One thing that I appreciated about Doctor Who over the decades and also is why I'm not a big fan is how loose it is with lore and previous episodes. There's some continuity, but there's also a built in acceptance that things might change because of "reasons". Try that with Trek or Star Wars or lord help you Tolkien and the fans will kill you, but for Who fans they're always waving their hands around. It's about the atmosphere and campiness, not hard facts that would deter a story. I've always seen Doctor Who as like a collection of scifi short stories all sort of tied together but not needing to be.

Granted, I again am not a big fan, mostly watching the older stuff, so maybe that's not an accurate assessment now, but that was the "feel" I always got from it whenever I would catch an episode here and there. If Doctor Who had lyrics to the theme, it ought to be something similar to MST3K's "it's just a show".

[–] socsa@piefed.social 12 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

That's part of the fun though. It lets them do massive epic story arcs without needing to constantly be writing around those consequences later on. Especially with stories that are so nonlinear and time travel oriented, every tedious plot would basically hamstring every future plot, unless you are willing to play fast and loose with the lore. Then you can really get creative, while sticking to a handful of "fixed points" in the lore, which themselves can also be changed if the plot is sufficiently dramatic.

[–] Archer@lemmy.world 4 points 7 hours ago

If it’s a big enough problem, it gets eaten by the time pterodactyls. Easy peasy