Why Gallifrey Should Have Burnt
Guest contributor Andrew Gledhill-Carr explains.
A long time ago, I once wrote an in-depth comment on this site about how I supported the salvation of Gallifrey. It elevated our beloved Time-Lord to heights never seen, that through his intelligence he’d discover a loophole to avoid an outcome on the worst day of his existence. And it only changed the experience for viewers up to that point, never erasing the emotion felt by us all when the planet was gone for good. All thirteen Doctors saving their home world. It’s a godly moment of television. But I’ve come to believe that the price for this awesomeness was rather something the show should never have paid, and that I was completely mistaken to have believed in the first place. I’ll explain my reasons.
Consequences
For a time now (most glaring during Moffat’s tenure to me, but that is subject to opinion), lasting, powerful consequence from actions or events has either been void or quickly overwritten, and now the biggest of them all has been blow away with a wimper: The destruction of Gallifrey to end the Time War.
Consequences in a show like Doctor Who are vital. They keep the experience engaging and relatable. They bind the fiction to our own reality’s laws and understanding of them and allow us to be taken in by the crazy world we’re often presented with. Already the most important of them all, permanent, condition-free death has been undermined by the constant resurrections, bush-beating and loopholes. The force of Time itself has been relegated to a forgettable power, lurking in the background that is forever at the Doctor’s whim, laws be damned, and now the one consequence that marked the revived era of the show as something to be taken as seriously as any nail-biting thriller, or action-packed James Bond outing, is gone.
It has destroyed my trust, and I’m probably not wrong in speaking the same for many others.
Now, whenever I see a character “die”, or a world explode, or a civilization wiped out I simply roll my eyes and wonder how many episodes it’ll take for that to be overwritten with some nonsense explanation. It has made the show entirely fictional. Entirely a piece of writing on a sheet presented by actors because now, anything can happen. Some shows live off that. But Doctor Who is better off without it. Russell understood this, when he created The Time War and its events in the first place.
The Price of Heroism
It is quite ironic when the series after its rescue, tried to explore the question of whether the Doctor is a good man. Thirteen incarnations of himself just rescued 2.47 billion children from a fiery oblivion and countless many other innocents on that planet. Let alone the fact he spent nine hundred years protecting it (and a little town caught in the crossfire) from the Daleks. Of course he’s a good man! That, right there is the problem, though.
The Doctor has always been a hero. Or at least tried to be. But ever since the show returned to our screens it gave us a little doubt in the back of our minds, that this incredible, beautiful, selfless man would commit such an act of genocide. It showed us that he couldn’t always win them all. Sometimes, the only choices are bad ones, and the lesser of evils have to be weighed. That’s the most humanly relatable explored element the series has ever showcased with such poignancy. While showing that the cost of war can be the things you hold dearest, it also shows the cost of being The Doctor is making these impossible decisions from time to time.
The Potency of The Time War
Returning to my point about consequences, the Doctor having to destroy his home planet in order to end the most heinous wars ever to grace the universe, shows just awful this moment of history was. The fact the planet now gets out mostly unscathed (They are sitting fine and dandy at the end of the universe!) makes the war far weaker. It’s just another one of those scuffles. Nothing major. The Time Lords lived. The Daleks lived. The Doctor lived. The rest is history. Heck, even the time lock has gone! There is absolutely no sense of consequence to this moment anymore.
For such an incredible addition to the history and backstory of the show, it is a shame to see it so undermined. It makes the universe feel smaller and the show feel ever more like fiction, because it’s some sort of perfect utopia where everything always works out okay in the end. That’s not okay.
Mystery No More
If the Doctor had not been presented as so mysterious when he came back to us in 2005, I don’t think my young self would have been nearly as engrossed.
Who was this strange, alien man. Where did he come from? What were his people like? What was this “Time War” he keeps speaking of? Why did he destroy his own world?
Now a lot of those questions have been slowly answered over time, during both eras. But mostly, Gallifrey wasn’t there to provide answer to them. And feeling as if it would never be able to return encouraged sadness because we’d probably never get an answer to these questions first hand.
Now it’s back. Now we’ve seen it quite a few times and realized just how mundane the world really is, that mystery is gone. Hell Bent killed my interest in Gallifrey almost entirely. It presented the planet as something mundane, human and relatable and that is something I never wanted to see the Doctor’s world become. This isn’t the homeworld of a race that had such a divinity about them, and quite frankly, now the mystery is gone I couldn’t care less about that planet anymore. At the end of Listen my jaw had hit the ground. It was Gallifrey! By the end of Hell Bent, I don’t really want to see it again.
Misused Potential
Part of my excitement about the events of the 50th special, was the anticipation for what would happen next. Where would the Doctor find Gallifrey? How would he find it? What would be the state of the planet, recuperating from the Time War. Admittedly, I never for one moment believed it would be another eight-year spanning arc. I did not, however, anticipate for everything to be wrapped up fine-and-dandy after just two.
To find this war-ravaged planet living comfortably at the end of time was a huge blow to the potential the arc possessed (further demeaning consequences mentioned earlier.) It’s not in any danger. The Doctor can visit it any time he wants. Heck he’s even loved there! No fanfare. No struggle. No nothing. It’s just “there”. Now I am not shy of expressing my absolute love for The End of Time, and this only makes that story sweeter for how it deals with returning Gallifrey to currency, because in my eyes, that’s how you deal with something as monumental as we are here.
It’s because of this misused potential that I am regretting of my support of its return. At the cost of a powerful moment in the Doctor’s history, nothing is offered in return. It’s done more damage than it has good things, which is why I solely believe it should never have been saved.
We are now left with no over-arching direction. Nothing to drive the show. Nothing to mark the show. Right now, the Doctor’s universe, motivation and past feel pretty weightless. His name has been beaten to death that it’s no longer something anyone cares about. Consequences are gone and there is little to get excited over in the grand scheme of things.
So on that slightly unhappy note, I am hoping that Chibnall will do something about this problem. The show, now more than ever, needs to regenerate.