Yes, their characters are very different, but you could have plugged in Eccelston's Doctor and still told essentially the same story, with a few tweaks.
I really, really don't see that. Eccleston's Doctor always came off as having newly regenerated in the wake of the Time War. Go back and read what people have been saying on the Internet for the past 8 years and you'll see that most people assumed it was McGann's Doctor who fought in, and ended, the war, subsequently regenerating into Eccleston. I've never gotten the impression that anyone thought Eccleston's Doctor was the one who blew them all up.
The War Doctor is a character who's been fighting for a long time, is sick of it, and feels he's exhausted every possible option except destruction. He's someone who's been a warrior for a long time. Eccleston has always been perceived, or so it's seemed to me, as the
post-war Doctor, the PTSD Doctor, recovering from the horror he experienced in his previous incarnation, and from the cataclysmic events that ended that life and started his current one.
If you're thinking in terms of fan service, what would have been more fun to the modern era fandom then have all 3 of those guys running around and interacting with each other.
I prefer to think in terms of what serves the story. It would've been nice for completeness's sake to have all three postwar Doctors confronting what the War Doctor had done, but I sure can't see Eccleston being in place of the War Doctor.
And consider this: Moffat has said that he wanted Billie Piper but didn't want to write Rose because her story was finished and was RTD's story anyway. So that means he always intended Piper to play the Moment/Bad Wolf instead. And the Doctor would've been from a point in his timeline before he met Rose Tyler. It wouldn't be a good idea to bring back the actors who played the first modern Doctor-companion pair and have them be strangers to each other, totally unable to build on the relationship they established with each other and with the viewers. It makes more sense if it's a different Doctor.
This story basically undoes the most fundamental aspect of the RTD Era. The Doctor didn't wipe out his own people. He didn't commit genocide. This was the fundamental defining characteristic of RTD Doctor Who. And it's gone.
And that's good. Having the Doctor be the last of his people was an interesting place to take him, but having him be the one responsible for their annihilation always felt to me like going a little too far. And Moffat pinpointed the exact reason why it went too far, the reason Davies glossed over: That the Gallifreyans aren't like the Daleks or the Cybermen where every last one is equally a monster. They have children. They have innocents. We know that the Doctor, for all his claims of pacifism, has a tendency to destroy the bad guys or arrange for their destruction; but as a rule, he doesn't destroy innocents in the process. So destroying the whole Gallifreyan species just to wipe out the corrupt few on the High Council seems hugely disproportionate. Moffat recognized and addressed a conceptual flaw in Davies's premise. And he did it in a way that preserved the emotional arc Davies created for the character, as well as allowing that arc to be advanced and resolved.
And it's a good resolution. Over his past two lives, the Doctor has gotten more quirky and childlike, afraid of being a grownup because of his memory of what his most grownup self did. Now he's free of the need to run from maturity, and that means he can potentially become a very different man, and that could mean we're in for an interesting new journey for the character. That's not a bad thing to me. The Time War stuff mostly worked, but it's been eight years and it's time to resolve it and do something different.
I guess this explains how so many Daleks managed to survive the Time War... he didn't actually use the Moment! Also, even if this is the final apocalyptic battle... you really expect me to believe that EVERY SINGLE* DALEK shot itself to pieces in the space of a few seconds?! That every single Dalek ship was sitting in a perfect orbit of Gallifrey?!
Given the reported intensity of the bombardment, and the sheer concentration of Dalek ships around the planet, I'm willing to suspend disbelief and accept that they were all destroyed, either by direct fire or by debris from neighboring ships. It's certainly no sillier than the cascading, all-encompassing orbital destruction in Cuaron's
Gravity, and that was supposedly the result of a single triggering impact.
The Zygon story was... cute... but pretty lightweight. Not exactly what I would have been saving for the big anniversary special. Should have focused more on the Time War and the Moment. But I guess that would have been too serious and dark, enh?
Serious and dark is overrated. It's not automatically better than anything else -- it's just more fashionable.
This is
Doctor Who, not
Game of Thrones. It's a children's show. So yeah, it doesn't get too dark. It gets scary, yes; it wants the children to watch from behind the sofa. But it doesn't want to traumatize and depress them and make them see the universe as a morass of endless despair. It wants them to laugh and have fun and perceive the Doctor as a source of hope.
Speaking of. Why in the world is the War Doctor bantering and joking with his future selves?!
Because he's still the Doctor -- just as this is still
Doctor Who. It's made to entertain us, not depress us.
This man has been fighting a holocaust war for decades and is one moment away from killing billions of his own people (and 2.X billion children) with the push of a big red button. Shouldn't he be a little bit darker? Angrier?
I think by this point he's probably burned out on anger and is more just weary. Remember, he said to Bad Wolf that he didn't intend to survive. People who have resolved to commit suicide are often very calm and relaxed, because they believe their troubles will soon be over.
Where was Rassilon? This was the final day of the Time War. We saw him in charge in "The End of Time".
The general leading the War Council mentioned that the High Council was busy elsewhere carrying out plans of its own -- as seen in TEoT -- but that wasn't going to stop him from continuing the fight. We saw the ruling elite in their ivory tower in TEoT, but here we saw the people actually leading the fight instead.
But we didn't get the classic "Companions swap Doctors and bitch about one another" schitck.
True, I would've liked to see a bit more companion action. But as Moffat said, this story was, for once, really about the Doctor himself. And that's good. Past multi-Doctor team-ups have really just been exercises in fanservice and Easter eggs, but this was a story where a man meeting different facets of himself was really about the man facing himself rather than just about fan-pleasing gimmicks and references. There were plenty of references, but they weren't the whole reason for the story.
And David didn't get a single scene with her!!!
Doesn't bother me. The whole Doctor-Rose thing has been more than satisfactorily resolved, and if anything was dragged on too long. Tennant and Piper have already had one or two reunion scenes, so we didn't need another. And I liked seeing Piper get to show her acting chops by playing a completely different character.
Remember how in "The End of Time" the Time Lords ended up as monstrous as the Daleks and them coming back was the worst thing in the world? 'Cause now they seem to be the noble victims of a terrible war again and the Doctor can't wait to bring them back into the universe.
Like I said, they're not monolithic. We've known for decades that not all Gallifreyans are Time Lords; the Lords are just the ruling nobility. So there's no contradiction there, any more than there's a contradiction in any class-based society having both a corrupt nobility and victimized commoners.
Oh and least I forget... at the end of "The Doctor's Name", the Doctor and Clara were trapped inside his own timestream vortex world thing. But here, they're out and perfectly fine without a single explanation!
No, they weren't trapped. The Doctor went in to bring her back, and he showed her the way: grab onto the leaf. Which she did, and then she found him and they were reunited. That was the resolution. But before he led her back, they lingered a bit because she sensed the "extra" Doctor. We saw them turn and begin to walk away just before we got the reveal of John Hurt. So while it's a little vague, the indication is that they were able to depart. The cliffhanger wasn't "How do they get out?" They had a way out, vague and fanciful though it was. The cliffhanger was "Eeek, there's another Doctor we never knew about? What's the story there, and what's the horrible thing he did?"
How was it that all 13 Doctors were there? Aside from the "rules" (which Moffat never follows anyway), did the present Doctors go back (and forward) to recruit all their past selves? They just popped up and said hey we need your help for a battle? Did they all loose their memories of this?
I'm sure that's exactly what happened. Although Capaldi's Doctor probably remembered it, just as Smith remembered it. The general rule in these things seems to be that the latest Doctor gets to remember it all, whereas the earlier Doctors lose whatever knowledge they gain of their personal future.
And if they went into the future to take #12... why not get 13, 14, 15, etc, etc?
Remember, the War Doctor is the actual #9, so Capaldi is his 13th life. As far as the Doctor knew, there weren't any beyond that one.
I was really hoping that the story was how the War Doctor came to use the Moment as a calculated and balanced decision.
It was. But it was also about how the later Doctors had had the advantage of hundreds of years of reflection letting them make an even
more calculated and balanced decision which led to a more hopeful outcome.
It would have been a nice tragic ending and shown us the established event in the pre-existing continuity...
But what would have been the point of that? We've had eight years of tragic. We already know the established event. What would be the benefit in just rehashing the past and giving us exactly what we expected? Stories' outcomes should surprise us. They should be what we don't expect. The story
began with our expectation that the Doctor would push the button and destroy the planet. How lame would it be for the story to end without any surprises? Where would the journey have been?
Moffat said that he felt the 50th anniversary story shouldn't simply rehash the past, but should set the stage for the future. It should take the character and the story somewhere new. And that's what it did.
Agreed. Much as I love the Eighth Doctor, I have a hard time picturing him as "world weary"-- and that's frankly not how I'd WANT him to be remembered. He deserves to go out being the romantic adventurer we always knew him to be, I think.
I agree. I think the War Doctor is a distinct role in his life and it makes sense for him to be a distinct identity, a distinct incarnation.
...but we had the fun of discovering an entirely new Doctor in the process (which is normally the kind of thing fans would be excited as hell about).
Indeed. Why the complaints when we have a whole new Doctor to speculate about? Maybe now we'll get books or comics about the Doctor we never knew about before.
However something else from the end is bothering me: what if the painting "Gallifrey Falls No More" is actually Gallifrey itself. No one seemed to know where the painting came from after all, and those paintings were stated to be pocket dimensions.
I don't think so. The painting/stasis cube was "taken" in the middle of the fall of Arcadia, hours before the end. Besides, it's just too obvious -- surely the Doctor wouldn't overlook the possibility if there were any way it could be true. After all, he's a lot more clever than any of us. So presumably it isn't there.
