Well, yes, exactly.

I have a profound distaste for emoporn, always have. I like my heroes contained, their angst implied rather than explicit. This hit many of my buttons, in all the wrong ways.

EOT2 (I'm going to go on and on here): Well. Unlike Shir, I did not hate that. I hated part 1, so 'not-hate' was all I was looking for at this point, really. But I really rather enjoyed it.

I liked: GALLIFREY RISES! The Time Lord stuff was very cool. No, not perfect. Yes, they needed significantly more time to deal with that storyline (so give me less of the Master eating last week, already). But it was cool. My one irritation here was that the President was *not* Rassillion, as the Doctor called him, because Rassillion is dead. So unless it's a title and this fact passed me by, that was an annoying bit of discontinuity. I was also very keen on everything that Wilf and the Doctor did. He was the perfect final companion. Genius idea on someone's part, that was.

But most of all, I loved how, though it began with ridiculously superfluous supernatural Master-stuff, it all ended with one single moment of decision that was all about the Doctor. I nearly cried when it became clear just how *simple* the prophecy "He will knock four times" was. Because he realised that Character is Destiny. That he had to die not because of a prophecy, not even through a situation beyond his control, but because of who he is. The Doctor's death is not some timey-wimey-spacey thing - it's the saving of one apparently inconsequential human being. I. Fucking. Loved. That. (It seems I had the completely opposite response to Nora on this one. For me, his rant wasn't a rant at Wilf, not really. It was a rant at human beings and how he didn't want to HAVE to die for them, and a rant at himself for HAVING to anyway because that's who he is and he wouldn't have it any other way.)

I didn't love the goodbye montage quite so much as the rest of the death/regeneration stuff, because it was more RTD than Ten. But it wasn't totally out of character, either. The Doctor had been facing a death that, until just before, he had thought would be his ultimate end. He has clearly loved being Ten (cf. "I don't want to go"). He got slightly longer to regenerate than in the past, and he decided to take advantage of that. I'm not against this. Just as long as no future Doctors repeat the stunt, kthx?

New Doctor? I like him so far ("Still not ginger!" was fantastic). Yeah, it was a lot like Tennant's regeneration, but he also put his own spin on it. Beyond that, we'll see how he does. I still trust Doctor Who on casting (and Moffat on writing, as Shir points out).

I disliked the catcus people. Apparently I'm alone in this - but they were not funny, they were not clever, and I didn't see the point. Blah. And I hate that they had Martha marry Mickey. I have to go back and watch her Torchwood episodes to see if it's retcon, but I *think* she never said who she was married to. However, putting them together because they're both black is irritating as hell. I seriously hope that Torchwood makes some use of them and/or of their relationship, to make up for that one.

Regarding the mysterious woman: they played Rose's theme when she uncovered her eyes. To me this means someone very important to him, if not Rose herself. I agree with Shir that she was one of the Time Lords who opposed the decision to return to Earth after the Master and the Doctor. (Also, they did say that these two would become the Weeping Angels of Blink, right? 'Cause that was COOL!) But I think there's more to her than just another Time Lord, since they voiced the question of who she is. "I was lost" is interesting. My guess is maybe Susan (his granddaughter, who was left on Gallifrey) or another family member.

Wilf, though. What's up with the constant misdirects? "Who are you?" from the Doctor can't mean *nothing*. Unless it was just to reinforce the thing where all human beings are important and worth dying for yada yada, although that wasn't completely clear. I'd love it if (continued...)

( continues...) he came back and they closed that loophole. Not sure they'll bring Donna back now, though, so probably not.

And Shir, I have to respond to your "I'm almost furious that Tennant's exit was the scared little boy who didn't want to be alone." Because that loneliness was the second best moment of this, for me, after his moment of decision. Not only did he choose his own destiny, it was one he didn't want to meet - certainly not alone. It wasn't so much going to see all the old companions, as the scared end in the TARDIS that made that for me. Tennant's Doctor was a person in death as well as in life. I really like that. I agree that the montage was a let-down, but the moments afterwards felt much more real.

Goodbye, Ten. You rocked. You entertained angels, got a knighthood, got shot by a Dalek, met the devil, defeated the Sycorax with a satsuma, jumped out of a fireplace on horseback, managed not to crash the Titanic, became human, had a daughter, lost people, found people, had a metacrisis with an Essex girl, kissed Kylie, carried the Olympic torch, narrowly escaped the eruption of Vesuvius, and kept your voice down in the library (not necessarily in that order). What more can we ask from an incarnation of the Doctor?

Seska:

I agree that the rant wasn't at Wilf, but I hated that he had it *near* him BECAUSE WILF IS MY WOOBIE!!!

Rewatching EoT part 1: and wondering how the mystery timelord lady who appeared to Wilf got through the timelock to do so?

I have to say that I really liked Seska's point about how in the end it was a choice determined by the Doctor's character and nothing else. He could have walked away from a little person. The Time Lord Victorious would have. But he came back to his truer nature. In the end he wasn't the guy who married the Queen or made her nickname no longer apply.

The whole thing is growing on me. I'll have to watch the whole thing together this week.

Regarding EoT, I liked the bones of the story, but think the script could have used a thorough working through, with some parts expanded and other parts trimmed or revised.

As for the Doctor's speech and his decision to save Wilf, I think he that was the capstone on his post-WoM realization of just how close he had come (in Waters of Mars definitely, and even as far back as the Christmas Invasion) to becoming like the other Gallifreyans. I love the revelation that he did what he did in the Time War as much to stop his own people as to stop the Daleks. Dying to save one man--someone the Gallifreyans would have seen as expendable--was the biggest refutation he could have given to that.

My take on the Woman in White is that she was Susan. When Wilf asked who she was, I thought the way Ten looked at Donna spoke to the grandfather/granddaughter relationship. I need to re-watch the bit where Timelord!Dalton said something about the Weeping Angels. Did anyone catch what he said clearly?

I would like to have seen more of Donna and her new squeeze. From what little I saw of him, I rather liked him. I would have liked some hint that the money from the lottery ticket would have been used to fund their own adventures. I like the idea that Donna would go off and travel on her own, wthout the benefit of the TARDIS, and become through that the sort of person we saw her become on her travels with the Doctor.

The bit that made me laugh and squee was the way the Doctor and then the Master both said "Get out of the way."

I think I'm the only person on the internet who unabashedly loved EoT2. I feel a bit weird about it - because I know there were huge flaws in the episode but for some reason they didn't bother me.

I agree with Seska about the Doctor's rant. I think it's because I recently rewatched the last few series and more and more the entire show seems like a meditation on death and loss. The tenth Doctor is always going on about "new life" and he runs and runs and runs - but death just stalks him. It's like Steven Moffat's line in Forest of the Dead, "Everybody knows that everybody dies and nobody knows it like the Doctor." I know a lot of people find DT's slightly manic take on the character annoying, but to me, it's like this constant, colossal effort to avoid the decaying elephant in the room.

And I don't think it's so much his own death that bothers him as it is all death. The Master looked into the void and went insane, but the Doctor ran away. In the Waters of Mars he literally takes on the entire universe in order to defeat death. I loved this last episode and the rant and the "I don't want to go" because it got him to a place where he sort of accepted death, but not really.

The Time Lord said something to the effect of "They will cover their faces, to hide (or, "in") their shame, like the Weeping Angels of old," about the two dissenters .

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