When Doctor Who returned in 2005 a great deal of changes were made, some were good, so not so great. And it’s of my opinion that the Time War as a whole is something that should never have been. Removing the hindsight the Day of the Doctor (which actually strengthens the concept, but I’ll get to that later) I’ll look at how RTD (Russell T Davies) envisioned it and why I feel it was a bad decision looking back on his era in retrospective.
The main reason I feel this way doesn’t so much stem from the idea that the Time Lords are now gone (although that potential being lost is a shame given we now have the budget to represent it well) , but more to do with how RTD’s Doctor reacted to it. People attempt to justify it by claiming it adds depth to the character of the Doctor, which is why it was originally done, and the main reason people use to explain it. However I feel the Doctor’s reaction to it in Series 1 was on some level justified given how fresh the situation was in his mind, although the ‘humanisation’ of the character that was a terrible move because it messed with a fundamental part of the character, the Doctor is supposed to represent the alien/ outsider from a character perspective. All of this at least regarding the time war angst can be forgiven up until Series 2, this is where I start to think to myself that the very notion that the Doctor is dragging this post-time war angst along with him series after series after series doesn’t ring true to the character in any way.
First of all it’s worth noting one fact that people often overlook, the Doctor in the classic series hated the Time-Lords, there were the odd few he liked, but that’s true of how the Doctor saw any other world. However when it came to the Time Lords, he disagreed violently to the way they ran things on a basic moral level. This is the same race that exiled him to Earth for so many years, forced a regeneration on him (The War Games - The Three Doctors), fraudulently put him on trial to cover up a corrupt plan instigated by the High Council (Trial of A Timelord). Manipulated him to doing work for them because they didn’t want to get involved, in essence exposing their own hypocrisy (The Two Doctors, Genesis of the Daleks, Colony in Space etc.).
Before the defence comes in that others didn’t see that way, there is no other on-screen interpretation of the Time Lords in the classic series that sees the Time Lords as a society in a good light at all. So how does it make sense on any level that the Doctor would carry the weight of the time war on his shoulder’s for all the years as if wiping them out was this great personal loss to him when he never liked them to begin with? The argument made in the show is that it’s how he chooses to remember them, as the Time Lords of old (The End of Time) but what Time Lords of old is he referring to? There were no Time Lords of old that the Doctor remembers as being so amazing but tragically brought to their knees. Even the early days portrayed them as corrupt and willing to stab each other in the back, such as what happened to Omega (The Three Doctors) the idea that the Doctor would see them with these rose tinted glasses for so long doesn’t make any sense because at no point on screen before that point did we see them as anything more than corrupt and self serving. This is made even worse by them returning in his RTD’s final episode and they’re still portrayed as they were in the classic series, self serving and corrupt. Again further extinguishing the very reason why the Doctor would see this as such as personal loss and tragedy.
You’ve also got to bear in mind that their were worse events in the shows history, far more devastating situations that the Doctor has faced but did he spend seasons pining for those? Nope, in Logopolis an entropy field is consuming the universe, the Doctor leads the Master to the only planet stopping it from engulfing the universe, leading to him bringing it to it’s knees, this entropy field ends up wiping out half the universe and the home planet of one of his companions. Does the Doctor spend many seasons crying over this devastating turn of events? Which is far more destructive than the time war? Nope, because the Doctor isn’t the kind of character that should dwell in the past, blood shed comes with the character of the Doctor, and having him dwell over it is defeatist and unnecessary because the Doctor’s all about moving on. So how does it makes sense that he would dwell for so long over wiping out a race of people he didn’t even like anyway?
The last point I will make regarding this is character development. Where did the time war actually take the Doctor in the end? The occasional story such as The Water’s of Mars gave us new interesting territory, but all this interesting stuff was far few and in between and forgotten about almost instantly. As far as the main arc is concerned and the Doctor’s journey throughout, almost no real character development ever happened beyond Series 1. The Doctor would just go around circles covering the exact same gambit of emotions over and over again, it just became tiresome, endless angst without direction, it could have taken the Doctor to interesting places but whenever you thought it did, it was made redundant very quickly. If it was handled better it could have developed the character but because it was handled so poorly, there was no progression. This why I don’t understand the people that claim it somehow made the Doctor deeper and more interesting, because in hindsight it really didn’t.
The Moffat era for all of it’s faults in episodes such as A Good Man Goes to War shows that depth could be achieved in the character without it, without the time war, the journey Smith’s Doctor goes through rings true regardless because it’s a summation of the Doctor’s blood shed, an element that isn’t really portrayed as being something the Doctor dwells over but more a victory badge he uses to scare his enemies. This results in an exploration of the negative impact of that, this entire arc proves you have development and introspection without the time war. So why was it necessary again?
Now I will address Day of the Doctor (DotD), I feel DotD succeeds in doing something that RTD’s original time war concept didn’t, it shows us why the Doctor actually saw the time war the way he did and actually fixes it, the problem with RTD’s environment was that no emphasis was ever put on the innocents of the war, the casualties it created, which makes the Doctor’s angst a little more understandable. If he’s mourning the loss of the innocents caught in the cross fire then I understand it. But this was never the impression that RTD ever really gave in his writing.
This is also why I feel the decision to undo the time war in DotD was completely justified. Because it doesn’t just get rid of the lack of potential it creates, it gets rid of relentlessness, dead end angst that plagued the character in that era and allows the Doctor to move on and progress and more importantly actually grow and develop as a character rather than go around the merry-go-round of emotions that the character seemed to go around in the RTD era.
This is why I feel the time war is a mistake and why I feel removing it is the best thing the show could have ever done at this stage.
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