The Black Scrolls of Sam

Moral of the TimeWar, #1 failure of TDOTD, why the WarDoctor is still the Doctor

Author's note: The original title for this chapter is "The Moral of the Time War, the biggest failure of "The Day of the Doctor," and why the War Doctor is still the Doctor." It's way better, but since the new update came out Wattpad says it's too long and won't let me save or publish it like that!!! 😡

One of the biggest complaints against TDOTD, made by myself and others, is the disregard for continuity and a huge amount of established canon. This includes the vast difference between how the show had previously described it and how TDOTD actually showed it, and of course the change in the outcome. Some of the main problems are that it's hard to invest in a universe where there are no rules and everything is subject to change on the showrunner's whim, and that the way the Time War was previously described is way more awesome and epic.

Those are valid points, but they are NOT the main problem with TDOTD. The main problem is the way it skewed morality. Ironic, since a perception of skewed morality is what prompted the change in the first place.

In the situation TDOTD presents, destroying Gallifrey is what makes the War Doctor unworthy of the name of Doctor. By changing time to find another way, he is able to reclaim the name of the Doctor.

At first, I actually loved this. I thought it was a nice feel-good story.
But as time went on and the euphoria form the celebration wore off, I realized that it was completely wrong.

Even if you take the view that destroying Gallifrey was the wrong thing to do, the message of TDOTD is completely hollow. The message should be: "Learn from your mistakes, forgive yourself, and move on, because we all make mistakes but learning from them and overcoming them makes us better."
Instead, it says: "Get a time machine and undo it, because what you did is unforgivable."

Great. Because we can all just do that. Because endlessly dwelling on something bad that happened in the past and wishing you could change it is totally the most healthy way to deal with it.
(Moffat doesn't seem to understand that the Doctor shouldn't be able to fix everything, and that even he is fallible and has limitations and mistakes he can't undo.)

Not only is that a bad message, but destroying Gallifrey was NOT the wrong thing to do. (More on that in a minute) To make it so, Moffat had to completely reframe the situation.

TDOTD presents the last day of the Time War as this:
The entire Dalek fleet has surrounded Gallifrey and is shooting at it with lasers and sending individual Daleks and fighter pods to invade the surface. Every single last Dalek in existence is present. The Daleks burn down the city of Arcadia and lay siege to the Capitol. The Time Lords have no defenses except surface-to-air laser turrets, foot soldiers, and super-powerful force fields surrounding the planet except at Arcadia. This is all that's left of the War by this point.
The implication is that the Daleks will defeat the Time Lords and go on to destroy the rest of the universe.
The reason the War Doctor plans to use the Moment is to stop the Daleks, but can't do it without sacrificing the Time Lords in the process.

However, the previous canon established the last day of the War as something like this:
The Time War is raging through all creation ( but mostly in the higher dimensions and meta-reality), fought with the worst and most powerful weapons imaginable. The use of excessive temporal warfare and weapons has twisted time and causality so much that at the heart of the War, billions die and are resurrected every second as the battles rage forever. Countless worlds and civilizations are destroyed in the crossfire.
The War has corrupted the Time Lords right to the core, making them even worse and more dangerous than the Daleks. To win the War, they plan to destroy all corporeal reality, including time itself, and ascend to become beings of pure thought.
The War Doctor uses the Moment to save the rest of reality and end the suffering of the countless innocents trapped in the War.

Now we see the problem. Moffat's Gallifrey is like the City of Enoch that ascended to heaven to be beyond the reach of the wicked world. The Gallifrey of the previous canon is more like Sodom and Gomorrah, or North Korea possessing and willing to use a weapon that can blow up the sun.

If you had to choose between launching all of the world's nuclear weapons at North Korea and blowing it to oblivion, or allowing North Korea to annihilate the rest of the world, what would you do? If you knew someone who chose the former option, could you really blame them for it? Neither possibilities are good, but since there are no others, the first is undeniably the right one. Even though you might still feel awful afterwards.

Moffat doesn't seem to understand that sometimes there are no nice options. Even though we may have to choose between bad and worse, there's always a right choice.
The War Doctor made the right choice. He did what had to be done when no one else could. Ending the Time War was not a terrible sin. Instead, it was a terrible but necessary task that required enormous courage and willpower to perform.

Why, then, do future Doctors consider the War Doctor to be unworthy of the name, especially when they do admit to what they did at the end of the Time War?

It wasn't because of that one act, but his whole life. He rejected the name of "Doctor" right from the start. He lived by the sword and wasn't afraid to make sacrifices for the greater good. Destroying the combatants of the War to save reality was only the last on a long list of similar choices.

The future Doctors know, deep down, that he did what he had to do. They just don't want such acts and behavior associated with the name of Doctor. They're setting the bar to a point that doesn't always exist. They're filled with guilt and shame, and so they distance the War Doctor from themselves as much as possible.

Unlike the Time Lords, though, the War Doctor stayed true to his reasons until the end of his life. He fought for all the same reasons and ideals as the "real" Doctors. If he could have used nonviolence, he would have. He just had a much more difficult situation.

THAT is why he is still the Doctor. He was a good man with no good options, but did the best he could anyway. He really was the Doctor more than anyone else.

But did he have moments when he went too far and really didn't deserve the name? Of course he did. But so did all the other Doctors. No one is perfect. The point is to always keep trying, even after you fail.

Eventually, the Doctor HAS to realize this. Perhaps this is what the 50th should have been about, after the encounter in the timestream forces him to face the issue. Not undoing what he did, but learning to accept the War Doctor and forgive himself. Learning what the name of "Doctor" truly means. That would have been a great moral lesson, and a worthy story to celebrate 50 years of one of the greatest Sci-Fi shows in the world.