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.

Thanks guys. I'd been assuming that RTD (in Daniel's references above) was merely calling back to existing canon. I'd no idea he'd made it all up.

Thanks guys. I'd been assuming that RTD (in Daniel's references above) was merely calling back to existing canon. I'd no idea he'd made it all up.

Same here. Very illuminating!

If you look at the progression from "Genesis of the Daleks" in 1975, all the way to "Remembrance of the Daleks" in 1988, the Time War is a logical extension of all that.

The specifics of which only exist in RTD's mind, though.

If you look at the progression from "Genesis of the Daleks" in 1975, all the way to "Remembrance of the Daleks" in 1988, the Time War is a logical extension of all that.

Are there other series in between those two that you'd consider a part of that progression, or would watching those two cover it?