I know Eccleston didn't leave with the warm, fuzzies but I'd hope(d) he'd get over that for the 50th. McGann, Eccleston, Tennant and Smith are probably the only ones who can still pull off "themselves" without heavy CG. Of course maybe there will be the Great Intelligence/whatever, siphoning the Doctors' life energy through the vortex or some such.
I thought Davison pulled it off credibly enough in the short they did a few seasons back. When they were doing these specials back in the '80s, all they did was murmur about the Doctor's proximity to his future self closing a time circuit and causing his former incarnations to look older. Hang a lampshade on it and the audience won't care.
Meanwhile, Matt Smith keeps dressing more and more like Hartnell.
On this week's episode, I didn't quite get the leaf thing. So the leaf is more valuable because it has "an infinite number of possible futures". But so does everything else. So basically anything the god/monster eats will kill it.
The episode wasn't too bad until the ending, which turned into a cascading failure.
First, the
deus ex screwdriver has finally reached the point where I can no longer tolerate it. It's gotten pretty bad over the past few seasons in terms of being a magic wand that can affect any inanimate object in any way the writers want; but now the Doctor can just wave it emphatically in the direction of people and have it serve as an impediment. It only fails to work when the writers decide it would be more dramatic for it not to. They've dug themselves a deep, deep, deep hole with it and they show no interest in getting themselves out of it.
Second, there was the Doctor's interminable-but-empty-and-ultimately-meaningless speech about "take it all".
Third, there's the leaf. Which, as you say, makes no sense whatsoever. The thing can eat an entire kid without missing a beat because of the "infinite number of possible futures" it is directly snuffing out, but a leaf which merely
represents those possible futures is the thing's kryptonite? (And even that doesn't make sense, because that's not actually what the leaf is established as actually representing earlier in the episode.) Out of the millions of people who have offered up millions of sacrifices over the past few aeons, nobody has ever given up something that was sentimental because it was important to their dead mum until Clara came along? Complete nonsense.
And, on a minor note, why do you give Clara a speech explaining exactly what she's doing and then have the Doctor immediately repeat it point for point? It's not adding any credibility to your poorly conceived story.
I was pretty back and forth on the whole speech at the end thing. It is a standard part of the show I suppose (in fact the doctor's speech at the end seemed very 10th doctor to me) but I agree with you there seemed to be some logic issues going on (and I dont normally overthink those in who). I like the idea of the doctor giving up his memories to defeat the god, but he didnt seem to actually lose them. So that left me a bit confused (a doctor with pockets of amnesia would be an interesting turn).
When I watched Series 5, I actually thought Moffat was consciously deconstructing some of the elements of RTD's run which had become cliche. For example, Amy's whole "I'm just looking for a quick snog because I've got cold feet" arc seemed like a really nice subversion of RTD's sequence of doe-eyed companions. Notably, I thought it was great in "The Pandorica Opens" when the Doctor gives this huge, triumphant speech about how they're all too terrified of him to do anything... and then it turns out that, no, they were pretty much counting on him being a loud-mouthed egotist. And then, at the end of Season 6, I thought the whole "I'm going to let them all think I'm dead" (while making no sense when you're a time traveler, but whatever) was an inspired way of backing off the bombast-filled, "end of the universe" stuff for awhile.
So one of my disappointments with Season 7 is that it turns out nothing has changed: We're still getting empty regurgitation of stuff that's become completely cliched.
When Eccleston did "yeah, and doesn't that scare you to death?" at the end of S1 it worked because it was backed up by an entire season establishing a specific reason for the Daleks to be terrified of the Doctor and it was immediately supported with meaningful action. But the trope of the Doctor giving a speech full of bravado that somehow saves the day through sheer bombast has become completely fetishized over the last six seasons. And the hollow, empty, meaningless husk that's been left behind is what we saw on display in this episode.
