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When does continuity or fanservice become a problem?

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Doctor7
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Tanmann

Tanmann
Dick Tater

Continuity and fanwank tends to get a bad rap in fandom and seen as a bad move, but it seems to depend. Colin's era gets seen as relying too much on continuity, yet for fans who do criticize it on those grounds, Davison's era tends to get a pass for them for doing the same thing. As does many of RTD's fannish indulgences (Doomsday, Last of the Time Lords)

Attack of the Cybermen tends to get frowned on for an overuse of continuity, but The Five Doctors and Remembrance of the Daleks are generally judged to work precisely *because* of their use of continuity.

Meanwhile Jodie's season was meant to be a clean slate that had no continuity elements at all. Yet most of us would say it was a failure partly *because* it went to the other extreme in divorcing itself from the past, and making the show feel hollow. I remember someone saying that if the writers ignore the Doctor's history completely, then the character feels as deep as a puddle.

So what makes the difference, and when do you think a reliance on continuity becomes a problem?

Boofer

Boofer

I suppose it's a bit like how many sugars you can tolerate in a tea before it gets irredeemably cloying and undrinkable.

It helps if the continuity is relevant to the plot. Just smashing it into an episode with all the grace of a toddler trying to smash a triangle through the circle slot of shape sorter, probably isn't the way to go.

The failure of current Who is that it has utterly failed to provide continuity where it counts. You only have to look at the change in the character of the Doctor, the hokey sentimentalism and the piggy-backing of an increasingly pluralistic, yet disorientating zeitgeist, to see what the fuck is up with the show.

Doctor7

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Continuity is a interesting thing i do believe in the theory that the second doctor did in fact live on past the war games and went on missions for the Time Lords

burrunjor

burrunjor

Interesting post.

I don't think in regards to DW you even need to mention continuity most of the time. If you do a story set on a faraway planet, with new monsters and ideas, why bother mentioning an old story? Even if it is an old monster, all you need to mention is that the Doctor knows them like in Day of the Daleks.

The only times you should be mindful of continuity IMO is if you are doing a sequel to a past story, like Resurrection from Destiny, and in terms of not messing up the lore of the show.

For instance don't come along and do a story where earth is invaded and conquered in the 19th century, or blow up the earth in the 25th century. Earth future is vague enough to do lots of stories with humanity in the future, but just be mindful of the big events like the Dalek invasion or the earth's final death in The Ark. (TBH I'd avoid having dates for most future stories.) I'd also prefer to set stories involving future humans on far flung earth colonies in an undisclosed period in the future to avoid contradicting too much.

Of course I'd never go as far as the New Who shills like Jon Blum and try and make out that Classic Who had no continuity and that New Who should be the same and cite goofs like UNIT or the three destructions of Atlantis as proof.

Yes there were goofs, as there are in any long running series, but overall there was still a continuity.

For instance once the Doctors people were revealed to be the Time Lords, then that's that. They stay as the Time Lords. You can't come along and do another story that reveals they are Venusians instead. Similarly once they are revealed to have 13 lives as a big plot point, then you have to stick to that.

If you are going to change something, then you still have to find a way for it work within what's come before in some way. Like take Genesis.

It does still fit in with the original Dalek story in that, the Daleks home planet is Skaro, they were still created in an atomic war with the thals, still mutated from a humanoid race etc. Its just that the details are different, but Terry Nation explained that by saying that we get our history wrong all the time, which is fair enough.

We never saw their creation in the Daleks. We just heard a second hand account written hundreds of years later which could be wrong for various reasons. Once we do see the first hand account in Genesis however, then you can't go back and change it again. Similarly had Genesis been set on a totally different planet, and made the Daleks total robots, then it couldn't have fitted in with the first Dalek story at all.

Tanmann

Tanmann
Dick Tater

When the show came back, I was genuinely taken aback by the loathing there seemed to be toward the fans, and the view that it was our fault the classic show failed in the 1980's, and that ergo every feeling we had about the way the show should be done or was being mishandled by RTD was automatically deemed wrong.

Then I read the About Time books and got something of an inkling where this perception that it was our fault came from. How it was the influence of Ian Levine in the 1980's that led to the show indulging more and more continuity elements.

The more I revisited that era (since the New Series had sparked my interest in the show again), the more I felt that the continuity had become frustrating overkill from Logopolis onward and that there was an obsession with making it impossible for the show's adventures to just be satisfyingly self-contained anymore. Stories now seemed to have to inherit each other's millholes.

Certainly I think the Master should've had The Deadly Assassin be his last hurrah and I didn't really see the point of constantly bringing him back. Likewise I thought it was stupid to bring back Pertwee era one-offs like Omea and the Silurians, as their story had already been told, and seemed to give the impression of the show turning moribund and zombified.

But I now think really in the 80's the continuity fixation was a symptom of the problem more than the sole problem itself. And yes Levine was partly responsible for it. Which is that basically between JNT, Saward and Levine, the show's basecode had gone wrong and gotten severely confused, and the show seemed to be trying to suddenly do everything at once, including stuff it had already done.

It seems telling that under Cartmel's influence, the show seemed to both get something of a solid basecode again, and the continuity elements of Remembrance of the Daleks, Battlefield and Survival actually worked *for* rather than against them.

In a sense we finally got what the JNT continuity approach should've always been. An approach that made the show and its universe feel *vibrant* with monsters and foes for the Doctor to face. And yet for much of the Saward era it hadn't. It had felt dour and depressing and just cheap, redundant, lifeless rehashes, and just an excuse to have the Doctor have to balk ineptly at foes he'd already overcome long ago.

As for the New Series, there was always talk of how RTD had made the show fresh and new, wiping a clean slate and making it a self0sustained show casual viewers could follow again without feeling confused or alienated for the first time since 1979.

And yet I didn't feel The Long Game made sense to a non-fan. It only seemed to make sense as a fannish petty exercise in Adric-bashing by proxy. Likewise I still questioned the point of bringing back the Master for Sound of Drums, and was happy enough assuming he'd either perished in the TV Movie or the Time War. I still don't think anything good came from bringing him back.

I liked the Moffat era's willingness to indulge nice fan treats, whether Hartnell's library card, the telepathic cubes from The War Games, the reference to Susan. And yet more and more those homages seemed to turn into pointless tamperings.

Now Matt's Doctor apparently gave the Great Intelligence the idea for the plot for The Web of Fear, McGann never fought the Time War it was a new unseen incarnation that buggered up the numbering system, Clara was there from the Doctor's beginnings, gender-bending regeneration has always been possible and apparently each time prior the Doctor's regenerated as a man again it was a fluke, and of course now Capaldi is the one who saved Davros as a child and inspired him to reprogram the Daleks to understand mercy.

And every time it just became one less reason to care about the show anymore as more and more of its lore got tampered with in a way that made it feel it no longer mattered. Gradually it seemed possible to prefer RTD's way of simply treating the classic series as a closed book rather than one to be pointlessly tampered with.

I suppose the bottom line is, continuity and past elements can bring life and depth to the show (or indeed to the audios), but if pointlessly done or badly mishandled by the wrong team of people, they can actually damage the incentive to care anymore.

burrunjor

burrunjor

The failure of current Who is that it has utterly failed to provide continuity where it counts. You only have to look at the change in the character of the Doctor, the hokey sentimentalism and the piggy-backing of an increasingly pluralistic, yet disorientating zeitgeist, to see what the fuck is up with the show.

Excellent point. This is what I've been saying for years. The whole "DW is all about change" motto killed New Who as a show in its own right.

Forget about how unfaithful it was to the original. Even as a work in its own right that level of thinking IMO drove a lot of its fans away.

The changeover from Davies to Moffat is really rough for fans of the Davies era. There are no old companions, no story arcs are carried on, and worse all of RTD's story arcs are written out, like earth being made aware of aliens.

RTD spent 4 years building up Torchwood, the threat of what will happen if the Daleks return, and earth being aware of aliens. "21st century is when everything changes and Torchwood is ready."

Then its "oh no wait nobody's aware of aliens." There is a sort of explanation for it, but its really, really poor. The Cybermen are back with no explanation, the Daleks are back and it suddenly isn't a big deal, Torchwood isn't even mentioned and no old characters return.

It was literally a different show, and IMO a lot of RTD fans left as a result. Similarly when Moff left, the Jodie era has nothing from the Moff era either, so a lot its fans hated it too.

There was never such a huge clean break in Old Who. Each Doctors era flowed into the next.

Hartnell to Troughton, Polly and Ben are there in Hartnell's last few stories, whilst the Daleks also show up in Troughton's first season.

Troughton to Pertwee is the closest we get to a New Who clean break, but even then, all of the Pertwee era follows on from Troughton's last story, and  UNIT were introduced in his time too.

Pertwee to Baker, the transition is seamless. Sarah is there for Pertwee's last year, UNIT shows up 5 times in Tom's first two series, Benton three times, The Brig twice, plus the Daleks who had been a mainstay in Pertwee Who show up in his first year.

Tom doesn't really sever ties with the Pertwee era until The Hand of Fear, and by that time he's been there for almost three years so who cares?

Tom to Davison, Adric is there for a year, Nyssa, Teegan and the Ainley Master are all introduced in Tom's time too. Davison to Colin? Peri and the Ainley Master and the Cybermen. Baker to McCoy, even Mel carries over.

All of these things helped to ease the transition of leading actor. New Who's desire for a big royal flush of all characters and plotlines like earth being aware of aliens, IMO is why it doesn't have the long lasting appeal of Old Who.

Pertwee fans are going to probably buy Tom and even Hartnell because they see it as the same show, but a lot of Tennant fans won't bother with Matt because it doesn't feel like the same series anymore.

Tanmann

Tanmann
Dick Tater

Doctor7 wrote:Continuity is a interesting thing i do believe in the theory that the second doctor did in fact live on past the war games and went on missions for the Time Lords

I believe that's called the Season 6b theory. I know a few fans who subscribe to it.

ClockworkOcean

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Dick Tater

burrunjor wrote:Then its "oh no wait nobody's aware of aliens." There is a sort of explanation for it, but its really, really poor.

The explanation of events being erased by the cracks in time only holds up for the duration of Series 5. After that, I think Moffat just hoped we'd all forget about it.

burrunjor wrote:It was literally a different show, and IMO a lot of RTD fans left as a result. Similarly when Moff left, the Jodie era has nothing from the Moff era either, so a lot its fans hated it too.

The producers and script editors of the classic series understood that they were merely there to do a job, and that the show was bigger than them. While they had their preferences and wanted to make their mark, they weren't so vain that they couldn't work with what they'd inherited or at least phase it out respectfully. Davies, Moffat and Chibnall, on the other hand, actually seem to believe that they're bigger than Doctor Who, that working with characters and plotlines created by others is somehow beneath them, and that their presence is of such profound importance that it warrants jettisoning everything that came before them.

iank

iank

To be fair, I always thought the whole "everyone knows about aliens now" was incredibly dumb and just served to distance the Who universe completely from reality. The Davies era made a huge deal about being grounded in the real world, and then did something insane like that. What?
Part of the fun of classic who was the idea that all these things were happening just out of our sight or being swept under the carpet because "you know what politicians are like".
That's why I liked Aliens of London doing the whole first contact global thing, but then putting the toys back in the box at the end with "nope it was all a giant hoax". I thought that very sensible. Of course, then came Christmas Invasion and that restraint was shot straight to hell.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKNC69I8Mq_pJfvBireybsg

burrunjor

burrunjor

iank wrote:To be fair, I always thought the whole "everyone knows about aliens now" was incredibly dumb and just served to distance the Who universe completely from reality. The Davies era made a huge deal about being grounded in the real world, and then did something insane like that. What?
Part of the fun of classic who was the idea that all these things were happening just out of our sight or being swept under the carpet because "you know what politicians are like".
That's why I liked Aliens of London doing the whole first contact global thing, but then putting the toys back in the box at the end with "nope it was all a giant hoax". I thought that very sensible. Of course, then came Christmas Invasion and that restraint was shot straight to hell.

I don't think it needs to be grounded in the real world personally. It can be quite interesting to see what the greater ramifications of everybody being aware of aliens on our society would be (as was explored in Children of Earth to great effect.)

Still the point isn't even whether its a good idea or not. If someone has spent 4 years building that story up, you can't just toss it. Viewers have become invested in the story, so to just literally handwave it away will annoy them and make them quit.

There would have been other ways round it. Like for instance if you want a companion to not know about the Daleks, have them come from an earlier time. Like what they originally intended for Victorian Clara. Or set a story a couple of decades in the future when the alien invasion is still common knowledge, but its now so far in the past, life has returned to normal etc.

Also IMO it seemed to me like Moffat was just not interested in carrying on a story rather than because he preferred that format anyway, as he later did the exact same thing in Dark Water/Death in Heaven which has all the dead on earth becoming Cybermen.

To be honest though Moffat couldn't keep his story straight when it came to whether the earth invasions happened. It literally changed from story to story.

Clara isn't aware of the Cybermen and the Daleks meaning Doomsday couldn't have happened.

Dark Water/Death in Heaven meanwhile reveals that everyone on earth has been aware of the Cybermen since the Invasion. There's a bit where on the news we see clips of the Invasion, with the reporter mentioning that these Cybermen are different to the ones from previous invasions. Clips from Doomsday are also shown, so presumably both invasions are public knowledge then?

Similarly the Simm Master says to Missy that he used his disguise when he was around Bill because she would recognise him as her former Prime Minister. (Osgood also refers to the Master as a former Prime Minister.)

So then people still have their memories of the Simm Master stories? In which case they surely must know about aliens?

Then there's the fact that there are 20 million Zygons on earth living in secret that has just been completely forgotten about. Where were they during the Monks invasion? Surely considering they fought in the Time War, they could have some tech that could have helped? Also did the Monks brainwash them too? Even just a mention of the Zygons would have been fine, but there wasn't one.

Also remember the two Osgood's working with UNIT together was meant to stop there from being a war between humanity and the Zygons? What happened to that now that both Osgood's are presumably on the dole, since UNIT was shut down over BREXIT?

Well they can both always move in with me if they're on hard times. Big Grin

You can't stick in these huge developments and then go nowhere with them. Its just total laziness and I can't stand the way people like Jon Blum and Ellen Sandifier mask it as the writers having some kind of greater creative freedom. Sorry to go on a rant like that, Jon Blum just really pisses me off with his pretentious crap of "its all about change."

Tanmann

Tanmann
Dick Tater

Jon Blum is almost the kind of guy the term "mansplaining" was designed for.

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