Doctor Who: The Time War

The plot was simple, Davros had returned and regained control of the Daleks. Realising that The Doctor had foiled his plans time and again, Davros wanted to wipe him from existence. To do so, he needed an ancient Time Lord device that harnassed the temporal energy of the Time Vortex which he would use to phase Gallifrey out of all dimensions and time, so that they would never exist. It would create a self sustained paradox where the actions of the past still happened even though The Doctor wouldn't have existed to take part, while future (events after the device is used) events would never happen.

So Davros gathered an army and marched on Gallifrey...and he was utterly defeated and forced to retreat back to Skaro. The Time Lords then sent Romana to Skaro to arrest Davros.

But Davros was waiting. He infected Romana with a temporal regeneration virus, which made her cell structure break down and prevented her from regenerating to heal herself.

Another Time Lord (later knows as the Deserter) was in love with Romana and desperately tried to find a way to save her before she wasted away and died. Finding no help on Gallifrey, he went to Skaro to demand that Davros give him the cure. Davros agreed to give it to him, but only if he lead the Daleks to the temporal device. The Time Lord knew it went against everything that gallifrey stood for, that it went against temporal law and that he would be betraying his own people but he was so consumed with love and despair, he agreed to do it.

And so began the Time War. The Time Lords discovered what Davros was looking for, but in their arrogance, rather than destroying the temporal device, they divided it into pieces and hid it across space and time. What they didn't know was that they had been betrayed, and The Deserter was leading the Daleks across time to find the pieces.

After a long and brutal war, the final battle was on Arcadia , 3 billion years ago. It was a battle that decimated the Time Lords forces. Davros had found the final piece of the device and was ready to turn it on Gallifrey.

The Deserter, who thought that the Daleks wanted to conquer Gallifrey, not wipe it from existence, finally discovered the exact nature of his betrayal, and out of fear, he fled, taking his TARDIS to the centre of a black hole - a natural gateway between dimensions. Here, he would be safe from the effects of the temporal device. He tried to take Romana with him but she refused, wanting to stay and fight.

Although they hated to admit it, the Time Lords knew that The Doctor had experience dealing with The Daleks and so they reluctantly sent him to Skaro to stop their evil plan.

Davros wanted to wipe Gallifrey from existence, but the Daleks had bigger plans...they wanted to cause every world in the universe to disappear...leaving them alone, superior,the only life left in a universe that was ready to be reshaped. They turned on Davros, killing him and set the device to not only consume Gallifrey, but the entire universe.

The Doctor of course arrived to stop them, but he was too late. The Daleks had activated the device, which once started, could not shut down until its task was complete. The device was focused on an open gateway to the Time Vortex on Gallifrey (kind of like what the Master looks through to hear the drums), from which it would draw its energy.

And so the Doctor made the only choice he could...he wasn't able to stop the machine, but he could narrow its focus range...so he set it to target an area a million miles surrounding Gallifrey and a million miles surrounding Skaro. The focus point and the origin point. The Doctor then flew his Tardis to the centrepoint between the two worlds to act as a conduit and contain the effects to the specified points.

And so Gallifrey and Skaro were wiped from existence and while the Tardis remained intact, the effects of the temporal radiation bombarding it caused the Doctor to regenerate. (from McGann to Eccleston) The Time War was ended and the Doctor was alone. The Time Lords drifted into legend, a distant memory long since forgotton.

In the year 4218 AD, the Doctor (Tennant) visits a psychiatric hospital on a world on the edge of the Human Empire.

While there, he discovers an old man, chained up and beaten half to death, claiming to be a Time Lord. To the Doctor, the man seems familiar but he can't place him as a Time Lord until the man seems to die, only to suddenly be reborn in a new body as he regenerates. This, we learn, is the aforementioned Deserter.

At first the Doctor is disgusted by him for betraying his people but The Deserter says he has been travelling through space and time, searching for a way to put things right and he believes he has found a way.

Now the original idea called on The Master to be released from the Tardis because he knew of a way to reverse the effects of the temporal device.

However, given the end of last season, I revised it a bit, so that the Master isn't needed. Essentially, the Doctor has to travel to the exact place and time where his Tardis served as a centrepoint for the devices effects and use that energy to reverse it...so you get a strange Doctor Who paradox (one of many over the years) where that point in space and time serves to wipe Gallifrey from existence and at the same time, bring it back, a side effect being that Skaro is brought back too. It also allows for a moment between Tennant and McGann, and after McGann regenerates into Eccleston, he and Tennant also have a brief moment on screen together. The time line splits in two, creating a parallel universe, one in which Gallifrey is brought back and the other in which it's lost out of existence. It only lasts a few moments as the timeline with no Gallifrey collapses, leaving just a timeline where Gallifrey and Skaro are intact. The Doctor and the other "higher beings" remember everything, but the "lower beings" have no idea that gallifrey was ever gone. The sheer force of the events also causes the device to be destroyed so that in another twisted paradox, it never existed, yet the events still happened...except they didn't. Classic Who right there :P

Anyways, I've rambled on long enough...The Deserter goes to Gallifrey to face judgement and it is decided that he would be stripped of his regenerations...until we discover that he only had one left anyway after years of searching for a way to fix things.

Rather than simply remove his regeneration though, he asks that it be given to Romana so that she can regenerate and be healed from the disease that had threatened to kill her. The Time Lords warn him that this would kill him, but he doesn't care and he gives up his life to save Romana in a final act of redemption.

The story ends with the Time Lords giving him a lecture for his continued joyriding across space and time, interfering in the affairs of lesser beings. The Doctor of course, doesn't listen and asks Romana if she would like to go with him on a trip, for old times sake.

And that's essentially my Time War story...am I just too geeky? Is it crap? Should I submit it? Should I get a day job? Answers on a postcard....

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It revolves around the idea of The Doctor being half human, which was learned in the McGann movie and while some people, including RTD, choose to ignore it, it does actually explain a lot.

The story starts on Gallifrey, where the Doctor grows up with his father, a Time Lord. His father's regenerations have been taken from him for violating gallifrayan law and mating with a lesser species (human), and so the young doctor is looked down upon by his peers for being half human. Even as a child, he is pretty much an outcast. After his father dies, The Doctor leaves gallifrey and goes to Earth, looking for his mother, and some place in the universe where he truly fits in.

He finds her in a hospital, old and dying. For her, 60 years have passed since she gave birth to her son, whereas for him, it's been half that, given Gallifreys relationship with time. He stays at her bedside, during which time he meets a young nurse, who he falls in love with. After his mother passes away, The Doctor marries the nurse and they settle down and have a daughter (who is one quarter Time Lord). The Doctor feels like he has found his place in the universe though he doesn't tell his wife and daughter of his true origin as a Time Lord. His daughter has a daughter of her own (Susan if memory serves, I'm sure you'll correct me if I'm wrong) and the family have a simple, yet fulfilling life on Earth (around the late 1950s).

That is until a tragic event occurs when an enemy of the Time Lords tracks the Doctor down and, kills his entire family apart from his granddaughter. The Doctor holds his daughter in his arms, trying to get her to regenerate, since she is part Time Lord. But he never told her that so she doesn't know how to regenerate and dies in his arms (which makes The Masters death all the more poignant in the last season).

Finally, all that's left is The Doctor and his granddaughter....which leads into the very first season of Doctor Who.

I think it's the type of story you wouldn't tell until the very end of Doctor Who, in the very last season, whenever that is, since it would mean revealing The Doctor's real name. One of the ideas is that the reason his name is hidden is because it's part of a memory of deep pain within him regarding the death of his family.

It would also explain why he is so fascinated with humans, being half human himself. And it would go a long way towards explaining why he travels through time and space, and why he needs companions. He's looking to find that feeling of peace again, of having a place in the universe. He has companions to stop the loneliness, not from the Time War, but from whatever happened to him as the First Doctor before the show started.

Then again, if you hate the half human aspect, you'll hate this entire post. I'm off to sleep. I hope you'll leave your thoughts on both my Time War story and my First Doctor story, good or bad. I don't mind a bit of criticism as long as it's constructive. I'm always looking to improve.

Note to RTD - Watch this episode again, matey-boy, and then watch the Kylie Minogue Christmas one. Notice a difference? More of this sort of thing, please, and less of the other.

Classic old-school Who. Can't wait for next week!

PS - Martha's arse. Mmm...

I'm not sure what the real one could be yet. It may have something to do with the Doctor and Donna becoming much too noticed, too infamous. They were made into household gods in Pompeii and have an Ood song about them that "will be sung forever".

The Time War story however would be far cooler. Seems to tie everything up nicely. BUT would a Time Lord really just fall in love and forsake his entire race? I can't see it. And isn't it a bit too similar to Anakins turn to the darkside? Wouldn't it be more likely that the 'deserter' himself falls in love with a Thal, and uses a the watch (featured in series 3) to make himself one also. Thus allowing them to be together. That way he could not even know he was a Time Lord. However, he himself is haunted by dreams of his past life, in particular the location of a number of pieces of machinery, spread out at particular moments in time across the galaxy (a chance to use CG to place new people or objects into footage of events from classic who) and writes his own 'Journal of Impossible things', which holds the key to the location of the parts to your 'temporal device'. Davros, the evil bastard that he is takes 'deserter's lady friend and demands the journal be given to him in return for her.

This way, it is not a time lord betraying his entire race (which would seem unlikely), but merely a Thal who loves his woman trading a 'worthless' book about his dreams for the woman of his dreams. Not a difficult choice. Davros then uses the Journal as a map, and is able to reconstruct this machine. Everything else as you said, except that instead of 'realising they wanted to wipe Galifrey out completely' his watch is merely opened, returning his Time Lord memory to him, and making him aware of his betrayal.

VadakinX, what do ya think of my revisions?

like omg wheres the reaper TB its been back on for 2 weeks..

no love for dexter?

etc etc

I hope they continue to ignore that bit, or write it off with a funny line, like they did with the Master being his brother.

I was only an egg, but I remember thinking that was a really great idea. How about we have something like this again, with McGann, Ecclestone and Tennant? How cool would that be?

No one is denying that reviews can be interesting but when they become more about the reviewer than the episode you have def missed the point.

Bill Nighy, please!

As for the regeneration from Paul to CE, it appears to have happened off screen, just before he shows up in the episode Rose, since he catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror and talks about it for a moment. I've sort of assumed that the Time War ended, he got some intel about the Autons, and was mortally wounded trying to get to Earth to stop them, only having time to grab a U-boat captains outfit, McGann outfit was burned off or something, and never caught a look at himself in a mirror. I think you could have a series with Paul in it, and not even do a retro-regeneration, just call it Doctor Who and say we are giving David a few years off to relax and show the events that lead up to and include the timewar. I think the fans would be happy as hell over that.

On the Master's ring front, we know from the commentary that it was a Production Assistant who picked up the ring, so I wouldn't be holding out hope for a Master's return or Rani anytime soon. On the gold issue with the Cybermen, I think that was a flaw in the original Cybermen who were from Earth's twin planet Mondas (sp), and I never got the feeling that these update Cybermen were effected by gold. I could be wrong though.

Finally a nit of my own. I didn't mention this in my review since it's more of a general rant, but... And this just isn't in Doctor Who, but most modern Sci-Fi, the concept of controlling cars remotely, it's wicked hard, it requires cables and wires and some wild technology that would be far and above the installation of a simple ATMOS ATMOS, Tom Tom like device. Why does no one think to just shut the car off? Causing a car to turn or shift gears, by it self, is a monumental task, have we learned nothing from Herbie? Just watch some Mythbusters and you will get an idea of how much goes into the idea of remotely controlling a car. Shooting poison gas is one thing, driving you into the river is another entirely. I hated it in Doctor Who and a hundred other shows and movies that rely on it.

PS. Razorback you actually had me laugh out loud there with your comment.

Saying that though, next week's ought to be shorter since we've covered a lot of ground already about this particular story.

Am I the only one who likes the half-human aspect though? It does actually help to explain a lot about the Doctor and it does make sense if you look at the whole history of the show.

RTD can ignore it if he wants. He can choose not to mention it or whatever, but it's still canon and will be long after he has left the show.

As far as reviews go...there's a difference between a review of an episode and what is effectively a written transcript of the show, spoiling the entire episode for those who haven't seen it with the occasional comment to make it seem more like a review and less like a summary.

Seriously, in Doctor Who you could explain it away as a sort of force field/tractor beam sort of thing. It wasn't taking control of gears or pistons-- It was merely controlling the whole vehicle in a sort of telekinetic way.

Complications solved. Next problem?

As for the episode it was a bit hit and miss we've got another evil corporation with a death in the pre titles sequence. (smash the back window you fool.)
The worst soldiers ever, who when they meet an Alien call him names and then get shot in the leg.Who trianed them? Certainly not Lethbrige Stewart.
Some of the plotting is juvenile why did the sat nav have to do the opposite of whatever The Doctor said? loved the huge explosion aftwerwards mind.

Great comedy lines entertaining and well played.

I'm enjoying the way the new series has used new technology in the new series. Ear pods for the cybermen, Diet pills, now sat Nav that kills you. and reduces your carbon footprint.

Great performance from the Sontaran Commander and The Doctor just sort out the plotting so I don't have to shout at the TV anymore.

It used to be beyond the government.

And incase RTD is watching, add my name to the list of people who would definately watch a Paul McGann series called 'The 8th Doctor', or 'The Time War' (as flibble said). Blooming marvelous idea.

Ok, we'll have Tennant, Ecclestone, McGann McCoy and...oo-er, Colin Baker is about thirty stone now, isn't he?

What is he eats his other incarnations?

It was one of the worst concluding episodes ever- the Dr the house elf, shit musical number, terrible reset button, awful "you can't stop them thinking plan" and a dismal whine from Martha to finish.

Shocking- and the Toclafane were shit as well

My low point was when the Doctor became Jesus, floated across the room and Forgave the Master for slaughtering mankind. Nice!
And the 1 year later stollen fron Galactica just screamed RESET! from the start.

I just grew more and more incredulous at the lameness of it.

Awful, it represented the nadir of RTD's writing and he carried on at that level with that shit Voyage of The Damned.

Thankfully this series is so far miles ahead of those.

SONTARANS! Great fun, though it's a little stupid to make them SO small. They must have the mother of all Chihuahua complexes. Altogether now - CHI HUA HUA! CHI HUA HUA!

Episode was okay, mostly a bit meh, though it was nice to see everyone investigating alone and not all depending on the Doctor so much - very Jon Pertwee era. Though even the nieces and nephews (ages 5 to 11) were screaming at the TV come the ending "JUST SMASH THE WINDOW! SMASH IT!". Full marks for a resoundingly stupid ending. Also hoping for a really nasty end for that arrogant pissant genius boy, too. Not bad, but not great, though loving General Staal - and especially evil Martha! Clones all round, boys...

Best forget the downpour of unmitigated shite that was the three-part finale last season - it was so bad I actually preferred Eric Roberts to John Simm(even after Simm's excellent work in LIFE ON MARS!)'s Master! Yep, I hated the finale THAT FUCKING MUCH. Let's REALLY hope RTD doesn't fuck us this year - so far so good on the episode front, no real dodos. Weird...

As for TORCHWOOD - the sooner that shit gets cancelled, the better. It's just a great big fucking waste of licence money - no redeeming features whatsoever.

When I pointed out we lived in the backwaters of England in a totally majority white city he looked at me like I was a bad person.

I do not understand why people would vote for the BNP when they have little or no political ideology, beyond playing to peoples fears, he left me in a very bad mood, so much so I had to go out and buy some skunk, something I have not done in a while, just to calm down.

Now thanks to the bloody BNP I am extremely toasted and have mad munchies, yet sadly I have only one Mars bar in the house so I am forcing myself not to eat it and trying to enjoy the anticipation.

I was going to talk about Who but the BNP man shook my day up so much I wanted to vent, pretend I am Harry doing one of his scene setting reviews, just without a review.

I agree Torchwood is not great, I cannot stop comparing it, unfairly maybe so, to Firefly, when I think it only got 1 season and TW has 2 and maybe will get 3 it makes me, well it makes me feel like the BNP man did, ha I found a way to tie it all together.

I a gay man, am made to feel the same way the BNP makes me feel by Torchwood.

What the hell's that about?

We accept Gallifreyan "magic" as advanced Tek so why the issue with the Doc syncing in with the Masters mind net and taking over?

I did not mind the reset as the main players still retained memories, giving the story extra meaning, like a Secret War.

My issue with the mind net and the remote control car is that they push the idea into the incredulous. From science fiction into fantasy. I'd rather not switch my brain off while I watch the show.

My main problem with the mind net from last year is, and even Rose's transformation at the end of the first series is like most RTD plot devices it comes from nowhere and solves everything in one quick moment.

It's a Deus Ex machine ending and its poorly written and unsatisfying.

Crichton, I'm sorry but how on earth you can defend that utter abortion is beyond me. For example: "Like Martha's family and especially her mother standing up to help the Doctor fight the Master" is actually one of the more unforgivably shit things in it- RTD had been saying all year that this was Martha's big moment to shine, and the reveal has that the Dr has been planning his fucking lame mass fucking mind meld for a year and yet they've got this stupid, ill thought out plan that they've all been working on in the meantime. So the Dr has this long term plan, which has Martha talking to the poeple of the world, but in the meantime is going to break out as a decrepit old fart. And do what exactly? It was contradictory and wank.

The reason I hate it so much, might be the fact that I genuinly enjoyed the first 2 parts- and liked Simm up to that point. It's the Spiderman 3(or X3 if you want) of series finales- rushed, ill-conceived and completely anti-climactic.

And don't get me started on the musical number.

Regarding Torchwood: I agree that I over-emphasised the sex, and am probably emotionally scarred by that shitty fuckmonster episode, and the first one of the new series, and have avoided it since. I promise not to comment on it again.

The UK, a tiny country compared to many geographically, is being flooded by so many immigrants - legal and illegal - that the NHS, the welfare/benefits system, and the employment system is being seriously overstretched. My understanding is that most English people - those indigenous to this island for at least four generations or more - are pissed off (and rightly so) because our government is telling those same indigenous Englanders to get to the back of the queue regarding the NHS, housing, benefits etc, and putting the immigrants, as well as those of an ethnic minority persuasion, first. God knows why this is - who are the Government hoping to score points with by doing this? Are they INTENTIONALLY trying to cause a civil war? Why do they just hate the English so much?

The reason most Englanders give for feeling this way about immigrants and ethnic minorities is also a reasonable one: if everyone who ISN'T English-born comes over here and gets considered for state-sponsored aid BEFORE those Englanders who for several generations paid INTO this very state, then WHERE should Englanders go when they need help? Other countries? Try asking a Saudi politician why there aren't more Christian churches in Saudi Arabia, or complaining to an Afghani ruler that they aren't free to stage a wet T-shirt contest if they want to. We do NOT get the kind of consideration in countries other than the UK that we show to immigrants and people of a descendancy other than English - so, if an Englander can't rely on help from a state system that HE HELPED CREATE (and maybe his family before him etc), and he has to see this aid system stretched to breaking point by being used on people who HAVEN'T contributed to it by paying taxes etc, and know that they CANNOT just barge into another country for help because no-one else treats its indigenous people with such disdain and outright resentment as our own bastard Government - is it, then, any wonder that so many indigenous Englanders who need help and aren't getting it will go to the first political party that promises to put English descendency and lineage FOREMOST as a means to rank people for who is eligible for state aid, and promises to let those whose ancestors BUILT this country and the legal, welfare and healthcare system be first in line when THEY need help?

In short - you both sound a little Ben Elton at times about this stuff - glib, pithy, and with no real rejoinder. By all means hate the BNP - running a party based on xenophobia first is hateful in every sense - but at least have a reply ready for those who support the BNP as to WHY they are wrong, and HOW you would solve this problem. 'Cos if an Englander can't get first place regarding help, healthcare, benefits, housing etc in a country he and his ancestors have paid for in taxes and blood (WII, anyone?) then why should he be happy about the state of affairs? And then he'll go off and misguidedly vote BNP, because no other country in the world hates its own so much as Britain...

There are NO easy answers. But I think helping those who have worked and paid taxes in this country for decades BEFORE helping those who arrived last week off the Chunnel at St Pancras would be a very good start to redressing this imbalance, and would allow immigrants who have lived here for several generations already to get their fair share of the system THEY have also paid into.

Having read a lot of fan ideas on the Time War on these TBs (I hope vadakinx's fingers have cooled down after those posts!) I can safely say that whatever RTD does with the Time War - IF he does - it won't be as interesting as what's in all our heads.

Davidaball - hit the nail on the 1head when he said:

"My main problem with the mind net from last year is, and even Rose's transformation at the end of the first series is like most RTD plot devices it comes from nowhere and solves everything in one quick moment. It's a Deus Ex machine ending and its poorly written and unsatisfying."

Very well said, sir ;D

I'd make it a fuck sight harder for anyone to get council housing regardless of gender, race whatever. The NHS is so problem ridden through gross incompetence that immigration doesn't make that much of a difference there either. As for social security- have you ever claimed the dole? I have and I promise you that it is not a lot of cash. I cannot believe that anyone would actively stay on benefits that amount to £40(ish) a week when they could work. That is not a living.

It is fine to hate the BNP- but their stance is not anti-immigrant. It is anti-person of colour. There are a shit load of people in this country that escape the BNP's ire, and they are absolutely not indiginous (my wife being a prime example). Furthermore, immigrants who get granted ILR have no recourse to government aid, no vote and are given the shaft in a very real manner (I absolutely know this for a fact- my missus can't vote, and if she lost her job she would not get the dole). Blaming immigration is simply not the answer. It is also necessary to make distinctions in immigration- there is a huge difference between economic migrants, asylum-seekers, spouses, migrant workers (as defined by the EU) and just sponging bastards who want welfare.

There is much wrong with the stance that this country takes regarding Islam (the laughable attempts to set up Sharia courts in conjunction with British law), and almost all the problems that we have stopping it stem from European Law. The only way to fix the problems (mass immigration, sharia etc) would be to drop out of the EU- repeal all directives and initiatives and effectively rewrite 30 years of legislation. This is never going to happen- we aren't even going to get a referendum on that lying constitution that the bent fucks are trying to pretend is just cosmetic. There are too many people in the ruling class with too many vested interests for Britain to even think about reforming any of the various acts connected to the Union.

That's what Torchwood should be- adult, intelligent and brutal, no sex and coherent plots with actual character development. Except with aliens instead of vampires.

I think the thing about indigenous Britishers vs Settled British immigrants is getting more blurred with every generation - I had black neighbours who go back four generations, to before WWII. They have been paying tax and working in this country for decades now - the BNP would discriminate against them, again completely unfairly. But then, I think some of the main problem with indigenous Englanders being angry is the lack of obvious appreciation for indigenous English culture. A small example: a few weeks back I walked into HMV and saw a stand saying THE BEST OF BLACK MOVIES. Several things wrong with that: (1) The number of times I got tutted at or got the wary eye from black people wondering who this white boy was looking at all the Martin Lawrence movies. (2) The fact that so much American black comedy is to do with the way black people are treated as differently than white people - and then they agree to be racially segregated in shops like HMV, categorised not by genre but by their colour. (3) That stuff like BLACK MOVIES and MOBO (Music of Black Origin) would be seen as racist if done the other way around - imagine a WHITE MOVIES THAT MATTER run on Channel 4, or MOWO (Music of White Origin). I'm not counting the recent WHITE run on BBC2, as it was a thinly digsuised hit piece on white working-class England, rather than a serious attempt to understand them.

It's easy to get emotional about this issue, because our own Government can be seen to be ashamed of a culture that we indigenous white working-class Englanders are understandably very proud of. Try telling a black person in the UK they should be ashamed of being black - see which Government agency tries to charge you with being racist first. Try telling people you're proud to be white and English, and they'll be throwing montages of football hooligans, British Bulldog tattoos and skinhead '70s violence on the news within minutes. Pride for white people in the UK is effectively banned as being racist; pride for othe cultures welcomed into the UK is actively encouraged, and even subsidised by the Government (who would get paid first - me wanting a one-off St George's Day street party event, or the local Ukraine community wanting to open a Ukraine community centre?). This breeds resentment amongst the indigenous white Englanders and presto! - they mostly vote BNP, and the thick fuckers in Whitehall want to know why. Motherfuckers.

Still, I suppose it's a lot to expect national pride when England is ruled by a fucking Scotsman in the first place. Not that I hate the Scots, but ask a Scotsman how he'd feel having an Englishman run HIS parliament >:D

As for the dole - new rules state that if you have NOT signed on EVERY WEEK that you HAVEN'T been in f/t education or in work, you won't get the dole. So if you miss one week of signing on, or are unemployed for two weeks between temp roles and just don't bother claiming for those two weeks (who needs the paperwork?), you effectively now don't get dole. Which means that my tax-apying when I AM in work is meaningless if I stop signing on, even if I don't get paid to sign on.

Oh they got round the "spending too much on the dole" problem all right. By fucking over the taxpayers AGAIN.

But I agree - dropping out of the EU could only be a good thing in the long run, so long as we get a half-decent Government in >:(

You seem to feel marginalised and resentful of this- I understand and to some degree I feel the same, but what you are really upset at is the prevalance of political correctness- this is not a race issue (stupidity is universal). As much as you see morons in the papers trying to ban Christmas, the truth of the matter is that no-matter what colour you are you can celebrate Englishness- and surely tolerance is one of our defining features. I do find it hysterical that the toad in power wants National British Day or whatever nonsense he is calling it when his party has done more than any other to end the union.

As you point out yourself, we are a small fucking island, do we really need to seperate it further into tribal partitions that are basically meaningless? And I'm proud to be English, as I was raised here- although my parents are celtic.

Finally, "working class" what the does that even mean nowadays? I don't know anyone that fits into this category, as the middle class is basically made up of people that work- so when do you cease to be working class? when you have a household income of £60,000? It is a bullshit distinction- the only real difference is between the ruling class and the rest of us.

Good to see the Ultravioet love- it was only 4 episodes, but I would be happy if they bought it back in some form. Make Unit like it.

Perhaps the one thing I like most about Doctor Who, is that he see everyone as just Hu-mons (as Quark would say), and any petty squabbing over borders and land and rules is all just foolishness.

I can see why others do like RTD's work - it tends to be the more obsessive fans like myself who see this huge vista of backstory with Who and would love to see it used effectively (in the same way the new BSG took the concepts of old BSG and made them spectacular, bleak and nuanced all simultaneously!) who get all bent out of shape. Viewed as harmless, forgettable kids' TV, RTD's scripts are passable at best, but look for inconsistencies in logic (such as - how come the plugging into the matrix enabled the Doctor to return to human form? How did it make the cage melt? How did it give him the power to levitate and glow golden? How did chanting his name give him this incredible psychic boost? Where DID ALL THIS CRAP COME FROM?) and you'ree suddenly frothing at the mouth at how badly written the scripts are!

An example: if you intend to have a spanner be used by our hero to save the day, somewhere in the script we must see that spanner, or hear about it, or know that the hero already has it. The means to end the narrative must be divulged to us at some point. Not to do so creates a Deus Ex Machina - where the writer just comes up with something unbelievable that was never before referred to at all in the narrative - in this case, that chanting the Doctor's name plus him plugging himself psychically into some "matrix" (which was never referred to earlier in the episodes, unless it's the weak low-level psychic field the Master was using to hypnotise the people of Earth. So HOW does the doc wir3e into that again?) would save the Doctor and restore him to health. And HOW did this psychic recharge melt the cage, help him levitate, make him invulnerable to laser screwdriver blasts, make him glow etc? It's not explained, not set up in the script - it's inconsistent. If you can handle that - have at it, Who's your show and I'm glad you enjoy it. I have to say, Season 4 has pleasantly surprised me - even PARTNERS IN CRIME, the weakest ep so far, was watchable, fun and quite enjoyable. I'm still majorly impressed by POMPEII - very ambitious and, for the most part, well executed. It's easily the best start to a season so far.

Crichton - it really wouldn't be hard to make something better than the Who movie. I still like Roberts though - he oozes slimy malevolence - and there's definite promise with McGann. Just don't mention chases on police bikes - just uurgghhhh.

When you have a series that is so uninteresting to talk about, the default position of everyone is to debate the more flawed episodes, and as this is AICN that comes with a whole spoonful of negativity.

Regarding ultraviolet- I don't know if you would like it Crichton. Tonally it is very bleak, and heavily stylised. There were only very few episodes- but each one was tightly constructed but fitting in the overall story. It was tonally very, very different to Torchwood, furthermore, although each character did have motivations etc. they were very much outsiders (the femae doctor was excellent). It was a slick, clever updating of vampire myth and would be more than welcome back

Or maybe somebody who's already been in Who. I remember thinking at the time 'The Idiot's Lantern' episode went out that the young lad in that would make a good companion. Or what about Nancy from 'The Empty Child/Doctor Dances'? Though she's got a kid so I'm not sure that would work as well.

Now I know she was not trapped in an alternate dimension but still, she travelled with him for a whole year ahd he just let her walk away.

This new Doc is sexually passive aggressive, he meets these young women, charms the pants off them, shows them wonders so amazing he is ruining there old lives then when they naturally fall for him he clams up and goes all British on there arses, what a looser.

I wanna see him settle down and have Mrs Who brighten the Tardis interior with some nice rugs and coasters.

All this make them love him and leave them is tiring and I'm worried the show never gets to establish an identity with all the changes.

Though I suppose you could say the change is the shows identity?

I'm kidding.