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List of Best Rated TV Series as voted by the Fediverse
Why would a show with a built-in reboot mechanic even need a hard reboot?
Yeah that's exactly it. Whenever it eventually comes back you can literally just cast a new Doctor, have the TARDIS appear somewhere and off you go. You genuinely wouldn't even need to necessarily explain all the loose plot ends the last season left open. The Doctor is mysterious, they can just allude to some terrible event and be vague about it. Or even just ignore it completely and let Big Finish sort it out later lol.
So they can retell old stories and be able to shrug and say "it's completely different" I guess? Or so they can completely rewrite things without previously established history getting in the way. Continuity gets a lot harder when you have decades of lore.
Doesn't stop 40k though.
But that's the thing, there's no 'continuity' in Doctor Who. In-universe time is not linear, not even a branching multiverse or anything like that. It is, quote, 'A big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff'. So, for example, you can massacre the daleks till there're only three of them and two episodes later they come back in the trillions, no biggie.
They've fully given up explaining how the Master comes back from being killed lol. They just show up again and everyone goes "Oh no"
Maybe they just need better writing.
And a consistent production schedule. Parts of Moffat's run (especially around the 50th anniversary) were pretty chaotic because of BBC fuckery (he had to write multiple versions of the 50th IIRC including one with different Doctors and one with no Doctors at all) and although nobody's really talked about it yet, it's a pretty open secret that the RTD2 era was absolute madness behind the scenes, with the BBC and Disney both fucking it about at the same time.
Not that I'm saying there wasn't bad writing as well (Space Babies, you will go down in infamy) but I think having a consistent production (even to the point of knowing if the actor who's playing the Doctor will still be there for the next thing you produce, which has not always been the case) would certainly make it easier to plan things out properly.
throwsguyoutthewindow.jpg
Oh my god, yes. I thought that both Jodie Whitaker and Ncuti Gatwa had amazing chemistry for playing the Doctor and were just kneecapped by terrible writing. It was incredibly frustrating to the point that I had to stop watching.
100%. I absolutely loved both of their takes on the character, but, calling the writing hit or miss is giving it a lot of credit.
Capaldi was just handed shit script after shit script and he did what he could but you really can’t fix a shit script no matter how good an actor you are
It's not because I'm obsessed with continuity, or because I'm a hardcore fan.... It requires more explanation than a soft reboot. Normally when you reboot something, you can tell it's a reboot.... But with Doctor Who, the fact it's a new actor doesn't tell you that at all, so most people casually watching would just be assuming, 'Oh, it's the next version of Doctor Who, he's changed again'... You'd have to keep reminding the audience, ‘We started from the beginning again.'
Completely fair for Doctor Who specifically, and as others have pointed out, utterly trivial to handwave things into however much of a reboot the new writers decide they want to do. Audiences of legacy SF properties will roll with whatever nonsense they need to if the resulting stories are compelling.
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".
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.
If it’s a big enough problem, it gets eaten by the time pterodactyls. Easy peasy
It wouldn't even make sense. You have all of time and space to explore and can just say "Timey-Wimey" to explain things if you step on anything established.
Strong disagree. Let it rest for five to seven years. Then start afresh with only slight callbacks to modern Who.
If it was me, I’d cast David Morrissey as the doc.