Deleted
Deleted Member
Likes:
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 23, 2019 19:28:59 GMT
I feel like if it wasn’t for the supposed right issues which have prevented her making an appearance since ‘Planet of the Rani’ we would have seen her by now.
I’m just imagining the Time Lords giving her, her own laboratory on some isolated moon somewhere to run gruesome experiments and tests on Daleks they have captured.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Likes:
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 23, 2019 19:36:42 GMT
The Rani, The Master, The Meddling Monk, The Eleven, The Valeyard all recruited by Cardinal Ollistra to go on secret missions. Basically a Gallifreyan Suicide Squad!
|
|
|
Post by mrperson on Sept 23, 2019 21:11:40 GMT
They sure try, but you just can't do justice to how it has been described at times....
"You weren't there in the final days of the war. You never saw what was born. But if the time lock's broken then everything is coming through not just the Daleks, but the Skaro Degredations, the Horde of Travesties, the Nightmare Child, the Could-Have-Been King with his army of meanwhiles and never-weres, the war turning to hell. And that's what you've opened, right above the Earth. Hell is descending!"
- Ten.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Likes:
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 24, 2019 0:23:12 GMT
They sure try, but you just can't do justice to how it has been described at times.... "You weren't there in the final days of the war. You never saw what was born. But if the time lock's broken then everything is coming through not just the Daleks, but the Skaro Degredations, the Horde of Travesties, the Nightmare Child, the Could-Have-Been King with his army of meanwhiles and never-weres, the war turning to hell. And that's what you've opened, right above the Earth. Hell is descending!"- Ten. Yeah. I think it's one of the most difficult writing assignments to try in Who. Some of those passages are like trying to actualise Roy Batty's speech at the end of Blade Runner. It's essentially a cosmic horror story told from the perspective of the more personable side of horrors. You can write The Thing from the creature's perspective (someone's actually done it and it's disturbing as it sounds), but it takes a lot of Kurt Vonnegut-style lateral thinking to make situations feel genuinely alien. An invisible conflict that created cannibal planets and predatory timelines. Bad enough that the Eternals, obsessed with diversion, fled their homes in disgust. Where continuity and reset buttons are weaponised to knock the enemy off-balance. Two sides throwing themselves at one another across a battlefield in the tradition of a blockbuster Hollywood film seems incidental by comparison. Like most conflicts, it's not about the whizz-bangery of the fight, but what's going on around it. War theoretician Carl von Clausewitz's "War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means." Why choose a stand-up fight when the enemy can rewrite it so that your general died in bed the night before? Minimise their own losses and crush any opposition with nary a soldier mobilised. And if there is a need for LOTR-style battles, what kind of soldiers are being sent to the battlefield who know that and fight anyway? What does a conscientious objector look like for a war where their mind can be retroactively changed in early childhood? For ages, my running theory for the War Doctor is that he was an incarnation brought into being not to fight the war, but ensure that whatever else happened, he had a timeline to go back to when it was all over. Stop Totter's Lane, Antarctica, the Time Lord Tribunal, UNIT HQ, the Pharos Project, Androzani, San Francisco, all those crucial moments from becoming a battlefield. All a good man has to do for evil to triumph... is nothing. That was his great crime, for me personally, why he was shunned where others like the Second (with his attempted genocide in The Evil of the Daleks) or the Seventh (pick a later story) weren't. He did nothing, save patch up the breaches and help to perpetuate the War. The title of "Doctor" became too deeply ironic. *scratches nose* Another thing... For all the War Doctor is put through, why is there never any mention of the Eighth Doctor's responsibility for creating him in the first place? Deliberately, as someone who would fight the War and commit atrocities in his stead. His own Frankenstein's monster.
|
|
|
Post by tuigirl on Sept 24, 2019 6:53:44 GMT
They sure try, but you just can't do justice to how it has been described at times.... "You weren't there in the final days of the war. You never saw what was born. But if the time lock's broken then everything is coming through not just the Daleks, but the Skaro Degredations, the Horde of Travesties, the Nightmare Child, the Could-Have-Been King with his army of meanwhiles and never-weres, the war turning to hell. And that's what you've opened, right above the Earth. Hell is descending!"- Ten. Yeah. I think it's one of the most difficult writing assignments to try in Who. Some of those passages are like trying to actualise Roy Batty's speech at the end of Blade Runner. It's essentially a cosmic horror story told from the perspective of the more personable side of horrors. You can write The Thing from the creature's perspective (someone's actually done it and it's disturbing as it sounds), but it takes a lot of Kurt Vonnegut-style lateral thinking to make situations feel genuinely alien. An invisible conflict that created cannibal planets and predatory timelines. Bad enough that the Eternals, obsessed with diversion, fled their homes in disgust. Where continuity and reset buttons are weaponised to knock the enemy off-balance. Two sides throwing themselves at one another across a battlefield in the tradition of a blockbuster Hollywood film seems incidental by comparison. Like most conflicts, it's not about the whizz-bangery of the fight, but what's going on around it. War theoretician Carl von Clausewitz's "War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means." Why choose a stand-up fight when the enemy can rewrite it so that your general died in bed the night before? Minimise their own losses and crush any opposition with nary a soldier mobilised. And if there is a need for LOTR-style battles, what kind of soldiers are being sent to the battlefield who know that and fight anyway? What does a conscientious objector look like for a war where their mind can be retroactively changed in early childhood? For ages, my running theory for the War Doctor is that he was an incarnation brought into being not to fight the war, but ensure that whatever else happened, he had a timeline to go back to when it was all over. Stop Totter's Lane, Antarctica, the Time Lord Tribunal, UNIT HQ, the Pharos Project, Androzani, San Francisco, all those crucial moments from becoming a battlefield. All a good man has to do for evil to triumph... is nothing. That was his great crime, for me personally, why he was shunned where others like the Second (with his attempted genocide in The Evil of the Daleks) or the Seventh (pick a later story) weren't. He did nothing, save patch up the breaches and help to perpetuate the War. The title of "Doctor" became too deeply ironic. *scratches nose* Another thing... For all the War Doctor is put through, why is there never any mention of the Eighth Doctor's responsibility for creating him in the first place? Deliberately, as someone who would fight the War and commit atrocities in his stead. His own Frankenstein's monster.You know what I would like to see? The 8th Doctor in a coma/ fever dream seeing what he will become and going through exactly that emotional trauma of being responsible.
Of course he won't remember it in the end, but just showing Eight that he will fall.
I think that will be the lowest you would ever be able to bring the character.
I am sure McGann will be up for it, however, just imagine for a moment they would have had Hurt to do it.
|
|
|
Post by charlesuirdhein on Sept 24, 2019 7:33:21 GMT
We'll see when Dalek Empire:Time War arrives, won't we?
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Likes:
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 24, 2019 8:45:08 GMT
The Rani, interesting. I wonder if it would have been better to have boxsets featuring some of Doctor Who's rogues gallery dealing with the Time War? I really enjoyed The War Valeyard, would have been nice to have his character cameoing in all of that boxset as a much needed story arc. Now that’s a good idea. Would make a great deal of sense as well for the Time Lords to recruit or otherwise use the services of their most vile of renegades. It would further display just how far they have fallen and that depths they are willing to go to. Or even a few ‘Tales of New Earth’ esque stories where we examine the fallout the Time War has had on otherwise unsuspecting planets and civilisations. If done right, you don’t even need to include the Time Lords or the Daleks. Stories NOT involving Daleks are actually far more interesting (IMO). There are always unscrupulous people-arms makers etc willing to take advantage of these situations. Dubious medical professionals ,people just following orders,collaborators these are stories worth telling-lets see POST WAR FALLOUT-TRIALS etc I mean look at all the horrifying stories from our own World wars and they can be educational too.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Likes:
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 24, 2019 8:48:43 GMT
We'll see when Dalek Empire:Time War arrives, won't we? I will hope it’s just not THIS TIME WAR 😎
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Likes:
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 24, 2019 9:19:14 GMT
Now that’s a good idea. Would make a great deal of sense as well for the Time Lords to recruit or otherwise use the services of their most vile of renegades. It would further display just how far they have fallen and that depths they are willing to go to. Or even a few ‘Tales of New Earth’ esque stories where we examine the fallout the Time War has had on otherwise unsuspecting planets and civilisations. If done right, you don’t even need to include the Time Lords or the Daleks. Stories NOT involving Daleks are actually far more interesting (IMO). There are always unscrupulous people-arms makers etc willing to take advantage of these situations. Dubious medical professionals ,people just following orders,collaborators these are stories worth telling-lets see POST WAR FALLOUT-TRIALS etc I mean look at all the horrifying stories from our own World wars and they can be educational too. This is why I don't think we should ever have seen The Time War. RTD intended it to be a McGuffin that was so impossibly odd and full of paradoxes and contradiction that it could never be shown - we couldn't even fathom it not being Time Lords. Just having it as a cosmic version of WW2 is not what I'd like it to be and not what it was ever intended as. I don't need Dalek Nuremberg trials or Quisling collaborators to draw parallels. The best Time War stuff that BF have done has embraced the outlandish impossibilities of a war across time. Just showing suffering and events to evoke correlations from our own past seems a bit crass and a waste of a rather grand concept.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Likes:
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 24, 2019 10:17:17 GMT
Stories NOT involving Daleks are actually far more interesting (IMO). There are always unscrupulous people-arms makers etc willing to take advantage of these situations. Dubious medical professionals ,people just following orders,collaborators these are stories worth telling-lets see POST WAR FALLOUT-TRIALS etc I mean look at all the horrifying stories from our own World wars and they can be educational too. This is why I don't think we should ever have seen The Time War. RTD intended it to be a McGuffin that was so impossibly odd and full of paradoxes and contradiction that it could never be shown - we couldn't even fathom it not being Time Lords. Just having it as a cosmic version of WW2 is not what I'd like it to be and not what it was ever intended as. I don't need Dalek Nuremberg trials or Quisling collaborators to draw parallels. The best Time War stuff that BF have done has embraced the outlandish impossibilities of a war across time. Just showing suffering and events to evoke correlations from our own past seems a bit crass and a waste of a rather grand concept. Very true. For the most part BF treat the time War as just another epic sci-fi war. A mix of more, for want of a better phrase, 'timey wimey' stuff along with real repurcissions for characters would be better. My Time War trilogy The Pentamerous will rectify this. It starts in a more traditional way then head off into mind & time bending visceral chaos.
|
|
|
Post by xlozdob on Sept 24, 2019 10:21:10 GMT
The Rani, interesting. I wonder if it would have been better to have boxsets featuring some of Doctor Who's rogues gallery dealing with the Time War? I really enjoyed The War Valeyard, would have been nice to have his character cameoing in all of that boxset as a much needed story arc. I somehow have the feeling we might not have seen the end of the Time War releases with the end of the current running 4 box set series.
So therefore a "rogue gallery story line" (great idea by the way) might not be off the table. Knowing Big Finish, I am even predicting that we might get a special finale set bringing all the ranges together.
I really hope so.
|
|
|
Post by xlozdob on Sept 24, 2019 10:40:48 GMT
Yeah. I think it's one of the most difficult writing assignments to try in Who. Some of those passages are like trying to actualise Roy Batty's speech at the end of Blade Runner. It's essentially a cosmic horror story told from the perspective of the more personable side of horrors. You can write The Thing from the creature's perspective (someone's actually done it and it's disturbing as it sounds), but it takes a lot of Kurt Vonnegut-style lateral thinking to make situations feel genuinely alien. An invisible conflict that created cannibal planets and predatory timelines. Bad enough that the Eternals, obsessed with diversion, fled their homes in disgust. Where continuity and reset buttons are weaponised to knock the enemy off-balance. Two sides throwing themselves at one another across a battlefield in the tradition of a blockbuster Hollywood film seems incidental by comparison. Like most conflicts, it's not about the whizz-bangery of the fight, but what's going on around it. War theoretician Carl von Clausewitz's "War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means." Why choose a stand-up fight when the enemy can rewrite it so that your general died in bed the night before? Minimise their own losses and crush any opposition with nary a soldier mobilised. And if there is a need for LOTR-style battles, what kind of soldiers are being sent to the battlefield who know that and fight anyway? What does a conscientious objector look like for a war where their mind can be retroactively changed in early childhood? That's why I don't think they chose the writers wisely. Yes, they're experts on 8, but their writing style might not be the right one to tell these stories. Keep a couple of them and the script editor to ensure the character is done justice, but look for writers who can write that kind of cosmic horror the War was supposed to be. Of course you can have stories less reliant on those aspects, but the series should be heavy on those and, thus, they have to be well-written. As much as I hate Lawrence Miles, he did a fantastic job with the Faction Paradox. Maybe they could have brought in (they still can) some of the people who wrote those from prose and audio. For ages, my running theory for the War Doctor is that he was an incarnation brought into being not to fight the war, but ensure that whatever else happened, he had a timeline to go back to when it was all over. Stop Totter's Lane, Antarctica, the Time Lord Tribunal, UNIT HQ, the Pharos Project, Androzani, San Francisco, all those crucial moments from becoming a battlefield. All a good man has to do for evil to triumph... is nothing. That was his great crime, for me personally, why he was shunned where others like the Second (with his attempted genocide in The Evil of the Daleks) or the Seventh (pick a later story) weren't. He did nothing, save patch up the breaches and help to perpetuate the War. The title of "Doctor" became too deeply ironic. *scratches nose* Another thing... For all the War Doctor is put through, why is there never any mention of the Eighth Doctor's responsibility for creating him in the first place? Deliberately, as someone who would fight the War and commit atrocities in his stead. His own Frankenstein's monster. That is a great interpretation of the character. And to a degree we had that in the War Doctor range. But maybe a more explicit focus on that would have been what that series needed. More inner turmoil than external. More manipulation of the Doctor rather than events on Ollistra's part. I'm still for a young War Doctor series down the line that could explore all of this and fix a lot of the little mistakes that made these ranges not so great.
|
|
|
Post by xlozdob on Sept 24, 2019 10:47:54 GMT
We'll see when Dalek Empire: Time War arrives, won't we? Since it's yet another creative team behind it, I'm going to assume it'll be just one more disconnected part of this saga. I mean, sure, it's a Time War, and chronology doesn't have to make sense, but hell, it's also all supposed to be one single story, and, thus, should have an arc. Where do the players start and end up? And since they're all related in some way, they should put more effort into establishing where they are in relation to each other. And now I'm gonna shut up lol.
|
|
|
Post by shallacatop on Sept 24, 2019 11:17:53 GMT
I love those references in the RTD era about the Time War. I don't think they're the be all and end all of it, though. I do think there's scope to explore the Time War further and there's a place for these Big Finish stories and their variety. They're not all bang on, I've voiced my criticisms of the Eighth Doctor range the other day, but I wouldn't want to be without the Gallifrey, War Master and War Doctor takes on events. They haven't attempted to do their take on RTD's descriptions and they've done well to prevent it all being Dalek driven and battles against them and the Time Lords.
It's a reason I enjoy the War Doctor range so much. They're all different and valid takes on the Time War and the events that will have contributed towards it.
I do think the Time War at Big Finish should have had a couple of people overseeing it all, though. Not necessarily crossing the ranges over all the time, but joining the dots up a bit. Of course, it's a war that spans the whole of time and equally just a couple of seconds, but our main leads are Time Lords that have the ability to travel up and down time as necessary. I suppose I'm mainly pointing the finger at the Eighth Doctor series, which strikes me more as everyday Doctor Who with a Time War background, and ends up feeling more disconnected.
Another point worth keeping in mind is I think the Time War at Big Finish would be a different beast if John Hurt was still with us. I certainly don't think we'd have as much Eighth Doctor involvement if he was. I absolutely don't think the Eighth Doctor stories are rewritten War Doctor ones - they're clearly not - but I think the increase of Eight has stemmed from the lack of War, thereby creating a bigger disconnect.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Likes:
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 24, 2019 11:41:38 GMT
Stories NOT involving Daleks are actually far more interesting (IMO). There are always unscrupulous people-arms makers etc willing to take advantage of these situations. Dubious medical professionals ,people just following orders,collaborators these are stories worth telling-lets see POST WAR FALLOUT-TRIALS etc I mean look at all the horrifying stories from our own World wars and they can be educational too. This is why I don't think we should ever have seen The Time War. RTD intended it to be a McGuffin that was so impossibly odd and full of paradoxes and contradiction that it could never be shown - we couldn't even fathom it not being Time Lords. Just having it as a cosmic version of WW2 is not what I'd like it to be and not what it was ever intended as. I don't need Dalek Nuremberg trials or Quisling collaborators to draw parallels. The best Time War stuff that BF have done has embraced the outlandish impossibilities of a war across time. Just showing suffering and events to evoke correlations from our own past seems a bit crass and a waste of a rather grand concept. I wouldn’t say It would have been crass I have learned a lot from fiction. I think it was limited in what it could do and BF made an attempt to do something that I personally think that it shouldn’t have been shown or put on audio. But my general feeling is that it should have been left well alone (IMO)
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Likes:
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 24, 2019 11:53:54 GMT
Yeah. I think it's one of the most difficult writing assignments to try in Who. Some of those passages are like trying to actualise Roy Batty's speech at the end of Blade Runner. It's essentially a cosmic horror story told from the perspective of the more personable side of horrors. You can write The Thing from the creature's perspective (someone's actually done it and it's disturbing as it sounds), but it takes a lot of Kurt Vonnegut-style lateral thinking to make situations feel genuinely alien. An invisible conflict that created cannibal planets and predatory timelines. Bad enough that the Eternals, obsessed with diversion, fled their homes in disgust. Where continuity and reset buttons are weaponised to knock the enemy off-balance. Two sides throwing themselves at one another across a battlefield in the tradition of a blockbuster Hollywood film seems incidental by comparison. Like most conflicts, it's not about the whizz-bangery of the fight, but what's going on around it. War theoretician Carl von Clausewitz's "War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means." Why choose a stand-up fight when the enemy can rewrite it so that your general died in bed the night before? Minimise their own losses and crush any opposition with nary a soldier mobilised. And if there is a need for LOTR-style battles, what kind of soldiers are being sent to the battlefield who know that and fight anyway? What does a conscientious objector look like for a war where their mind can be retroactively changed in early childhood? That's why I don't think they chose the writers wisely. Yes, they're experts on 8, but their writing style might not be the right one to tell these stories. Keep a couple of them and the script editor to ensure the character is done justice, but look for writers who can write that kind of cosmic horror the War was supposed to be. Of course you can have stories less reliant on those aspects, but the series should be heavy on those and, thus, they have to be well-written. As much as I hate Lawrence Miles, he did a fantastic job with the Faction Paradox. Maybe they could have brought in (they still can) some of the people who wrote those from prose and audio. For ages, my running theory for the War Doctor is that he was an incarnation brought into being not to fight the war, but ensure that whatever else happened, he had a timeline to go back to when it was all over. Stop Totter's Lane, Antarctica, the Time Lord Tribunal, UNIT HQ, the Pharos Project, Androzani, San Francisco, all those crucial moments from becoming a battlefield. All a good man has to do for evil to triumph... is nothing. That was his great crime, for me personally, why he was shunned where others like the Second (with his attempted genocide in The Evil of the Daleks) or the Seventh (pick a later story) weren't. He did nothing, save patch up the breaches and help to perpetuate the War. The title of "Doctor" became too deeply ironic. *scratches nose* Another thing... For all the War Doctor is put through, why is there never any mention of the Eighth Doctor's responsibility for creating him in the first place? Deliberately, as someone who would fight the War and commit atrocities in his stead. His own Frankenstein's monster. That is a great interpretation of the character. And to a degree we had that in the War Doctor range. But maybe a more explicit focus on that would have been what that series needed. More inner turmoil than external. More manipulation of the Doctor rather than events on Ollistra's part. I'm still for a young War Doctor series down the line that could explore all of this and fix a lot of the little mistakes that made these ranges not so great. Well, at the top of my list would be Jim Mortimore. He's written at least one Time War story as part of the Seasons of War anthology, but he also dealt with hugely experimental ideas like Campaign, The Natural History of Fear and Eye of Heaven. Books and audios that didn't just turn their stories upside down, but inside out. In both large and small ways. I mean this was the guy who came up with the nice little idea that Frobisher's ancestors evolved into shape-shifters over generations to avoid being perishing as canaries in the praxis mines and the sweeping quantum changes to the history/histories of Blood Heat: Director's Cut. Thanks. Yeah, we might need to see a progression to get us to that point. I can't remember who suggested it, but someone came up with the nice, symmetrical idea of Arcadia's more traditional gunfight being the result of every single last weapon of the War being exhausted. A callback to the Doctor finding the laser and bullet-loaded rifles side-by-side in Genesis of the Daleks. (If anyone recalls, feel free to speak up, it's still a good theory.) There's a few ways you could go about exploring that focus. tuigirl 's pre-mortum fugue is a great suggestion. Another could be that the War Doctor has Eight as his own personal demon, a la Harvey to Crichton in Farscape (or Six to Baltar in the reboot Battlestar Galactica). There's a tonne of angles you could explore with Eight and his successor from both perspectives. It's an enormously complex issue with multiple arguments. For Eight:- From one perspective, Eight commits the ultimate sacrifice, the death of self, to create someone he believes will be able to handle the War. That can be seen as rather brave and noble.
- From another, he forces the onus of that responsibility and that decision onto another incarnation. That can be seen as rather cruel and ignoble.
For War:
- From one perspective, he doesn't get to choose who he is in this incarnation. His past self got to choose who he was.
- From another, his decision to end the War points to the fact that he had more free will as to who he was than he realised.
*scratches nose* Another thing... For all the War Doctor is put through, why is there never any mention of the Eighth Doctor's responsibility for creating him in the first place? Deliberately, as someone who would fight the War and commit atrocities in his stead. His own Frankenstein's monster. You know what I would like to see? The 8th Doctor in a coma/ fever dream seeing what he will become and going through exactly that emotional trauma of being responsible.
Of course he won't remember it in the end, but just showing Eight that he will fall.
I think that will be the lowest you would ever be able to bring the character.
I am sure McGann will be up for it, however, just imagine for a moment they would have had Hurt to do it.
Back when To the Death was considered to be the final curtain on the Eighth Doctor, I pictured his fall as being something not unlike what happens to Lawrence in the second half of Lawrence of Arabia. In the film, the character's taken before the Bey, brutalised and tossed into the street at night. Something changes in him after that incident. Something doesn't snap, per se, but wears away. I think that would be an interesting place to take the Eighth Doctor at the end. A man who isn't wild with his horror, but a small and fragile thing, so in a crisis he loses himself to it. I'm not sure whether or not you could still do that permanently, but it's definitely still there to be explored.
|
|
|
Post by whiskeybrewer on Sept 24, 2019 12:07:55 GMT
They sure try, but you just can't do justice to how it has been described at times.... "You weren't there in the final days of the war. You never saw what was born. But if the time lock's broken then everything is coming through not just the Daleks, but the Skaro Degredations, the Horde of Travesties, the Nightmare Child, the Could-Have-Been King with his army of meanwhiles and never-weres, the war turning to hell. And that's what you've opened, right above the Earth. Hell is descending!"- Ten. Bad enough that the Eternals, obsessed with diversion, fled their homes in disgust. Where continuity and reset buttons are weaponised to knock the enemy off-balance. I thought they ran away in Fear at the consequences of this Time War. I still want to see a story around the Fall of the Crucible
|
|
|
Post by whiskeybrewer on Sept 24, 2019 12:11:25 GMT
I feel like if it wasn’t for the supposed right issues which have prevented her making an appearance since ‘Planet of the Rani’ we would have seen her by now. I’m just imagining the Time Lords giving her, her own laboratory on some isolated moon somewhere to run gruesome experiments and tests on Daleks they have captured. I didnt know there were Rights issue with The Rani?
|
|
|
Post by shallacatop on Sept 24, 2019 12:12:15 GMT
I can't remember who suggested it, but someone came up with the nice, symmetrical idea of Arcadia's more traditional gunfight being the result of every single last weapon of the War being exhausted. A callback to the Doctor finding the laser and bullet-loaded rifles side-by-side in Genesis of the Daleks. (If anyone recalls, feel free to speak up, it's still a good theory.) I don't want to rubbish anyone's idea, but I would say that's fairly explicit in The Day of the Doctor. The Daleks have invaded Gallifrey at long last, destroyed their sky trenches and are on the ground. It's over. The Time Vault is empty (The Moment, aside). All the soldiers have left are their guns. Don't get me wrong, it's a brilliant idea, but it's fairly explicit in the story. I love your War Doctor theory, by the way. I've realised that's part of my interpretation too, I've just never really been able to put it into words.
|
|
|
Post by xlozdob on Sept 24, 2019 13:44:41 GMT
Thanks. Yeah, we might need to see a progression to get us to that point. I can't remember who suggested it, but someone came up with the nice, symmetrical idea of Arcadia's more traditional gunfight being the result of every single last weapon of the War being exhausted. A callback to the Doctor finding the laser and bullet-loaded rifles side-by-side in Genesis of the Daleks. (If anyone recalls, feel free to speak up, it's still a good theory.) There's a few ways you could go about exploring that focus. tuigirl 's pre-mortum fugue is a great suggestion. Another could be that the War Doctor has Eight as his own personal demon, a la Harvey to Crichton in Farscape (or Six to Baltar in the reboot Battlestar Galactica). There's a tonne of angles you could explore with Eight and his successor from both perspectives. It's an enormously complex issue with multiple arguments. For Eight:- From one perspective, Eight commits the ultimate sacrifice, the death of self, to create someone he believes will be able to handle the War. That can be seen as rather brave and noble.
- From another, he forces the onus of that responsibility and that decision onto another incarnation. That can be seen as rather cruel and ignoble.
For War:
- From one perspective, he doesn't get to choose who he is in this incarnation. His past self got to choose who he was.
- From another, his decision to end the War points to the fact that he had more free will as to who he was than he realised.
There's still time for that, and I hope after the fourth volume of 8 (War Master is already over, after all) they leave the Time War in the back burner for a bit (maybe continue Gallifrey past the 4th volume, that series could provide that much needed framework). I think, ultimately, they jumped the gun with the Eighth Doctor Time War range. They should have waited and planned it out better, wait until the rest of the ranges have done their thing and then act accordingly. It's not like we have shortage of Eight Doctor material anyways. I'm not saying what they've been putting out is not good, it's just not as good as it could have been, cause right now it feels like they rushed out a commercial substitute for the War Doctor range using their reliable writers, without much though given what sort of stories this range should tell or what they wanted to accomplish with it. Like many have said, it's generic Doctor Who, or even generic Eighth Doctor, with the Time War as a backdrop.
|
|