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

[Alidar Jarok]

Sometime around the period could be two or three years later for all it matters. No reason this has to be the first thing brought up. Also, where was Amy during these events? If she were on the TARDIS, it would also be less likely for her to bring this up.

 

[MacLeod]

...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.

Isn't it closer to 30 season of DW , and besides the crack appears to have elimnated some memory of alien invasions from Earth's history.

As Torchwood is a spin off from DW and DW is a time travel show, and the Doctor has said Time can be re-written. So that could be used as an explanation. Admitely it might confuse first time viewers.

 

[Stevil2001]

I was reading the most recent DWM to come out in America (which came out in the UK seven weeks ago... whoo...), and Davies says in it that not only does Miracle Day mention the Doctor, it actually references a plot point from the next season of Sarah Jane!

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

I'd hate to see the impact of everyone turning in the Master all at once on the world economy. Hell, between that and the sorts of panic that would naturally result from Raxicoricalfalipatorian ships slamming into Big Ben while 10 Downing Street is destroyed, from Sycorax ships mind mojoing a third of the planet's population into trying to kill themselves, from global Cybus Cybermen invasions, from Racnoss attacks on the City of London, from the assassination of the United States President-elect on live television on the order of the British Prime Minister, from the Sontaran invasion attempt, from the global unrest that would almost certainly follow the 4-5-6 Crisis, and from the cities and militaries devastated by the Dalek Invasion, I'd frickin' hate to live in the RTD-era Whoniverse. The global economy's probably been screwed over since Series One!

As opposed to in the real world, where the global economy has really only been screwed over since Season 4.

BTW, I suspect that Torchwood did a whole lot of retconning to erase the bit about Harold Saxon ordering the assassination of the U.S. President. No matter what was uncovered about Harold Saxon's background or motivations after the fact, that incident would have had an insanely deleterious effect on Anglo-American relations, instantaneously taking our countries from one of the closest relationships in the world to a level of hostilities our nations haven't felt towards each other since the War of 1812. Irrespective of any mitigating circumstances, you'd have millions of Americans crying out for British blood and hundreds of pundits & politicians trying to figure out how to appease that.

 

[Sci]

I'd hate to see the impact of everyone turning in the Master all at once on the world economy. Hell, between that and the sorts of panic that would naturally result from Raxicoricalfalipatorian ships slamming into Big Ben while 10 Downing Street is destroyed, from Sycorax ships mind mojoing a third of the planet's population into trying to kill themselves, from global Cybus Cybermen invasions, from Racnoss attacks on the City of London, from the assassination of the United States President-elect on live television on the order of the British Prime Minister, from the Sontaran invasion attempt, from the global unrest that would almost certainly follow the 4-5-6 Crisis, and from the cities and militaries devastated by the Dalek Invasion, I'd frickin' hate to live in the RTD-era Whoniverse. The global economy's probably been screwed over since Series One!

As opposed to in the real world, where the global economy has really only been screwed over since Season 4.

Oh, I think that the effects of an instant worldwide Cyberman invasion alone would have been more than enough to plunge the global economy further into the tank than it ever did back in '08...

BTW, I suspect that Torchwood did a whole lot of retconning to erase the bit about Harold Saxon ordering the assassination of the U.S. President.

Granted that this is the Whoniverse and crazy things happen, but I just don't see that. We're talking about something that is quite literally impossible. The assassination happened on live television and was viewed in real time by hundreds of millions of people. There's just no way to give that many people the retcon drug.

No matter what was uncovered about Harold Saxon's background or motivations after the fact, that incident would have had an insanely deleterious effect on Anglo-American relations, instantaneously taking our countries from one of the closest relationships in the world to a level of hostilities our nations haven't felt towards each other since the War of 1812. Irrespective of any mitigating circumstances, you'd have millions of Americans crying out for British blood and hundreds of pundits & politicians trying to figure out how to appease that.

Maybe. Maybe not. I rather think that if it came out that same day that the Prime Minister had also assassinated his own Cabinet and then been himself assassinated by his wife, that may well go a long way towards easing tensions between the U.S. and U.K. Things would be strained, but I doubt it would set relations back quite as far as you seem to be arguing.

(Minor nitpick: Arthur Coleman Winters actually identifies himself as the President-elect of the United States, not the President. While it's probably RTD making an error, I choose to interpret that line as being literally accurate. To accommodate this, I conjecture that both the U.S. and U.K. had elections in November of 2008, with President-elect Winters successfully lobbying the outgoing President Bush to get the U.N. to appoint him as U.N. envoy to the Toclafane rather than Bush.

From Winters's assassination, I presume that his running mate, Senator John McCain, assumed the Presidency, and held office either until dying in the Dalek Invasion or until being impeached following the 4-5-6 Crisis, upon which time a young Congressman Barack Obama, who had previously gotten himself elected Speaker of the House subsequent to the Dalek Invasion, was thereby elevated to the Presidency in time for Christmas 2009 and the Master Race crisis. Just my little bit o' conjecture, that. )

 

[David cgc]

Well there is Melody Pond, but who knows when she was even born. Oh wait, AGMGTW, sometime around that time period.

Yeah. Apparently some time in the 52nd Century.

That'll play merry hell with her paperwork. Maybe it's a good thing she operated out of an age where time-travel was a thing.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

BTW, I suspect that Torchwood did a whole lot of retconning to erase the bit about Harold Saxon ordering the assassination of the U.S. President.

Granted that this is the Whoniverse and crazy things happen, but I just don't see that. We're talking about something that is quite literally impossible. The assassination happened on live television and was viewed in real time by hundreds of millions of people. There's just no way to give that many people the retcon drug.

I think it would be possible to slip retcon into enough of the water supply that most of the American public would be affected. Something that big would be impossible to cover-up completely, but it would probably be a good idea to at least grease things along by making memories of the event just hazy enough that it shifts from an international incident into a mere national tragedy.

The swift subsequent assassination of Mr. Saxon himself would also help.

(Minor nitpick: Arthur Coleman Winters actually identifies himself as the President-elect of the United States, not the President. While it's probably RTD making an error, I choose to interpret that line as being literally accurate. To accommodate this, I conjecture that both the U.S. and U.K. had elections in November of 2008, with President-elect Winters successfully lobbying the outgoing President Bush to get the U.N. to appoint him as U.N. envoy to the Toclafane rather than Bush.

From Winters's assassination, I presume that his running mate, Senator John McCain, assumed the Presidency, and held office either until dying in the Dalek Invasion or until being impeached following the 4-5-6 Crisis, upon which time a young Congressman Barack Obama, who had previously gotten himself elected Speaker of the House subsequent to the Dalek Invasion, was thereby elevated to the Presidency in time for Christmas 2009 and the Master Race crisis. Just my little bit o' conjecture, that. )

That seems a bit convoluted. Was President-elect Winters ever identified on screen as a Republican? Wouldn't it be more reasonable to assume that Winters was a Democrat and Obama was his running mate? (BTW, presumably Obama is still the president in 2012 when Henry Van Stanten says, "The President is ten points down. I want him replaced," in "Dalek.")

 

[Stevil2001]

Does retcon work that selectively, though? Doesn't it just erase you most recent memories? (The exact extent based on dosage, I assume.) By the time anyone could orchestrate simultaneously doping the entire American population... I mean come on, Torchwood can't even stop people in one city from knowing who they are.