The Time of the Doctor reaction post

[tardis_stowaway]

I am apparently Grumpy Fan in relation to Doctor Who.  While there were definitely some things I enjoyed, if you are looking for unadulterated squee you might want to scroll past.

[Spoilery reaction to ]Sadly, "The Time of the Doctor" carries on the tradition from "The End of Time" of sending off a popular Doctor with an overstuffed wreck of a final episode.  I wish

Comments

[tardis_stowaway]

I don't necessarily have a problem with the concept of the Doctor aging, but it seems like it ought to take a hell of a lot longer than he spent on Trenzalore to see that much of a change. The only thing I can think of is that doing without the TARDIS for so long was messing his body up. Or maybe the various enemies had some sort of weapon that contributed? It's stupid.

Sometimes I feel like Moffat just asks a bunch of eight year old boys what they think will be cool, writes down what they say without paying much attention to it, and puts all of that into the show.

And I was also very, very disappointed by his hand-wavey solution to the limited regenerations problem. If he's going to take that plot point for himself, he could at least spend the time on it that it deserves.

Exactly! It would have been so easy to either not count the metacrisis or not have created the War Doctor. If one of those regenerations didn't count, then the limit could have been a plot arc for Capaldi when Moffat is initially still running the show. I don't know how much notice Smith gave that he was leaving, so maybe they couldn't have dealt with the regeneration limit gradually in S7, but it was just bad storytelling to suddenly make it a thing for just one episode.'

Sometimes I work to remember that nothing Moffat does erases the existence of the better times of the show. Sometimes one just has to rewatch the good parts and ignore later reinterpretations.

[reverendjmg]

So, I remember a moment after River Song first regenerated into the River Song we know and she said, "Maybe I'll take the age down gradually over the years, just to freak people out." I guess it's possible the apparent age of a Time Lord is an expression of their mental state, something they can control with enough mental discipline, but something that might slip into old-old age if they're feeling really down and depressed. That's kind of stretching for an explanation, though. At the end of the day, the writers just wanted the Doctor to feel old so they made him up to look old. I have to admit they did a good job with it, and Matt Smith did an excellent job of ACTING old and tired. It still bugs me though.