I thought that BBCA's marathon of Doctor Who season 1

It was both days. I liked Eccleston as the Doctor. How is the new guy? Is BBCA a season behind SciFi? and Torchwood, is that on both or only BBCA?

BBCA is a season behind Scifi. And Torchwood will only be on BBCA. (So far as I've heard.)

Ten is good. A bit manic at times.

I fell asleep last night during "The Parting of the Ways" and my tape therefore recorded over Megasnake in its entirety before I could get around to watching.

The Doctor, saving us from fake-looking monsters since 1963.

How is the new guy?

Aw, he's lovely. He's a very different Doctor from Nine - but then, that's always the case. I did love the fact that Eccleston brought a blue collar edge, with his Northern accent - and I do repine, a little, over the fact that Tennant isn't playing it in his own native accent (which is cute as a fucking cute thing) - but Ten is lovely. Plus, the actor's a TOTAL Who geek, unlike Eccleston or, well, most of the other actors who've played the part. Tennant grew up with the show, owns lots of paraphenalia, and is just a big Who geek, just like RDT - I was reading a thing the other day by the Eighth Doctor, one of the McGann brothers, and he mentioned that he'd acted in something with Tennant once and his initial impression was that Tennant was a bit snotty, 'cause he just stood there and didn't say anything after they'd been introduced. And it wasn't until later that the guy realised it was a case of Tennant being paralysed with Geekly Fannish Awe at being face to face with an incarnation of the Doctor.

(And on the DVD extras, the stuff where he's geeking out over having a wee action figure, and boggling over the fact that he had an action figure of the Fourth Doctor when he was wee, and now he IS the Doctor, and - oh, it's just lovely. Lovely! Bless him! One of us!)

His version of the character, though, is a bit ruder and more brittle and manic - I mean, his physicality is quite different from Eccleston's, and that has an impact. But he's a wee scone, and he's got The Best Job He Could Ever Have Hoped For. Which is just fab.

His version of the character, though, is a bit ruder and more brittle and manic - I mean, his physicality is quite different from Eccleston's, and that has an impact.

With Eccleston, the Ninth Doctor's personality was very much a departure from so much of what went before - with the massive trauma of the Time War, that made sense for the character. With Tennant, the Tenth Doctor has gotten a bit of distance from that great grief, so his character is as much informed by more traditional characteristics of the Doctor as he is by the Time War. Ten has his own unique quirks, as it should be, and yet you never know when a glimmer of - well, I saw bits of 4, 5, and 9 in there, and those are the ones I'd seen before - some previous incarnation will show through.

In which series did the Time War take place?

The time war was never shown. It was something that RTD made up.

Huh?! Well that explains why my searching through the wikipedia episode guides turned up nothing...

I believe there was a series of books (or maybe more than one) that involved Gallifrey and the Time Lords going kaboom, but presumably RTD isn't using more than the same basic concept.

I think Matt's right.

In a Wiki [link] it details some semblance of the story, but the page as a whole has spoilers for series 3 of the new Who.

The last great Time War is first alluded to in the first episode of the 2005 series, "Rose". There, the Ninth Doctor explains to his companion, Rose Tyler, that the reason behind the Nestene Consciousness' invasion of Earth was because its food planets were destroyed in "the war". Later in the episode, the Doctor states that he fought in the war, but he was unable to save the Nestenes' planet.

In the following episode, "The End of the World", set five billion years in the future, Jabe of the Forest of Cheem expresses amazement that the Doctor, a Time Lord, still exists, implying that the war had consequences up and down history. At the end of that episode, the Doctor confesses to Rose that the war had destroyed his home planet, leaving him the only surviving Time Lord.

In the third episode, "The Unquiet Dead", the Doctor encounters the ghostly Gelth, aliens from another dimension whose bodies had been destroyed by the war. The Gelth say that the war was unseen by "lower species" but devastating to the "higher" ones.

In "Dalek", the sixth episode, it is revealed that the Time Lords' adversaries in the war were the Daleks. The Doctor claims responsibility for the destruction of ten million Dalek ships but also admits that the Time Lords "burned" with them. What actually started the war was not stated, but executive producer Russell T. Davies commented in an episode of the documentary series Doctor Who Confidential that the origins of the war dated back to the 1975 serial Genesis of the Daleks, where the Time Lords send the Fourth Doctor into the past in an attempt to avert the Daleks' creation or affect their development to make them less aggressive.