Rawkuss wrote:It's like the Doctor has entered a chinzy Xmas card/chocolate box painting; a snow globe of frozen time. He becomes Mayor, grows old and makes toys for small children. He also brings upon them a savage war that lasts hundreds of years and which he knows will eventually end in all their deaths. And to what end? To bring back the Time Lords, which itself will restart the Time War and kill trillions more. The truth field reveals the Doctor to be a facile, selfish monster, and yet Clara decides that he is the hero of this story and saves him.
If he leaves Trenzalore the war will end. He must know that the Time Lords never returned and the war was futile, but he remains. His presence there is an implicit threat to restart the Time War. It's the bait that draws the other races down to the planet for the Doctor to kill. The Doctor is the hammer and Trenzalore is the anvil. But for what? Ego? Bloodlust? The Church of the Papal Mainframe clearly worships him, even though they must know this futile war will eventually destroy them. What the Doctor is doing is unfathomably evil.
How do you come back from that?
To be honest, I've known the Doctor manage to come back (at least in the eyes of fandom) from far worse examples of reckless endangerment, in ways I can't fathom. Maybe the collective cultish will of fandom just makes it instantly forgiven or justified, whether its 1984, 2007 or 2013.
No, it doesn't make much sense to me that he chooses to stay, when he could probably prevent the war by removing himself from the equation entirely. The only semi-plausible explanation is that seeing the aftermath of the battle in Name of the Doctor curses him to know that pre-destination demands he has to stay here and meet his fate. But even that's never made lucid, and instead it just comes across, as you say, like either war-hungry bloodlust or just teenage obstinance.
In terms of the Time War potentially kicking off again if Gallifrey returns, there isn't really the build-up to it there should be to justify that dilemma. It seems that Gallifrey would be safe to return just prior to the final five minutes of Victory of the Daleks, when Rassilon's power was broken, and the Daleks were no longer a temporal or imperial power to be reckoned with. So how did the Daleks get from that to being the almighty threat to Gallifrey again, and why couldn't the Doctor stop them? We're supposed to infer that they are now based on their appearances in Asylum and this, but that's just glimpses we're expected to build a full picture of urgency from.
I think ultimately the Doctor could've made a conscious rationale for why there was even a dilemma between staying or leaving (maybe he feared if he left, then under Orla Brady the Church would do a scorched Earth on the planet just to be sure Gallifrey couldn't return), but Moffat forgot or couldn't be bothered because 'thinking too much is for neeeerrrrrdddss!'.
It just smacks of Moffat really just wanting to wash his hands as quickly as possible of the whole Smith era and the Trenzalore mystery, and the Silence arc.
It probably only gets away with this by being unrealistically sanitized about the war that happens. Where apparently thanks to the Doctor's near-infallibility, there are very negligible casualties across several centuries for a townsfolk of luddites, and no real disruption of their innocent lives, despite being constantly bombarded by the biggest, most ruthless military power in the universe. It's basically the usual New Who approach of let's make believe the Doctor can do the idealistic and impossibly heroic.... for centuries.
As I said to Bernard recently, it's a bit more excusable and reassuring for me for the New Who Doctor to behave that way in the knowledge that he's in the kind of show where the safety net is there, and it makes sense for him to take and win those kind of impossible gambles.
I'm not someone who thinks doing it the nihilistic Saward way of showing the obvious consequences of the Doctor's stupidity was better, like we don't know already that if the hero did the stupid thing, the consequences would be stupidly disastrous.
I tend to view it that that Christmas fairy-tale naivety was of its era, same way the green preachiness of the Pertwee stories was of its era, before things got a bit more adult and harsh under Hinchcliffe. So in that light I can kind of indulge it as a last hurrah of that style, but it's very rare I find myself going back to it these days. It just begins to feel like candy floss really. Nice for a bit but not something you could enjoy for a full hour without getting bored of it.
Home
