The Fires of Pompeii

[armb]

It was nice to see in Doctor Who Confidential that they took David Tennant to Pompeii and taught him some history. A shame they didn't teach anything to the scriptwriter. I know it's not about the history, but that's no excuse for gratuitous ignorance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etna#Historical_eruptions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Vesuvius#Before_79
http://www.aeoliancharme.com/islands/vulcano/eng.html

(The end was a bit poor too - either he can interfere then on a small scale, or not, but claiming he can't and then changing his mind?)

But good fun on the whole.

Comments

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

None of that history happened until the Doctor changed things, if I've understood what they were saying correctly - when the rift closed it retconned all history since the alien pod landed.

Later edit - forgot to add that I suspect that the rescue will have consequences, e.g. a cult worshipping the Doctor, which will ultimately turn out to be a problem.

[uk-sef.livejournal.com]

Initially Donna had wanted to save everyone - which he definitively couldn't do. However, since a few people were known to have survived the eruption (being out at sea in a boat), that didn't preclude him playing a secret role in some survivals - especially undocumented ones of insignificant people. However, we haven't necessarily yet seen the consequences of this piece of intervention coming back to bite him (as per Rose saving her father).

[armb.livejournal.com]

I didn't see any hint of retconning changing geological history to that extent.
But even if it did, we still saw Caecilius inventing the Latin word for volcano after the rift had closed, when it should have been retconned into prior existence too.
We do know that alternate universes exist and the Doctor's timeline isn't ours, so maybe he's in a universe where Vesuvius really was the only volcano known to the Romans, and that only after AD79, but that's just excusing gratutitously poor writing.

[armb.livejournal.com]

Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention, but I thought at the end he was claiming he couldn't rescue even just the family, then went back and did so, not just that there were risks to even small interference.