As the sole person out there following this sorry excuse for a blog might have noticed, I filled out my "Doctor Who goes on hiatus" time by watching every single frakking episode of Battlestar Galactica, and, as I hinted at here, I do feel that Galactica is the better show (for one thing, even the "bad" Galactica episodes like "Black Market" and "The Woman King" didn't even approach the special level of awful dreck that was "The Rebel Flesh" or "Fear Her," and though "Daybreak, Part 1" was a fairly massive tease, at least it was more engaging than "A Good Man Goes to War").
So, having spent the last several weeks exposing myself to a miniseries, seventy-three episodes and two films of general awesomeness, am I really looking forward to the return of Doctor Who?
Well, yes. Despite the fact that as far as I can tell, our first episode back, the preposterously-titled "Let's Kill Hitler," is probably going to be Moffat carrying out some sort of revenge fantasy, I still want to know what the hell was really going on with that astronaut on the beach at the beginning of the season. (And on the subject of comparing BSG to Who, someone please tell me that the Moff has a Plan, because he can't exactly drop that event the same way Apollo suddenly dropped all that weight in Season 3.)
See, Joss Whedon (and to a lesser extent, Russell T Davies) wrote backwards; they figured out where they wanted to be at the end of the season and then worked out how to get there. (I can say this with some certainty because I believe Joss when he says that plans to kill of certain characters had been in the works for years, although I also suspect certain revelations near the end of "Dollhouse" might have been the complete opposite of planned out in advance.) Ron Moore and company famously/notoriously (delete according to preference) wrote forward, giving themselves plenty of plot elements to use in the future, but also plenty of rope to hang themselves with. I'm not entirely sure where Moffat falls on that spectrum, but I hope it's towards the Whedon/Davies end. When Moore came up with the Final Five, and their identities, he had to scramble like a madman to tie up loose ends (Number Seven, the fact that Cylons age, "Hot Dog is the father," etc). Now it worked, so I'll give him credit for that, but even so, the Hot Dog thing was way out of left field. But that's nothing compared to straight-up murdering your protagonist at the beginning of the season like Moffat did. And before you make the obvious comparison to a certain BSG event in Season 3, Doctor Who is pretty athiestic, so it's not like the Doctor's going to waltz back in with a brand-new TARDIS that can magically point the way to Earth, and "God did it" won't be an acceptable answer... Besides, with the timey-wimey ball in effect, you can't even take Matt Smith's name out of the credits for a few episodes to fool people into thinking he's dead for good.
...so they're going to kill Hitler, wich is going to cause a massive dent in history, causing robot jellyfish to attack them because robot jellyfish make more sense than killer time dragons, but whatever. Hey, maybe in all the mayhem, you could go untangle some other stuff in your history, like, I don't know, the Valeyard? No, I'm just kidding, go back to that beach and save yourself from dying. Do it. Do it now.
Also: according to your own Fourth incarnation, Doctor, you don't have "the right" to wipe out the Daleks. Ah, but Hitler's a different story. Why? Because Tarantino did it first.
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