Do we want to know the Doctor's secret?

[Captain Crow]

Complaints about shows being "fanfic" = "But it's not MY fanfic!!"

Yeah, because anyone who points out a show has turned fanfic-ish is automatically a disgruntled fanfic writer.

 

[EliyahuQeoni]

I know the reason for it but, it's like an awful fanfic.

I mean honestly, a reincarnation of one of founding members of Time Lord society The Other. Not to mention the looms.

Yeah, I was never really happy with the resolution of the "masterplan" as seen in the Virgin NAs. I enjoyed the hints dropped in the last couple seasons of the Classic Series that The Doctor had some mysterious connection to the "Dark Times" on Gallifrey and might be "more than just another Time Lord" and even enjoyed quite a lot of the build up in the NAs, but the reveal left me wanting a lot. And I always felt as if the Looms were created solely to make it impossible for Susan to simply be the Doctor's granddaughter as stated in the series. I'm not sure why, but some fans always seemed to have issues with that.

 

[JoeZhang]

The long running theory about that is there is an element of fandom that is frightened by the vagina and by association want the Doctor to be as well. The idea that Susan is not his granddaughter only seems to gather steam when the uber-nerds are the only ones running the show (so to speak).

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

The current show has been in fanfic territory too.

I don't agree. What I mean when I say that the show used to feel like fanfic is that it was needlessly self-referential to the point of being creatively sterile. I don't think the same can be said of the current show.

 

[Gov Kodos]

Because almost 50 years later, The Beatles are still relevent, whereas McFly, What Not To Wear and Big Brother won't have the same luck.

Popped ahead via your Tardis to tell us that, did you?

 

[Starkers]

It makes no sense for there to be a random button that makes a random bit of ledge disappear. It's a deus ex machina that has no logical place in the story.

It makes emotional sense, it's surprising, funny and deeply satisfactory because it's the tenth Doctor first significant victory. But no, it doesn't make sense in a real-world-logic way, and I can see how that could be annoying if you're interested in that kind of things.

Well, Black Mirror is a show that deconstructs and satirises the media whereas RTD just filled the show with as much celebrity culture as is possible in order to grab ratings. This had the effect of making it date very fast. What was "cool" in 2006, now looks incredibly lame, dated and confused. Your mileage may vary.

It does vary, yes. I can remember quite a few stories where pop culture was satirized in RTD's Doctor Who. Just off the top of my head, the Britney Spears song in The End of the World, a song which, quite obviously no one remembers and no one really listens to and is only played because a bunch of decadent rich people desperately want to feel a connection to old Earth but can't because they can't be bothered to learn anything about it, is, in my opinion, a clever pop culture reference.

What? Toxic is like one of her best songs EVAH!

It's easy to look back with hindsight and say it's wonderful that the Beatles were played on Who but that is with a lot of hindsight. For all anyone at the time knew the Beatles were a mere flash in the pan who'd quickly become a footnote in history.

I wasn't always keen on RTD's celebrity nods, but they were rarely more than brief cameos and mostly didn't impact on the plot, and hey in future people watching episodes will probably just think McFly were a made up band designed to give the episode some colour. Is it really that different to John Cleese in City of Death or Hale and Pace in Survival?

But yeah, RTD wasn't always great on endings, although in fairness even though a lot of them were rubbish they were often foreshadowed and didn't quite come out of nowhere (Tooth and Claw, Last of the Timelords).

Being completely honest and up front I'd take Moffat over RTD, but again if I'm completely honest I don't always love Moffat Who as much as I expected to, and sometimes I do miss a dash of RTD in-your-faceness.

 

[chardman]

I really think that the answer that will be revealed in "The Name of the Doctor" will be something along the line of "I don't know".

I think that the Doctor doesn't know the answer to the question of "Doctor Who?", and doesn't particularly want to know. Is in fact, actively fleeing/hiding from the information for some very important reason. (Like when 10 was hiding his Timelordiness in "Human Nature / The Family of Blood".)

When he silenced Clara before she said his name aloud in "Journey to the center of the Tardis", he didn't seem all that concerned that she knew his name, but that she not tell him what she knew, because he has blocked this info from himself for some higher purpose.

The revelation that Moffat promises we'll come away with, is that not even the Doctor knows who he really is, and the why of this will form the underlying theme of the next series.