.
yeah i started the War Doctor audios and found myself growing more disinterested because of this. i was looking for the edge, i was looking for the reasons he doesn't like to be called Doctor but it's just John Hurt kind of doing a First Doctor impression for the most part? kind of a bummer. even 11 and 12 have better moments of darkness than anything i saw from the first two War Doctor audios. i swapped over to the War Master audios and have been enjoying them more.
It's gutting that Big Finish had JOHN FUCKING HURT and that's all they did with him tbh. I enjoy them for what they are, but they're just not what I wanted from the War Doctor. Then again, I've since avoided all Time War media cos I've realised its way more impressive in the abstract than when very human writers try and write about something that should be beyond our comprehension.
yeah i mean John Hurt is still fantastic and a wonderful addition as a Doctor, but it's just not cashing the check that NOTD/DOTD wrote.
Strongly agree. The War Doctor exists solely because they couldn't get Eccleston, and wouldn't get McGann. The reputation they build up around him and the way the Doctor talks about the time war, just doesn't match up to what we get of the war doctor. Whilst Hurt was obviously an incredible actor, he didn't really bring much to the role, or get much of a chance to shine in it. I also think there was a real poetry to the idea of McGann's Doctor, a bright eyed romantic, being worn down and forced to commit such a terrible act, to put an end to even greater evils.
Yeah, we should have been very **scared** of the War Doctor. He should have been a very very dark figure. But he's just like a lovable grandpa who cracks jokes. I understand he used to be younger, but still.
War needed more hints at his brutality. He didn’t enter the war and gain that name and reputation being who we see Hurt playing.
Exactly! The Day of the Doctor should have ended with all the viewers saying: "So *that's* why we don't call him the Doctor."
I kinda love the idea that the War Doctor - and what was going on in the Time War - was sort of locked up to us, the viewers, as well - like this was the Doctor after McGann during the Wilderness years. I always want to see more McGann, but I also struggle to see him pressing the button. I'm largely okay with how it played out (and Hurt, regardless, was fantastic).
I think The Day of the Doctor is beautifully done, and I also love the War Doctor being a surrogate Classic Who-only fan in the episode, but there’s absolutely nothing they can do with the character that would actually live up to the idea of what he’s supposed to have been like. I would have preferred McGann, but ultimately I think the War Doctor shouldn’t ever have been seen outside of that episode. We get his redemption, and that’s the whole purpose of the character. The BBC’s request to keep the character comparatively mild totally neutered the Big Finish version and made the whole series kind of pointless. He goes out of his way to help people and limit the war’s impact on innocents, and then at the end just says “I’m a monster” as if that comment makes it true.
Funny I think it makes perfect sense that the doctor never used the moment. It makes perfect sense to me that the man who imagines himself to be the doctor, who sees “all that ever is, was and ever could be” would stop from himself committing mass destruction. And the fact that, by doing so, as he had, he has no recollection and will forever demonize his past self for it and torture himself for hundreds of years afterward. The doctor’s pretty hardcore, and he is the doctor.
Doctor-companion romance. Seems a bit predatory.
I suppose half your age plus 7 is out of the window.
In gallyfrey it's half your number of past regenerations plus 3 Anything that lasts less than a century is the equivalent of a one night stand or a quick summer fling
I've always kind of seen it through the lens of tragedy, where the Doctor probably does desire close relationships (especially with the destruction of Gallifrey; that loneliness would drive people mad), but the reality of who and what he is just makes it simply impossible. That was a lesson I suspect he took away from Rose. By the time of Amy Pond it is clear that, while he has regenerated, the 11th doctor still clearly took that lesson to heart and actively tried to shut down Amy's romance attempt.
I appreciate eight rejecting Charley for this reason
That the Statue of Liberty is a Weeping Angel. It lead to a cool shot, but it didn’t make any sense. 😂 I like the idea that an image of an Angel becomes an Angel. It’s scary.
River Song turning out to be Melody Pond. All of the mystery that made River so compelling got replaced with a dense tangle of lore. And it was odd how little the realization that they’d never get to properly raise their child affected Amy and Rory.
> And it was odd how little the realization that they’d never get to properly raise their child affected Amy and Rory The whole divorce storyline in *Asylum of the Daleks* could have been actually not awful if this was the catalyst for it and the stress was visible throughout the latter half of S6, but it's just left unexplored.
I wish Moffat had held some restraint with River. She was a really fun character in her first couple of appearances, but she became overused and her additional lore wasn't that exciting to me (everything should have been kept ambiguous). And as you said, tying her to Rory and Amy was weird.
Moffat has a real problem with "strong female characters" in that they all basically become the same person and that person is so ridiculously one dimensional and over the top that it kinda just sucks the air out of the room. The same thing happened on Sherlock.
Yeah, Moffat tends to write his major female characters as some kind of Catwoman type. Irene Adler in the original short story wins partly because she is intelligent and Holmes underestimates her, but also because she has pure motives and just wants to move on with her life. Moffat made her a dominatrix blackmailer who took advice from a terrorist on how to blackmail the government.
I was fine with the mystery concluding because it's easier to develop a character than a mystery. My problem was how it limited River's character and that any weight it held was contingent to the ponds' continued appearance. Unsurprisingly, in her appearances post-Manhatten, it held no relevance and thus felt rather deflating.
This was addressed briefly when Amy kills Madam Kovarion. Doesn't she say something like "My baby grew up and we're happy now but you took her from me and I didn't get to raise her so I'll never forgive you." Definitely not the exact quote but something along those lines. I dislike the implication in "let's kill Hitler' that they "raised" River by always taking care of their unruly friend Mel essentially acting like her mom and dad. I was okay with the wobbly wobbly time line up until that point.
Not me deciding I have to do a whole Moffat era rewatch before tackling the river audios
Someone else got to "Oh no, Gallifrey isn't actually destroyed after all" first. So I guess I'll go with Reapers? It made for a neat story, but set a terrible precedent that they've basically quietly ignored ever since.
The reapers are pretty misunderstood. They're not a hard and fast rule that always happens when you create a paradox, they're more just vultures. They might see a particularly juicy paradox and start feasting. The events of *Father's Day* are also very specific. It's actually a double paradox. Not only does Rose save her father when he should have died, but she does it in front of a version of her and the Doctor that saw him die, erasing their past selves from history and creating another paradox.
Also if you add on top the whole Bad Wolf scenario. Rose scatters the words throughout time to lead them to that moment. That’s already established by the time of Fathers Day, so Rose altering her past in a way that could stop her meeting the Doctor would have a massive impact on time. It’s a big old bundle of paradoxes in one, perfect place for them to be
The reapers showed up because there were two sets of The Doctor and Rose there. They don't just show up any time something has been changed.
The Doctor being half-human. P.S. That's not just something he said - he also demonstrated it towards the end of the film by being able to open the Eye of Harmony, which was stated as something that required a human eye to do.
I thought to myself, ugh the timeless child and wasnt going to even bother commenting that completely unoriginal take, but i thought for just a second and remembered something worse. Me, or Oshielda, to be more obvious. The girl who died and the woman who lived. Theres some interesting aspects to the character, her memories are so full that she just forgets everything eventually. Shes well acted, and has an interesting dynamic with the doctor. But she shouldnt exist. That stupid tiny little circuit in her head made her completely immortal, beyond civilizations, beyond every other immortal, the doctor can literally make any one he wants at any point immortal, he has that kicking round his tardis and yet several of his companions since have died. Theres either no stakes when any character can just become immortal at any point and theres no sense that they dont. So i just pretend it never happened.
There's a great short story called The Triple Knife about Ashildr, where all three of her children have the bubonic plague and she's forced to make a choice between them of which she wants to cure with the Doctor's immortality technology. In the end, she realises that it's more of a curse than anything else and chooses to let all three of them die.
That time lapse shot at the end where it goes from happy in tone to slowly melancholic as she comes to terms with her immortality is pretty haunting though
Probably the recent River Song stuff. Classic Doctors was already eh but I came up with a rationalisation. But Post-Darillium River meeting 12, 13 and *Pre-Library 10* really just undercuts literally all of Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead's pathos.
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This is a big one for me. What made them scary was that they were basically just parasites. I never got the idea that they were really intelligent beings during Blink. Statues that mindlessly "kill" you when you blink is scary. As soon as they start talking, it detracts from what made them work. Add to that the snapping of necks, the weird image of an angel thing and it just makes them less effective. With Flux we even establish that some of them have jobs, they work for the Division. It would have been better to invent a new monster for some of these stories in my opinion.
I don’t mind the image stuff so much as the notion that their quantum locking only activates if they THINK you can see them. Absolute rubbish
Also the fact that they were called WEEPING ANGELS because they cover their faces so they can't see each other but then all the way through the two parter they're just shown looking at each other all the time. Like it's literally the entire plot resolution of Blink!
I want to just start by emphasising that this is a lore answer, not a question of quality, because otherwise it looks like Moffat is getting a battering. The more the show becomes about time travel as a plot device the less sense anything makes. In the old days the Tardis was a magic door that got you to the adventure and events play out. If it's known history, it doesn't ultimately deviate, if not the crew has scope to do as they see best onsite. The ship was unreliable with precise control rendered unlikely so what happened needed to be resolved as is. Nowadays we have bootstrap paradoxes up the wazoo which is a bit smug perhaps but fine. We also have timelines freely changing, except where they don't. The reason? Fixed points, which basically work on the principle of "trust me mate, can't do that". There's no rule, just sometimes you can and sometimes you can't. Then there's *Christmas Carol* which provides objectively the best answer to every problem in the form of: what if the bad guy was a better dude? Well, we can do that. Except it doesn't ever happen again.
Clara ‘surviving’ and running off with Me. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the Season 9 finale and I do like Clara and wish her the best generally, but I liked the way she died in Face the Raven, because she forgot she wasn’t the Doctor. Bringing her back gave me the feeling they just didn’t have the courage to finish her off.
I started to dislike Clara towards the end. Her story completely overshadowed that of what should have been the main character. Jenna Coleman, for her part, did a good job with what she was given. This isn't a knock against her as an actress, but more of a knock against the character. The writers seemed completely lost over what to do with her. Clara was originally introduced as a transition character, the one that swaps in before a regeneration to smooth the transition to the new Doctor, before making a graceful exit? Companions don't usually say they're ready to leave and then stick around for another season or three. (other than Tegan, of course) The Doctor was completely unnecessary in some of his stories once they had her go full on Clara Who. All of that being said, I did think she was given a great death. By bringing her back, it just negated all of that drama and tension leading up to it. It showed that there are really no consequences to any of the characters actions.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the Witches Familiar but the Daleks saying “Exterminate” to reload just seems kinda dumb for me and a pointless thing to explain. And also if I’m remember correctly in the same episode they say that Daleks have a restriction on what they say. Like both of these just seem pointless additions and just makes the Dalek seem a lot less interesting.
Pretty much all the new dalek lore in those episodes was bad imo, very weird that when Daleks aren’t invading planets or committing genocide they just stand around in buildings on their home planet chilling and doing nothing
> Daleks have a restriction on what they say It's incredibly silly that these creatures, hatred incarnate, genetically created preciscely to hate and kill, needs to have systems in their metallic shells that prevent them from saying nice things. When would a Dalek ever say something like that in the first place?
Not saying that writing Daleks is easy; there's a lot of Dalek stories that are shite, but Moffat *really* couldn't write them. Eventually he sort of gets there with Enter the Dalek by basically just riffing on Dalek (which was itself an adaptation of a short story, I think?).
The Tardis having holographic projection that sometimes responds to the person speaking and sometimes doesn't. If it does then why doesn't the Tardis _always_ have an interactive holographic interface?
Davros having normal eyes that he was just screwing up really tight before.
I kinda love that. He’s all sorts of messed up, and believes that seeing things through the Daleks eyes is the best way to look at the universe. He’s so insanely dedicated to his crazy ideology that he literally blinds himself to what makes him human. It’s a lovely bit of visual storytelling.
I don't think they're exactly healthy
Hot take: River Song. I really liked her when she appeared in the Silence of the Library/Forests of the Dead 2 parter, but her sporadic appearances during the Matt Smith era in which she spent more time posing in fancy outfits and saying catchy one liners than actually settling down enough to be developed in a natural way wasn't enough to convince me that her and the Doctor had this super special relationship that was uniquely close among companions. They spent more time coming up with new ways to make her look cool than actually developing her and her relationship with the Doctor.
Yeah, I never liked the action hero femme fatale direction they took her character after that first two-parter. And I also feel like they completely blew the initial premise of them being time travelers who met out of order. To me that implied that they kept running into each other by happenstance while on their own adventures, like in Silence of the Library. Instead, River Song seems to be always turning up with the explicit intention of meeting up with the Doctor. So why do it out of order? And her character is a whole lot less interesting for not having any life outside the Doctor, with even her career as an archeologist turning out to be just a way of keeping tabs on the Doctor.
>And her character is a whole lot less interesting for not having any life outside the Doctor, with even her career as an archeologist turning out to be just a way of keeping tabs on the Doctor. I get why this isn't great, but I started to interpret it in an almost tragic way after AGMGTW and LKH, that once the Doctor knows who she is and why she was created he feels a sense of responsibility to her. She's obsessed with him because she's been built to be that way, and he's gone along with it because like the viewer he was kind of presuming that they an odd couple who kept having meet cutes across time, but once he knows the truth he sees her almost like a victim of his he has to make it up to. I think THORS really sells the idea that without him she's kind of a massive fuck up and Capaldi really sold the idea that he loves her, perhaps not in the way we thought he would in SITL, but loves her nevertheless.
Was looking for this. They didn't ever act like a married couple. If you are going to do it do it right
Moffat kinda undermined his own efforts with River due to his characterisation of the Eleventh Doctor. This is nothing against Matt Smith or his portrayal. But Moffat wrote the Eleventh Doctor as a very alien incarnation who seems to completely misunderstand most human norms. So to continually pair him with a romantic interest felt really odd and it never got better.
Yeah, I get that. I can see Pertwee being a good husband, but not Colin Baker. Matt Smith was just too alien
And half the time 11 was kind of a dick, yelling at her for no reason right before she saves the day.
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Tbf Susan presumably shares DNA with the doctor and she was always intended, at least by the end of S1/mid S2, to have mind reading and sensory powers to some degree even if rarely used. So I don't think it's out there for the doctor to be able to read some of the "simpler" minds.
Yep she definitely had the ability of psychic communication in "The Sensorites", as it's a pretty central plot point early in that story.
I started liking it once I realised it’s the inverse to The Master’s mind control. The Master uses his talent for evils but the Doctor only uses it to help people. It’s a nice contrast between the two.
The Doctor once used mind control in Silver Nemesis but as you can imagine it was done in a benevolent way
He also hypnotised some people to get them to safety in battlefield
"The Magician's Apprentice"/"The Witch's Familiar" explaining that it's the Dalek casing that translates anything the occupant says as *"Exterminate!"*
there was no need for that. since daleks are made to be hate. so there will never be.. well anything that would need to "trigger" the exterminate word replacement
The fact clara was there from the beginning
The genetic loom nonsense from the Lungbarrow novel.
That’s a toughie because there’s a lot. Timeless child And Bringing back galifrey Are my two big ones
I loved Tennant and Smith's performances, but I hated how their season arcs were just one-upping each previous in terms of scale and scope of the peril humanity, the Earth, and eventually all of reality were in. And by Smith the writers turned The Doctor into the most important being to ever exist. That paradoxically diminishes the character. And the whole River Song arc wasn't nearly as interesting to me as it was to the showrunners, but I don't think that's necessarilly a lore problem and just investing a lot of airtime to a particular story. I bailed after the first Capaldi episode and just watch Classic episodes anymore, I like how just about every story is a small scale mystery
And then they didn’t really know how to follow them through. I felt like the resolution of the Doctor’s name and the Hybrid arcs were quite weak. Even River Sing didn’t quite work for me, I think they should have left her as this mysterious event in the indeterminate future.
every regeneration having the same visual effect
I'm so with you on that! The only explanation I'd except is that that is how regeneration is supposed to look, but the Doctor, being a sorry excuse for a Time Lord, didn't figure it out until the Time War. However, I still prefer them all looking different.
Yea. I hc that 9th looked like explosion of time vortex because he absorbed it. Thats why the others and retro activily adding it to every timelord ever makes no sense
I don’t remember it too clearly but the whole river-eleven relationship seemed off to me
Absolutely fantastic in silence of the library etc. Then felt like it needed an explanation when it was pretty final. Tenants acting when he realises how much he meant to her was *chef kiss* then she just popped up a lot and kinda ruined it? I love river don't get me wrong but didn't like post 10 river.
There was that period of time where it was sort of the in-thing to retcon various Doctor Who gestalt creatures like the Great Intellgence and the Nestene Consciousness into being Great Old Ones (or derivatives thereof) from the Lovecraft mythos. Christ that was dumb. ~~I like the Timeless Child addition~~
In what stories did that happen, just curious?
It was a running thing in the *New Doctor Adventures* (*Millennial Rites, All-Consuming Fire, White Darkness, Conundrum, the Well-Mannered War, Divided Loyalties*, among others) and audios like *Gods and Monsters* and *Beyond the Ultimate Adventure*, and tied in the Intelligence, the Animus, Fenric, the Nestrenes, the Celestial Toymaker, and the Guardians with straight-up Yog-Sothoth, Lloigor, and Azathoth. Post-show Seven tore through *the Call of Cthulhu* bestiary. It died down a bit, but the Intelligence was also called a GOO in the relatively recent short story *Legacies*.
I don’t know if this is “lore” but I hate what the reboot has done with the “sonic” (f/k/a the sonic screwdriver). It has become a lazy plot device, used way too often. It develops new capabilities every time we see it. Since we don’t really know what the “sonic” is and what it’s capable of, there is less tension when the doctor is in a jam. They can just whip out the “sonic”, wave it around, and poof - problem solved. That might be fine in a show about wizards and magic wands. But I don’t like it here.
People had the same complaints in the 80s but tbf its the 45 min format which necessitates some kind of occasional magic wand. Before that we wasted a lot of time with the doctor being imprisoned etc
12 Regenerations Always hated it and hated that RTD and Moffat didn't just fucking ignore it
I always thought it would be great if the 12 regens was just a recommended limit because after that it can lead to problems. Before the Timeless Child stuff my headcanon was the Morbius Doctors counted and Davison was the 13th incarnation, leading to the line "I might regenerate, I don't know... It feels different this time" and the subsequent unstable-ness of Colin's Doctor.
If it was only in Deadly Assassin maybe it could be ignored, but I'm pretty sure it was mentioned too much and too well known subsequently, to change in the 2000s.
That's JNT's fault. Guy absolutely loved The Deadly Assassin so much he entrenched every part of it as consistent established canon
That's scene where Davros, a villain that has been built up over years and years, has a little cry and a joke with the Doctor before the writers make it all better by being like its okay, he's really doing it to betray him. Bullshit. Davros would consider such weakness the lowest of the low.
The last of the Time Lords. I absolutely get the reasoning, and it definitely added some worthy character stuff, but ultimately I dislike the importance it gives to the character. I love the idea of the Doctor simply being a wanderer who solves problems that he stumbles across, and the whole thing of him being some near-mythical being always rubs me up the wrong way. The classic series got around the whole Gallifrey thing by making him an exile, and the first few appearances of the Time Lords are minimal and totally tally with that. In fact, I think making him an exile from his own people actually has more character potential than him being the last of his kind.
***WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE CYBERMEN CAN FLY? EVEN THE 60'S ONES? WHY?***
Everything about the 50th Anniversary, but particularly Gallifrey being saved. I can't get behind that decision when so much importance was put on the tragic choice of the Doctor having to destroy it in the first place. Taking that away, the weight of his guilt, the torment of making the impossibly hard decision of destroying your own people for the sake of the universe, just... makes all the suffering he went through (particularly as Nine) feel so meaningless to me. I know a lot of people like it, and that's totally fine. I wish I could too! But I can't stand any part of the 50th. It feels like complete character assassination to me.
I am of the same opinion. Timeless Child stuff was awful. Some meaningless one-off pics in the Brain of Morbius becomes the defining characteristic of the character?
I really don't understand why people keep assuming the point of TTC was to explain the Morbius faces. The point of TTC was clearly to give the Doctor some investment in an unexplored period of the setting - prior to the First Doctor's infancy - and use that to introduce new mysteries, allies, enemies, etc. Which, being Chibnall era was all implemented really badly. But to say that "some meaningless one-off pics in the Brain of Morbius becomes the defining characteristic of the character" really does miss the point of the reveal.
They're one and the same. People that liked the idea of Morbius doctors, liked it because it means there were adventures and doctors before Hartnell. It's not like people only cared about a continuity issue caused by some faces in an old serial, they cared about what those faces *meant*. The *Timeless Child* as an addition to lore clearly has the same motivation.
Fugitive Doctor
I realise a lot of people love her, but to me she's a violent gun-wielding idiot who most of time would be the bad guy in a Doctor Who story. I mean, Jo Martin is amazing, but I really dislike the character we were presented with.
It makes sense in context for a distant past version of the Doctor to be nothing like the Doctor now, imo. She's presumably from before a time where any of the First Doctor's character development happened.
then why is she the Doctor? she's nothing like the Doctor, she has none of the Doctor's character traits, why does this character *need* to be the Doctor?
The Clara splinters being everywhere in The Doctor's timeline. It was a very forced retcon that makes little sense and was very awkwardly introduced and was very confused for the character of Clara going forward especially with how quickly it was forgotten and the S7 arc made her less of a person because it
It was pretty common during the Moffat era to have large life changing events be forgotten instantly. Amy got her parents back, that should be huge, yet we never see them again. Amy and Rory lose their baby, and forget it by the next episode. Knowing it's River apparently removes all grief, and regret of not being able to raise their baby. Clara going inside the time stream, the Doctor casually jumps in and carries her out, never mentioned again. It would have been nice to see these events have some lasting impact on the characters.
I always thought that 12 should have just been talking to a Clara splinter in Hell Bent after companion-Clara convinced him to let her back to her time-stream to die Would be a full circle on the narrative of her becoming like the Doctor, because of course they would sacrifice themselves to fix time
That Gallifrey survived the Time War. Day of the Doctor is a wonderfully enjoyable episode, a fantastic character study of the Doctor, and a worthwhile part of the then-ongoing storylines without being too bogged down to work as a standalone... But Gallifrey should have stayed gone. The Doctor should have had no better option than to blow it up. That's *the* entire point of the Time War, and frankly even though I *adore* Day of the Doctor, I really don't like that change. Worse yet, once the Time Lords were back, barely anything was done with them anyway. The only reasons to bring them back were because they're conceptually nice to have around, and because "think of the children!" And yes, I know that the 9th and 10th Doctors still remembered the false memory of them destroying Gallifrey, but that doesn't change the fact that we know different, and it bogs down these earlier stories and takes their teeth away. Some people can use the memory rationale, personally I think that's a handwave people choose to take on to diminish the damage. And for me, it doesn't work at all.
Nah disagree, the 'last of his kind' angst can only be milked for so long. I'm glad they tied up that plot thread so it wasn't hanging over the show forever.
There is such a thing as making peace with your trauma and having the time to sufficiently heal so it no longer constantly hangs over you day to day. The show was already heading that way, and had been for quite a while. Matt's Doctor, even in Day itself, was the Doctor who had "moved on"
I don't think genociding your own people is something you really get over. It's not reconcilable with the character as a permanent part of their identity. Also 11 hadn't moved on, he was deliberately running from it, that's his whole deal.
I'm personally okay with the memory rationale, for me it adds greatly to 9 and 10 during rewatches - it adds an element of "you're grieving and carrying this burden and anguish for hundreds of years, it's your punishment for having the solution". The trauma is real, there just will be a happy ending eventually. And I agree with those who just can't see the Doctor ever pushing the button. I feel we got to have our cake and eat it, so to speak.
Gonna go with the Reapers from "Father's Day" since they never get brought up again, even when someone does the exact thing that summoned them in the first place. Plus there's Blinovitch Limitation (aka "shorting out the time differential") *right there*.
The Delgado Master NOT being the dark side of the Doctors id has always been a shame. I love the character of the Master that followed but the idea that he would have been a Third Doctor only character and his entire existence is tied to the Doctor would have been fantastic.
I don't like that later Masters kill indiscriminately. I liked that while Delgado's Master never hesitated to kill someone, he only ever did so to serve his goals. Between that and his gentlemanly demeanour he came across as a much more controlled, manipulative evil. In much the same way, I think the Daleks were far more effective in the 1960s when they manipulated and betrayed other species rather than simply exterminating them on sight.
I do like how the audio drama “Masterful” spun that as a natural development of the Master’s character. That as they live on, their constant failure builds a resentment that makes them more sadistic and cruel, until they eventually lose all grip on the final scraps of their sanity and become the new who masters.
as much as i loved jodie's doctor. it did feel rather eh. and things were happening "because they had to" but my leat fav lore thing? probably how the master came back with no explaination of how. She took the masters full laser screwdriver and even the master said "oh lol you cant regenerate i know what i did" and then she regenerates offscreen to give us a cheap rug pull about how the master is back. (yes im vaugely aware of comics/books/audiobooks, but those feel like alternate media that i wasnt really gonna consume anyway, so from a purely tv perspective. it feels random that missy regnerated) River somehow using all her regeneration energy to save the doctor? heck, river being a timelord was always weird to me. do we ever learn who the "hybrid" is? or what it is. or was it just another throw away plotpoint?
What was in the Doctor’s hotel room in *The God Complex*. Originally left nice and ambiguous, and then Moffat felt the need to explain it in *The Time of the Doctor* even though it was the one thing in Series 6 that didn’t need any more context.
Of the revival era -- Moffat's retcon that The Doctor was smart enough all along to engineer a third option to favourably end the Last Great Time War. (Because The Doctor can't be a killer of his own people's children). Of the classic era -- The Doctor being half-human on his mother's side.