The Doctor Who thread

[griffin]

I am not a fan of retconning... and yet, the Doctor did point out that she may not have come through the portal from another Universe... however, it does still reinforce the earlier claim that the Doctor is not from Gallifrey, because he/she was the first to be able to regenerate.
If I was story editor, I would find a way to retcon back to the 50th Anniversary episode (Day of the Doctor), during that brief period of 4 weeks when we had just 13 Doctors (quoted by the War Council as "all 13 of him" with Capaldi shown), to just 12 Doctors in the next episode (the Christmas special) when the Timelords made Capaldi the first of a next set of 12 regenerations.... which in just a couple years was itself retconned during the Whittiker era to possibly have an infinite amount of regenerations that has spanned multiple universes (which makes it confusing that the Smith Doctor was dying and needed to be gifted a new set of regenerations).

As for the Universe-ending plot device, I guess after 50+ years, they have to keep outdoing themselves on the drama scale... but it does indeed make previous "epic" story elements less impressive, like the season-long plot relating to the Tardis destroying the universe. Then again, there were several episodes after that which had the Tardis being destroyed in some way (or about to) that didn't destroy the universe...
Nor is it very believable that a single Tardis could destroy the entire universe from any point in time, considering there would be thousands of Tardis' out there travelling throughout the billions of years of the universe and its dangers... are yet we to believe that no other Tardis has ever blown up, destroying the universe (and the flaw of that is, if all of space and time is destroyed, how did anything exist in the first place to create a device that destroys the universe).

And during Capaldi's run, we saw him fly to the end of the universe, which was billions of years in the future, with just one planet (and Asildiar) left... the Flux occurring during the time of Earth and Modern Day Humans, doesn't that prevent every far-future story we've seen over the last 50 years from existing now?


What I would like to see them do is take a break from big dramatic seasons for a while and do something similar to the 3rd Doctor, by having the Doctor stuck on modern day Earth for a while, dealing with "small town" mysteries (not planet-at-risk plots every week) and going to places around the world that we are familiar with, making it easier to relate to the settings and follow the story. The time during the late 70s to early 80s with the 3rd and 4th Doctors spending a fair bit of time on Earth with UNIT, were some of the most popular seasons in the old series, because as interesting as it is to see creative settings of alien worlds and concepts, the Brand needs familiarity (like a setting in Modern Day Earth) to draw in more of the general audience to make it profitable enough to survive and expand. You go too crazy and creative for the hardcore fans who want alien adventures, and you lose the regular viewers... a bit like Transformers toys - the hardcore fans mostly want niche cult characters (like the Convention toys and GEN Selects), but Hasbro knows that they need to sell hundreds of Bumblebees and Optimus Prime toys with horrible gimmicks that we hate, in order to fund the Brand enough to risk doing those niche collector toys that the general public mostly won't recognise to want.