Spoilers Hot Take: Chibnall didn't obliterate Doctor Who's continuity. He actually fixed it.

Educated opinions on matters pertaining to subjective content are just opinions.

 

Shocking news that. An opinion, is an opinion. Next week: water, is it wet? A question for our times featuring a man called Dan dipping his hand in his sink.

 

And yet, here you were, using the phrase "educated opinion" like it elevated you.

As long as we all know where we stand.

 

No, it means my opinion is educated, coming from a place of knowledge and interest in the subject which is being discussed. It’s also a turn of phrase. A way of saying ‘look, I have thought about this at length and not just plucked it of the air, and comes not from instinct but from thought.’

Now, if you assume that elevates my opinion — because I am sure we talk about peoples opinions and posts on here, and never the individual, because that would be against the rules for a start — then that’s up to you. If you assume a reasoned conclusion, made after looking at evidence — like actually watching a long video where someone else expresses an educated option, rather than dismissing it out of hand on the basis your assumptions of it trump any factual evidence — is in some way superior to an off the cuff, instinctual, expression of one based on a lower level of information, then well…
I don’t know what to say. People disagree all the time. The world keeps turning. Chibnall keeps writing. And regular as clockwork…

 

^ Intentionally or not, you do come across as pretentious, as if the only opinions about the Thirteenth Doctor that matter are your own and those of others with whom you agree, like JayExci.

 

Oh I’m completely pretentious. Or something like that.
And any opinion matters, I’m just more likely to agree with ones that are well thought out, or based on something. Discussing Who these days occasionally feels like auditioning for the Happiness Patrol.
Imagine that, a fandom that currently likes to quell dissent or disagreement with the idea that everything is fine, having a story like The Happiness Patrol in it’s canon.
I would love to see a solid argument for why taking the Doctor down well trod Campbell ‘chosen one’ paths, instead of what was fairly unique about the character, is a good idea.
I would love to see a well expressed opinion on the idea that the pre-Hartnell Doctors concept actually brings anything creative to the table, other than essentially doing a convoluted ‘Dumbledore was gay’ thing.
(Any groundwork needed to show Time Lords — and by extension The Doctor — can change ethnicity or sex during regeneration was already done. We didn’t need to undermine so many things already done well to have an ‘excuse’ for future Doctors. Which is how it comes over.)

Is it possible something can be done with it now? Maybe. But one episode in, and many of Chibnall’s flaws as a writer, and the new flaws he has put into the character, are still on display. (A repeat of ‘oh you’re not here to do bad thing, you’re here to do good thing. Sorry, I needed the audience to think you were a baddie!’ For instance.)

I agree when there is something close to a factual underpinning. And JayExci used existing methodology around media to show his working out. At the moment, the closest thing to a riposte is ‘oh but the Morbius Doctors’ which… well. We’ve been there before, and it’s almost like the whole Indian Legion thing. People suddenly experts in something relatively obscure because it’s a fig leaf for what is at the very least a divisive decision in the production office. People didn’t let Gatiss get away with it when he wrote his Mars story, but it had a different goal then I suppose.

I shall wait and see, but this era has been a failed experiment in so many ways.

 

I don't think it was anything to do with diversity, that was a nice to have I guess, and more to do with re-instilling the sense of mystery about the Doctor (whatever that is). whether you think that is a good idea or not is subjective. I've always been of the opinion that I don't need the Doctor to be some mysterious super being, to me the Doctor is A.N Other Timelord, only one who didn't fit in with the others and went off to do their own thing.

Yeah the Karvanista bit makes less sense the longer you think about it, and isn't he a baddie anyway? I mean he was about to drop the Doctor and Yaz (a human) into acid? That "Oh I misread you" thing can work really well, it just feels lazy here.

It struck me the other day that Whittaker is the anti-McCoy. Seven was the Doctor who knew everything, Thirteen is the Doctor who knows slightly less than Jon Snow.

 

I said this since the episode tried to say Doctor Jo was a pre-Hartnell Doctor. The TARDIS did NOT look like a Police Box until Doctor Hartnell landed in 1963 UK and it got stuck. Before that trip to '63, it was a plain cylinder (if you go by Moffatt's imaging).
So... Doctor Jo cannot be pre-Hartnell.

 

"Everything you think you know is a lie".... including the notion of the Doctor's TARDIS only being a Police Box because of An Unearthly Child's initial setting.

 

I could imagine the TARDIS choosing to intentionally look like a police box in that one scene in that scene to let 13 know that Ruth is the Doctor.

 

OK, but unless its perception filter capabilities were better back in the pre-Hartnell days (so it could appear in different forms to different observers), why wouldn't Jo-Doc be surprised to see it in that form?

More likely the blue box TARDIS belonged to Jo-Doc through to the last "Division Doctor" (assuming they aren't one and the same) before they were mind-wiped. It was sent to the breaking yards and forcibly reverted to default settings until Hartnell found it again (as for why it was down there at least a few hundred years - Time Lord bureaucracy moves very slowly).

 

The only reason the Tardis looks like a police box is narrative shorthand for the viewers, most of whom likely didn't go "But hang on a minute..."

Is it explainable? Sure, The Ruth Doctor's Tardis chanced upon that shape and both Tardis and Doctor liked it so they kept it. We don't know what happened between the end of the Doctor's last pre-Hartnell incarnation (though I have a theory*) and Hartnell, but clearly he stole the same Tardis and the Tardis remembered even if the Doctor didn't. It lands in Trotter's Lane and thinks to itself "Aha, a chance to reclaim my favourite look."

*The Doctor undertakes one final mission for the Timelords and either as a reward or because the Doctor knows too much, the Timelords release the Doctor from their obligations and gifts them a whole new regeneration cycle, which comes with a complete memory wipe and regeneration into a child. The Doctor grows up believing he is just like any other Timelord until his innate personality prompts him to steal a Tardis and take off.

It can make sense, you just have to contort yourself through more narrative hoops than an Olympic gymnast to make it work (did no other Timelord know the truth, that there'd been a Doctor knocking around before Hartnell? You can handwave the Doctor not knowing they'd been around for ages, after all any time the Doctor encounters people who've met them before the Doctor presumably just assume it's a future self and never realises it's a past one, but either no other Timelord was aware or else they were all lying, which is possible I guess, but as with any conspiracy theory you have to consider just how many hundreds of people might have needed to be involved, how much information redacted or destroyed, and the likelihood that not a strip of relevant information came to light in all the hundreds and hundreds of years of the Doctor's life doesn't make a lot of sense.)

 

Since the chameleon circuit still works she probably wouldn't be surprised to see it look like any random object, as long as it's vaguely TARDIS-sized and has a door.

 

"Logopolis" implied that the TARDIS could appear at least as large as an Egyptian pyramid...if the cham' circuit were properly functional.

 

Yes, "TARDIS-sized" is quite a variable.

 

Hmm, if not planning to exit the capsule for a bit, I wonder how small the "outer plasmic shell" can be shrunk? True, we saw the "siege mode" in that Capaldi episode (looking a bit like a Lament Configuration box from HellRaiser), but who's to say it could not materialize smaller, like a marble, a grain of salt, shoot, possibly an atom? Or go the opposite direction, have a TARDIS appear as a whole freakin' planet! Given the extent of expanded universe material like novels, comics, audio plays, etc., I'd be surprised if either extreme has NOT been explored.

 

Well, the TARDIS shrank to an inch or so high in Planet of the Giants. Granted, that was a malfunction, but it shows it's possible.

 

Oh, that's right! I even saw that two part story. I should have remembered that.

 

You know how much time I spent worrying over Ruth Doctor's TARDIS looking like a Police Box? Absolutely none at all.

 

But the TARDIS had already shrunk by then. “Siege Mode” might normally be the size of a bank vault.