It’s January 12th, 2020. Stormzy, Ed Sheeran, and Burna Boy are at number one with “Own It,” while Lewis Capaldi, Dua Lipa, Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, and The Weeknd also chart. The family has been busy—we’d spent the late fall looking for a place to rent for all four of us, and in the early weeks of 2020 secure it and work on signing a lease, with a move-in date at the beginning of April. Life’s a busy blur of social engagements and planning, and Doctor Who is little more than my career obligation—the thing I have to find space on Sundays to deal with. In this case, it happens at Skulls, where the only television space involves us pulling kitchen chairs into a small bedroom if we want to get four people to watch it. We do so this week. Nobody enjoys it.
And of course, why should they? To say that this episode appears to have production problems is an understatement. It’s the ultimate “Chaos in Cardiff” production, such a self-evident shambles that they blatantly did not actually have the monster costumes on set for the bulk of it, having to shoot the bulk of confrontations with them as a shot-reverse-shot with the reverse just being a flash of a couple of them hissing in a dark room. It’s embarrassing like Underworld or Timelash is embarrassing—a colossal basic failure of television production. Which is, of course, no surprise. Like we said, last week all meaning collapsed as the show simply went into a long term nervous breakdown.
This week, then, it’s not even much of a surprise when time itself breaks. That is, ultimately, the only way to understand this episode. The fact that this cannot easily be reconciled with The Mysterious Planet (an episode that, being a corrupted Matrix visualization, arguably has no inherent continuity implications in the first place) is easy enough to get around given that the Doctor explicitly declares this to only be one possible future. The problem is just that, well, the Doctor explicitly declares this to only be one possible future.
It’s not, obviously, that the idea of possible futures is new to Doctor Who. Time can famously be rewritten, and Kill the Moon explicitly introduced the idea that seemingly major events in history and future history were explicitly unfixed points. Nevertheless, the idea that there is a relatively singular timeline has clearly been the default. There are multiple instances in which the TARDIS has repeatedly visited broadly coherent notions of the future, including instances that span vast stretches of the Doctor’s subjective timeline. Put simply, if the sort of relationship with the future that Orphan 55 is suggesting were in play, it would be much more remarkable that the Doctor should encounter Alpha Centauri in both The Curse of Peladon and The Empress of Mars than the Doctor ever suggests. The timeline clearly has comparatively malleable bits, and you can certainly argue that it’s undergone massive revision over time, but there’s still generally supposed to be one of it.…
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