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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

99 Comments

  1. Stuart Ian Burns
    February 11, 2013 @ 12:44 am

    Of course then there's Lance and Lars's approach to all this in AHistory which proposes essentially that both this and the tv series's time war are the same thing from different points of view and the Grandfather Paradox is the figure who regenerates into the Ninth Doctor.

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  2. elvwood
    February 11, 2013 @ 12:55 am

    Nice. I bought The Ancestor Cell in 2006 when I was just getting into the novels, because it had BIG! EPIC! EVENTS! and it sounded like a good idea. I then read it, concluded it wasn't really such a good idea after all, and sold it again. It was the start of me developing some sense of what I did actually like (and dislike) in my textual Who, so I guess I can be grateful to it for that.

    I always smile at Lance Parkin's twisted attempt in AHistory 2.0 to make it fit in with the Time War of the new series: it was Grandfather Paradox who regenerated into Christopher Eccleston. Which fits with the "I watched it happen – I made it happen – I tried to stop it" line. Bonkers, of course, but wonderfully creative, and better than having two almost-identical Time Wars. But I prefer the "alternate timelines" theory anyway.

    Hmm. Here already. I was hoping to read Father Time before your review, but seeing as I haven't started it yet it seems unlikely now!

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  3. Nick Smale
    February 11, 2013 @ 12:59 am

    Heck, the fact that the Eighth Doctor was in some fashion involved in a big reality-breaking Time War that destroyed Gallifrey is one of the cornerstones of the new series.

    Actually, I don't think the new series ever definitively says which Doctor was involved in the Time War. I tend to think it was the ninth…

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  4. Kit
    February 11, 2013 @ 1:56 am

    The new series deliberately implies, at least, that the Ninth hasn't had time to look in a mirror at any point between regeneration and the beginning of "Rose."

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  5. Nick Smale
    February 11, 2013 @ 3:09 am

    But "Rose" also deliberately implies that the Ninth Doctor has had many previous adventures – the whole strand of the episode about Clive and his conspiracy archive exists to establish this. Specifically, we're shown that the ninth Doctor was present at JFK's assassination and the launch of the Titanic.

    I think the remark about the size of his ears the Doctor makes in Rose's flat has to be read in the light of this. It's RTD's way of hinting that the Doctor has had different faces in the past (something, let's not forget, which would be news to the fresh audience "Rose" brought to Dr Who) not specifically that this particular face is new.

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  6. Ross
    February 11, 2013 @ 3:20 am

    @Kit: But it does it in a sufficiently roundabout way as to deliberately leave it open to interpretation. (And the fact that Rose isn't in any of Clive's pictures seems a deliberate move to implicate that all those adventures are pre-'Rose')

    I'm starting to understand now that one of the things that always made me uncomfortable during the Wilderness Years is the way they tried to make the Doctor Who universe "small". They claimed otherwise, but, and once again, I'm probably interpolating a lot from having spent time in rec.arts.drwho, there always seemed to be a feeling that the Doctor Who universe was getting "full" and that there was a need to jettison things "so we can get back to having good old-fashioned adventures".

    That's at the core of a lot of things that bug me during the Virgin era and ZOMG especially during the BBC Books era. It seems like whenever some thread or concept or line wasn't going to pay off, they felt that it wasn't good enough to just move on and do something else, they had to instead bring the narrative to a crashing halt, nuke it from orbit, salt the earth, and preferably cause a temporal paradox to make sure it never happened in the first place. Like everyone was spending sleepless nights clutching sweat-soaked blankets in abject fear of the wrong sorts of things getting into their precious canon. (I'll go back to the TVM here just for a second to recall that one of the actual complaints I heard was "The worst thing about this is that it counts. If it were just an NA or a comic or something and wasn't really properly canon, it would just be an interesting non-canonical idea, but this counts and thereby ruins Doctor Who FOREVER!!11ELEVENTY!!"). Gallifrey and the War don't seem to be going anywhere useful. That's okay, it's a big universe. Stars can be cold. Just go somewhere else and stop paying attention to it. But no, they say, the universe isn't big enough for our continuing storyline AND Gallifrey and the War, so we need to nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

    The thing — and I didn't realize this until decades later — that had always drawn me to Doctor Who as a child was how big the Doctor Who universe was. It's a place (and this bit I really only appreciated once I started reading this blog) where literally anything can happen. And in more than 25 years of it happening, I can pretty much count the times that the details of past things which were in the canon actually mattered on my fingers. It was a big enough universe that if something didn't seem to be panning out, you could always just walk away.

    That sense just isn't there for me with the stuff that came out of the Wilderness Years. The Wilderness Years seem to be the result of people who were living in desperate fear of running out of Universe in which to set Doctor Who.

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  7. Stephen Jeffers
    February 11, 2013 @ 4:20 am

    'To take it away and give it to someone else'

    Steve Cole was the editor of the range, it's not 'taken away', what we see is the guy who's in charge share his vision, and the result is a terrible book that clearly hates the Cole era.

    That his books are terrible and clearly don't understand the appeal or audience of the range points to the real problem, I think. As does the fact that the moment his baleful influence is lifted the books suddenly get a lot better.

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  8. Stephen Jeffers
    February 11, 2013 @ 4:37 am

    I don't think Steve Cole understood that the EDAs were a range – he clearly wanted a set of bland standalones for 'general readers' … what the NSAs are, now. But it's not what the audience was in the nineties: everyone read them, every month, they discussed them online, they knew which authors hated which other authors, they knew the continuity stuff backwards and forwards.

    So the readers jumped onto the Lawrence Miles stuff because it was actually suggesting that reading all the books would build up to create a bigger narrative. If the books are not sequential, they are inconsequential.

    And the other authors picked up on it for the same sort of reasons. But things like a War where the Doctor died in the first battle and Compassion were just stupid ideas, and things like Faction Paradox and other-Sam were not actually all that strong, either. The Enemy was probably too clever an idea to be functional in a running series.

    And you have an editor who doesn't seem to know any of that, or to have any great insight into what the bottles or Faction Paradox or whatever are, and whose grand vision for Grandfather Paradox is to make him the Valeyard.

    Steve Cole was clearly of the DWM party, the people who didn't like big words, kissing and new things in Doctor Who. The side who lost the war in 2005, but who spent the nineties opposed to the novels, even though they never read them. His encouraging of Miles, at times, does feel like Jack Donaghy trying to tank NBC.

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  9. jane
    February 11, 2013 @ 4:44 am

    Judging by Nine's checking out his daft ears in the mirror in Rose, I've assumed he's recently regenerated. My head canon says he regenerated after "pushing the button."

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  10. jane
    February 11, 2013 @ 4:45 am

    And this is what I get replying before reading the rest of the comments. Phil, you can nuke these both, Time War style!

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  11. sorrywehurtyourfield
    February 11, 2013 @ 4:46 am

    I would love to read a behind-the-scenes account of the EDAs, an era which seems every bit as bizarre and baffling as the mid-1980s on television. Lawrence Miles undergoes such a strange trajectory; in 1999 he's the toast of the town, writing what was clearly the "event" book(s) of the year, with more established names like Orman and Cornell playing along with his concepts. Then by mid-2000 relations seem to have broken down so utterly that they perform this dramatic purge on all in concepts. (So was this the result of one of his controversial interviews? I thought that he didn't take to doing those until after Ancestor Cell was published.)

    But weirder still, in late 2001 he's back with another "event" novel, introducing another Miles character who dominates much of the remaining range. I mean, what happened? Did they change their minds and decide the range couldn't function without his ideas after all?

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  12. Nick Smale
    February 11, 2013 @ 4:50 am

    Was Cole still the editor? I was under the impression that Justin Richards had taken over by this point – Ancestor Cell was him commissioning Cole to tie up the plotlines from his era, before Richards kicked off his own era the following month with "The Burning"…

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  13. sorrywehurtyourfield
    February 11, 2013 @ 4:56 am

    I could be misremembering here, but I thought that by the time of The Ancestor Cell Justin Richards had taken over as editor and it was he who instigated the purge. So what Cole oversaw was essentially the relatively forgettable standalones of 1998 then the ramping up of Miles' ideas in 1999, suggesting he was open to something more ambitious but seemingly lacking much ambility to coordinate it. Then I thought it was Richards who decided to drop everything and thereby return to a more standalone format, with Cole brought back for this novel to close off his "era". I could be utterly wrong about that though, it's been a long time.

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  14. jane
    February 11, 2013 @ 5:02 am

    @Kit: "The new series deliberately implies, at least, that the Ninth hasn't had time to look in a mirror at any point between regeneration and the beginning of Rose"

    @Nick: "But Rose also deliberately implies that the Ninth Doctor has had many previous adventures – the whole strand of the episode about Clive and his conspiracy archive exists to establish this."

    Aack! I have new head canon.

    Looking into the mirror is very symbolic in the Revival, which is all about the exploration of Identity. It's entirely possible Nine had many adventures before "looking in the mirror" because the last thing he wants to do after the Time War is to confront himself and what he's done. He's become a loner, a "generic Doctor" without a Companion.

    But meeting Rose is his turning point — it "reverses his polarity" and makes him specific, because now he has a relationship. An appropriate relationship, too: as a Doctor with a "Northern" accent, he comes into focus by having a Companion from the council estates.

    BTW, does anything one else get the impression that Clive stands for a particular type of Doctor Who fan — specifically an anorak-type obsessed with "darkness" — and that his pathetic death (destroyed by consumerism) is a meta-statement on the part of Davies? 'Cause I do!

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  15. jane
    February 11, 2013 @ 5:08 am

    @Ross: "It was a big enough universe that if something didn't seem to be panning out, you could always just walk away."

    The problem isn't the "stuff" in the Universe that's problematic, but the memories of the characters, because big traumatic memories play such a huge role in shaping character motivation. And at this point, it's clear that hitting the reset button on the characters for every story — not unlike most of the post-Lambert series — is equally problematic.

    It actually makes a good deal of sense to me that the 8th gets amnesia from the Time War, given that he's got to deal with the fallout of that event if you don't. And, obviously, we eventually get to a point where dealing with that trauma is exactly the right way to go.

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  16. Stephen Jeffers
    February 11, 2013 @ 5:37 am

    Justin Richards commissioned him, but it's Steve Cole (and Peter Angelhides') book. I don't think the brief was 'pretend to lack understanding of the ongoing plotlines'.

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  17. Stephen Jeffers
    February 11, 2013 @ 5:42 am

    Richards commissioned Cole to wrap up the storylines of the Cole period. Anyone who asserts that the author of The Ancestor Cell just didn't get what went before has to accept that its (co) author edited what went before.

    Yes, it's a very obvious, mandated clearing of the decks. But it's a job given to the guy who'd been arranging the decks for the previous few years.

    And the Richards stuff isn't standalone – you have a series of mini-series, basically.

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  18. Andrew Hickey
    February 11, 2013 @ 6:08 am

    I just want to say here that for me, the single best interpretation of all this (and one that chimes a lot with what Phil says here) is by Richard Flowers and Alex Wilcock, in their essay A Fractal History Of The Time War, which can be read in http://olsenbloom.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/pep.pdf (a zine I edited three years ago), from page 28 on. I honestly think it's essential reading for any Who fan.

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  19. Stephen Jeffers
    February 11, 2013 @ 6:14 am

    And, yes, it was presumably Richards' idea to wrap everything up in one book, but this wasn't the first time a series has had to wrap up sooner than planned … and the problem with The Ancestor Cell is not that it's so crammed with awesome there just isn't room to do it all justice.

    If they'd commissioned Miles to do it, I'm guessing it would have been a better book, or at least a far more interesting one.

    I think what it demonstrates, though, is that Cole – who was running the series – just had no clue about where the series was going, plans for big revelations ahead or anything like that.

    The problems with the range under Cole can be split up – Miles and his unworkable, bad but fascinating ideas; the good authors who played along with Miles; the bland authors who churned out filler. But the overall lack of purpose and direction for the range … that's the editor's fault, surely?

    This is a guy who turned down a Lance Parkin Dalek book that Parkin was willing to write for free in order to give the slot to himself to write Parallel 59.

    I can sum this up very easily: the guy who wrote The Ancestor Cell thought The Ancestor Cell was an All Good Things / Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow style finale of the EDAs up to that point.

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  20. Elizabeth Sandifer
    February 11, 2013 @ 6:21 am

    Cole has said the following in an interview:

    " think it's great. When I asked Justin to take over I did so knowing he would have lots of good ideas about what to do with it. He was really the only choice for the new editor, and it was always taken as read that big changes were going to happen in the range – there should always be something big coming up, it's what you build up to, what keeps a dynamic going across several books. I wanted to round off my time on the range with the book that became The Ancestor Cell that would tie up a lot of loose ends… we'd built everything up, now it was time to knock it back down and start growing something new. With the past brushed away in suitably apocalyptic fashion, I think it's great that Justin's opted to go 'back to basics'… certainly it left me free to tell a story in Vanishing Point which was about characters rather than continuity, which I was really pleased about."

    So while I don't know where the precise Cole/Richards handover point was, it's clear that The Ancestor Cell was the intended finale of Cole's run designed to set things up for Richards and what Richards wanted to do.

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  21. Elizabeth Sandifer
    February 11, 2013 @ 6:23 am

    If I ever want to talk about Doctor Who again once I've finished this project, a proper history (as opposed to a critical history) of the Wilderness Years in general is the project most likely to tempt me back, so to speak.

    Assuming I haven't infuriated and alienated all possible interview subjects with my blog by then.

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  22. Adam Riggio
    February 11, 2013 @ 6:53 am

    It makes me wonder: When you finish the thorough and horrifyingly detailed TARDIS Eruditorum project, will you ever be able to be a fan again? And just enjoy Doctor Who?

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  23. jane
    February 11, 2013 @ 6:54 am

    That was quite tasty.

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  24. Stephen Jeffers
    February 11, 2013 @ 7:01 am

    Yeah. My understanding is that The Ancestor Cell was the first book commissioned and edited by Richards, and he commissioned Cole, briefing him to wrap everything up (and presumably to blow up Gallifrey and set up the Earth arc).

    So it's a 'Richards edited book', not a 'Cole edited book'. It's not the ending Cole would have done, left to his own devices. But it's also clearly the last Cole era book which ends with the clean break. Cole was commissioned to round off the Cole era. Wrapping everything up in one book is editorial fiat, and Richards was the editor, but Cole's picked because he is, theoretically anyway, eminently suitable. He's not some outsider or hired hand.

    The Ancestor Cell's main crime is that it's badly written. The 'flashback' to The Ancestor Cell in The Gallifrey Chronicles (also a book written in a hurry to wrap things up by editorial fiat) that changes nothing at all except all the words is just a masterclass in how you can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear after all.

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  25. Elizabeth Sandifer
    February 11, 2013 @ 7:09 am

    Well, I squealed with joy at bits of The Snowmen, so thus far I'm still doing OK.

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  26. Elizabeth Sandifer
    February 11, 2013 @ 7:10 am

    You linked this once, well over a year ago, and I made a note to read it before writing this entry. Then I forgot to. It's pleasantly comforting to know that it largely wouldn't have impacted my handling of this entry at all. (Though obviously we're not done with the Time War by a mile.)

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  27. ir3actions
    February 11, 2013 @ 7:17 am

    It's entirely possible that Nine had recently gotten a haircut that exposed his ears. Some of the images we see of Nine in his Rose-less adventures show him with Eccleston's full head of hair.

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  28. ir3actions
    February 11, 2013 @ 7:29 am

    I don't think there's any great mystery to Lawrence Miles' return to the range. Lawrence was running low on money. He was prepared to accept this. However, some very exciting Lego sets were being released. Wanting to buy them, he pitched a book to Justin Richards.

    Richards, being an absolute professional who judged authors' material by the quality and not the author's personality, liked Miles' material. Miles proceeded to write the book. At no point during Miles' proposal did Miles mention that the book was written as a historical document centuries after the events it described, or that the Doctor would get married, or that the Doctor's second heart would be removed. Miles checked with Richards about removing the Doctor's second heart and Richards gave his permission. The book was submitted. It was not what Miles had proposed. But Richards accepted it anyway and asked to continue using the character of Sabbath as he found him very intriguing. Miles agreed and proceeded to complain that every subsequent writer mis-handled Sabbath. Sabbath was supposed to be the one who understood how the post-Time Lords universe worked, according to Miles, while the Doctor was clueless and incapable. But instead, the writers made Sabbath dangerous and destructive and made the Doctor the hero of his own series (shame on them, eh?).

    Miles claims to have been banned from the books since then, not by Richards, but by Steven Moffat. I think it's more likely that BBC publishing isn't eager to hire someone who posts personal attacks towards the current producer of a science fiction franchise that's been very successful for the BBC.

    Justin Richards would later comment (off the record) that he thought Lawrence Miles was a very talented writer who seemed totally uninterested in writing DOCTOR WHO novels and instead wanted to write his own characters and concepts without the Doctor at all.

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  29. Nick Smale
    February 11, 2013 @ 7:34 am

    It's entirely possible that Nine had recently gotten a haircut that exposed his ears.

    I think this is my favourite theory. I often remark on the size of my ears after they've been revealed by a haircut, even though it's been ages since my last regeneration.

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  30. ir3actions
    February 11, 2013 @ 7:35 am

    I don't know if it's true that Stephen Cole didn't understand Lawrence Miles' material. It seems more likely to me that he didn't have a lot of time or space to resolve all of Miles' material. He chose the best solutions he could come up with in the time that they had, and because of the rush and the need to wrap everything up in one book, he wasn't able to create resolutions that matched Miles' material.

    THE GALLIFREY CHRONICLES does indeed have a fabulous rewrite of the Doctor/Grandfather Paradox confrontation. Would that Lance Parkin had given THE ANCESTOR CELL a revising pass, eh?

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  31. ir3actions
    February 11, 2013 @ 7:46 am

    In "Rose," the Doctor leaves Rose briefly in the TARDIS. Then he returns. Any number of adventures could have taken place during that gap, including every adventure that Clive documented and shared with Rose.

    I don't think there's any firm answer and it's at the discretion of the individual viewer.

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  32. T. Hartwell
    February 11, 2013 @ 7:47 am

    I prefer Jane's theory, but isn't it also possibly (albeit unlikely) that all the events Clive documents happens after the Doctor visits Rose's flat? As in, he visits, then hops off in the TARDIS and does all these crazy adventures, and then pops back to get rid of the Nestene?

    Mind you, that does leave the question of why the heck the Doctor would interrupt fighting the Nestene to go back in time and signal Rose with all these adventures, but then I guess nothing's perfect.

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  33. Steven Clubb
    February 11, 2013 @ 7:47 am

    I think the problem is all the Big Events had the effect of making the Doctor Who Universe smaller. Before, the Doctor is a drop of water in a universe of infinite possibilities. The attempt by fans to make the universe more coherent (with big status quo shattering events) end up making his world seem so much smaller and familiar.

    It used to be every time they showed us a future of Earth, it was different from what was shown before. Then after a while, you're just waiting for the Adjudicators to show up.

    It was a sad day when the Doctor started giving his companions lessons about former companions… on the off chance that being able to identify Jo Grant could earn you points with a planet's rebels. Or when Benny is telling everyone in a three mile radius about the Doctor's history with the Master, because he can't be arsed to do the necessary exposition anymore.

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  34. T. Hartwell
    February 11, 2013 @ 7:49 am

    Dammit, I was typing my comment and then ir3actions snuck in with the same theory. Ah, well.

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  35. Wm Keith
    February 11, 2013 @ 7:56 am

    A wonderful theory. One can surmise that the Doctor had been for a haircut in Hendricks'.

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  36. jane
    February 11, 2013 @ 8:05 am

    The whole bit with the Russian Nesting Dolls theory of the polycosm is my favorite bit: Time is layered, with previous iterations buried beneath the current one. This is why River Song is an archeologist.

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  37. Ross
    February 11, 2013 @ 8:06 am

    Yeah, I think that introduces a big load of "But why?" for no better reason than to justify the desire for the earlier scene to be shortly post-regeneration, which in and of itself doesn't actually have any advantage for the series. Why would the Doctor pop off in the middle of saving the earth to have a bunch of other adventures? Especially this Doctor, who isn't Tom Baker-in-Robot or Matt Smith who can't stand to sit still for a ten-count, but who's instead a much grimmer, darker sort of guy who, just for example, explicitly points out to Rose that you can't just go popping off to cheat once you're part of local events.

    Just doesn't work for me, not with this Doctor especially.

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  38. EarBucket
    February 11, 2013 @ 8:20 am

    He also dematerializes briefly at the end before returning to tell Rose that the TARDIS is also a time machine. One fan theory I've seen suggests that he has a bunch of adventures in between those two moments.

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  39. Steven Clubb
    February 11, 2013 @ 8:22 am

    "he clearly wanted a set of bland standalones for 'general readers'" — sorrywehurtyourfield

    I doubt "bland" was part of the mandate, but Doctor Who is largely a series of stand-alone parts, even the New Adventures which usually only shared a Continuity rather than actively built upon itself. Most attempts to do that usually ended up with middle parts tossing in a handful of references in the hopes that it served the over-all plot that few cared overly much about.

    Even with today's show with a fairly strong series-long arc, they minimize as much as possible the walking into the middle of a movie problem by mostly serving up stand-alone stories.

    The problem ends up being how to make that interesting and the big problem with the EDAs is they didn't have a familiar Doctor to use as a foundation.

    And I think that's probably a large part of the reason why ended relying on status quo shake-ups, something which has been few and far between up until then. Going big with a Time War is practically a Hail Mary, because if that fails, then there's no way they can go bigger.

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  40. Ununnilium
    February 11, 2013 @ 8:27 am

    "It was a sad day when the Doctor started giving his companions lessons about former companions… on the off chance that being able to identify Jo Grant could earn you points with a planet's rebels."

    See, this seems perfectly charming to me, and one of the reasons why you'd want to be consistent about these things.

    That said, I very much support being able to walk away from a bad idea.

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  41. Matthew Celestis
    February 11, 2013 @ 8:34 am

    Which raises the question of what happens to the main timeline 8th Doctor if he does not become the 9th Doctor. Presumably, he regenerates into the Shalka Doctor.

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  42. ir3actions
    February 11, 2013 @ 8:38 am

    I don't think there is any doubt that the authorial intent for "Rose" is that the Doctor recently regenerated. It's just that there's sufficient ambiguity for fans to be open to the idea that this isn't necessarily the case. Each individual fan can decide for themselves.

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  43. Steven Clubb
    February 11, 2013 @ 8:40 am

    The problem I see creeping into the show in the 80s is that the lore was becoming cumulative, rather than just odd peeks behind the curtain which may or may not contradict previous peeks behind the curtain. The Brains of Morbius puts forth the intriguing idea that Hartnell was not the first Doctor, which totally didn't gel with anything else and ended up being a bit of trivia for Who fans.

    Then after a while it seems like they can't go three stories without someone mentioning the 12 Regeneration Rule and how many lives the Doctor has left. The McGann movie even opens with a recitation of the basic lore… which has absolutely nothing to do with anything in the movie, but by then they were in such a habit of explaining it all (even in the New Adventures) that the Doctor would have seem naked without it, I guess.

    But I do think this kind of thing makes the show seem smaller, which is pretty much the thinking behind the Cartmel Masterplan in which they remind the audience at least once a year that the Doctor has some major secret that they're totally not telling us.

    One of the things that strikes me about the New Adventures (and to a lesser extent, the EDAs) is how un-Doctorish it all is with the Doctor being a pretty massive chatty Cathy about stuff he was pretty tight-lipped about for ages. The Doctor putting his companions on a need-to-know basis in the new series feels so much more Who to me.

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  44. elvwood
    February 11, 2013 @ 8:45 am

    @EarBucket: Yeah, that's the version I've heard. He shrugs his shoulders, thinks bitterly "oh well, I didn't want company anyway", goes off and has a bunch of adventures (usually related to murder and disaster), before realising he really does want Rose to travel with him and can have another go at changing her mind. And he's not interrupting an attack on Earth to do so.

    If you insist on him being newly regenerated in the 'ears' scene, this is the best place to put all those trips IMO.

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  45. elvwood
    February 11, 2013 @ 8:47 am

    Ha ha! Love it!

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  46. Archeology of the Future
    February 11, 2013 @ 8:49 am

    'The Doctor Who universe is big / The Doctor Who universe is small' dilemma creates a honking great problem for telling
    Doctor Who stories. If the universe is small, it becomes impossible for The Doctor to avoid evidence of his own future actions as he is effectively written through history like words in a stick of seaside rock.

    That's why epic and Doctor Who aren't an amazingly good mixture. Events need to shake individual characters and end their worlds, rather than events shaking the lives of countless billions we never see. If the event is too big, then The Doctor will know about it. The seventh Doctor was an answer to this problem in that he did know about it. That was the point. He knew what none of the other characters (and us) knew: what was going to happen.

    That's why The Eight Doctor has to keep losing his memory.

    Or, in the case of Miles ideas, why the Doctor had to be introduced to a series of ideas that were effectively 'from beyond'.

    In a funny way, I think Steven Moffat is really, concerned about issues like this. He seems to be on a mission to 'fix' the logical inconsistency of the Doctor Who universe. He's obviously trying to return to a universe that is massive and where everything is possible, but is battling his own instinct to create a universe which is small and where The Doctor has about ten friends, all of them at the end of the phone.

    He's so concerned by this that he's a)rebooted the universe and b)had the Doctor try to erase himself from history.

    I actually get the feeling sometimes that Moffat's worldweary Doctor knows that Moffat is coming to the limits of his ability to tell new stories about him. He's tired because he's been pushed through a process of tryin to openb up new storytelling possibilities but which as painted him into a corner. The Doctor wants out because the mechanics by which his story happens are becoming entropic.

    How does the Doctor's story escape entropy? You can change the Doctor, change his universe or change the mechanics by which his stories are created.

    But is that enough?

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  47. Ross
    February 11, 2013 @ 9:06 am

    There's also a certain amount of wiggle room on what "recently" means in this context. Can you really say "The Doctor hasn't seen himself in a mirror yet therefore he regenerated as a result of ending the time war and came straight here?" as opposed to "The Doctor regenerated in the middle of the time war and is only just now looking at himself in a mirror because he's been busy with that whole 'time war' thing"

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  48. David Anderson
    February 11, 2013 @ 9:38 am

    I've just read Father Time, and I liked it. (More than I liked The Dying Days.)
    I'm not sure what the status of Phil's account is, whether we're charting things as they happened or looking back with hindsight. Because with hindsight, going by Sullivan's rankings, the next ten books are going to contain some of the highlights of Doctor Who in novel form.
    Certainly there's a crash in the number of votes, so it could be that only the relatively undiscriminating were still voting. But comparing Seeing I and Year of Intelligent Tigers as a control case, I'd say that's not so.

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  49. T. Hartwell
    February 11, 2013 @ 10:09 am

    Of course, in the end Davies probably put it in there merely to hint at the notion of regeneration and make the Doctor more strange and unusual off the bat (which is I think the point of that entire scene).

    Certainly when I first watched it (being my first experience with the show, and only vaguely familiar with the idea of regeneration) I had just assumed he had regenerated because of the explosion in the first scene and happened to have the same face or something. Obviously that doesn't make sense with the actual idea of regeneration, but I think that's the purpose of the remark- to not be logical or make much sense. Because the Doctor at this point is weird and alien, and makes absolutely no sense at all.

    Reply

  50. Sean Daugherty
    February 11, 2013 @ 10:19 am

    Strangely, I never interpreted the mirror scene in Rose to suggest a recent regeneration. I figured it was just supposed to represent a quirk of the ninth Doctor's characterization.

    I was really surprised when it became clear that "recent regeneration" was the accepted interpretation of that scene among fandom. I mean, I can see it, I suppose, but it still strikes me as a very vague suggestion at best. For a fandom that's more than happy to hand wave The Brain of Morbius, it's surreal that so many people are fixated on this particular reading.

    Reply

  51. Daibhid C
    February 11, 2013 @ 10:43 am

    No, in the AHistory theory there is only one timeline, in which the Eighth Doctor is present at the destruction of Gallifrey trying to stop Grandfather Paradox, then goes on to become Grandfather Paradox, and is present at the destruction of Gallifrey where he regenerates into the Ninth Doctor.

    Odly, this interpretation seems to completely contradict Lance's quite clever reinterpretation of Grandfather Paradox in The Gallifrey Chronicles, which AHistory had just referenced two pages earler in the entry on The Ancestor Cell.

    Reply

  52. Daibhid C
    February 11, 2013 @ 10:58 am

    And with several lines, most notably the Eighth Doctor Adventures, making rather massive changes like “oh we nuked Gallifrey so that it never existed in the first place,”

    From what I remember at the time, I think that should read "…so that maybe it never existed in the first place. It's up to you; do you want it to never have existed in the first place? Whether it did or not isn't really relevent to the story we're telling, so it's a matter of interpretation."

    This, of course, didn't work for a number of reasons, but I'm pretty sure it was the intention.

    Reply

  53. jane
    February 11, 2013 @ 10:59 am

    Part of why the mirror scene has such strong regeneration connotations has to do with the role of mirrors in the Classic series — and specifically, how the 4th Doctor uses the mirror to comment on his new appearance in Robot.

    "Well, nothing's perfect. Have to take the rough with the smooth. Mind you, I think the nose is a definite improvement. As for the ears, well, I'm not too sure. Tell me quite frankly, what do you say to the ears?"

    Reply

  54. J Mairs
    February 11, 2013 @ 2:05 pm

    What's more interesting than the fact that the Eighth Doctor keeps losing his memory is the fact that his series…es mirror him a lot in the sense that they seem to get easily distracted and never finish properly.

    Second War in Heaven? Let's get rid of that. And finish the entire run on a cliffhanger with the Doctor jumping into a volcano of carnivorous flies!

    Trapped in a Divergent Universe? Quick! It's coming back on TV – ABORT ABORT!

    Traveling with a fish-person for a companion? No reason not to leave that hanging!

    And then there's the fact that Big Finish are never really going to be able to end the Eighth Doctor's story…

    On the other hand, I'm on board with the "There was only one Time War" hypothesis. They're both enjoyable in their own merits and it undermines everything and everyone if the same bloke is responsible for blowing up his home planet twice in rapid succession.

    That said, I've decided the sequence of events should be Last Great Time War -> Destruction of Gallifrey -> Second War in Heaven. "The Moment" (which is now suddenly referenced in the title for this post) is the fact of Gallifrey's destruction, weaponised by the Doctor from his biodata. He'd already lived that Moment hence why everyone wanted wanted his corpse… And another mystery is solved.

    Also, The Daleks are clearly the Divergence. And I won't expand on that until April 1st. 🙂

    Reply

  55. Scott
    February 11, 2013 @ 2:33 pm

    Something else that also struck me about The Ancestor Cell — if memory serves, at the time it was also supposed to deal with the thorny issue of Doctor Who continuity by essentially wiping it all away (through destroying Gallifrey and wiping the Doctor's memory) and effectively suggesting/admitting that the continuity of the series had just become too top-heavy and to effectively run the series you'd need to do a full reboot and start all over.

    How valid this idea was at the time is up for debate (on the surface at least, the new series arguably more or less blew it out of the water by managing to be hugely successful and popular while still clearly being a continuation of the old series, although it's not entirely free of a tendency to reboot either — the Time War, of course, being the most prominent example) but BBC Books arguably cacked this up a bit as well, since in practice they didn't really get rid of continuity at all — they just turned it into a massive elephant in the room that they were determined to ignore despite all the people constantly pointing it out to them, since the question that everyone naturally asked was "So when's the Doctor going to get his memories back then?"

    Reply

  56. Ross
    February 11, 2013 @ 4:49 pm

    Oh. And one other thing. Having never actually read this book, I'm curious: is that thing on the cover a flower made out of petrified tongues?

    Reply

  57. Ununnilium
    February 11, 2013 @ 7:01 pm

    "That said, I've decided the sequence of events should be Last Great Time War -> Destruction of Gallifrey -> Second War in Heaven. "The Moment" (which is now suddenly referenced in the title for this post) is the fact of Gallifrey's destruction, weaponised by the Doctor from his biodata. He'd already lived that Moment hence why everyone wanted wanted his corpse…"

    Yes. I love this idea and I'm stealing it forever.

    Reply

  58. Ununnilium
    February 11, 2013 @ 7:04 pm

    So basically a House of M approach to "fixing" an aspect of the setting, making a change that doesn't work as an ongoing status quo because it's presented on the same level as the changes the heroes normally undo.

    Reply

  59. Scott
    February 11, 2013 @ 8:35 pm

    RE: Miles not being invited back to the Doctor Who line, it's also perhaps likely that the publishers of a range of shared universe novels are a bit hesitant about publishing the work of someone who, while he undeniably has fantastic ideas, has a history of complaining loudly whenever his ideas get shared and used by anyone else in a manner he doesn't seem to be 100% in favour of.

    It's often been said that Lawrence Miles is a Doctor Who writer who doesn't seem to want to write Doctor Who at all, and while there's something to that, I'd argue that he's also the kind of writer who just doesn't really prosper in a shared universe. Granted, we can all get protective of our particular babies, but the very nature of working in a shared universe means that you ultimately have to be willing to cut them loose and let others play with them come what may, and Miles just doesn't seem willing to do that. He's not really a team player, and he ultimately wants to control everything that happens to his ideas. Not that that's a bad thing, of course, but it does mean that he's never really going to fit into a shared universe like Doctor Who writing kind of demands you to.

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  60. Scott
    February 11, 2013 @ 10:15 pm

    While I fully agree with the 'keep getting distracted and / or leaving things hanging' point, to be fair the arrival of the new series kind of threw everyone a bit of a curveball. IIRC the comic strip at least was planning to resolve the whole 'fish-person' thing by having Destrii travel with the Ninth Doctor for a few issues at least, but it was nixed when Russell T Davies — who it perhaps should be noted was otherwise perfectly happy for the comics to start using the Ninth Doctor to the point of allowing them to officially show the regeneration — nixed the idea of the Ninth Doctor travelling with anyone before he met Rose.

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  61. Scott
    February 11, 2013 @ 10:24 pm

    That's pretty much it, yes.

    Which in hindsight makes it a bit amusing how irritated BBC Books would get with everyone wanting to know when the Doctor would get his memories back and insisting it was permanent now, since it's almost like they essentially tried to do the exact opposite with the Amnesia arc of what they did with the War arc; with the War arc, they took a concept that was never meant to have a resolution and tried to give it one, and with the Amnesia arc they have a concept that — given how 'the hero has amnesia' trope almost inevitably results with the hero recovering his / her memories — everyone automatically expects to be eventually resolved, but they keep resisting it and insisting that it's never going to be.

    Reply

  62. Elizabeth Sandifer
    February 12, 2013 @ 9:13 am

    Nope – it's a flower made out of bone. 🙂

    Reply

  63. Matthew Celestis
    February 12, 2013 @ 9:17 am

    Yes, there is one timeline on this scenario. But it still leaves an 8th Doctor who does not become the Ecclestone Doctor.

    Reply

  64. Matthew Blanchette
    February 12, 2013 @ 9:23 am

    If we're criticizing old Who for being "small", why not New? "Journey's End", after all?

    Reply

  65. Matthew Blanchette
    February 12, 2013 @ 9:35 am

    Hmmmm… you know, I can change a few words in that statement… et, voila:

    "I think it's great. When I asked [Steven Moffat] to take over I did so knowing he would have lots of good ideas about what to do with it. He was really the only choice for the new [showrunner], and it was always taken as read that big changes were going to happen in the [series] – there should always be something big coming up, it's what you build up to, what keeps a dynamic going across several [episodes]. I wanted to round off my time on the [series] with the [story] that became ["The End of Time"] that would tie up a lot of loose ends… we'd built everything up, now it was time to knock it back down and start growing something new. With the past brushed away in suitably apocalyptic fashion, I think it's great that [Steven]'s opted to go 'back to basics'… certainly it left me free to tell a story in [SJA's "Death of the Doctor"] which was about characters rather than continuity, which I was really pleased about."

    Eh? 😉

    Reply

  66. jane
    February 12, 2013 @ 10:06 am

    @Matthew: "Hmmmm… you know, I can change a few words in that statement… et, voila:

    Eh? ;-)"

    Which just goes to show that the fractal theory of Who continuity applies to the real-world as well. Talk about ideas that can think for themselves!

    Reply

  67. John Seavey
    February 12, 2013 @ 10:08 am

    It wasn't that they couldn't walk away because they had to wrap it up, it was that they couldn't walk away because, well…where else would they go? As Phil points out, the EDAs apart from the War stuff weren't really stimulating the imagination, so people kept returning to the War because it was at least interesting. 🙂

    I'm not totally agreeing with Phil, here–I think there's something of a fallacy of the excluded middle going on. I remember plenty of people at the time perfectly willing to slot the EDAs, the PDAs and the audios into each other's gaps, and it wasn't really until 'Spiral Scratch' that Gary Russell started really insisting that this wasn't possible, at which point the TV series came back on the air and it became obvious that demanding people choose a narrative primacy might have unforseen complications for your bottom line somewhere down the road. 🙂 But 'TAC' was still a bit early for that.

    Reply

  68. Matthew Blanchette
    February 12, 2013 @ 10:08 am

    …which is kind of telling, don't you think?

    Reply

  69. Stephen Jeffers
    February 12, 2013 @ 10:25 am

    It doesn't. In that scenario, the eighth Doctor grows up to be Grandfather Paradox (who remembers meeting his younger self), then regenerates.

    Grandfather Paradox isn't an alternative future for the eighth Doctor, he's the actual future eighth Doctor. So it's one individual.

    Reply

  70. Scott
    February 12, 2013 @ 4:09 pm

    Possibly — to be honest, I'm a bit overworked, underslept and headachey, so other than it suggesting that RTD had an arc in mind for the Ninth Doctor with regards to his companions, I'm not quite sure what you're driving at. 🙂

    Reply

  71. storiteller
    February 12, 2013 @ 6:07 pm

    It looked like a banana peel to me, but I figured that couldn't be correct.

    Reply

  72. Matthew Blanchette
    February 12, 2013 @ 6:35 pm

    The fact that Rose was somehow always meant to be the "All-Important Companion" for the RTD era, which impacted on everything else around it (including other characters' stories)… that kind of grated, on me. :-/

    Reply

  73. Matthew Blanchette
    February 12, 2013 @ 6:36 pm

    It's the "apocalyptic fashion" line that really made me think of it.

    Reply

  74. Kit
    February 12, 2013 @ 7:29 pm

    But "Rose" also deliberately implies that the Ninth Doctor has had many previous adventures – the whole strand of the episode about Clive and his conspiracy archive exists to establish this. Specifically, we're shown that the ninth Doctor was present at JFK's assassination and the launch of the Titanic.

    I assumed at the time that all of those photos were taken after the events of "Rose", and have never really reconsidered this. It's certainly clunky to ram them into the middle of the story, but if it makes people happy then all the best to them.

    The haircut explanation is plainly the most elegant, though.

    Reply

  75. Kit
    February 12, 2013 @ 7:34 pm

    (Missed Ross's note below – Rose just doesn't have to be standing next to The Doctor at the moment the photo was taken! [Or he can nip offscreen for all those adventures between televised episodes…] )

    Reply

  76. Scott
    February 12, 2013 @ 10:20 pm

    Ahhhh… it's several aspirins and a nap later. I get ya now. 🙂

    I can see what you mean now, although to be honest Rose as All-Important Companion didn't bug me so much in series one — it did kind of suit the dynamic of the Ninth Doctor's overall character arc from shell-shocked and bitter war-veteran trying to put on a facade of normality to more of a 'Doctorish' figure to have Rose be more of a central and important figure to him than if he'd had previous companions in that particular incarnation.

    It was when the relationship with Rose and the Tenth Doctor became a bit smug, cliquey and codependent that I started feeling the cheese-grater. Without wanting to get too far ahead, I always thought they really should have shook up the Tenth Doctor / Rose dynamic rather than trying to replicate the Ninth Doctor / Rose dynamic.

    (It helped that Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper had much more engaging chemistry than Piper and David Tennant, in my view.)

    Reply

  77. Scott
    February 12, 2013 @ 10:51 pm

    Just wanted to add my own voice of love to that particular theory.

    Reply

  78. Scott
    February 12, 2013 @ 10:55 pm

    As for the Time War, my own personal head-canon has the Time Lords themselves try to split the Eighth Doctor's timeline in a desperate but ultimately futile attempt to avert their own destruction at his hands, but with each timeline ultimately leading to the same point.

    And the more they try this, the more the effects reach back to previous Doctors, until we get 'split-off' realities (i.e. non-TV canon like the Virgin New and Missing Adventures, the three Ninth Doctors, the early comic strips, etc) and adventures involving the First and Second Doctors getting wiped out of time, and so forth.

    Not quite as intricate as some (and less fractal than the theory outlined in the document Andrew linked to above), but it works for me.

    Reply

  79. elvwood
    February 12, 2013 @ 11:44 pm

    I'm a bit slow sometimes. I suddenly realised I could pause the book I was reading and switch over to Father Time, then finish the other one later – so I've just finished it. I liked it too – but I'll say more on Friday…

    Reply

  80. Ross
    February 13, 2013 @ 2:48 am

    I'm not crazy about the idea that Rose, who the show seems dead set on telling is is TEH MOST IMPORTANTEST COMPANION EVAR manages to not even once get her picture taken with the Doctor during their travels together.

    No, Clive clearly doesn't have any sense of the Doctor ever having a traveling companion, and to me that only makes sense as "The Doctor is coming off of a long period of being on his own." Playing little technical games to justify the idea that 'Rose' is immediately after the regeneration — even though it's the kind of mental exercise I usually find fun — seems to me to be dodging the thematic implications of that episode: in order to make the canon work out the way you like it, you end up sacrificing the whole idea of the characters as characters who have a story and an arc, reducing them to just being cult-sci-fi-style plot token archetypes.

    Reply

  81. Ross
    February 13, 2013 @ 2:55 am

    @Matthew Blanchette: I'm not sure what you'retalking about re Journey's End, but, while I'll admit there are blips, the new show seems to be pretty consistent about depicting the universe as large — in fact, if anything, it seems like every time they get into a position where you can predict the anorak brigade trying to infer a boundary to the universe, they outright defy it. Hence RTD's love of nonsensical numbers: whenever you can sense poor old Jean-Marc Lofficer out there somewhere trying to squeeze your stories down into one canonical timeline with fixed dates for everything, RTD will come along and tell you that this story happens in the year "Sixty Bazillion" or, heck, "Apple" — numbers designed not to help someone nail down firm boundaries, but to sort of mock them for even trying

    Reply

  82. Ross
    February 13, 2013 @ 3:11 am

    I think RTD went too far with Rose, but I still find it preferable to the alternative. When I drifted away from Doctor Who for a while (Roughly the period from the TVM to 'Rose', though the timing was largely a coincidence), one of the things that I found made it hard for me to keep enjoying the old series was the sort of casual disinterest it had in its own regulars. A sort of expanded Problem of Susan, if you will, where the show was almost always fairly mercenary about the fact that companions weren't really characters in their own right, but just a slot to be filled with someone who could fall down, get captured, and prompt the Doctor for exposition. They were, in a very real sense, disposable (No, not 100% completely, but as a general rule) — they'd turn up with nothing to really distinguish them from any other Sympathetic Guest Star Of The Week, and when their contracts ran out, they'd be unceremoneously dumped wherever they happened to be at the time. They were rarely treated as characters so much as custodians of the "companion" role (Contemporaneously, I slowly evolved toward being an adult sort of person who had relationships and commitments in the world, and it became increasingly disconnected to me to imagine this stream of adult human beings who could simply drop out of their preexisting lives to go off and travel the universe with a madman in a box, many of them never going home again. Real people's lives don't work that way unless their name is Sol Paradise). Rose was a really serious attempt to change that, to make a companion who was first and foremost an individual person with a whole life, and not just person-shaped meat to fill the Doctor's Companion-slot (That sounded dirtier than I meant it to be).

    (A lot of this is also true for the Doctor himself, which is why I liked the tenth doctor's regeneration: for once, we had a Doctor who faced regeneration from the perspective of "I am a distinct individual person who is going to cease to exist and I do not care for that at all" instead of "I am a mere caretaker of the 'Doctor' role, not a person in my own right, so my dissolution is a noble sacrifice because it subtracts one from my Extra Lives counter". The closest we really come in the classic series is Troughton's regeneration, and he comes off more like a schoolchild who's annoyed that he's being punished, when they're about to, y'know, execute him)

    Reply

  83. Scott
    February 13, 2013 @ 4:01 am

    Have to agree with Ross here — went too far with it he may have done, but Buffy alone would mean that any twenty-first century attempt at Doctor Who would have to construct the companion as a person rather than just a plot device.

    Reply

  84. Matthew Blanchette
    February 13, 2013 @ 7:21 am

    @Roos — except Ten is not a distinct individual; merely part of the whole. Changing that just because RTD's leaving is immensely egotistical, especially in that it tries to turn the audience against Eleven before he even shows up on screen.

    Reply

  85. Matthew Blanchette
    February 13, 2013 @ 7:23 am

    @Ross — I don't mean the literal universe, but the Doctor's universe; it's very telling that, of all the people to help the Doctor in that two-parter, it's only companions from the New Series. Rose's whiny "and I was here first" is quite telling, in that regard…

    Reply

  86. Ross
    February 13, 2013 @ 10:34 am

    Yeah I just disagree on that. Each Doctor is not "merely part of the whole". Each Doctor is 100% his own individual person as well as part of a whole. When you reach the end of a Doctor's tenure, you don't go "Aw man, the Doctor now only has X incarnations left before he's dead," you mourn for the man who dies, and then celebrate for the man who's just been born. It isn't egotistical, it's how you write a story with characters people can actually care about rather than Cult Sci Fi with Archetypes Whose Purpose Is To Make The Plot Happen.

    Reply

  87. Matthew Blanchette
    February 13, 2013 @ 11:35 am

    The funny thing is, Ten, just minutes after his own regeneration, disagrees with you. As that bit was also written by RTD… I'm still thinkin' that, yeah, RTD was bein' kind of stick-in-the-mud-ish on the whole thing when he himself had to go.

    Reply

  88. Ross
    February 13, 2013 @ 2:56 pm

    Yes. Clearly RTD is being a stick in the mud and it couldn't possibly be intentional that there might be a profound contrast between the way a man who has literally popped into existence a minute ago feel about his situation and the way he feels years later when faced with his own mortality. Impossible that, in fact, the tenth doctor's entire character arc was leading him from "I am exactly the same man" to "I'm not going to be me any more; the man I am is going to die and a new man is going to walk away."

    Reply

  89. Scott
    February 13, 2013 @ 3:15 pm

    Without wanting to get too far ahead again, or get too blinded by my own prejudices when it comes to regeneration (long story short — as much as RTD and Ten deserved a send-off, they went a bit too far with the angsty hand-wringing that time, I felt), RTD does seem to contradict himself a bit when it comes to regeneration. I remember when time came for the Ninth Doctor to regenerate reading comments from RTD insisting how he was tired of regeneration being presented as a sign of death and weakness (with the Doctor always prone and lying down, etc) and wanted to frame it as something triumphant and hopeful, as much a rebirth and a heroic act as an end. Come the Tenth Doctor's regeneration, however, we're being beaten over the head with how terrible it is, how it's a death, the Doctor himself nearly crazed with grief and terror about it, etc.

    I do get what you're saying about treating each Doctor as an individual person as much as part of a whole, Ross, and I agree, but I do think they went a bit far with it that time. I also kind of agree with Matthew in that, while I'm not certain I'd go so far as to suggest that RTD is deliberately trying to turn people against Eleven (although there's definitely a hint of ego there, especially since most of the last year of RTD's tenure seemed to be filled with RTD finding even more ways of saying goodbye to himself), having Ten be so vocally grief-stricken and having it so explicitly pointed out to us that regeneration is death does kind of stack the deck against Eleven from the start. Yes, any Doctor leaving is supposed to be a moment of grieving in one sense, but RTD seems to forget his own words about it also supposed to be uplifting and hopeful; they make so much of the fact that we're supposed to be wailing and rending our garments over Ten leaving that they forget that we're also supposed to be welcoming in the new guy as well.

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  90. ferret
    February 13, 2013 @ 6:08 pm

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    Reply

  91. ferret
    February 13, 2013 @ 6:13 pm

    I'm of the opinion that the Eighth tried to end the Time War peaceably, and is killed trying. He regenerates into the Ninth, his first act being to fight and end the Time War forcibly – another example of the Doctor encountering an adventure he is incapable of surviving, then regenerating into someone who can.

    Reply

  92. Kit
    February 13, 2013 @ 6:50 pm

    who the show seems dead set on telling is is TEH MOST IMPORTANTEST COMPANION EVAR

    Obviously the historical record is arguing against the show in this regard.

    Reply

  93. Ununnilium
    February 14, 2013 @ 11:08 am

    See, I disagree – I think those few moments we get of Eleven at the end of The End of Time are all about the joyousness of the rebirth, and slot in perfectly with what came before it and what comes after.

    Reply

  94. Scott
    February 14, 2013 @ 2:28 pm

    I think that's the intention, certainly (and of course, YMMV; if it works perfectly for you I'm certainly not going to dispute you on that score) but for me at least, I think the way they handled it would kind of make it harder to accept Eleven being all joyful and cheery after having, in the way the episode frames it, essentially 'killed' Ten (and Ten having essentially begged for his life on top of that). Certainly, I didn't personally have any problems dealing with Eleven, but one of the frequent points I've seen about that episode is people complaining that Eleven is quite cheerily callous over the fact that he's 'killed' Ten; like I say, it kind of stacks the deck against him and makes him harder to accept and like from the start, for what seems to be a lot of people at least.

    I think it gets back to the issue of whether individual incarnations of the Doctor should be treated as an individual character or as a single part of a larger entity. The thing is, he's both, and it's a tricky balance to pull off, and I'm not convinced RTD (and since Steven Moffat apparently wrote the Eleventh Doctor's first few moments in that episode, I'm focussing on RTD specifically for the purposes of this commentary) really pulled it off.

    Reply

  95. BerserkRL
    February 25, 2013 @ 9:11 pm

    But I think it's natural that the continuity aspect of regeneration would be more salient for someone who's just regenerated. and that the death-and-replacement aspect of regeneration would be more salient for someone who's about to regenerate.

    Suppose you're about to step into a Star Trek transporter that will disassemble you here and reassemble you elsewhere. It's natural to worry that what comes out the other end will only be a copy and not you. But then suppose instead that you're just stepping out of the transporter, with all your memories intact. Although you have no better objective reason to think you're the same person, it will feel natural to suppose so.

    Reply

  96. BerserkRL
    February 25, 2013 @ 9:14 pm

    It’s just the idea that there’s a continually told story that got decimated.

    It was reduced by one tenth?

    Reply

  97. Ross
    February 26, 2013 @ 2:52 am

    Remember, "reduced by one tenth" in the context that the word "decimate" actually comes from means "Reduced by a staggering amount, far larger than the percentage of combatants who typically die in even an especially bloody war"

    (I know how everyone's got this pet peeve about people "misusing" the word 'decimate' because it's "only" ten percent. But "decimate" was always meant to mean "kill off a truly shocking proportion of". Fr'instance, to "decimate" the united states, you'd have to kill every man, woman and child in: Mississippi, Arkansas, Kansas, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Nebraska, West Virginia, Idaho, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakora, Vermont and Wyoming.)

    Reply

  98. Andrew Hickey
    February 26, 2013 @ 3:07 am

    From oxforddictionaries.com :

    "Definition of decimate
    verb
    [with object]

    1 kill, destroy, or remove a large proportion of:the inhabitants of the country had been decimated
    drastically reduce the strength or effectiveness of (something):public transport has been decimated

    2 historical kill one in every ten of (a group of people, originally a mutinous Roman legion) as a punishment for the whole group: the man who is to determine whether it be necessary to decimate a large body of mutineers"

    "Historically, the meaning of the word decimate is ‘kill one in every ten of (a group of people)’. This sense has been more or less totally superseded by the later, more general sense ‘kill, destroy, or remove a large proportion of’, as in the virus has decimated the population. Some traditionalists argue that this is incorrect, but it is clear that it is now part of standard English."

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  99. Andrew Hickey
    February 26, 2013 @ 3:38 am

    "Suppose you're about to step into a Star Trek transporter that will disassemble you here and reassemble you elsewhere. It's natural to worry that what comes out the other end will only be a copy and not you."

    Only if you don't accept the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, in which case you're throwing away several centuries of science. I would have considerably less unease about changes to my identity from going through a Star Trek style transporter than I do about changes to my identity from going to sleep.

    I think there have clearly been different intentions with different regenerations. The regeneration of the third Doctor into the fourth, or the fourth into the fifth, for example, are clearly represented as 'deaths', while the regeneration of the second Doctor into the third is more of an inconvenience.

    I tend to see the different Doctors in the same way that I see myself at different ages — were I to meet myself aged 14, I would differ from him in more ways than we would be similar, but there would be a certain set of core traits that we would both share that would allow us to be identified as "the same person". I'm sure that my fourteen-year-old self would be horrified at the thought of turning into me…

    Reply

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