knowledgeable (geeky)

TV Because I know you love me talking about Doctor Who all of the sodding time, I thought I'd post this fabulously knowledgeable (geeky) lightly coherent comment I've just written to appear under MaryAnn's latest legacy review:

The End of the World is where the series really began and I can still remember my reaction to that speech. Gut-wrenching. The Doctor in the old series simply didn't talk like that and though there had been similar since in the spin-off media, this was the first time we'd heard him really talk about his feelings in such a bald way on screen (with the odd exception during the Hartnell era).

But it's the content too, the hints of what may have happened between the last time we saw him and now whether you believe that to be the end of the novels, comic books, audio series or TV Movie and whether you even believe it was the Eighth Doctor who was in the time war. It's not something which has ever been established on screen, just a general assumption that he must have regenerated as a result of something that happened during the time war, the destruction of Gallifrey presumably.

Author Lance Parkin's suggestion is that it's the same event from the novels seen from different points of view something he elaborated on in his recent Tenth Doctor novel The Eyeless which features a moment in which the timelord reflects back on the time war and the description of his home planet being snuffed out replicates what's said in The Ancestor Cell. The Eyeless is replete with these subliminal reference to the EDAs, for example the origin of the weapon.

Personally I'd rather not know what happened during the Time War because nothing which happens on screen could be exciting as the version going on in our heads. I remember with affection the years in which I could only dream about the content of The Clone Wars and the crushing disappointment when I found out the clones where all just Boba Fett's dad over and over and over again.

If we were to see Eighth again I'd much rather in a multiple Doctor story and from early within his own timeline, way before the time war with the post-Gallifreyan destruction Doctor unable to tell him about his future, demonstrate once again that he has the web of time in his hands and demonstrating to whoever his companion is the gravity of trying to change time -- look I can't even use it to save my own planet. Though depending on who you talk to, the Doctor's subliminally aware of both his past and future but the convenient victim (for the purposes of drama) of a deep case of selective memory.

Hands up anyone else who understood that...