#time war

I was rewatching planet of evil and aaaahhhhhhh, the doctor telling the professor ‘we buy our privilege to experiment at the cost of total responsibility’. We know the doctor feels responsible for what happens on each planet he lands on, every new place he explores he has a responsibility to protect because they are his experiment, every new place comes with new ideas, new theologies, new everything and it is his privilege as an explorer to see these wonderful new things. But then when it all goes wrong, he takes responsibility because in the same way a scientist may change a variable in an experiment, the doctor is changing the world he lands on, even if it is in the smallest way it means he has a responsibility too fix what has gone wrong. This then jumbled up with the time war where he does at first take responsibility but how can one person no matter how immortal or fantastic or alien they may be, how can one person take responsibility for everything that went wrong. Every death, every planet destroyed, every time line changed he views it as his responsibility to fix what he has changed yet he can’t.

I was rewatching boom town and the doctors reaction to Margaret’s claim that she changed makes so much sense now. What if his immediate denial for people changing was related to the fact he didn’t want to have changed. The time war made him into a killer and all he wanted was to be the happy traveler going to save galaxies again. He doesn’t want to believe change is possible in a person because then it’s possible that he changed into a monster.