Russell T. Davies Returns to Doctor Who as New Showrunner

[jaime]

Believe me, I've spent time figuring out how Patience fits into the Timeless Child backstory.

I keep going back to what I was thinking about yesterday -- that the TARDIS knows more about the Doctor in An Unearthly Child than the Doctor does -- and I had an interesting insight, which meshes quite well with the TARDIS's story in Time Lord Victorious.

What if, when the TARDIS reverted to the Police Box form and refused to change, she was trying to get the Doctor to remember who he was? She gets stuck as a Police Box, she kidnaps Ian and Barbara and doesn't take them home, and the Doctor, who had been a tourist, is forced by the TARDIS into situations where he has to be an actor in the events, until over a series of adventures -- The Sensorites is commonly cited as the point where the first Doctor really starts acting Doctor-ish -- really starts to act like the person the TARDIS remembers he had been.

In other words, the Police Box is the TARDIS staging an Intervention for the Doctor.

I was very fond of Patience. Though I loved Compassion, frankly. If the books had done this (and they did many similar things, like the whole Sabbath post-gallifrey arc… can you imagine if TVs post Gallifrey world had The Adventuress of Henrietta Street? Lol) they would have done it with style. And found a way to have their cake and eat it, probably by having the same cake exist in multiple planes of reality.

The TV show has borrowed concepts from the books, but *always* managed to make them fresh. Why they didn’t just go to the ‘nine gallifreys’ and similar for this, I will never know.

 

[matthunter]

I'd completely forgotten that line. Thanks for the reminder! I must be due a Pandorica/Big Bang rewatch.

No problem and apologies for the snarky "did you even watch it?" comment - I'd been doing a Blake's 7 rewatch and gotten stuck in Avon Mode.

 

[Starkers]

I think the trouble is that we have no evidence that the pre Hartnell Doctors were especially Doctorish, or even got the chance to be. Martin's Doctor, as far as we can tell, spent all her time either working for the Division or hiding from the Division, and there's no reason not to imagine the same was true of the other pre Hartnell Doctors. It's possible they managed to escape the Division's grasp for a time I suppose, and even working for the Division they might have had agency with regard to individual missions, but they sure as hell don't seem to have been roaming the universe battling injustice.

Don't get me wrong, there's potentially interesting stuff there, with the Doctor trying to do the right thing even while being sent on (possibly) villainous missions by the Division, but the Pre Hartnell Doctors are like the last season of The A-Team when they were working for Robert Vaughn, distinctly lacking in agency compared to the way the characters acted in the first four seasons.

And how did they get the name Doctor if they were, effectively, a prisoner coerced into going on missions? Was it supposed to be ironic?

As people have noted, the Tardis as a police box is a case of Chibnall taking that very literally, hence the policeman in ascension of the Cybermen/the Timeless Children. Which poses the question why is the Doctor the Doctor not the Copper

Post Hartnell there's something ironic about the Doctor's time machine being a police box, because the Doctor is the very antithesis of a police officer, the Doctor isn't an authority figure, they (usually) aren't working for the state, they're not interested in protecting the status quo etc.

This is why the Timeless Child doesn't bother me too much, because for me the Doctor is the person they became from Hartnell onwards, who they were before that doesn't matter unless you want it to.

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

Fan opinions mean nothing.

RTD and future Showrunners will do what they want to do, and the fandom can either accept those decisions or reject them.

Yeah, but a smart showrunner leans into giving the audience things they want and care about. I don't mean giving into to fan demands, I definitely don't mean paying attention to the loudest and most negative voices on social media, I mean understanding what makes the series work with people and adjusting their plans when they sense that elements aren't working.

Uh, the first example that jumps to mind is that a stand up comedian doesn't stick to their artistic vision when the crowd falls asleep doing their set, they use the feedback to decide what to rework, what to throw out, and what to keep. And then they get better, at least in the crowd's subjective opinion.

 

[DigificWriter]

Yeah, but a smart showrunner leans into giving the audience things they want and care about. I don't mean giving into to fan demands, I definitely don't mean paying attention to the loudest and most negative voices on social media, I mean understanding what makes the series work with people and adjusting their plans when they sense that elements aren't working.

Writers/showrunners might find a way to de-emphasize elements that audiences seem not to be responding to, but they'll also find a justification for doing so that isn't merely a response to fan reactions.

Television series rarely change direction solely because of fan opinions havinv the degree of influence that you want to assign.

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. I know a certain pair of characters in Lost got a lot less screentime than originally planned when audiences showed what they thought about them. Plus in Deep Space Nine the Bajoran aspects of the series started to get less focus as it was determined that audiences weren't all that interested.

 

[Turtletrekker]

Believe me, I've spent time figuring out how Patience fits into the Timeless Child backstory.

I keep going back to what I was thinking about yesterday -- that the TARDIS knows more about the Doctor in An Unearthly Child than the Doctor does -- and I had an interesting insight, which meshes quite well with the TARDIS's story in Time Lord Victorious.

What if, when the TARDIS reverted to the Police Box form and refused to change, she was trying to get the Doctor to remember who he was? She gets stuck as a Police Box, she kidnaps Ian and Barbara and doesn't take them home, and the Doctor, who had been a tourist, is forced by the TARDIS into situations where he has to be an actor in the events, until over a series of adventures -- The Sensorites is commonly cited as the point where the first Doctor really starts acting Doctor-ish -- really starts to act like the person the TARDIS remembers he had been.

In other words, the Police Box is the TARDIS staging an Intervention for the Doctor.

I really like this idea.

 

[David cgc]

I think Hartnell's life looks this this. The Time Lords wipe the mind and force regenerate the preceding incarnation back to an male infant. He's is raised by parents (Ulysses and Penelope?); perhaps Time Lord science even makes it possible for his mother (a human?) to give birth to this infant Doctor. As a child, he meets the child Master, looks into the Untempered Schism, attends the Academy, lives as a minor academic on Gallifrey, marries, has children, his children have children (Susan, definitely, but also John and Gillian?). As far as he's concerned, as far as everyone (except maybe some very senior Time Lords on a need-to-know basis), he's the first incarnation of the Time Lord. And one day, feeling a touch of wanderlust, he slips away from Gallifrey with his favorite grandchild in a stolen TARDIS that, even though he doesn't know it, is a TARDIS that was his friend and companion through many, many lifetimes.

This reminds me of the elaborate "Chewie and R2 are secret Rebel agents who used Han and Luke as their unknowing patsies" theory. I feel like it has the same issue with retconning the original work into something totally unrecognizable, a big weird metafictional misdirection from the real story which has nothing in common with it but the strictest reading of events and characters. I can think of some other times this has happened in canon (and innumerable fan-fics), but none where I particularly liked it.

 

[Mr Awe]

Of course she can still die. Even when the Doctor thought they were a regular Timelord there were circumstances where regeneration wouldn't be possible. Could the Doctor survive being at ground zero of a nuclear explosion for example? It's hard for every cell in your body to renew when every cell has been vaporised. I did once consider a horrific scenario where the Doctor has to walk out of some horribly irradiated zone and basically has to go through dozens of regenerations to do so!

And have we ever thought the Doctor could die? No exactly conducive to an ongoing series, so there's no less jeopardy than there ever was IMO.

Clearly the Doctor won't die in the TV series. However, the knowledge of not being able to die would change the character and her MO.

As for you other questions, we just don't know. It seems like Jack would be able to survive those types of events, so why not some unknown alien from another universe?

 

[Mr Awe]

I keep going back to what I was thinking about yesterday -- that the TARDIS knows more about the Doctor in An Unearthly Child than the Doctor does -- and I had an interesting insight, which meshes quite well with the TARDIS's story in Time Lord Victorious.

I could live with this explanation. It makes the best out of a bad situation. But it's a direction I wish the series wouldn't go in. Yeah, they can wallpaper over it like that. Or they could've just not gone there.

 

[Sketcher]

In many ways TTC hardly matters. The Doctor is aware that she exited before the Hartnell incarnation, but she has no real recollection of that time aside from the few pieces of information she's garnered. Her memory was wiped so as far as she ever knew she's 13th incarnation of the Doctor, that's her personality, she is the person she is now because of her lives Hartnell to Whittaker, sure maybe there's a little Martin in there now, but our Doctor is still pretty much the same person they ever were.

To piggyback off of this, and I'm not super familiar with the storylines, but is anything with the TC being ignored any different than what was/would've happened with the Cartmel Masterplan and the Other? It seems like that was just another story of the Doctor having another origin/life they don't remember, and doesn't really matter to who they are now.

 

[The Wormhole]

Plus in Deep Space Nine the Bajoran aspects of the series started to get less focus as it was determined that audiences weren't all that interested.

In that case it was more Paramount executives didn't like it, and claimed it wasn't a hit with the audiences accordingly.

 

[jaime]

To piggyback off of this, and I'm not super familiar with the storylines, but is anything with the TC being ignored any different than what was/would've happened with the Cartmel Masterplan and the Other? It seems like that was just another story of the Doctor having another origin/life they don't remember, and doesn't really matter to who they are now.

The get out clause for The Other is that the Doctor was still The Doctor. It was vague as to whether or not he was a reincarnation of The Other, or more of an heir, and he didn’t much like being either. It didn’t remove any agency (oh the irony) as such, and was pretty much left to a fair amount of interpretation as to whether it was even true. (As an aside, all the Pythia stuff and the Sisterhood stuff, and the sterile Gallifreyan stuff was magnificent world building, that has strongly bled into things people liked in the new series… without ever being name dropped or confirmed.)
The fact things complicate again in the later (BBC) books in terms of universes/continuity and the whole thing has this nice sense of being both apocryphal and not, all at once, even before the show came back.
As to ‘The Cartmel Masterplan’ in some ways it was only ever supposed to raise questions, then hint at possible answers, whilst not actually taking the mystery injected back out again by giving answers and making it a thing. Which could be either good or bad.

 

[Starkers]

Clearly the Doctor won't die in the TV series. However, the knowledge of not being able to die would change the character and her MO.

As for you other questions, we just don't know. It seems like Jack would be able to survive those types of events, so why not some unknown alien from another universe?

Even Jack eventually died though.

 

[Photoman15]

Believe me, I've spent time figuring out how Patience fits into the Timeless Child backstory.

I keep going back to what I was thinking about yesterday -- that the TARDIS knows more about the Doctor in An Unearthly Child than the Doctor does -- and I had an interesting insight, which meshes quite well with the TARDIS's story in Time Lord Victorious.

What if, when the TARDIS reverted to the Police Box form and refused to change, she was trying to get the Doctor to remember who he was? She gets stuck as a Police Box, she kidnaps Ian and Barbara and doesn't take them home, and the Doctor, who had been a tourist, is forced by the TARDIS into situations where he has to be an actor in the events, until over a series of adventures -- The Sensorites is commonly cited as the point where the first Doctor really starts acting Doctor-ish -- really starts to act like the person the TARDIS remembers he had been.

In other words, the Police Box is the TARDIS staging an Intervention for the Doctor.

And The Doctor (and Susan) just happen to first land in 1963 UK where that is the design of local Police Boxes of the time.
No....I don't buy this Fugitive Doctor as a predecessor of Hartnell. It's too convoluted to explain (though not as convoluted as some Moffatt stuff ).

 

[jaime]

Ultimately, like almost every other ‘event’ episode Chibnall did (and a fair few besides) it just repeated something else had already done, except without any of the reasons for why it worked when it was done first time. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that it is not even ‘almost’ but is in fact literally every arc point, every finale, every ‘shock’. I have just sat here thinking about it, and it’s really… disappointing.

Whatever RTD does (and I vastly preferred the Moffat years) it can really only be a step up. At this point I am just surprised there will even be any more Who, and am wondering really if I even care. And that’s rather sad.

 

[kirk55555]

I'm familiar with the idea of the Martin Doctor going between Troughton and Pertwee. When it was suggested at a convention before the pandemic (Farpoint 2020?), I said that it's basically taking fandom's old Season 6B idea, but instead of Troughton having those adventures, Martin does. (I'll leave others to work out the implications for The Two Doctors.)

The problem with this idea -- Troughton -> Martin -> Pertwee -- is that it doesn't fit with what we actually see on screen at any point -- not The Three Doctors, not Mawydrn Undead (which is the main argument against pre-Hartnell Doctors), not The Five Doctors, and not The Timeless Children.

Martin being a pre-Hartnell Doctor doesn't contort Doctor Who history. Martin going between Troughton and Pertwee does.

No, it doesn't contort history to put her there because season 6B still happens. Martin doesn't overwrite 6B, Troughton does 6B, grows older (as seen in his team up stories), and eventually regenerates into Martin Post-6B. Then, when Martin regenerates (probably caused by the timelords), her memories are erased/surpressed and she's left on Earth, with The Doctor thinking they just got to Earth because of the events of The War Games.

Also, There is no pre-Hartnell Doctor, Hartnell is THE First Doctor, at least before Chibnall shit all over the franchise. Outside of one stupid reference in Morbius that was literally ignored/retconned long before Classic Who even ended, and that moronic garbage Cartmel wanted to do but was never canon in any form, Hartnell was very much established as The First Doctor. Hell, last time we saw The First Doctor, in Twice Upon a Time, he refers to himself as (something along the lines of) THE Doctor, the genuine article of which (from his perspective) there was only one at the time.

Obviously Chibnall destroying the franchise with his shitty retcons can do anything, but up until Chibnall ruined Doctor Who The First Doctor was THE First Doctor.

 

[The Nth Doctor]

I'm continuously amused how some fans take some of this waaaayyyyy too seriously. Same complaining, different era. Only difference from now and all of the big changes during the classic series is how the Internet makes that complaining more noticeable.

 

[Starkers]

^ I mean, God the BBC got so many complaints about Troughton and you can just imagine if the internet had been around in 1970...

"By producing Doctor Who in colour, Barry Letts has ruined the show!!

 

[jaime]

If people, fans, did not take it at least a little bit seriously, do you think there would even be a program to discuss after nearly sixty years? (Not to mention, we are on a forum for fans of another thing people took seriously enough that it is still going after nearly as long.)

I think that whilst a thing should not necessarily be made only to please the fans, my general observation after paying attention to various things over the years, would be that avoiding displeasing them, without a good purpose, is a good idea. That and if you can’t learn from your own mistakes, at least learn from other peoples, rather than attempting to ape their successes.