Countdown to 60: (Dis)Continuity

A double one this - the 58th and 59th items in the Countdown to 60. I've decided to join them together as the first leads inexorably into the second...

As we mentioned the last time, Chris Chibnall had steered clear of continuity throughout his first series in charge. The series concluded with a lukewarm finale which was a real let-down. One of his failings throughout had been "tell, don't show" and an episode with a battle in the title, which opens after said battle is finished, is guaranteed to be anti-climactic (not the thing you want for an event episode). Stealing ideas from Douglas Adams didn't help either...

Coming only a few week's after The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos, a lot of fans prefer to think of Resolution as the real series finale. This brought the Daleks back - or at least a single specimen of the race. Chibnall manged to do something new with them, by having this one forced to construct a temporary casing out of scrap metal. 

Unfortunately we then had a year long gap in production, but when the series returned it was with a regenerated Master in its opening story, and a visit to Gallifrey - destroyed by the Master for some reason. Publicity images had already revealed that the Judoon would be back later in the series, and Cybermen were spotted on location by some fans. 

After a dearth of familiar elements, Series 12 was going to include lots of returning elements.

Unfortunately, Chibnall would stick with the Daleks for all three of his New Year stories, and they and the Cybermen would be back in Flux, along with Weeping Angels, and an Ood.

Chibnall went further with redesigned Sontarans and Sea Devils. Unlike Moffat, Chibnall respected their original designs and refused to make major changes.

His final story featured the very first Master-Dalek-Cyberman get-together.

Considering that he only ran two and a bit seasons, one of which featured zero continuity, by the time he departed Chibnall had given us the Master, Daleks - with their own mini-continuity - Cybermen, Sontarans, Weeping Angels, Ood, and Sea Devils.

It should have been a golden age - but one of these stories triggered the most divisive concept in the series' history...

Mention The Timeless Child and the vast majority of fans will scowl and prefer you didn't. I use the term "vast majority" advisedly, as - if the internet is anything to go by - the haters outnumber the likers.

True, haters might be more vocal and only appear to be in the majority, but I've done my homework and have found that far more people disliked it than loved it.

Even the accepters would rather Chibnall hadn't done it.

The sad fact is that there was never any need for it. We all love the Hinchcliffe-Holmes era, but they made a few cock-ups between them. Holmes thought that the Time Lords had been behind all of the Doctor's adventures to date, for instance. The pair also thought that there had been Doctors before the Hartnell incarnation, and this was written into The Brain of Morbius.

The Three Doctors had already made it explicit that there had only ever been those three.

The faces seen in the mental duel between the Doctor and Morbius could easily be explained away as incarnations of the latter. They are the last thing we see just before he loses, so as far as fans were concerned these were earlier incarnations of Morbius.

Fugitive of the Judoon, whilst adding to continuity with a returning monster, begins to mess with it in a major way. We had already seen a previously unknown incarnation of the Doctor in The Name / Day of the Doctor - but he had derived from within the Doctor's established timeline - between what we knew of as the Eighth and Ninth Doctors. Holmes and Saward had also given us the Valeyard back in 1986 - a future incarnation, so again one that could be contained within the established timeline.

At first glance, the Fugitive Doctor appears to be another such incarnation. She has a TARDIS in the shape of a Police Box for instance, and it only got stuck in that form after Totter's Lane.

The problem was, the Doctor clearly couldn't fit this incarnation into her timeline as she remembered it...

The resolution came in The Timeless Children, where it was revealed that the Doctor wasn't even a Time Lord. She was an immortal orphan from another universe who had fallen into this one, and been found by a Gallifreyan who then reverse-engineered her, genetically, to give her people the ability to regenerate. Her life since she looked like William Hartnell was simply that which she recalled. 

Prior to that there had been innumerable incarnations, who each had their memory wiped. She had also been a soldier / security officer - a member of some Black Ops Gallifreyan agency known as The Division.

Part of Chibnall's reasoning was that any child, of any ethnicity or gender, could be just like the Doctor. He also felt that he was opening up the format - suggesting that he found the established set-up as being constrictive in some way. No-one before him had ever thought this way.

Things could have been worse. A lot of people who would have hated all this had already stopped watching...

In the aftermath of the "Davros Controversy", here's something (by Jonathan Morris) I just read in the new DWM special 60 Moments in Time, pertaining to continuity:

"It's about maintaining the world of the series, making sure that the stuff the audience has been told to care about doesn't get contradicted or forgotten. Because when it is, it breaks the bond of trust between the writer and viewer".

"They (the showrunner) know it inside out - and know to check if not sure. Because if they start changing things that have already been established, they risk breaking the entire universe".

Someone tell RTD2...