"Says who? Why? That's an opinion, as McGann is factually a Doctor."

Okay, from "The Pandorica Opens" on, they did yeomen's work in making Rory a badass, but let's be clear, it was necessary 'cause they'd let him be such a wet fucking blanket before that. They pretty much had to let him stare down the Cybermen fleet just to bring him back to "tolerable character".

I'll reiterate: I see a direct line between 3's sneering dismissal of UNIT in his early adventures, through 4's gleeful abuse of pretty much all authority figures, through 10's hatred of weaponry and insults to companions who went to work for UNIT, to 12. Arguing in the alternative, 12 is not 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9,…

It's also awfully silly to complain in one breath that DotD doesn't respect history enough, and then in the next complain that it didn't do enough new.

"Why? How? Prove that as a fact rather than a lack of imagination and willingness for Doctor Who to be presented as a whole history, versus what one might try to pass off as "kewl" since 2005?"

I'm not sure what you're arguing here. Of course The Doctor is a hypocrite. He always has been, to varying degrees. If you don't like how hypocritical he's being here, that's fine, we can only like what we like, but it doesn't actually come out of no where.

"Why not an actual Doctor?"

" Moffat already made an excuse for why past Doctors might look older now in TIMECRASH. Ignoring that because the writer is ashamed of history"

"Since when do "soldiers" bother him?"

"Hell if they wanted that, why force the story to be about overwriting RTD's Time War"

Yes, and basically just stopped the Scarecrow, Ra's, the Joker, and Two-Face, and called it a career.

So who's the FDR (the one who was really better than Tommy and Teddy, but didn't get considered)?

Okay, got it. I buy it, I just didn't put it together at the time. It almost could have been any companion.

I took their exchange at the end of "Deep Breath" as pretty much the Doctor admitting he'd fancied her. I agree he'd never try to date her, but it would be because he knew it wouldn't work, not because he didn't want to.

Oh, and the Brig, but sometimes I don't think of him as a full companion 'cause he doesn't fit that "young, pretty subordinate" role.

Trying to thread the needle between "importance" and "entertainment"…

What were Rory's negative qualities, though? "Amy finds him boring" says a lot more about Amy than him. Once they really started building Rory as a character, if anything, they went too far in making him a badass (to make up for him being a complete wet blanket prior to TBB).

But Danny's not THAT far off, either. I'm not sure if "Officer" is the right phrase (he really is to anarchic/anti-authority for that), but the show has always had a bit of Colonialism to it, with the charismatic guy from the UK swooping in to solve all of the locals' problems.

Yeah, I guess the alien plot could have basically been the same, but the emotional beats would have been way different. It's been pretty well established now that 11 had a crush on Clara after all.

Can you tease out how Clara was Amy Pond in NiS?