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Did they reset it though? Gallifrey can't have burnt that hard, given that the Master was able to pull them out - briefly - in Tennant's final episodes. It's been a while since I've watched earlier episodes, but it was always just locked away, IIRC. So it's not so much a retcon as explaining earlier canon via timey-wimey, at least as I see it.

More generally though, flipping awesome.

 

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Seems like a reset to me.
Consider this; the daleks still exist and if Gallifrey was brought back.. Wouldn't that just put them back in square one?

 

Wow. Just wow. That was...

Wow.

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It was so good. Baker's cameo blew my fucking mind. It was so good in fact, that I forgave all the conflicting Moffaty explanations. The only plot hole from this episode that mildly bothered me was the fact that if they didn't use the moment, then how did the Time Lock come about?

 

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The daleks never went away...as for being back at square one, well, potentially. The End of Time implied if not outright said that much of the truly awful stuff happened because the Time Lord leadership went crazy and tried to wipe out reality, so maybe with different leadership it could turn out differently?

Edit for Khan:

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With the stasis painting tech, except on a grand scale, via the power of 13 TARDIS's

 

I really liked it. I had high expectations and it didn't disappoint.

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The general warning to a rabbit was the best, though.

 

Thought it was absolutely excellent. And I'm thoroughly enjoying watching folk flip out about it on Facebook. Hilarious.

 

The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot.

 

Absolutely amazing.

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I'm glad they're bringing Gallifrey back. We've seen the Doctor throughout his regens in the new series slowly come to terms with his actions in the Time War. It felt like this was an appropriate time for him to both forgive himself and acknowledge his regret over it.

 

Jesus frickin' christ, that was neatly plotted. And clever. And hit all the proper notes. Man. And the cameos, man. The cameos. And all the Gallifreyan stuff that will not be mentioned in any further detail without spoiler tags.

The budgeting was - well, must have been - fantastic. All of the CG and effects-heavy sequences were really properly well done, and that's just absolutely fantastic given everything that's been going on. The actors that they got to bring back, the shoutouts and all the minisodes and side episodes (The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot was amazing), everything. And man, I just can't help but imagine that this was what had gotten Moffat the job as showrunner, pitching his idea for the 50th to RTD and the BBC, because man.

It's all paid off, despite the crappy episodes from time to time. Kinda felt like Moffat was filling the space between his taking over the show to the Day of the Doctor, but man. This was worth it.

I think I'll post something on the implications of the episode later today. Yeah. That sounds good.

 

Huh. That was amazing. Can't fault something done so well on such a scale.

So:

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Tom Baker said something along the lines of 'revisting a few old faces'. Old favourites. Are we supposed to take that as a future regeneration could regenerate into an older Doctor. That the 12 Doctors we've lost are still in there, and can be cycled back?

Because that's a pretty interesting concept.

 

I have no problems with this episode at all.

 

That. Was. Brilliant.

 

Crackpot theory time?

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Last scene, the three doctors are in the museum, and in the background there is a hexagon pattern with circles in the hexagons. Anyone else think that means that the museum is in fact the TARDIS? With the Doctor as the curator.

 

So, a lot of what I want to respond to in terms of what's been talked about in this thread so far is covered in Sorrows' post. Her points are valid, but I'm inclined to give Moffat much more credit than she does. Because it really wasn't...

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...a reset.

The beauty of the 50th Anniversary Special's conclusion is that nothing has changed for the Whoniverse at large, while absolutely everything has changed for the Doctor himself.

If I understood the episode right - and my rewatch indicates that I did - Gallifrey has been frozen in an instant in time, taken out of its final moments under the Dalek offensive to survive as a painting, of sorts. As I understand it, the previous chronology of events as the Doctor remembered it was that...

1. A billion billion Daleks besiege Gallifrey in the final battle of the Time War, assaulting it from all sides.
2. The Doctor steals the Moment from the Omega Arsenal.
3. The Doctor activates the Moment, destroying Gallifrey and every being in its vicinity - it's implied heavily that every single Gallifreyan and Dalek was there. It's also left unclear whether the Doctor regenerated from War Doctor to Nine before using the Moment or in its aftermath.

The new information from the 50th reveals that instead...

1. A billion billion Daleks besiege Gallifrey in the final battle of the Time War, assaulting it from all sides.
2. The Doctor steals the Moment from the Omega Arsenal.
3. The Moment's Interface shows the War Doctor his future selves in order to provide him the context he needs to make his choice.
4. The Interface lets Ten, Eleven, and Clara to pass through the Time Lock on the Time War to that old shack.
5. The Thirteen Doctors intervene in the moment before Gallifrey is destroyed, preserving it outside of time and space and frozen in a single instant.
6. The Moment comes to pass. The Daleks are gone, and the Time Lords with them. At least, to the rest of the universe.
7. Ten, Eleven, Clara, and the War Doctor have tea in the gallery, Eleven finally having come to accept his wartime self as The Doctor after over four centuries.
8. The War Doctor departs, regenerating soon after from old age (or whatever else he meant by saying that he was "wearing a bit thin", since Eleven has been around for a few hundred years and he's still young and spry). He (and all the other Doctors who participated from One to Ten lose their recollection of the Day of the Doctor.
9. Nine does whatever he does afterwards. That angst-monster.
10. He eventually (given that the War Doctor indicates that 400 years would need to pass for him to be 1200 or so, about a century later) meets Rose Tyler, and so begins his recovery.

So, if you'll humor some analysis...

The Moment was known as the Galaxy Eater, presumably a super weapon of massively devastating efficacy. Given that the Time Lords were known to have possessed numerous colonies all across their galaxy at one point or another, it was probably the case that all of them were either under siege from Dalek forces or destroyed/lost during the conflict. The events of The Day of the Doctor seem to indicate that Gallifrey was the last Time Lord planet left, though the dialogue in The Last Day minisode does raise some questions. The Gallifreyan soldiers at Arcadia - which we now know was a city on Gallifrey - don't seem nearly desperate enough for Gallifrey to be the only Time Lord world left standing. Although I suppose it's possible that the siege of Gallifrey took a long enough time that the Daleks were able to wipe out every other Time Lord stronghold in the universe, before converging all of their forces at the home world for a final offense. This would be in line with what we see in The Day of the Doctor, since the only planet that the Doctor tried and did save was Gallifrey.

Whatever was actually the case, what we now know actually happened is thus:

1. The Dalek fleets surrounding Gallifrey are (almost) entirely wiped out in an omnidirectional crossfire. Presumably, the Daleks' firepower is immense.
2. The Time Lords appeared to have died out with them.
3. Gallifrey (and every being on it) is shunted into a pocket universe that even the Eleventh Doctor doesn't know the location of. For any outside observer able to see it, they would be frozen in one single moment of time - The Moment.

The Doctor knows that the only way to end the Time War was to use the Moment and destroy Gallifrey. It would have never stopped - the Time Lords, led by Rassilon, are on a rampage to destroy the Daleks and the universe along with them. The Moment is unavoidable, he concludes.

The Moment is unavoidable. The Interface confirms this - it's coming. She's coming. And it's here that Moffat pulls his usual trick of "the Thing that was supposed to happen happens - but not in the way you thought it would". The Moment does occur, but not the one we expected. The Moment - the weapon - is never used. The Moment - Gallifrey in its final instance - is preserved. Alternatively, if the Doctor actually did use the weapon after regenerating into Nine, then Gallifrey was already in the clear.

So what does all this mean for the Doctor? He now knows with absolute certainty that he is and always has been the Doctor - not a Warrior, not a genocidal fighter who sacrificed his entire civilization for the sake of the entire universe - his promise was never broken. From the viewpoint of character progression, this is quite possibly the most appropriate outcome that could ever have been imagined for this particular anniversary. It reconciles the Doctor we've come to know in New Who - regretful, haunted by his conscience and his terrible past - with the Doctor we've always known - a good man, who combats injustice in all of the cosmos no matter wher he finds himself, never cruel or cowardly, unyielding and uncompromising in the face of evil.

And that's what I love about the 50th and what Moffat's accomplished here, despite all of his other writing and all of the shit I have to complain about from his tenure as show-runner. He's irrevocably changed the future of Who, changed its past, and the Doctor's personal history (or at least, how the Doctor saw his past), without having altered the history of the show in any way at all. None of it was retconned. Everything that has happened up to this point has still happened. The past was honored in a way that was fantastically well done - and the army of fans who believe Steven Moffat to be this selfish, horrible writer only interested in his own amusement can go fuck itself, because they evidently don't even stop to consider what the actors involved themselves wanted to do. Whatever else he is, Moffat's a professional, and he's deadly serious about Doctor Who.

Because the whole point of Doctor Who is that the Doctor always - always - saves the day. Or if he can't, he tries his goddamn best to help. At his most fundamental level as a character, he's not meant to be an antihero or an angst machine or a love interest or whatever else have you. He is without a doubt the Superman of British scifi - he's the rational, scientifically minded paragon of good who helps anyone he encounters that needs helping.

So I find it ludicrously appropriate that on The Day of the Doctor, the Doctor finally manages to save himself, from himself, by being the Doctor. I dunno, man. I love that about this episode.


From a show-running perspective, this outcome is really the best thing that could have happened. The Doctor has come to terms with his past, and he now has several new objectives. The Curator tells him that he still has many things left to do - and so the Doctor, after centuries without hope for himself, has genuine cause to look forward to the future. This frees the character up to develop into new directions - after the return of the show, the Doctor has been utterly ruled by the aftermath of the Time War. Not anymore.

Russel T. Davies shocked old Who fans by introducing the idea of the Last Great Time War, and that the Doctor wiped out the Time Lords to end it. The show since then hadn't been able to move past that part of the narrative - and it kind of showed. RTD didn't really flesh out the particulars of what the Doctor did to end the Time War - and he didn't need to. That part of the mythos was still new and exciting. But past the 50th aniversary? It wouldn't have held.

Three Doctors so far have been defined by the events that ended the Time War. Nine, Ten, and Eleven are all heavily affected by what happened at the end of the War, and it's high time that things changed. The character shouldn't remain stuck in this static state - because although Doctors Nine through Eleven were all markedly different from one another, they are fundamentally the same haunted man. In a way, Moffat freed up the character and the stories that could be told about him in the future by having him come to terms with and be at peace with his past. And that's exactly what The Day of the Doctor managed to accomplish.

Now, the story can finally move forward. At least, that's what I think.

It's been implied that Time Lords could influence their regenerations given the right circumstances. The Master regenerates into a younger form after having encountered the Tenth Doctor, jealous of his youth, for instance. And besides - it's the Doctor, way into the distant future. He must have come up with something.


EDIT: I forgot to add. The Doctor was always a very important Time Lord - he was Lord President of the High Council of Time Lords for a time, and he was always said to have been a general at the frontlines during the Time War, even during RTD's era.

 

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I wrote a post last night that said pretty much the same thing as you did, but didn't actually post it. I'm glad I didn't, because you said it much better than I did. I quoted the most important part. Eight years, seven series and three Doctors have all been defined by the Time War and it's aftermath. It was way past time for that arc to end.

The beauty of Day of the Doctor is that it manages to tie up the Time War and set up the Search for Gallifrey as a story arc for the next decade of Doctor Who. In the same 85 minute episode. And it was a really good episode too.

Jesus, spoiler tags are annoying.

 

I don't understand why the eleventh doctor doesn't know where Gallifrey is now, how all the other doctors lost their memory of what they did, and how they all knew to come to Gallifrey in the first place at the same time.

Plus, how did the moment "untimelock" the end of the time war (so that #10 and #11 could get to that wooden shed where the war doctor was)?

And, why did both of the human/zygons decide to "cancel the detonation" when they didn't know if they were human or zygon? The human would proceed with the detonation, whereas the zygon would not want to proceed. Why did the zygon-viewpoint win?

Also, they seemed to just let that storyline die without even a whimper.

I think assuming that everyone in this thread has seen the special is reasonable.

 

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They chose to cancel the countdown because the human determination/rationale of saving many at the cost of the few was made incredibly fragile by the sudden knowledge that maybe you don't want to kill yourself and millions of your fellows because maybe you're the zygon. From there, survival instinct took over.

Gallifrey's location; they didn't just put it somewhere convenient, they did something on a rather large scale that hasn't been done before and wasn't an exact science. Who knows what happened after.

As to how The Moment Interface unlocked the Time War...well, timey wimey. It's the freaking Moment. Galaxy Eater. Seems to have a bit of juice behidn it.

 

Well, enough about the Day of the Doctor...it's all about the Time of the Doctor now. That being the title of the Christmas special.

 

Damn that looks awesome. Also who are those guys in the backgrou-?

Never mind.