End of Time Commentaries

[studyofrunning]

Since there's at least one person on my flist with no access to the Part 1 commentary, and since in the future I'd rather reread this post than relisten to three hours of talking, here's all the important and plot-explaining stuff from the podcast commentaries.

By the way, they (Julie Gardner and RTD) call these commentaries "episodes 17 and 18," so we can all stop asking and agree that the specials are Series 4.

• The Master bleached his hair to try and look less like the prime minister, since obviously everyone would remember Harold Saxon's face. JOHN SIMM'S HAIR IS IMPORTANT SHUT UP.
• The Doctor's death is a self-fulfilling prophecy. This one's a little complicated:
  
  • The Doctor's time and the Master's time are linked, because they're both Time Lords. The amount of time that passes for one passes for the other.
  • Between this and Waters of Mars, the Doctor went off and had off-screen adventures because he was running away from his prophesied death.
  • During that "time" (metatime, I guess), the Master was resurrected and went around being all Skeletor/Palpatine as seen. If the Doctor had come here straight from Waters of Mars, he would have arrived before the Master came back. Then he could have stopped the whole story from happening, and nobody would have done any knocking.
  • Therefore, because the Doctor was told he would die, events happened as they did and the Doctor died as a result.
  • This was supposed to be implied by the ood telling the Doctor "you should not have delayed." Also by some technobabble about time that Ten says when Wilf first boards the TARDIS, I think.
  If you find a copy of this commentary, it's about 16 minutes in, if you want to hear it in RTD's words. RTD thinks that he should have used the phrase more or had someone more important say it, but Julie thinks the inevitability and self-fulfilled prophecy thing comes across clearly, and timelines don't need explaining. I hope that's a fair summary of what they said.
• The red-nailed hand that picked up the Master's ring was never meant to be Lucy.
• The Master's flying powers and lightning are because the failed resurrection ripped the Master open, so that's his regeneration energy and his shiny Time Lord life force leaking out of him, and all his superpowers are a sign that he's dying. RTD points out that he's not saying all Time Lords die like this all the time, it's just because the Master's been "ripped open" in this instance.
  
  I mention it here because I think he's trying to explain Ten's regeneration making the TARDIS explode, as well. (He can't say it because the Part 1 commentary came out before Part 2 aired. They explicitly avoid Part 2 spoilers in another part of the Part 1 commentary.) That's just my interpretation.
• Donna's part was small in order to better shift focus onto Wilf. Julie also says it would have been "fake" to give Donna a big part in this after she's lost her memory.
• The Time Lords can smell each other because that let RTD cut out ten pages of script about the Master leaving clues at crime scenes for the Doctor to find. Apparently, RTD's been saying they can smell each other since Season 1.
• Julie, like me, thought Wilf was going to shoot the Doctor. RTD expected viewers to think "the war" was the Time War and Wilf was Rassilon. Anyway, apparently Wilf has had a feeling all his life that he didn't do enough, because he's a big fan of the military but was just barely too young to join World War II.
• The guards can see skeletor!Master if they look at the Master through their visors.
• RTD reads along: "TO...BE...CONTINUED!" and laughs an evil laugh.
• This has nothing to do with anything, but Julie says she's five months pregnant with a new Doctor Who fan. Which, just, aaaaaawwww!
• RTD was surprised that Bond!Rassilon going "the end of time itself" in Part 1 didn't make it obvious to everyone that the Time Lords are bad. I think he's saying he brought them back for the scale of it, to bring up some ultimate enemy for the Doctor to fight in his "last" battle. He also says that when the Doctor confessed to killing the Time Lords, and we all knew it must have been necessary to kill them for some reason, he thought the most interesting story was if they ended up being as bad as the daleks in the end and that's why they had to die.
• The drums were always meant to be real in some way. (The Master is "still a killer," drums or no.) Some crewmember actually said to RTD that four drum beats was like a Time Lord's hearts. That's where he got that.
• There was gonna be a thing where the two cactus aliens' names have the same sounds with slighly different emphasis. There was mention of, um, dipthongs. The ship's name was the Hesperus.
• Julie, stuck in America, will have to pirate the Season 5 trailer that they assume will air at the end of Part 2.
• They use the phrase "Star Wars dog fight" twice, and a few minutes later, RTD says "Bernard Cribbins is Luke Skywalker." Told you.
• Everyone asks who the woman was. (According to Julie, everyone guesses the Doctor's mother.) They leave it open, not implying anything about who it is. They don't mention Susan, Romana, the TARDIS, or the Doctor's wife at all. Julie decides later on that it's the Doctor's mother, but RTD is just like, "is it?"
• Originally, way before writing this, RTD had the idea of the glass rooms, but with some random extra in there instead of Wilf. The Doctor would have asked him his name, and then done the exact same thing.
• There are a couple scenes (the telepathy in Part 1, right around Wilf knocking in Part 2) where RTD originally wanted no music at all. In at least the first case, he did get them to put in less music than they were going to originally.
• Martha/Mickey is just for the pun. Her first episode was Smith & Jones, so now she's married a Smith. Her name in the credits is Martha Smith-Jones. Apparently in Torchwood they mentioned that she was married, but never named her husband. Tom was just her rebound boyfriend. (I just checked, and she does say the engagement ring is Tom's in the Sontaran episodes.)
• RTD: "Oh, it's the Star Wars Cantina! I've always wanted to do this." Told you again.
• There was a cut line that said that Donna is doing charities now, not just being a temp anymore. So while Julie thinks Donna would be terrible with money, RTD thinks she'll do good things with her lottery winnings.
• Bad news: "Geronimo" is Steven Moffat's, and so even more likely to be a catch phrase.
Apparently RTD wrote "I don't want to go" and then left a big blank and handed it over.

There are apparently pics with David Tennant and Matt Smith together on the set where the regeneration happens. Are these out yet? Are there non-spoilery links to them?