Doctor Who Series 7 (2012-13)

[Doogie2K]

That's the one thing that has me confused. The Doctor's owned up to his Time War crimes. Unless he's accepting them as The Man Who Usually Goes By The Alias The Doctor but denying that the regeneration that did them was The Doctor, because that's not who The Doctor is. Which is confusing as shit and seems like a weird kind of psychological trick. But I guess it would add a bit more context to Nine's death wish beyond survivor's guilt. I dunno.

[Tel Prydain]

The "accepting them as The Man Who Usually Goes By The Alias The Doctor but denying that the regeneration that did them was The Doctor, because that's not who The Doctor is" thing works for me - I really like that as an idea. But I'm also interested to see if that's all it is - there could well be more to it.

I mean, we are just all assuming that the 'sin' was part of the time war. It could be something else he did (or failed to do).

[Xerxes]

The Valeyard sounds sexier than skipped regeneration.

[Squidbot]

Moffat is really doing his best to make me hate Dr Who.
All the classic Doctors? Saved by some cockney tart. Totally ineffectual as the Doctor without her.

[Shieldmaiden]

I thought the point was that she was counteracting the Great Intelligence trying to destroy him. I don't think it implies he would have been useless without her.

[Inverarity]

I think that's a pretty harsh reading. What Clara was doing- what was explicitly shown in the episode- was displacing the Great Intelligence and undoing the damage it did to the Doctor's time stream.

Take any episode of the classic series: it happened just as was originally shown, with no intervention from (a) Clara. Much later in the Doctor's life, the Great Intelligence steps into his time stream and starting messing with critical moments. In the Doctor's present, the universe starts showing the effects of this*, prompting Clara to follow the GI into the time stream and prevent or undo the GI's manipulations.

End result: things happen as they had previously, but with (a) Clara somewhere in the vicinity, usually never even having met the Doctor in any memorable way. She's not saving the Doctor because the Doctor isn't/wasn't competent to do something on his own; she's saving the Doctor by keeping the Great Intelligence from retroactively screwing things up. Perhaps all this requires most of the time is a strong genetic compulsion on the part of any Clara to punch anyone who looks like Richard E. Grant.

Time working in this way - things don't happen until they happen, if you like - is why the multi-Doctor adventures can work at all. The Five Doctors wouldn't make any sense if the Fifth Doctor could remember all of the things that had happened to his other incarnations in Rassilon's tower before the adventure had even started. It's only once things have happened in his present that they can be remembered as having happened in his past.

* Since the stars were going out, presumably one of the things that the Great Intelligence did was keep the Doctor from arresting the entropic collapse of the universe in Logopolis. During the interval between when the GI jumped into the time stream and when Clara followed, the CVE that stablized the universe ceased to exist and the star sytems that would have collapsed (as, say, Traken did) reverted back to that state.

(ETA: ...and Shieldmaiden gets to the right answer before I do. Well done.)

[Inverarity]

Oh, and regarding the John Hurt Doctor- I know that the current speculation is that he's a 'disowned' regeneration in between the Eighth and Ninth that we know, made plausible by the lack of a regeneration scene from one to the next.

He might be older than that, though. We never saw the Second Doctor turn into the Third, after all. And it's accepted in many quarters that the Second Doctor did a lot of work for the Time Lords after the events of The War Games (the "Season 6B" theory). That gap shouldn't be off limits for speculation either...

[Squidbot]

Clara was "born to save the doctor" and has "always been there".
Unless she turns out to be a female regeneration of the Doctor I will be very disappointed.
Moffat is just continuing to annoy the hell out of me, and many other Who fans. I don't give a fuck about his real name, if it is ever revealed most of the mystery and charm of the character will be gone.
And stop bringing people back to life. What's the point of killing them? And please, please fuck OFF River!

[Inverarity]

Sounds like you need a break from the show, Squid. Not every era is to everyone's taste. I can't bear the Pertwee/Letts years for the most part...but then there was Tom Baker and Philip Hinchcliffe.

Did you really believe they were going to reveal the Doctor's name, though? I don't think there was ever a chance of that. There's no point whatsoever to knowing his actual name. But you can get a lot of mileage, thematically, by talking about names, their power, and their meanings (see The Sound of Drums for Davies visiting the same subject a little bit).