Johonebesus wrote:I've been hoping that the Timelords would be resurrected and Gallifrey saved, and at the same time dreading it, for exactly this reason. Here we've had several years of the Doctor angsting over the destruction of Gallifrey, how he had to sacrifice his people to destroy the Daleks, and now they're worse than the Daleks. It's like RTD just had to think of one last way to screw us over. As others have said, it could have been so good. The Timelords could have had a plan to manipulate the Doctor and the Master to save themselves while destroying the Daleks and sealing off the Time War. It didn't have to be some super-evil plot to destroy all of creation. The Doctor could have ended up pissed off at being lied to and forced to think he had destroyed his planet.
This is what gets me. Also it's rather trite that the Doctor doesn't even have to consider the implications of killing off his people again, because they force the issue with Gallifrey about to punt Earth out of orbit. How very convenient!
This, the same Doctor who refused to commit genocide just to destroy all of the Emperor's Daleks now casually tosses the Time Lords back into oblivion.
This kind of cowardly writing is what truly pisses me off, while RTD is no doubt patting himself on the back for being oh so controversial with the Time Lords. No you weren't you chump, you just wasted them, and deliberately crafted a situation where the Doctor can be totally guilt free about it because you're a hack!
"No it's just Anacrap coming to whine and do nothing." -Mike Nelson on Anakin Skywalker
Johonebesus wrote:I've been hoping that the Timelords would be resurrected and Gallifrey saved, and at the same time dreading it, for exactly this reason. Here we've had several years of the Doctor angsting over the destruction of Gallifrey, how he had to sacrifice his people to destroy the Daleks, and now they're worse than the Daleks. It's like RTD just had to think of one last way to screw us over. As others have said, it could have been so good. The Timelords could have had a plan to manipulate the Doctor and the Master to save themselves while destroying the Daleks and sealing off the Time War. It didn't have to be some super-evil plot to destroy all of creation. The Doctor could have ended up pissed off at being lied to and forced to think he had destroyed his planet.
This is what gets me. Also it's rather trite that the Doctor doesn't even have to consider the implications of killing off his people again, because they force the issue with Gallifrey about to punt Earth out of orbit. How very convenient!
This, the same Doctor who refused to commit genocide just to destroy all of the Emperor's Daleks now casually tosses the Time Lords back into oblivion.
This kind of cowardly writing is what truly pisses me off, while RTD is no doubt patting himself on the back for being oh so controversial with the Time Lords. No you weren't you chump, you just wasted them, and deliberately crafted a situation where the Doctor can be totally guilt free about it because you're a hack!
RTD's problem: he got stuck on this whole idea of the Doctor as "the most wonderful man in the Universe", which means that anybody he opposed would be irredeemably evil. At the same time, he's got to be seen to be offering mercy even to his worst enemies because he's supposed to be "the most wonderful man in the Universe" (I swear that if I kept hearing Wilfred Mott twitter on along those lines, I was going to puke) —except of course if they weren't special in some way or another in the Doctor's view, which means they could just burn (like the Racnoss). This guarantees that RTD's writing will base its "logic" upon one or more very huge black/white fallacies. He is indeed a hack. Worse, he's a fanzine-level hack. How this man got the credentials to be counted a professional writer speaks volumes as to how far standards have sunk over the years between "Survival" and "Rose". Not even John Nathan-Turner would have greenlighted bullshit like this, and he's the man who inflicted "Time And The Rani", "Delta And The Bannermen" and Bonnie Langford on us all.
When ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.
—Abraham Lincoln
People pray so that God won't crush them like bugs.
—Dr. Gregory House
Oil an emergency?! It's about time, Brigadier, that the leaders of this planet of yours realised that to remain dependent upon a mineral slime simply doesn't make sense.
—The Doctor "Terror Of The Zygons" (1975)
It's a close competition indeed as to who is more annoying, Bonnie Langford or Rose. ATM I can't remember Langfords character name and I'm feeling too lazy to look it up on Wiki. Of her era I've only ever seen Trial of a Timelord and thankfully her appearances are kept to a minimum.
Don't Move you're surrounded by Armed Bastards - Gene Hunt's attempt at Diplomacy
I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own - Number 6
The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done.
You mean Mel? Bonnie Langford was hell annoying in the Sylvester McCoy era, as all she did was scream.
Never apologise for being a geek, because they won't apologise to you for being an arsehole. John Barrowman - 22 June 2014 Perth Supernova.
Countries I have been to - 14.
Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, Germany, Malaysia, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, USA.
Always on the lookout for more nice places to visit.
Well I've only got one McCoy story and that's Remembrance of the Daleks which was an Ace story, thankfully Mel was gone by then.
Don't Move you're surrounded by Armed Bastards - Gene Hunt's attempt at Diplomacy
I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own - Number 6
The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done.
Patrick Degan wrote:
except of course if they weren't special in some way or another in the Doctor's view, which means they could just burn (like the Racnoss).
The Racnoss were a highly malicious race who were a clear and present danger to everybody, of course the Doctor was going overboard in his actions (and as shown in "Turn Left" would've died if Donna hadn't snapped him out of his kill frenzy), but the Racnoss had to be stopped or London would've been their starter course.
RTD is a fanboy who progressively got more carried away like a kid in a sweet shop, although he isn't incapable of writing antagonists who are ambigious or multi-layered - there is the pitiful, wise but still sinister Ood, the Sontarans are charismatic, the coldly arrogant Dalek Sec became a sad freak, Mrs. Saxon was a memorable henchwoman, the Tolcafane are rather sad monsters, and by far the best example is John Frobisher from the Torchwood mini-series. While the Time Lords coming back and then getting waved away with the shooting of a McGuffin is rather 'ho-hum seen it all before', at least the Time Lords are still about and leaves something for Steven Moffat to tie up properly (with S6/7 episodes set on a ruined post-TW Gallifrey), the Time War must've drove the Time Lords nuts getting them trapped in timeloops for millennia/eons on end, and Rassillion (from what I've heard of him) was always a raging cunt.
Timothy Dalton was a commanding presence, but somewhat wasted and his role not properly explained, John Simm never seemed to quite cut it as the Master, especially when compared to Derek Jacobi and Roger Delgardo, although he was not as badly miscast as the smug Eric Roberts and you still loved to hate him (and the likely final demise of the Simm's incarnation is anti-heroic).
My least favourite companion of NuWho in relative terms was Martha Jones (Freema was alright but her character's parents...), I thought Billie Piper did great for a washed up teen pop star, Micky improved quite quickly, Donna Noble could stand up for herself and not entirely be hoodwinked by the Doctor, with the best companion undoubtly being Wilfred Noble, even though he was introduced when some people felt RTD DW was turning to shit/getting repetitive. Bernard Cribbins, already a DW veteran, stole the show for the 1534th time in "The End of Time" and his character went through the most interesting arc (starting off as comedic relief at a newspaper stand and finally sealing the Tenth Doctor's fate through a well meaning act). I want companions to be more branched out and varied in demographics (Moffat has not really bucked the RTD trend with the casting of that hot redhead from London, although it's still too early to judge).
Anyway here's a list of RTD's crazy ideas for the show during his writing process:
1. David Tennant had a short-lived “wobble” about staying on for the fifth series (before his leaving was announced, mind), and did have a meeting with incoming producer Steven Moffat, in which Moffat laid out his plans for the season.
2. Other ideas were considered for the Easter special. One was very space opera, all dogfights and spaceships, with the Doctor arriving in the midst of a war in space. One of the races involved might have been the Chelonians - man-sized tortoises from Gareth Roberts’s Who novel The Highest Science.
3. Another centred around a deserted hotel, and would have seen weird, spindly-legged alien creatures like centaurs, with singsong voices, freezing Earth in time for a bizarre carnival procession.
4. Yet another was a kind of Star Trek pastiche - essentially “the Doctor on board the Enterprise, puncturing all that Starfleet pomposity with this sheer Doctor-ness”.
5. Speaking of which, back in 2004, a Doctor Who/Star Trek crossover was seriously on their list of plans, until Enterprise was axed.
6. Gareth Roberts’s first treatment for the Easter special involved an outer-space hotel with mysteriously disappearing guests, who were being taken down to the planet below to be implanted with alien eggs (because eggs=Easter, see?). Sounds a bit Battlestar Galactica (70s version) to us.
7. Phil Ford’s first treatment for his special was a sword and sorcery story called “A Midwinter’s Tale”, featuring an alien princess who’s come to Earth to be married. It all ended up with much chasing around through secret corridors underneath Buckingham Palace.
8. Davies considered other options for David Tennant’s final story, too. It could have been a one-parter, which saw the Doctor dying saving a family of four aliens stranded in a small spaceship with a leaky engine. Fixing the engine would have irradiated the Doctor.
9. Instead of the Vinvocci, “The End Of Time” could have featured gloop-faced “runny people” aliens.
10. For two or three days, Russell was planning to bring back the Daleks for “The End Of Time” too. They would have been in an alliance with the Time Lords, and there would have been a Dalek Parliament and a Dalek Minister. He eventually changed his mind after learning that Steven Moffat is using the pepperpots in season five.
11. A line was cut from the scene where the Doctor talks to Wilf on the Vinvocci spaceship. He would have explained that he “was half-human back in 1999 for a couple of days” (a reference to the Paul McGann movie).
12. Who’s that mysterious woman in “The End Of Time”? Here it is from the horse’s mouth: “I like leaving it open, because then you can imagine what you want. I think the fans will say it's Romana. Or even the Rani. Some might say that it's Susan's mother, I suppose. But of course it’s meant to be the Doctor’s mother”.
13. Russell’s nickname for the alien in Torchwood: Children Of Earth became “Smokey the space pelican”, after a kid visiting the set said that it looked like one of the birds!
14. Both Martha and Mickey were originally planned to feature in Children Of Earth. Freema Agyeman became unavailable when she was cast in Law And Order: London. Mickey was only written out a week before the read-through, when Noel Clarke was offered a role in a Michael Winterbottom film.
15. It was also hoped that Martha would team up with Sarah Jane in the climax of season two of The Sarah Jane Adventures. When Freema became unavailable, the Brigadier was used instead.
16. Russell was offered the option to turn The Sarah Jane Adventures into a show airing on Sundays at 5.30pm, which would have required reinventing the series. He decided against it.
17. Mackenzie Crook is very enthusiastic about Doctor Who, and they’ve tried to cast him “a million times”, but the dates have never worked out. He was almost cast as Clive in “Rose”.
18. Davies’s parents were very involved with Swansea rugby club, and used to get Christmas cards from the Foreign Office every year for their part in helping a rugby player defect to the West, back in the ‘50s!
19. When Davies collected his OBE, he asked Prince Charles, “Are those ears real?”
20. Former defence secretary Geoff Hoon is a big Who fan, and owns a sonic screwdriver (Russell was at university with Hoon’s son).
I'm still looking forward to Moffat's first season, I'm looking forward to the vampires (my review/synopsis of "State of Decay") and even to the Daleks: Spoiler
Who have been revamped again: they've got Dalek casings that have been built in the last five years, got rid of their default bronze/gold colour scheme, and repainted them in a dark greyish-blue colour that the standard Daleks had from "Genesis of the Daleks" (Davros' prototypes) up till "Remembrance of the Daleks" (the Renegade units). The bone white Dalek seen briefly is very reminiscent of the Imperial Daleks but less gaudy and more minimalist (with spikes flowering out from its eye piece).
I'm not looking forward to the Weeping Angels getting trotted out, they're best as oneshot villains, I'd rather had the clockwork robots have frequent cameos (like the Ood).
'Alright guard, begin the unnecessarily slow moving dipping mechanism...' - Dr. Evil
'Secondly, I don't see why "income inequality" is a bad thing. Poverty is not an injustice. There is no such thing as causes for poverty, only causes for wealth. Poverty is not a wrong, but taking money from those who have it to equalize incomes is basically theft, which is wrong.' - Typical Randroid
'I think it's gone a little bit wrong.' - The Doctor
10. For two or three days, Russell was planning to bring back the Daleks for “The End Of Time” too. They would have been in an alliance with the Time Lords, and there would have been a Dalek Parliament and a Dalek Minister. He eventually changed his mind after learning that Steven Moffat is using the pepperpots in season five.
I note he didn't change his mind because it was a damn stupid idea.
This guy just didn't care anymore, did he? Anything to be "cool" and rile up the fans because apparently he thinks it's clever to give two fingers to the people who supported him as the saviour of Doctor Who after his first series.
What a wanker.
"No it's just Anacrap coming to whine and do nothing." -Mike Nelson on Anakin Skywalker
10. For two or three days, Russell was planning to bring back the Daleks for “The End Of Time” too. They would have been in an alliance with the Time Lords, and there would have been a Dalek Parliament and a Dalek Minister. He eventually changed his mind after learning that Steven Moffat is using the pepperpots in season five.
I note he didn't change his mind because it was a damn stupid idea.
This guy just didn't care anymore, did he? Anything to be "cool" and rile up the fans because apparently he thinks it's clever to give two fingers to the people who supported him as the saviour of Doctor Who after his first series.
The idea is not completely unreasonable. There was an armistice between the Time Lords and the Daleks for a while (referenced in the 8th doctor movie) which broke down. Neither side wants to be wiped out. If both realise that they're about to be anhiliated, an uneasy alliance of necessity is possible, though almost certainly with dissenting factions on both sides. Both the Time Lords and the Daleks would reason that survival is the immediate priority, and that if they can get out of the time lock they can rebuild and launch a fresh attack later.
Of course in practice RTD is incapable of appreciating any of that, or writing anything approaching subtlety or depth (his idea of 'shades of grey' is Torchwood). His cartoon villain timelords would be cheerfully, even gleefully working with the Daleks to give the Doctor as much of a free ethical pass (for destroying them) as possible.
Starglider wrote:The idea is not completely unreasonable. There was an armistice between the Time Lords and the Daleks for a while (referenced in the 8th doctor movie) which broke down. Neither side wants to be wiped out. If both realise that they're about to be anhiliated, an uneasy alliance of necessity is possible, though almost certainly with dissenting factions on both sides. Both the Time Lords and the Daleks would reason that survival is the immediate priority, and that if they can get out of the time lock they can rebuild and launch a fresh attack later.
See I don't like the idea that they're still active inside this time lock at all. What happened to "my people burned, the Daleks burned, all dead, etc. etc."
I used to think the time lock meant that something the Doctor did meant that this period of history was effectively excised from time. So one could never go to Gallifrey before the Time War because it's just *gone*.
But now it's like hey they're all still alive and well, just trapped in a bubble.
Of course in practice RTD is incapable of appreciating any of that, or writing anything approaching subtlety or depth (his idea of 'shades of grey' is Torchwood). His cartoon villain timelords would be cheerfully, even gleefully working with the Daleks to give the Doctor as much of a free ethical pass (for destroying them) as possible.
I'm sure that RTD was planning exactly this. Maybe Rassilon riding about in a floating Davros chair twirling his invisible mustache.
"No it's just Anacrap coming to whine and do nothing." -Mike Nelson on Anakin Skywalker
Starglider wrote:The idea is not completely unreasonable. There was an armistice between the Time Lords and the Daleks for a while (referenced in the 8th doctor movie) which broke down. Neither side wants to be wiped out. If both realise that they're about to be anhiliated, an uneasy alliance of necessity is possible, though almost certainly with dissenting factions on both sides. Both the Time Lords and the Daleks would reason that survival is the immediate priority, and that if they can get out of the time lock they can rebuild and launch a fresh attack later.
See I don't like the idea that they're still active inside this time lock at all. What happened to "my people burned, the Daleks burned, all dead, etc. etc."
I used to think the time lock meant that something the Doctor did meant that this period of history was effectively excised from time. So one could never go to Gallifrey before the Time War because it's just *gone*.
But now it's like hey they're all still alive and well, just trapped in a bubble.
Oh, but its like a bubble but not - straight from the Doctor's own mouth and by extension RTD
Personnally, I always thought the 'Time lock' was exactly that. One of those points where nothing can intervene because the timeline is 'LOCKED' and cant be changed.
Journey's End was bad but at least Dalek Kane / Davros rescue was apparantly a non-issue. He was going to die anyway, Dalek Kane just saved him right before he died thus the Time war isnt changed. As for Dalek Kane being able to do it, the Doctor has said many times the Daleks are extremely intelligent and at the height of their power they could match the Timelords. I would be willing to buy the idea that one of the supposed 'elite' thinkers of the Dalek race at the height of their power would be able to outdo the Doctor in breaking the Timelock in a small way.
As it is, Dalek Kane got wasted and took the Daleks with him rather than perhaps being the catalyst for changing events in the Time war that could have explained the return of the Timelords. Leaving us with RTD showing us the Timelords are still active inside this supposed 'bubble' and have the ability to retroactively alter the past of people OUTSIDE the bubble in a desperate bid to bring themselves back.
Timelords: The old woman said TWO would survive...
Rassilon: Enemity of ages, huh ?
Rassilon: Clearly the Doctor and the Master...
RTD Rassilon : Gee, lets fuck with the Master who has spent his life creating mayhem and misery. It makes absolute sense to pin our hopes on this mentally unstable character.
SMART Rassilon: The DOCTOR (Why the fuck do we call him by this stupid title ? Not one of us know his real name ? Oi you, mommy, whats his real name ? ) ... who is also a Timelord, who also was taken for initation, who also has a past on Gallifrey.
*Lightbulb*
SMART Rassilon: HANG on a miniute, why dont we retroactively alter the Doctors past ?
We can make the reason why he runs around so much part of our unique conditioning to keep him alive and the key to bringing us back is on Earth. Additionally, the reason why he shows 'mercy' all the time is to make sure he dosent do a 180 and try and banish us back to oblivion.
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For bonus points, lets throw in River Song during this and have her working along side Tennant to get rid of that sticky continuity mess of having to meet a different Doctor than the one she apparently has a relationship with. Additonally, live up to the suspense over the Doctors 'name' since the Timelords should reveal it anyway.
