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I saw this episode and while I like the subtext he brings up about choosing to sacrifice yourself for others and the specialness of simple lives at the end of the day as an hour of TV it was just... wha? I mean fixing a paradox by having space dragon bats eat every living person on earth? How does that fix it? Then the Tardis disappearing but not the doctor. In other words the subtext was gold, the actual text was shit.

Felt to me like they were looking for a way to make the idea a bit more "monsteriffic". They've got a good basic premise here - having the Tardis often raises questions of why the Doctor doesn't just solve every problem by nipping back in time half an hour whenever something bad happens and fixing it. They even play with that very idea on occasion, but mostly they just use the Tardis as a way to deposit him into the story and then leave once it's done.

There have been several attempts to get around this over the years, mostly by making the Tardis or the Doctor's control of it unreliable. They've toned that down a lot nowadays and emphasise the idea that "some things just cannot be trifled with" and "you can't meddle directly with your own past self" instead. This one is largely about showing why you can't do that.

My guess is that they had this idea and figured it made for an episode full of rather dry, talky, heavyweight issues with nothing for the kids. "Oh... well put some 'time monsters' in that are released by the damage," somebody says.

I'm usually one of the first to condemn a piece of writing for having something either extraneous or blatantly a mechanism of writer's fiat - but funnily enough, I didn't really have a problem with the jabberwocks in this one. I think a big part of the appeal of DW has always been putting an actual (alien) face to the traditions of our mythos, and in this case I think that the time wyverns were merely an embodiment of the point of the ep. In part, that was necessary for the nature of the show as a TV show; in part, to show in a tangible way that doing Bad Things^TM can cause a manifestation for which even the vaunted Doctor shows a healthy amount of respect or even fear. That last point wouldn't have quite the same impact in a one-hour episode that showing a deep discussion and the Doctor's moral outrage would have had.

Also, it's just a further example that Rose = "git." Isn't that the word you guys use over there?

You can't entirely excuse the Doctor either. By this time he should be well aware of her git-ishness and that taking her back there is a bad idea and doing it a second time is even worse.

Tyyr wrote:You can't entirely excuse the Doctor either. By this time he should be well aware of her git-ishness and that taking her back there is a bad idea and doing it a second time is even worse.

That's true. I can't imagine why he'd think an airhead would behave as anything other than an airhead, especially when placed in a situation which calls for thoughtfulness and circumspect behavior.

Yeah, the Doc should've just said "No!" and be done with it. Big mistake on his part, there.