New Doctor Who episode to be called.....

[Eternal_Freedom]

Now there I agree with you. Power and Evil (from the scripts I have read and the few clips I have seen) are very strong stories indeed. They're probably the only lost stories I really want to see.

[Stark]

Yah obviously I just remember them from the books I read as a kid, which often include heaps of characterisation not in the actual episode. The novel of Rememberence, for instance, is chock with POV shit that gives the conflict a much stronger context.

One of the worst things about the Daleks is their informed attributes. Someone like Sarah shits her pants over them, even though she only saw them in low-rent stories where they did not much. It would have been interesting to have a story where someone reacts to them with 'oh, those losers for the Movellan war' only to discover they have changed or developed into a major threat. I think this is why the early new stories worked; they assumed no knowledge and actually worked for the sense of threat. Dalek had the Doctor pissing his pants in terror, and the finale had a huge multiplication of that threat.

[Eternal_Freedom]

That's a good point about informed attributes, although in Sarah's case (and most companions) it's most likely that the Doctor would have elaborated about them offscreen, explaining just how bad they are.

At any rate, seeing some character thinking about them as losers because of when they lived would have been good.

[mr friendly guy]

Why do you think the Time War was ill-conceived? Even today years after I first saw it, the most memorable thing about the first season NuWho was the pathos of the Doctor being all alone, sad at being the last member of his race, and feeling guilty over causing the destruction of an entire other race, and how tremendous Ecclestone sold that in the character through his performance.

Perhaps it was ill-conceived because the writers didn't have the guts to follow-through with it, but that doesn't seem like a criticism of the premise itself but rather the writing in general.

My take is that the Time War suffered from the writers telling, but not showing. Here you had epic battles, but not even flashback scenes. It was all dialogue. So fans get the feeling of what might have been.

Edit - the concept of time travelling races fighting a time war is interesting in and of itself. Although I am not sure having the Daleks as the main antagonist to the Time Lords was a good idea, as that just powers them up. I would have preferred they just invent a new race, heck why don't we just call them The Enemy like the novels did to show how afraid of them the TL were. They didn't even get a proper name. Have the Daleks ending up a servitor race (like the Drakh and the Shadows) and the survivor Daleks trying to scrummage tech left over by their masters. This way the Daleks aren't so powerful, can be powered up for a special episode (they found the tech of their masters, made some improvements, but don't completely understand it) and depowered again.

[Stark]

Using the Daleks worked because inventing some timey-wimey bunch of idiots (like the apallingly horrid Faction Paradox where evil uni students destroy the world) would have been less resonant. The Time War had even begun in the old series; RTD just gave it a name and a climax.

It stopped working because everything we found out about it was AMAZINGLY LAME. Remember the Shadow Proclamation not being a proclamation at all but a bunch of retards hanging out in a 1984 hotel lobby doing nothing?

[mr friendly guy]

Faction Paradox appears. Then gets trashed in a massacre scene, with dialogue showing the main players never took them seriously.
Thats a big fuck you to Lawrence Miles and BBC books who made them a weird time travelling voodoo cult with powers to take over Gallifrey through contrived plot devices.

[Stark]

Don't forget their base being days that literally don't exist. Published fanfic has never been so terrible. :V

[mr friendly guy]

To be fair to Miles, he comes up with some neat ideas which just so weird they work. For example, he postulates that if both sides keep on time travelling to alter a specific event, eg battle, eventually there will be no more seconds left, each point in time would be occupied by a force time travelling to alter the event. So he had the Enemy come up with zero time or some such name, where they somehow add time. I think he also used the explanation to say why the TL initially had trouble detecting the Enemy.

I can even sort of buy their shadow monsters FP wields (just say its an alien which absorbs light so it looks like a shadow), but the losing your shadow was too much. Seriously, just Miles not know the shadow is merely an absence of light, and not some physical thing.

However the 11 day Empire where FP purchased time from the English when they switched calendars just crossed over into the realms of bullshit. Was that supposed to be a pseudoscientific explanation for why the TL couldn't find them initially?

[Darth Lucifer]

...I think they're going to have it be a refuge where a bunch of lost Daleks are trying to hide from the Doctor, maybe run by the power rangers.

Maybe they're trying to hide from the Mighty Morphin Dalek Rangers. After all, they blasted the other old Daleks into atoms shortly after coming into being.

[The Imperator]

Faction Paradox.. they were supposed to be like magic. Their intro by Miles was in Christmas on a Rational Planet, and the Grandfather escaped to create them after the universe was infected by Irrationality. Interesting idea. I love the Faction Paradox series, and most of Miles' books. The book you all are referring to, where the Faction did that stuff to Gallifrey, was not written by Miles. In fact, IIRC, that was one of the reasons he ended up falling out with the BBC. He didn't want Faction Paradox to be teh uberz, but the other writers made them that so they could have the Doctor beat them and then get rid of them. And, just to add insult to pain, the BBC went and made the Sycorax look exactly like Faction members, and they even used blood rituals; that pissed me off. The shadows worked because it was how your mind processed the residual psychic leftovers of stuff removed from time. Unless you use anti-time, the knowledge of erased from time stuff stays with you; the Grandfather just created a way to erase stuff, but leave the knowledge of it visible, in some weird way with psionics.

[PREDATOR490]

It was about time they brought out the multi-coloured daleks... gotta get those dalek toys rolling off the shelves and now they get to make an episode with daleks from previous eras. No doubt to showcase how uber-awesome these new daleks are. This episode sounds like its going to be utter shit from the get-go.
Seems they just cant let go of having every companion introduced to the daleks and now we have a new one... cue Doctor's gloomy exposition to the audience via the companion incase folks havent quite got it yet.

[DaveJB]

Um, Amy and Rory are still going to be the companions in this episode, and both have already met the Daleks.

[PREDATOR490]

Um, Amy and Rory are still going to be the companions in this episode, and both have already met the Daleks.

They have barely met the Daleks and I fully expect the first episode of the series to use that as a means of dumping Dalek exposition on the audience. Only question is wether it will be the Doctor doing it or the cliche Companions getting captured so the Dalek can explain the plot to them.

[Vaporous]

The Time War never worked as anything other than a way to free nuWho from being trapped by the old continuity and give the Doctor some pain and tragedy to deal with to keep him human in some way. Dalek was brilliant because it worked perfectly from that premise.

Of all the things that came after Dalek that made the Time War not work, the worst is obviously The End of Time. We find out that instead of being destroyed because it was the only way to save all life from the Daleks, (leaving the Doctor agonizing and guilt ridden over destroying his own more or less good people) the Doctor had to kill them all because "in the final days of the war" (repeat ad nauseum) Rassilon came back as red robed space hitler and the Time Lords were trying to unmake reality. Uh, so why do we care that they're dead? Now the doctor didn't kill his flawed but remarkable species because it was the only way; he did it because they were as bad as the Daleks. Sure, okay, it sucks that they became what they became and the Doctor still had to do an Awful But Necessary Thing (tm), but the entire effect is spoiled because the Time Lords are such dicks.

So I don't mind them bringing back the Daleks anymore, because they've already destroyed the Time War concept, so why not? Go hog wild. Just try not to make them so dull, and don't end the season with them nearly destroying creation before being defeated by the reset button.

[jollyreaper]

I grew up watching Who with my dad. The Fourth Doctor is always the real Doctor for me. Series 1 of NuWho brought back great memories.

The subsequent series have been uneven due to spotty writing. There have been some really great bits but also a lot of dodgy and embarrassing faffle.

The Time War was an interesting twist. Agreed with comments above about how it gave the Doctor pathos. And the thing about people who can fight throughout space and time is that any war that occurs will occur everywhere and everywhen. Even if, from the subjective POV of the participants the war had a beginning, middle and end, from the POV of the muggles (anyone who isn't a time-traveler) the aftermath of the war is part of the always-was.

Dalek was a great episode. Every subsequent outing has been horror movie sequelitis. Freddy Krueger was terrifying in the first film. I remember the second film as being scary but haven't seen it in years. It might come across more camp. Anything after that pretty much turned him into a homicidal clown, cracking jokes and slashing bellies. You couldn't take the horror seriously.

What should a Dalek do when the Doctor runs into the room? Don't let him talk, start blasting. Why? He starts monologuing, you sit there like gits letting him ham it up, he waves the sonic vibrator around and everything blows up. You would have been better off shooting first and not asking questions.

My biggest objection with the recent seasons is the Doctor isn't written smart. He randomly blunders into dangers because he never plans ahead. He doesn't defeat his enemies by outfighting them. Well, that's part of his character, he's supposed to out-think them. But he never does. Instead all we get are techno-babble ass-pulls that never hold up.

The way I would prefer the Daleks is as hopelessly static villains. They're scary but lack imagination. They're living fossils, like sharks. So they came about early in the history of the galaxy and don't change. The Doctor encounters them across time and space and they're always the same and this is why he can defeat them. And he points out that given the creativity of their race before they locked themselves into their fighting machines, they potentially had the mental horsepower to rival Time Lords.

So, they're dangerous, they outclass every other mundane race they encounter, but the Doctor can outthink them and so consistently defeats them. And this holds open the possibility for a Dalek who can think, who can be creative, who can be a threat.

And the other factor that could make the Time War interesting is if the Doctor lost a life getting out of it and his entire memory of the time is hazy. He can't even remember who it was fought against. And the snarls leftover from this fight could imply that time travel is no longer really within his control. He can map out certain points to consistently return to like Earth in the 20th and 21st centuries, most of the time, but everything else is kind of a crapshoot.

The possibility also remains that what he did to end the Time War was a gross violation Everything. And the ripples are settling down. Which means that he didn't finish the war, he put it on hiatus. What he thought he destroyed he merely concealed. So this means Time Lords can start dribbling out into time and space as well as whoever they were fighting against.

[Broomstick]

Of all the things that came after Dalek that made the Time War not work, the worst is obviously The End of Time. We find out that instead of being destroyed because it was the only way to save all life from the Daleks, (leaving the Doctor agonizing and guilt ridden over destroying his own more or less good people) the Doctor had to kill them all because "in the final days of the war" (repeat ad nauseum) Rassilon came back as red robed space hitler and the Time Lords were trying to unmake reality. Uh, so why do we care that they're dead? Now the doctor didn't kill his flawed but remarkable species because it was the only way; he did it because they were as bad as the Daleks. Sure, okay, it sucks that they became what they became and the Doctor still had to do an Awful But Necessary Thing (tm), but the entire effect is spoiled because the Time Lords are such dicks.

The Time Lords have always been portrayed as dicks, from the very first episode they appeared in where they tortured someone in an attempt to get them to testify in a trial.

Why should he care if he race went all space-Nazi and he had to wipe them out? Um... he has friends and relatives? Remember, he eliminated all Time Lords (according to the narrative) including the "good ones", his old companion Leela if she was still living on Gallifrey, any relatives he might have had. You know, people he personally cares about. All of them that were on Gallifrey at the time.

[Lord Revan]

Why should he care if he race went all space-Nazi and he had to wipe them out? Um... he has friends and relatives? Remember, he eliminated all Time Lords (according to the narrative) including the "good ones", his old companion Leela if she was still living on Gallifrey, any relatives he might have had. You know, people he personally cares about. All of them that were on Gallifrey at the time.

that's a very good point, we're not suppose to care about the destruction of Gallifrey because the Time Lords were good people, but rather because they were the Doctor's people. Also there's the thing that we're suppose to care because it means the Doctor can't ever return home, because there's nothing to return to.

[Enigma]

How does time loop = destroyed? They still exist but outside of time AFAIK.

[The Imperator]

How does time loop = destroyed? They still exist but outside of time AFAIK.

It is a time lock, but the Moment is a gigantic De-Mat gun. At the "end" of the time lock, it(used by the Doctor) destroys all the combatants. That's why Rassilon was in a hurry during End of Time.

[Enigma]

How does time loop = destroyed? They still exist but outside of time AFAIK.

It is a time lock, but the Moment is a gigantic De-Mat gun. At the "end" of the time lock, it(used by the Doctor) destroys all the combatants. That's why Rassilon was in a hurry during End of Time.

Ah. But still, the Time Lords are not destroyed unless BBC wants The Master eradicated too. So, the Doctor thinks they are gone for good but I believe Rassilon has another trick up his sleeve.

[koputusx]

It is a time lock, but the Moment is a gigantic De-Mat gun. At the "end" of the time lock, it(used by the Doctor) destroys all the combatants.

Where is this information from?

[The Imperator]

It is a time lock, but the Moment is a gigantic De-Mat gun. At the "end" of the time lock, it(used by the Doctor) destroys all the combatants.

Where is this information from?

Let me see *checks tardis.wikia.com sources,* The moment - the comics The Forgotten, and Don't Step on the Grass. The time lock was discussed in Stolen Earth/Journey's End. Multiple comics, EU books from the 90s, and the some of the new books, all say Gallifrey was destroyed at the end of the Time War, by the Moment. So, Rassilon and Co. are destroyed at the end of the War, but they may try to get out again, subjective time wise.

[koputusx]

Let me see *checks tardis.wikia.com sources,* The moment - the comics The Forgotten, and Don't Step on the Grass. The time lock was discussed in Stolen Earth/Journey's End. Multiple comics, EU books from the 90s, and the some of the new books, all say Gallifrey was destroyed at the end of the Time War, by the Moment. So, Rassilon and Co. are destroyed at the end of the War, but they may try to get out again, subjective time wise.

Thanks for the info! So, is there lot of stuff about time war in books and comics?

[Stark]

I think you'll find its entirely non-canon made-up bullshit. And thankfully so, because the show doesn't need any help coming up with shit ideas.

[The Imperator]

Let me see *checks tardis.wikia.com sources,* The moment - the comics The Forgotten, and Don't Step on the Grass. The time lock was discussed in Stolen Earth/Journey's End. Multiple comics, EU books from the 90s, and the some of the new books, all say Gallifrey was destroyed at the end of the Time War, by the Moment. So, Rassilon and Co. are destroyed at the end of the War, but they may try to get out again, subjective time wise.

Thanks for the info! So, is there lot of stuff about time war in books and comics?

Yep! The idea of the Time War has been around since Genesis of the Daleks (Daleks curbstomp universe in an alternate future). Some of the Virgin New Adventure novels bring up the topic of Gallifrey being destroyed in the future, completely and forever, and in the Eighth Doctor Novels, there is an alternate future where the War is in full swing, and the Doctor is dead. The real info about the Time War comes from the newer comics, and the audios, Dalek Empire I, II, III, IV, and V are good, as is Apocalypse Element.

I think you'll find its entirely non-canon made-up bullshit. And thankfully so, because the show doesn't need any help coming up with shit ideas.

Wow, what? RTD referenced several of the audios as directly leading to the Time War of the show, and many things in the show started in the books. You may not like something, but you don't have to hate on it. Also, the BBC has no canon policy, it all counts unless specifically stated to be an alternate Doctor/alternate universe.