cross-posted from: https://leminal.space/post/9913175
I do appreciate that the Lemmy Doctor Who communities are less prone to wild fan speculation and continuity semantics rabbit holes, I really do. Sometimes, though, I dip back onto the main subreddits, and boy, do they get into massive circle jerks over little things that only jar others slightly.
Having exposed myself to the fandom mind virus, but refusing to join the fray on Reddit, I’ll just infodump my own head canon explanations to (apparently controversial) occurrences in the latest season of the show here:
Is the Shalka Doctor now unredacted from continuity?
In the episode “Rogue”, holograms of the Doctor’s past selves loop around 15 like an old iTunes cover gallery. One of them is clearly Richard E Grant, who played the a ninth Doctor in “Scream of the Shalka”. The animated series was short-lived and written out of the show’s canon when the 2005 revival show introduced Eccleston as the “authoritative” ninth Doctor.
IRL explanation: Russell T Davies thought it would be fun to throw in Grant’s face in the line-up. There’s probably not more to it.
My in-universe explanation: The eighth Doctor actually regenerated into the Shalka Doctor, but because the Time War happened and rewrote timelines several times over, 8’s eventually solidified upon the events of “Night of the Doctor”, where he instead regenerates into the War Doctor.
However, time being relative, the Shalka Doctor is still extant if only as a wisp of an individual timeline, because a) he is a time traveler and therefore a complex temporal event not easily erased, and b) the Time War left the time stream in such a disarray that he may exist in a state of flux (no, not that one), and either continues adventuring as an offshoot of the Doctor’s timeline, or is suspended in some kind of quantum field just slightly removed from it.
Pretty handwavy, yes, but all of Who continuity sort of requires you to gesture wildly like the eleventh Doctor having a thought, just for it to make some sort of sense.
The Doctor “was a dad”, but 15 “hasn’t had children yet”?!
In “The legend of Ruby Sunday”, the fifteenth Doctor talks about his granddaughter Susan, who traveled with the first Doctor in the early years of the show. He then pivots to saying that he hasn’t had children yet.
This is despite several if not all NuWho Doctors having referred in some form to having been a dad — including 15, just a few episodes earlier, in “Boom”! So which is it?
IRL explanation: As above, Russell T Davies likes to throw in non sequitur comments and details that mess with people’s understanding of the show’s lore. On a positivist note, it keeps that lore dynamic and throws some mysteries out for himself or subsequent writers to glom onto, like the Morbius Doctors or “half human on my mother’s side” of the past. If it doesn’t stick, ignore it.
My in-universe explanation: Ignoring the extended universe here, we don’t know a lot about the Doctor’s life previous to “An unearthly child”, and nearly none about their family relations. What we do know is that they are a very prolific time traveler, and as witnessed from 11 and 12’s relationship with River Song, things tend to get complicated, and invariably nonlinear.
With that in mind, it’s perfectly feasible that 15 or a future incarnation has a child (the birds and bees part, or possibly looms?) that, for whatever reason, they leave for their previous, Hartnell self to raise (be a father to). Heck, given the above Shalka Doctor explanation, he could be the father, and 15 would be off the hook. Exactly what can we assume about a Time Lord’s sense of self when alternative timelines come into play?
Along with the Doctor’s realization that they are an “adopted” Timeless Child, as well as Ruby’s search for her bio-mum in the past season, this explanation plays nicely into the twin notions of parenthood as giving life to a child versus raising it. Add to this that the Doctor’s relationship to his companions (post-Susan) have always been stories of found and/or extended family.
It all makes sense when you (don’t) think (too hard) about it!
So there you have it, the Doctor Who Reddit post to end all Doctor Who Reddit posts, deliberately not posted to Reddit. The important TL;DR is, time is in flux, several things can be true at the same time, and don’t break your mind thinking about a TV show.
Anything else that needs explaining?
[Edited to get rid of the quotation formatting]
The closest we get to an “in-universe” explanation for the Shalka Doctor is actually in The Gallifrey Chronicles, the final BBC Eighth Doctor book, where one of the surviving Time Lords (from the pre Time War BBC Books arc where Gallifrey is destroyed) notes that Eight’s timeline is an utter mess and he has at least three separate “Ninth” incarnations. At the time, this was intended to cover both the Shalka Doctor and Eccleston’s (although post “The Name of the Doctor”, that would have been retconned to the War Doctor; in either case, one of them was meant to be the Time War incarnation). My personal view is that “Scream of the Shalka” is the timeline prior to the changes caused by the Time War.
Of course, “The Night of the Doctor” then seems to establish that Big Finish’s Eighth Doctor continuity is the accepted one, rather than the BBC books, as Eight name-checks companions from the BF series rather than the BBC book series. Regardless of which continuity you accept, Eight’s timeline is very convoluted in both cases (and probably the most complex of all Doctors).
I stopped watching after Capaldi’s first season (as far as I’m concerned, the show ended with “The Day of the Doctor”), but the most obvious explanation for Fifteen’s comment in “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” is that that incarnation hasn’t had children. The implication was always that Susan was the First Doctor’s biological grandchild, plus Ten not only mentioned having a family at one point but there was also Jenny (from “The Doctor’s Daughter”), who one could argue was Ten’s biological offspring.
That Eighth Doctor book reference is a nice, deep cut from the extended universe! I tend to take the books, comics and audios as well-produced fan fiction, or I wouldn’t be able to post such confident continuity fixes as the above 😆 I do think Moffat had to acknowledge Big Finish’s massive effort of establishing 8 while the TV show was off the air. That is too wild to just shrug off!
I won’t argue against your head canon about the eighth and Shalka Doctors, after all we’re both (all!) making subjective rationalisations from a frankly bonkers continuity. Plus we don’t seem so far apart on Shalka.
Jenny, though? She is explicitly said to be a partial clone of the Doctor, probably with some local parts thrown in, so might actually be part human on her “mother’s” side… IMO she’s his daughter in episode title only, like the TARDIS/Idris was “the Doctor’s wife” 🙂
Side note: You haven’t followed the show since the end of series 10!? I know Capaldi’s early characterisation was a bit bumpy, but you’re missing out on some terrific Missy episodes. Plus, 12 mellows out after Clara, and his last series has one of my favourite companion pairings.
Eight is one of my favourite Doctors, so I was really pleased with the references in “The Night of the Doctor”. You are probably right that given the common contributors to both the Big Finish and BBC productions (e.g. Nick Briggs), Moffat couldn’t ignore it. The fact that Sam and the others from the books aren’t name-checked, though, was an interesting point and suggested that the BBC had rejected that continuity (especially since the new series destroyed Gallifrey all over again, not to mention much of the Cartmel Masterplan – which I personally am glad never made it to TV – that manifested through the Virgin Publishing series and which was implicitly accepted by the BBC Books, since many authors worked for both publishers).
Fair point about Jenny, although the Doctor certainly treats her as his daughter in the episode. In either case, though, I think the stronger argument is that Fifteen’s comment simply indicates that he (in that incarnation) has not had children.
As for abandoning the show in the Capaldi era… The writing of the show was on a steady decline since 2010, with each season weaker than the previous. “The Time of the Doctor” was one of the worst regeneration stories and proved once and for all that Moffat is simply incapable of resolving plot arcs satisfactorily – the whole Silence arc from 2010-2011 is explained away in basically a few sentences, plus “The Time of the Doctor” makes the resolution of “The Day of the Doctor” feel like a plot device just to provide an easy out for Moffat to resolve the issue of Eleven being the last incarnation of the 13-long cycle.
I think Capaldi would have made a fine Doctor (and the clips I saw of him later on supported that), but he was given rubbish to work with a lot of the time. Moffat only knows how to write one female character and too easily falls back on tropes (his favourite being “all the enemies at the same time”, which worked really well in “The Pandorica Opens” because it was such a rare thing). I could go on, but from what I have seen and heard, the show has basically been unwatchable since 2014.
Some day, some day I’m going to try and get started on the eighth Doctor books. If for nothing else then to get more background for Faction Paradox which is honestly one of the crazier hard left turns I’ve heard of… If that ever makes it into the main (or its own) TV show I’ll be very curious to follow!
But even though I’m only aware of some of the eighth Doctor’s adventures, ie. audios, the show owes the character as well as Paul McGann (and a slew of writers) for tiding the fans over through the wilderness years.
As for Moffat, I don’t disagree with you about the quality of his writing, at least during the time when he was running two of the BBC’s most prominent shows. I do think Capaldi’s last season was solid, and a bit of a fresh breath after much too much Clara Oswald, but to each his own.
I’m one of the few who will defend the Jodie Whittaker years, though I don’t hold any hope to convert you on them. They’re not bad on average but there are real stinkers as well as a handful of very good episodes — and quite a few “well, that was certainly …a Doctor Who episode?” ones. But it didn’t have the flair that RTD and Moffat brought to their runs.
Faction Paradox was an interesting concept. Be aware that some of the Eighth Doctor BBC books are a real slog to get through (Interference comes to mind - there just isn’t enough plot for it to be two books). The main thing I didn’t like about the wilderness years books (Virgin & BBC) was that they were distinctly more adult than the show, which I found jarring.
I do wonder what we would have gotten had Moffat left with Smith as he originally wanted. From what I heard, it sounded like he was stuck in the same situation JNT was in the mid 80s - if he wanted the show to continue, he had to run it. Unfortunately in both cases this corresponded to a decline in the show’s quality (Colin Baker really shines in his Big Finish audios, but a lot of his TV episodes are terrible due to the writing; Sylvester McCoy fared slightly better, but still had stories like “The Happiness Patrol”).
I haven’t actually seen any of the Whittaker episodes apart from part of “The Power of the Doctor” (which my wife watched in its entirety and thought it came across as bad fanfic), but after I heard about the whole Timeless Child arc (which apparently Chibnall came up with as a kid watching the Seventh Doctor), I was not impressed. It felt like there was no respect for the show or its continuity. The Whittaker era might have been okay by itself, but as the part of the larger universe, it really grates on me.
