Has Who always been prophetic?

[RoJoHen]

I am strictly a nuWho fan, but I am wondering about the existence of prophecies in old Who. With the new stuff, we have Rose's "Bad Wolf" stuff as well as the Ood referencing The DoctorDonna and knowing that the Doctor's "song will be ending soon." We even had that random lady on the bus tell The Doctor that "he would knock 4 times." Hell, even the Face of Boe (Captain Jack?) knew he would see the Doctor one more time and reveal the secret about The Master.

It seems that Doctors 9 and 10 had destinies that had already been written. Did classic Who stories ever toy around with this? How do you feel about this kind of storytelling?

 

[Chris3123]

... for Logopolis, the Fourth Doctor's last story.

.
.
.


There was The Watcher, a being who was seen watching/assisting the Fourth Doctor and his companions in the time leading up to the Doctor's regeneration. This being was revealed to be a manifestation of the Doctor himself, though not any specific incarnation. While there was no actual prophecy per se, The Watcher was there in anticipation of the upcoming regeneration, which it knew would happen.

 

[Stevil2001]

There's a seer in The Ribos Operation who makes seemingly accurate predictions.

 

[C.E. Evans]

While I know some would like to strike him from canon or whatever, I did like the idea of the Valeyard as an evil future version of the Doctor. He punked both the Doctor and the Master for awhile there...

 

[Piper]

The series has been prophetic from the very first episode - when Susan observed that the UK hadn't decimalised its currency yet, eight years before it really did - and on to the mid Seventies when the Brig reported to a female PM (perish the thought!)

 

[23skidoo]

Although as noted there have been some exceptions, the idea of "foretelling" really didn't come into effect until the new series, which has been written under the relatively new "arc" style of writing for television. Although they were serials, and occasionally serials linked together, the original series still basically followed the "standalone story every week" format that dominated television writing from the 50s to the late 90s. What I mean by that is shows like, say, Star Trek TOS were written in such a way that the episodes could be shown in any order (because in syndication they often were). Even The Prisoner worked this way (except for the first episode and the last two). The Fugitive was one of the earliest series that actually had an ending episode that had to run at the end.

So in Doctor Who except for the fact that there were cast changes, there was nothing saying that, say, Robots of Death had to be viewed before, say, The Sun Makers. The stories were standalones for all intents and purposes. But when the show came back in 2005 the standards had changed in the intervening 16 years and while you still had shows that allowed for "randomized viewing" like Law & Order, people now expected arcs and foreshadowing, etc. And RTD did a great job, whether with the Bad Wolf arc, or throwing references to Torchwood into the show a full year before the pay off. And now the whole "Your song will be ending" prophecy that took nearly two years for the show to resolve.

Alex

 

[luvscifi]

While I see the value in today's market of a about a zillion tv shows to choose from, of having a story arc that hooks you to come back to see its conclusion, I'm glad that the earlier shows weren't written that way. As a new Whovian, it would really be dreadful to have to seek out all the old shows in sequential order to make sense of the whole story.