One particular SPOILER from The Name of the Doctor

[The Wormhole]

If anything I would have thought the biggest age jump would have been between 10 and 11 since it seemed like 10 spent a lot of time roaming around the galaxy and time and generally going on his own merry way sans companions or at least companions we were told about. I mean hell he married 'Good Queen Bess' so... I mean let's face it, he could have lived with her for even the average life span of like 60-70 years - but its sorta quasi accepted that it was only a few years he spent traveling around

The Doctor gives his age in Voyage of the Damned as 903 and in The End of Time he says he's 906, so clearly between those two episodes there's only three years. After RTD established the Ninth Doctor was 900 years old, he consistently added one year to that age as each season when by, which Moffat continued until seasons 6 and 7 where the Doctor starts aging a couple hundred years.

 

[Christopher]

^Yeah, but the problem is that the Doctor first said he was 900 in "Revelation of the Daleks" in his sixth incarnation, and claimed to be 953 in "Time and the Rani" at the start of his seventh.

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/The_Doctor's_age

 

[Sindatur]

And...what would he use as a reference point? Kinda hard to keep track of the passage of time when you're travelling through time. Plus, which planet's years?

 

[Skellington]

And...what would he use as a reference point? Kinda hard to keep track of the passage of time when you're travelling through time. Plus, which planet's years?

I like to think that a year on Gallifrey equals roughly nine months on Earth; hence the Doctor in Tomb Of The Cybermen would have been about 600 Gallifrey years old, and by the time of Nuwho about 1200 (900 Gallifrey years travelling and 900 Earth years old).

He would surely know his age or have access to some kind of time-telling device . In NuWho the Master even kew the Doctor's approximate age, so presumably there is some kind of synchronicity.

 

[Christopher]

And...what would he use as a reference point? Kinda hard to keep track of the passage of time when you're travelling through time. Plus, which planet's years?

Which is kind of my point. RTD and Moffat being so careful to keep track of the Doctor's age references and move them forward somewhat consistently clashes with the previous practice where his mentions of his age were all over the place.

 

[diankra]

And the Time and the Rani reference is one we can take as definite: the situation is that the Doctor is able to guess the pin-code for a locked door, because he guesses the Rani will have used her age, and they're the same age, so... and it opens the door, so he's either right, or very very lucky.
This obviously opens up lots of stuff, like apparently confirming Gallifreyan Mean Time (that there's some link in TARDISes which mean Time Lords meet in sync: if it's been 10 days for one of them it'll be 10 days for the other one as well, so the Doctor and the Rani are always the same age), and whether that's Gallifreyan years or not (but either way, the Doctor and the Rani are using the same ones, so it surely must be Gallifreyan?), and quite when the Doctor worked out how old he actually was, having lost count during Tom Baker's time (at least according to Romana).
But.. the Time and the Rani scene only works if the Rani and the Doctor are both genuinely 953 at that point, so they are 953 [wherever] years old in that episode, and any statement that contradicts that is wrong, or has to be finessed out of the way, like using a different year.

 

[Christopher]

^It's Doctor Who. Continuity has never been a priority. Don't worry about it.

 

[diankra]

^It's Doctor Who. Continuity has never been a priority. Don't worry about it.

Says the chap whose ingenuity in sorting out the times when Trek writers said the same is legendary!

 

[Nightowl1701]

I'm gonna take a stab here and suggest that the Doctor, by the time we first meet Nine, had stopped counting his age from when he was biologically born/Loomed/whatever (a deliberate attempt to distance himself from the people he'd just murdered) and started counting his age from the day he first set foot inside the TARDIS and fled Gallifrey - the day he first truly became 'the Doctor.'

 

[Christopher]

Says the chap whose ingenuity in sorting out the times when Trek writers said the same is legendary!

Well, that's different. Trek has usually made some effort at consistency and credibility, even though it often falls short. Who has generally been more unrepentantly a fanciful tall tale, a ripping yarn where believability is not a priority. It's tended to have a much more improvisational approach to its worldbuilding, and that's part of its charm. I feel that trying to discipline it into a cohesive, logical continuity is doing it a disservice.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

Says the chap whose ingenuity in sorting out the times when Trek writers said the same is legendary!

Well, that's different. Trek has usually made some effort at consistency and credibility, even though it often falls short. Who has generally been more unrepentantly a fanciful tall tale, a ripping yarn where believability is not a priority. It's tended to have a much more improvisational approach to its worldbuilding, and that's part of its charm. I feel that trying to discipline it into a cohesive, logical continuity is doing it a disservice.

I dunno, I think RTD's years had a pretty tight continuity within the stories themselves, and with what came before, especially in regard to the Tom Baker years, whose Genesis of the Daleks was the unofficial beggining of the Time War.

Can't talk about the Moffat years because I've only just finished RTD's run, and am muling over the Tom Baker years as we speak.

 

[Christopher]

I dunno, I think RTD's years had a pretty tight continuity within the stories themselves, and with what came before, especially in regard to the Tom Baker years, whose Genesis of the Daleks was the unofficial beggining of the Time War.

That was, what, five or six years out of over thirty? And I felt RTD was as revisionist as any previous Who producer, reinventing the laws of time or rewriting past and future cosmic history as it suited him. For instance, the fate of Earth in "The End of the World" didn't bear any resemblance to its other far-future fates in stories like "The Ark" or "The Mysterious Planet." By contrast, "The Beast Below" in Moffat's first season did implicitly tie into the solar-flare cataclysm from "The Ark in Space"/"The Sontaran Experiment." Moffat's been heavier on the past-continuity nods than RTD was, but he's also been quite cavalier about rewriting the continuity, even explicitly incorporating the mutability of time into his storytelling.

 

[Nick Ryder]

Well think about it - all the meddling with time and space and other things probably changed things here and there and y'know hey... that was the same thing people complained about Trek was all the continuity to have to keep straight - even more confusing is when not everything from the past 50 years - even the past 40 years isn't really completely available. So I'll give Moffat some props for actually TRYING to tie in things to the past more so than RTD did and still think that this 'new series' should almost be accepted as a quasi-reboot - for all we know the Time War fucked a lot of things right up the ass and the 'future' as seen from any of the previous 8 Doctors is totally up for grabs as are events from the past. That COULD be what the Hurt Doctor's 'crime' was - he tried to 'fix' things too much.

 

[Christopher]

^Well, sure, it's pretty much a given in-story that the Time War rewrote history. But what needs to be understood is that the original series was anything but a consistent timeline. It contradicted itself and rewrote its rules all the time, because so many different people wrote and produced it for different generations of viewers, and past episodes were seen as disposable, something not expected to be seen again (the mentality that led to the erasure of so many of them). So its continuity was a mess. Atlantis was destroyed in three contradictory ways. Earth was destroyed/devastated in a few different ways, at least a couple of which were incompatible. The future development of Earth's technology was portrayed quite inconsistently as well -- one story gives them transmats (teleporters) by 2100, but many later stories show no sign of the technology hundreds or thousands of years further forward. Mars was home to the Ice Warriors in the Second Doctor era, but they weren't mentioned at all in "The Pyramids of Mars." The Daleks and Cybermen met their final ends multiple times, and updated Cyberman designs were used in place of older designs no matter where the stories were set in time. UNIT stories were presumed to be set nearly a decade in the future, the late '70s and early '80s, while they were being made, but when the Brigadier returned in "Mawdryn Undead" it was assumed that the UNIT era had happened in real time, with the Brig retiring in 1976. And the show was blithely unconcerned with the kind of time paradoxes that so intrigue Moffat; every time the Doctor met his former selves, the question of whether he should remember living through the same events was completely ignored.

So while I can analyze and nitpick the heck out of other SFTV shows, I've rarely seen the point with Doctor Who. It's more the sort of show where you just roll with the absurdities and don't worry about how it holds together.

 

[Redfern]

Basically, the MST3K "mantra".

Sincerely,

Bill