New Doctor Who

See spoiler, which talks about both season 2 and season 3.

Season 2 spoiler
#1, his self-preservation instinct didn't go out the window. Just because he loved Rose didn't mean that he would willingly accept his own death. Rose was going to die. I doubt that there is anything like an atmosphere in the Void, so Rose was going to die. In Who Confidential, RTD (I think it was him) described her scream as her death cry.

#2, had the Doctor jumped into the Void, he would have had no way to get out. Once the Void had closed up so that there was no danger of his own death, I believe he would have immediately gone into the Void in his TARDIS to rescue her. Here's a timeline of the rescue of Rose. Let's say that the Void is opened at 1pm local time.

1:30:00 Rose loses her grip and starts falling.
1:30:01 Because of the way the 2 universes were so close to collapse, Pete actually hears Rose scream and jumps across the Void.
1:30:02 Pete arrives in time to catch her.
1:30:03 Pete and Rose jump back across the Void.
1:45:00 The Void closes.

First, note that I have come up with what I think is a plausible explanation behind why Pete showed up at the exact right time to catch Rose.

Now, let's assume that Rose got sucked into the Void. I think the timeline of rescue changes.

1:30:00 Rose loses her grip and starts falling.
1:30:03 She is sucked into the Void.
1:30:06 Rose dies.
1:45:00 The Void closes.
1:45:01 The Doctor makes a mad dash for the TARDIS.
1:30:03 While the Void is open, the Doctor materializes just at the point where she would get sucked in, catches her and immediately dematerializes. He doesn't materialize before she gets into the Void, because that would risk the return of the Reapers. It still sort of breaks a Time Law, but I think he would have done it for her.

Now, I have question about Blink.

"People think of time as a sort of straight line, but when you look at it from a non-linear, non-subjective point of view, it's more of a great big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff."

In the conversation he had with Sally on the DVD Easter Egg, he read from a transcript in 1969. The conversation was transcribed in 2007, based on what he said in 1969. He didn't get the transcript until 2008. When was the origination point of this conversation?

Blink is brilliant in at least 2 ways. #1, it's brilliant as a stand-alone story. #2, if you buy the premise, then you have to buy into the idea of the Master being reborn in 2007 + 100 trillion years, yet coming back and affecting events on Earth before he was actually reborn. It all has to do with the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.

Remember when Sally saw the Doctor and Martha walk by the record shop at the end of Blink? What would be truly fantastic is, when Martha comes back in season 4, we see that meeting take place in whatever story is going at the time.
end spoiler

I have the Edge of Destruction, but not the others. I've seen most of An Unearthly Child and nothing of The Daleks.

 

Ok, where is everybody?

Any American viewers currently watching S3 on Scifi? The Lazarus Experiment was on last Friday. What are your thoughts on it? What are your thoughts on anything we've seen so far? Anybody else besides me watching old Doctor Who shows? I've been kind of skipping around with various episodes here and there from 4's tenure.

In Doctor Who Confidential, RTD said that he's always had sort of a rough plan for the series, bringing back the Daleks, the Cybermen and other iconic figures. He further said that the rough plan isn't over. When you think of "Classic" Who, who are the iconic figures? Here are the 3 I thought of instantly.

Daleks
Cybermen
The Master

Here are some others.
Davros - introduced in the fantastic Genesis of the Daleks and has been in 4 additional stories since (Destiny, Resurrection, Revelation and and Remembrance of).

Sontarans - We saw them in 2 or 3 of 3's stories (Time Warrior for one) and in 3 of 4's stories (The Sontaran Experiment, Horror of Fang Rock and Invasion of Time).

The Zygons are reported to be one of DT's favorite monsters and I could see them making a return. If the Autons can come back, why not the Zygons?

Omega - He was the "Big Bad" in The Three Doctors and Arc of Infinity. Definitely a worthy adversary.

Romana - Not a villain of course, but I'm a member of the Doctor Who forum on scifi.com and she was/is a huge fan favorite.

If you're a lurking American Whovian, you absolutely do not want to miss Human Nature/Family of Blood. These should air on Scifi on the 24th and 31st, respectively. Fantastic story. Every part of it is so well done. It's DT's finest performance on the show to date.

 

Just to catch up on a question that we had around here. From what I've been told on the scifi forum, CE only signed on to do one year of DW. RTD tried to get him to stay longer, but no deal.

Tom's first season was definitely a good one, mostly because of the fantastic Genesis of the Daleks. If Revenge of the Cybermen had been a better story, that season would be completely untouchable. Arguably, of course. :smilewinkgrin:

[visiting Pete's Spoiler City (where the prices are crazy! .. ahem... sorry )]
A bit outdated on the pass joke, but a solid effort nonetheless.

I'm calling you out on your John Simm bit. After Family of Blood, you said, "After HN/FoB he passed 3 and has 4 in sight, but 1 will be another story." Oh how quickly we forget how good DT was in HN/FoB. :smilewinkgrin:

Not only is it not a misunderstanding, if you go back to Gridlock, you'll hear the Face say "Doctor" exactly the same way as Jack does. Sorry, Pete. I know you don't like Jack much.

And, I'm not going to say never, but I can't foresee Donna rising to the level of Rose, Sarah Jane or Martha.
[leaving Pete's Spoiler City]

I haven't seen Unearthly Child in a long time and haven't seen The Daleks at all. Edge of Destruction is good.

They sort of did with the Age of Steel Cybermen. The Borg certainly wouldn't have the technological advancement over the Doctor like they did the Enterprise, but the assimilations, removal of individuality, etc. are definitely Cybermen concepts.

 

Definitely. He's hit on men, women, robots and, as seen in Utopia, insects.

 

That was brilliant. :laugh:

 

I don't want to wait until Last of the Time Lords finishes up in the U.S. to ask this question.

[entering spoiler city]
We first saw a reference to Mr. Saxon in Love&Monsters. Victor was reading a newspaper and we saw a piece that said that Saxon was leading the polls at 64%. Which, btw, I think it was very cool that RTD had something planned out that far in advance. Not that the plan started with Love&Monsters, because it actually started with Christmas Invasion.

Anyway, my question is, where was the Master during the Battle of Canary Wharf? If the Daleks had taken control (and they would have been the ones, because they would have exterminated the Cybermen), wouldn't that have brought the Master's plans crashing down around him? Wouldn't he have wanted to prevent that from happening? Or, did the Battle of Canary Wharf happen while he was taking Lucy 100 trillion years into the future?

Had he been around, would it have been possible to see the Doctor and Master working together to defeat the Daleks? Imagine that possibility. And, as I said after Family of Blood, think how powerful the Daleks had become to take on the Time Lords.
[leaving spoiler city]

 

[spoilers, even though the only people posting here are those who've seen everything ]
It's not like the Master went to the end of the universe before fighting in the war, though. He was concerned with saving his own neck, likely because he knew the Daleks would hunt down every Time Lord in existence.

Regardless, I think that he would have done nothing in the 2 months prior to Army of Ghosts. He probably knew exactly what was going on, but would have had to pretend that he didn't. On the day that Army of Ghosts/Doomsday takes place, he let the Doctor take care of the Cybermen and Daleks instead of doing it himself. You could argue that the Doctor pre-empted the Master's rise to power by sending the Cybermen and Daleks back to the Void.

I think sending them back to the Void took a couple of hours. I think it was said in Confidential that the ones that were in London were sucked back through the Torchwood Institute, while the ones that were in India and all over the world were sucked back through right where they were.

I was under the impression that the CoS went into the Void as a pre-cursor to the War. They knew it was going to happen, so they went into the Void to preserve the Dalek race just in case the Time Lords won the war. The Time Lords undoubtedly had a few victories of their own early on and probably imprisoned those Daleks in the Void as a result of an early victory.

The taking over the Cruciform was definitely the tipping point. Until then, the fate of the universes was unknown. Once the Daleks had control, the war was over. They had won. There's a mathematical definition to the Cruciform that I think explains, roughly, what it is/was. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Cruciform.html.

Consider that 9 said, "The War between the Time Lords and the Daleks, with all creation at stake." Think of the point where the lines intersect in a cross and imagine if the intersection of the lines is the point where all universes intersect. Perhaps the Cruciform was the one singular object that the Daleks wanted. By having control of it, they could travel to any universe they wanted to and conquer it. The Doctor couldn't allow that to happen, so he did the only thing he could do, wipe them out.

Although the stakes were high in Parting of the Ways, other universes (all of creation) weren't at stake, so he wasn't as willing to wipe out the Daleks as he was at the end of the war.

I had thought at one time that, if they wanted to jump the shark and make a Doctor Who movie, the events of the Time War would be the perfect story for said movie. However, I've come to the realization that I don't want to see it. It would be the saddest thing ever, I think. The ending of a movie like that would be the antithesis of everything Doctor Who stands for.
[end spoiler]

Changing gears, I said a couple of weeks back that I learned that CE was only signed on for 1 season. Considering the way that season played out, and the Doctor's search for redemption, having him literally become a new man was the absolute best way for that season to end.

 

Oh yeah, that's one of my favorites. Sutekh is one of the great villains in Doctor Who. He never even moves a muscle until the last half of episode 4 and he's more sinister and evil than the majority of Who villains.

 

After Last of the Time Lords is shown over here, I won't be using spoiler tags until Christmas, when Voyage of the Damned is shown. Now, onto Sutekh.

It's an interesting question, and one I hadn't thought of. My guess is that the tunnel significantly reduced his power. Since the sound waves from his voice could reach the end of the tunnel, certainly his mental power could as well, but it was nowhere near powerful enough by that point to affect the Doctor. When the Doctor faced him on Mars, there was nothing to impede Sutekh's power. The Doctor faced Sutekh straight up and from no further away than 2 or 3 feet.