Russell T. Davies Returns to Doctor Who as New Showrunner

[DigificWriter]

When the First Doctor becomes the FIRST Doctor again by on-screen evidence, automatically that means whatever implications there existed of previous Doctors to that is therefore non-applicable

That's not how retconning works.

It's quite a reach to imply that no, the Morbius Doctors were always canon

Doctor Who doesn't have a canon.

Things are being constantly written into, but not explicitly out of, the show's lore, and so everything that has ever been revealed about the Doctor and other prominent characters is both true and untrue simultaneously at all times, with each Showrunner and/or individual writer getting to decide what pieces of said lore they want to draw attention to or ignore.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Hopefully RTD will restore the pre-Chibnall continuity, which would be easy enough.

I don't have the quote in front of me, but I recall RTD saying he thought the Timeless Child stuff was brilliant. He certainly didn't sound like someone who would throw it away just because he could.

 

[DigificWriter]

I don't have the quote in front of me, but I recall RTD saying he thought the Timeless Child stuff was brilliant. He certainly didn't sound like someone who would throw it away just because he could.

Exactly.

And even if he did decide to quietly move away from it as being a focal point of the Doctor's narrative, the Doctor being the Timeless Child would forever remain a fact about the character and a part of their history.

 

[Haggis and tatties]

Hopefully RTD will restore the pre-Chibnall continuity, which would be easy enough. Just say it was all a ploy by The Master to mess with The Doctor, and literally everything will be fixed. That is pretty much the only way I'll ever really enjoy Doctor Who ever again. Even if RTD new stuff is good in general, if they don't retcon Chibnall's shit out of existence, its never really going to be Doctor Who to me. It will just be some new show created by an idiot using the Doctor Who branding.

This is why i am so glad i dumped Chibnall's run mid season 2, and was not assaulted by the TC in any way, so my canon is still intact as it should be, with Hartnell as the first doctor and Capaldi at present the last, with the ball now in RTD court as to whether that will remain or continue with a new doctor, but if not than i can happily live with 50 years of tv Who from Hartnell to Capaldi, with hopefully the animation of the last few remaining lost stories as a bonus to eventually tie a ribbon around the original show. :-)

 

[Brendan Moody]

The funny thing about this “RTD is coming, he’ll bring us food and water and smite our enemies” angle is that the Timeless Child is just another way of doing what RTD himself did by killing off the Time Lords: giving the Doctor a mysterious backstory that makes them special and not just another Time Lord. But because the gap between the Eighth Doctor and the Ninth occurred offscreen, it was entirely new continuity rather than an addition to the established past, and so less taboo than the Timeless Child, or the Morbius Doctors, or the Cartmel Masterplan (although I think hindsight makes people forget how controversial the whole “last of the Time Lords” deal was).

 

[jaime]

Hinting at something a bit mysterious and letting the audience fill it in, without flatly contradicting stuff, is good.
This… is the opposite of good, and insulting to boot.

 

[StCoop]

This… is the opposite of good, and insulting to boot.

I'm not insulted. He just took the established fact that there were Doctors before Hartnell and ran with it.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

Except, the entire backstory introduced by Chibnall is in itself a new kind of baggage that is not at all adding to the mystery of the character, but is instead a giant bag that will carry the character until someone finds a brilliant way to destroy that stupid thing to oblivion.

 

[dupersuper]

Except, the entire backstory introduced by Chibnall is in itself a new kind of baggage that is not at all adding to the mystery of the character

I'm not a big fan of the Timeless Child stuff, but surely being found as a baby on a distant planet under an unexplained portal to an unknown location adds A LITTLE mystery...

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

I'm not a big fan of the Timeless Child stuff, but surely being found as a baby on a distant planet under an unexplained portal to an unknown location adds A LITTLE mystery...

But its not an exciting, inviting mystery. And furthermore, it takes away from the core of the character, which was his ambiguity. You don't know anything about the Doctor in An Unearthly Child, and that's why he's dangerous. You've no idea if he's good or bad. You don't know and that was the core mystery of the guy. Not if he came from a distant past on Earth or another planet.

 

[The Knappos]

You don't know anything about the Doctor in An Unearthly Child, and that's why he's dangerous. You've no idea if he's good or bad. You don't know and that was the core mystery of the guy. Not if he came from a distant past on Earth or another planet.

You knew he wasn’t bad though, well before the end of the first season. So that ‘core’ mystery was solved in 1964. It’s not like that was hanging around until 2019 and was suddenly filled in.

All this mystery about The Doctor stuff doesn’t add, nor necessarily detract from the show at all. It’s not why anyone watches it, really.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

You knew he wasn’t bad though, well before the end of the first season. So that ‘core’ mystery was solved in 1964. It’s not like that was hanging around until 2019 and was suddenly filled in.

Well, no, because the Doctor's unpredictability was always key to his continual success. Its exactly the most successful element of the Seventh Doctor by Cartmel, making him a figure that is actually commanding and unknowable. It's not a secret why both RTD and Moffat's Doctors directly borrow from that inspiration. Hell, RTD basically made him into a genocidal murderer just to add to that unpredictability factor, and even Moffat kept it as part of the character's ongoing struggle with himself.

 

[Sketcher]

Well, no, because the Doctor's unpredictability was always key to his continual success. Its exactly the most successful element of the Seventh Doctor by Cartmel, making him a figure that is actually commanding and unknowable. It's not a secret why both RTD and Moffat's Doctors directly borrow from that inspiration. Hell, RTD basically made him into a genocidal murderer just to add to that unpredictability factor, and even Moffat kept it as part of the character's ongoing struggle with himself.

I do hope RTD continues this with his return. I liked how he would sometimes allude to the Doctor being this trickster or devil, and we weren't always sure what his true nature was.

 

[N-121973]

This is why i am so glad i dumped Chibnall's run mid season 2, and was not assaulted by the TC in any way, so my canon is still intact as it should be, with Hartnell as the first doctor and Capaldi at present the last, with the ball now in RTD court as to whether that will remain or continue with a new doctor, but if not than i can happily live with 50 years of tv Who from Hartnell to Capaldi, with hopefully the animation of the last few remaining lost stories as a bonus to eventually tie a ribbon around the original show. :-)

Exactly my sentiments. Even if PH intended there to be many more doctors (and I've just looked it up and he admitted they hadn't thought it through properly), you can easily view the Morbius sequence as I do that they were Morbius' past selves and retcon the Timeless Child - Ruth Doctor and all out of existence.
I Mean they were obviously making things up on the fly. I imagine - assuming Susan really was a fellow Timelord/lady, that if they'd come up with regeneration sooner, when Carol-Ann Ford left at the end of the Dalek Invasion of Earth, instead of leaving Susan behind she would have regenerated and they'd have continued with a different actress. Maybe even Maureen O'Brien who played Vikki.

 

[jaime]

I'm not insulted. He just took the established fact that there were Doctors before Hartnell and ran with it.

It was an established fact that there weren’t. (Impossible astronaut, day of the the Doctor, and… the Matt Smith finale whose name temporarily eludes me depend on it to a great extent, and every multi-doctor story does.)

And the insult wasn’t necessarily to the audience… just to rather a lot of talented people that had come before.
It was executed in a way that made ‘dumbledore was gay’ seem like MCU levels of planning and foreshadowing.
(Don’t worry! Look! See! The doctor has always been inclusive, we just didn’t know that before he was some brain addled old white man, he was so many various girls and ethnicities. Non speaking of course, because have to keep the budget down on the token — I mean representative roles.)
And what is really annoying, is that Chef!Doctor (I really liked that series. I still think of the salmon tracking gag to this day.) is really good, better than Jodie in terms of costume, character, the lot. (I’m not commenting on acting, because you can only work with what you’re given.) I mean I may not like Kung-fu doctor stuff, but Pertwee happened yonks ago.

But there are ways of doing that which could have been interesting, and built something, without tearing stuff down. Being in a parallel universe has been tinkered with in who before, on and off screen, and that would have been better. We could in that way have even kept the development of missy.
Instead we have… this.

 

[Steve Roby]

This is why i am so glad i dumped Chibnall's run mid season 2, and was not assaulted by the TC in any way,

Assaulted? Really? Would you have ended up in the ICU or would the injuries have been non-life-threatening? Can you show us on this David Tennant action figure where the concept would have hurt you?

so my canon is still intact as it should be,

You don't run the show, so you don't have a canon. Like the rest of us fans you have opinions about what counts and what's good as far as you personally are concerned, which is not what canon is. But then, Doctor Who doesn't have a canon in the way fans tend to use the word these days.

with Hartnell as the first doctor and Capaldi at present the last,

Whittaker's the Doctor, and RTD is not going to pretend she was never the Doctor, nor will anyone who ever runs the show.

with the ball now in RTD court as to whether that will remain or continue with a new doctor,

RTD likes Chibnall. You know that, right? RTD brought Chibnall into Doctor Who in the first place. He's not going to shout "Begone, foul Chibnall, and all thy accursed, uncanon works!" Moffat worked with Chibnall, too. Chibnall wrote Doctor Who episodes for both of them, did a lot of work on Torchwood because of RTD, and got the showrunner job because of all that. He was an obvious choice. This clear, bright dividing line you seem to see between RTD and Moffat on the one side and Chibnall on the other doesn't exist. They all worked together.

but if not than i can happily live with 50 years of tv Who from Hartnell to Capaldi

Funny, you don't sound like a happy person.

 

[DigificWriter]

Again, Doctor Who has no official canon; it has a vast trove of lore, but no showrunner or writer is explicitly beholden to follow any of it.

 

[jaime]

Again, Doctor Who has no official canon; it has a vast trove of lore, but no showrunner or writer is explicitly beholden to follow any of it.

I feel like you missed the nineties, the era where modern who was very much gestated, which very much spent a lot of trees on pinning down, cataloguing and sorting out the canon and continuity to within an inch of its regeneneration.
You may not like the concept. Some may not.
But for every one that doesn’t, there is another that does.
And for the most part, production teams do, because then they get to do things like celebrate bringing something back, or having an anniversary.

 

[Brendan Moody]

It doesn’t matter how much time anyone spent pinning down anything. Doctor Who has no official canon. Despite what some fans think, there’s no one correct answer to the many points on which different stories have contradicted each other; different writers and production teams are free to do whatever works for them at the moment. Fans are free to consider or disregard whatever they want in their vision of “true” Doctor Who, but the show itself will continue to be an unruly mess of contradictions.

 

[The Nth Doctor]

Fans are free to consider or disregard whatever they want in their vision of “true” Doctor Who, but the show itself will continue to be an unruly mess of contradictions.

Most importantly, that's okay.

After all, time travel in involved so of course there will be contradictions, especially a franchise this long-living.

If anything, that makes me enjoy Doctor Who all the more. I much rather the show focus on the characters and the stories they're involved with than some silly notions about canon.