I have a bad feeling everyone in Miracle Day is...

[bryce]

...gonna totally surprised and incredulous when they first hear about aliens...and act like Earth has NEVER had any contact with aliens at all, and the public has no knowledge of extra-terrestrial activity at all.

Just like how everyone but Sara Jane's and her sidekicks acted in the last season/series of "The Sara Jane Adventures".

Everybody has forgotten the ship hitting Big Ben or the spaceship over London or the Cyberman or the Daleks or the 17 planets or even the 456 from just a year or two ago... - and there will be no explanation as to why...

I understand that Starz and the producers of the show are trying to bring Torchwood to an new, wider audience - who have never seen a single episode of Torchwood before - let alone Doctor Who...but, Torchwood also takes place in a larger shared universe, and it makes it hard for the many fans - who will also be back and watching "Miracle Day" - to suspend disbelief or get any feeling of consistency or continuity between this new version of Torchwood and what has come before.

And there *are* subtle ways to not contradict past events without having to spend the first 20 minutes of the new series trying to catch people up on what happened in 6 seasons of Who and 4 series of Torchwood and several of Sarah Jane...*if* the writers are creative enough.

But if the Torchwood/DOctor Who/Sarah Jane/whatever comes next producers have decided that they suddenly want aliens to not be common knowledge anymore - then I think that there needs to be an explanation for that.

And the beauty of it is that explanation need not happen in Torchwood itself (or any other spin-off) - it can be a story in Doctor Who - that way long-time fans won't have to shake their heads and wonder why 3 previous series of continuity has suddenly gone out the window...and the new audience of Torchwood doesn't have to be aware of it at all!

(One simple way to do this would be a throw-away line in Who that when Amy restored reality from her memories or when all that stuff was happening with the cracks...things changed.

I just...think it's gonna really bother me (and maybe long-time fans - Whovians and Woddies) to be watching a series that's supposed to be a continuation of what came before - and builds upon it - when everyone's gonna be acting like what came before never happened!

Just my 2 quid.

 

[C.E. Evans]

It does seem like it's a common staple in the Doctor Who universe for most people to forget about Earth being contacted and even invaded numerous times by aliens (with the exception of UNIT and Torchwood). I guess the bulk of humanity get so caught up in their own lives and affairs, and that such invasions are eventually spun as elaborate hoaxes.

 

[Obiwanshinobi]

Maybe somebody cooked up a big batch of Retcon and put it in the drinking water.

 

[Turbo]

Seven: "Do you remember the Zygon gambit with the Loch Ness monster? Or the Yetis in the Underground?"
Ace: "The what?"
Seven: "Your species has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched only by its ingenuity when trying to destroy itself!"

This is nothing new in the Whoniverse.

 

[Brendan Moody]

In some fairly recent interview (since the new version of Torchwood was commissioned, at least), Russell T Davies said that people in the series would know that aliens existed but still be taken aback on encountering them in daily life because they're not that common.

 

[Phily B]

Wasn't the crack mentioned? Personally I think it's lazy writing, I mean RTD used to just ignore it but it was never flat out everyone forgot/didn't believe, he just made up silly things like terrorism through poisoning water supplies. I'm really not a fan of it.

 

[Guy Gardener]

America was sleeping when England was invaded.

Every time England was invaded.

By the time America woke up the 24 hour News Stations were on a new cycle.

WHERE THE FUCK WAS TRINITY WELLES!?

 

[Technobuilder]

Basically the "456" events caused the creation of new regulations, amendments, and classifications for dealing with extraterrestrial type events.

The X-Files are now just coded as "456" type events.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Mulder vs Jack?

Sexy.

 

[Phily B]

Alternatively, maybe that stuff Jack used in the water to make people forget about Torchwood was used with aliens etc?

 

[Butters]

Nah. I think it will be like Buffy, or The Lost Boys. Everyone knows, they just prefer to remain ignorant.

 

[Sci]

Actually, one of the things I liked about RTD's era was that people stopped thinking aliens weren't real.

After the Raxacoricalfalipatorian ship hit Big Ben in 2006 and then the Sycorax tried to invade on Christmas Day of that year, it's clear that there were plenty willing to believe those events were just lies. And yes, Captain Jack refers to the Cybus Cybermen invasion of 2007 as having been covered up with claims about terrorists and drinking water.

But by the time of Series Three, it's pretty obvious that the existence of aliens has become a political topic. We hear one of Defense Minister Harold Saxon's supporters in "Smith and Jones" talking on the radio about his strong belief that there are aliens. And then, of course, Prime Minister Saxon orders the Toclafane to kill the United States President-elect on live television in 2008 -- that's just not something you can cover up, at all. And on top of all this, you have the British (and, apparently, other world governments) agreeing to round up children after a pillar of fire descends upon Thames House and children start proclaiming "We are coming, we are here" while pointing towards London, and you have the Racnoss attack on Christmas Day 2007, and the Titanic replica nearly hitting Buckingham Palace a year later, on top of the Sontaran invasion attempt, the abduction and return of the Royal Hope Hospital, and, of course, the Dalek Invasion of 2009.

So it's pretty obvious that any government cover-up has started to utterly fail by this point. (There was really no need to include a "Mister Smith put out a cover-up story about wifi going mad" in "The End of Time, Part Two." After a Dalek invasion, why would anyone really have trouble believing that something temporarily turned everyone into replicas of Harold Saxon?)

It's entirely Steven Moffat's trope to literally have everyone forget things like 26 planets in the sky and a massive Dalek invasion. He sorta-kinda gets away with it with the Cracks in time -- although, given that the majority of the present-day sections of Series Five take place in an alternate timeline that's erased after the Doctor reboots the Universe, one could interpret their forgetting of the Daleks and the aliens as having been an artifact of that alternate timeline that no longer exists, and assume that Amy and Rory and the others now remember the 2009 Dalek invasion and other alien incursions. Or maybe not. It's subjective.

The relevant question is whether or not Torchwood: Miracle Day will take place in a Cracks-made-us-all-forget-about-aliens timeline or not. (I haven't seen Episode One yet.)

 

[Admiral_Young]

In the start of Children of Earth the Dr. Rapash (was that his name) that ended up betraying Jack mentioned that the majority of the world has chosen to ignore or not believe the events that happened in "The Journey Ends". Indeed the Doctor himself when mentioning Donna's mind wipe said to Wilf and Sylvia that the events will "just one of those Donna things she missed" or something similar.

This thread reminds me of an EJA thread.

 

[Butters]

^
I think its safe to say that Big Bang 2 restored everyting. Amy's parents, Dalek Invasions and Victorian Cybermen.

 

[Admiral_Young]

^ Where in my post did I dispute that? I was offering an in universe explanation from characters who have given quotes about how people would forget or ignore events. We ignore events that happened in the real world all the time. One major news event to the next.

Yeah this definitely reminds me of EJA now.

 

[od0_ital]

I liked the references to the "456 protocals" in last night's episode.

 

[Sci]

In the start of Children of Earth the Dr. Rapash (was that his name) that ended up betraying Jack mentioned that the majority of the world has chosen to ignore or not believe the events that happened in "The Journey Ends".

I think you're mis-remembering that scene. I seem to recall him saying that there were many who refused to believe it, but not all. There was also a scene in COE where Gwen talked about how the rate of suicides had gone up amongst people who felt that the various alien invasions meant that science had "won" the argument with religion.

 

[Admiral_Young]

The majority of the world isn't all of the world Sci. I probably did get the wording of the dialogue wrong but people hopefully will get the point of my post.

 

[The Badger]

I'm sure I read an interview with the Grand Moff where he said that Amy's crack, as it were, had removed certain events from universal history. It was a dramatic device for ensuring people don't know about aliens when the story requires it.

It also explained why no one knows about the big stompy Cyber King in Victorian London.

 

[Butters]

I'm sure I read an interview with the Grand Moff where he said that Amy's crack, as it were, had removed certain events from universal history. It was a dramatic device for ensuring people don't know about aliens when the story requires it.

It also explained why no one knows about the big stompy Cyber King in Victorian London.

In fairness though, the Cyberking did vanish in to the void or somewhere taking all trace of its existence. The witnesses could have been written off as weirdo absinthe drinkers.