Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special

[Hydra009]

<<SPOILERIFFIC.  If you haven't seen the movie, stop reading right now, go watch it, and come back>>

Okay, so I just saw this and want to talk about it with the few of you Whovians out there.  I know you're there.

Didn't much care for yet another invasion of Earth (at this rate, we're like the galactic equivalent of France) but watching 10 and 11 together was a real treat.  They should seriously have a season together or something.  Loved it on the whole, but I was a little bit irked by its portrayal of the Time War and baffled by the predictable but massively continuity-altering ending.

Bear in mind that I've only ever seen the new series, so I'm not very knowledgeable about Time Lord technology, but I expected something very different for the Time War.  These are the two most powerful races in the universe.  And the war between them was nothing short of epic.  In particular, this is how I pictured Gallifrey (pictured!  Get it?   :P).  The Gallifreyans are nothing short of insanely powerful and they threw everything they had into the war effort.  They created...horrors.  Imagine my surprise at seeing a conventional war complete with Imperial Guardsmen and pew-pew-pew lasers.   #-o  Give me a battle with some unique Time Lord tech, not some GI Joe battle.  Something, anything!  Sure, it's near the end of the war and they had already exhausted their superweapons, but still!  It didn't help that the Doctor just casually runs over a couple Daleks, either.

And then there's the ending.  The Doctor doesn't actually destroy Gallifrey, he saves it from destruction.  Ignoring the fixed point and don't cross your own timeline issues, this act, this black day, has a huge impact on the Doctor's character.  Sure, he's the savior of humanity and a genuinely kind guy.  But he also has the fury of a time lord.  He's the oncoming storm.  He's the madman with a box.  He's still a hero, and an amazing one at that, but he's not without a dark side.  And throughout the show, you see him slowly come to grips with the Time War (9 is very angry at himself, 10 really pushes himself to be the best damn hero he can be in part because of his deep regret/guilt, and 11...apparently he just plain forgot).

I guess what I'm saying is that undoing the Time War is like undoing the destruction of Krypton or the deaths of Bruce Wayne's parents.  They have such an impact on the title character that you just can't change it.  If there is a lesson to be learned from the Time War, it's that some problems don't have easy solutions.  Sometimes you have to make hard choices and you have to live with the results.  It's a very important lesson to learn.  But apparently, that's all wrong.   ](*,)

And the really screwed up thing about this is that the time lords are very much a threat to the galaxy.  They're the sort of people that get the good Doctor to pick up a gun.  Oh, and now every time 9 and 10 angst about the time war and have real emotional moments about it, they're completely mistaken.  Lovely.

So, I'm sort of irritated by this continuity change.  Anyone else or is it just me?