How much do you care about sacred cows?

The New Series has butchered more than its share of sacred cows about the show, about the Doctor's character, about the lore.

Who slaughtered the most important ones for you?
Which ones mattered to you the most?
Which ones did you never really care about and never saw why they became sacred cows in the first place?
Or indeed which ones did you not realize you cared about that much until they were tampered with?

The Doctor seemingly falling in lurve with a human girl more or less his granddaughter's age was the first step in the road to ruination.
The ludicrous gender-bending bollocks was the end of any credibility New Who ever had.

How much do you care about sacred cows?

I care if after too many cows are slaughtered there's no more milk to drink.

Once you change the Doctor's history, his reason for leaving Gallifrey, his sex and sexuality, even his nature then what about him is even the doctor anymore?

An unpleasant thought, but a 1000 year old time lord entering into a relationship with a 19yr old human is basically paedophilia. Take into account that 19yr old girl is a chav who works a minimum wage job,In a timelord's eyes she's basically a retarded child.

And that's a major problem with nuwho. And a fault that is shared by RTD,Moffat & Chibnall. Despite being fans of the show they constantly forget the Doctor is a centuries old alien, with all the knowledge and baggage that carries.

I suppose by 2005 I'd come to think of myself as more a casual fan, and certainly one who, unlike Levine, would much rather the show be true to its previous spirit than its letter. In that light I suppose I'd bought into the Paul Cornell new age view of the show (namely that dogma was the root of all evil and misery, and the show was better off without it - I was quite hardcore in that belief then).

So it didn't bother me when Rose and End of the World toyed a little with the lore and only took some of the vagarities of the old canon. That the Nestenes were now a refugee race rather than an intergalactic empire, or that End of the World didn't quite align with Earth's fate in Trial of a Time Lord. I accepted that not everything could possibly be adhered to, and that some things were going to be changed for simplicity's sake. And I probably wouldn't be troubled by the canon being reset back to how it was in its 1977 prime, before everything got messy.

I also think it didn't necessarily bother me that there was meant to be a romantic hints going on between the Doctor and Jabe. The idea seemed to be that under the right writer and story, that could work (ditto, Girl in the Fireplace). I was never that bothered by the romance in the TV Movie. It didn't seem out of keeping with Hartnell's romance with Cameca in The Aztecs, or the hands-on nature of the Tom and Romana pairing in Season 17, or indeed the moment in Talons where  Tom's Doctor seems briefly besotted by Leela's Victorian make-over. In the hands of the right writer, those nuances and desires of the Doctor can come out.

Gallifrey's destruction seemed a potential upping of the stakes, and a good way to dump a boatload of excess continuity in one go, so the show needn't be held back.

On paper I think when concerning the new series I was exactly the kind of easy-going fan the Fitzroy Tavern crowd insisted was the best way to be. But then these fan types always love to play the false moderate.

The fact is that as Series 1 and 2 went on, the more apparent it became that RTD just wanted to bait a reaction constantly by going for the wrongest characterisation of the Doctor as a common yokel thug and a lothario again and again. RTD seemed obsessed with the idea this was going to be prodding some feathers, and that the fans would get angry. And I just don't understand why you would have such a belligerent and nasty, petty attitude to your own audience?

It wasn't the romantic inclinations that made RTD's Doctor seem unDoctorish, it was his almost caddish, jack the lad, response to being snogged by a Cassandra-possessed Rose with "Yeah still got it", rather than worrying what's wrong with her. In what universe was that the Doctor? And he only said it because RTD was laughing his fat head off at the idea of how objectionable fans would find it. Likewise Eccleston's thuggish threats to the Editor and hostile jealousy towards Adam in The Long Game.

That's when I was infuriated by the seeming idiocy of the approach. If the Doctor wasn't going to be a more enlightened figure than that, then that pretty much seemed to defeat all point of bringing the show back in the first place.

Another point that annoyed me was in Aliens of London, when the space pig flees, and the Doctor orders a military cordon. The fact that the Doctor didn't even think to yell out "don't shoot!" before the tragic inevitable happens, just made the Doctor seem really stupid for the purposes of the scene. It was plain insulting. And indeed seemed to completely ignore his long history with the military and experience of what they can be like at their worst.

I struggled to square the cockney yokel characterisation of Tennant with the intellectual Doctor of old. But I could somewhat believe maybe in there was the essence of the noble Doctor, buried and compressed like diamond.

I think however it was Moffat's era that really caused the deal-breakers. And ones that would fit under the category of 'sacred cows I didn't realize I actually cared about until they were tampered with'.

Fitting an extra unseen 'War' incarnation of the Doctor between 8 and 9. I didn't think that would bother me. A number's only a number, but it did matter. This pointlessly changed premise that upturned previous assumptions in a way that just wasn't as interesting as the set-up it had replaced.

Then the gender-bending. I always thought I disliked the idea of a female Doctor because it was a bit too novelty, and also I liked the Doctor being someone I could identify with and look up to as a male, and in this day and age, why take that away?

After all I didn't exactly balk at the physics of it in Curse of Fatal Death or various fan films that tried the idea.

But then when Missy happened, I realized it actually has far-reaching repercussions to establish it as just something that was always possible. That the Doctor's prior male regenerations can all be retconned as a fluke each time. It doesn't add up as believable at all. Adn as a result I couldn't invest in the show anymore. It had been changed to the point all meaning had crumbled.

Likewise when The Witch's Familiar made a ridiculous retcon of Davros' childhood and Dalek history and nature, it was just one less reason to care. One less reason to invest in a lore that was now changeable on a stupid whim and meant nothing.

So ultimately I started relatively fine with letting some cows be slaughtered, but now I'm just depressed.

EDIT: One more thing.

I know Jon Blum once went on some nauseating self-important butt-hurt rant about how fans who don't like the celebrity hero worship Tennant was subject to in Planet of the Dead among others, are somehow indicative of the desire to cut the 'tall poppies' like him and Cornell.

But on reflection I've come to realize that what actually bothers me about that cultish hero worship, is I can't help think the Doctor of old would've been genuinely *horrified* that humans worshipped and deified him in such a slavish, undignified way. He'd want friends to like him for who he is, but to still have some individuality and capacity to think for themselves and question him. This I think he would find unnerving. But Tennant just seems to lap this pathetic display all up.

I wouldn't have bothered with many continuity references.

That's not to say I wouldn't have respected them.

I believe you should create enough narrative distance to leave the lore of the show (mostly) intact. You should create new lore as you go along that's a continuum of new ideas, monsters and events.

If you're bringing back old monsters and planets you leave enough ambiguity for people to infer their own canon, instead of creating a continuity clusterfuck that upsets fans of the show.

You don't really need to butcher old lore, only expand upon it. And you can change the rules if you really want to, as long those rule changes are explained as part of the logic of the stories, and not to satisfy external influences like politics.

Agreed. Going back and retconning shit... it's fan-fic. That's all it is. They've no confidence in their own abilities (probably because they know they're shit) so they get their kicks by writing bad fan-fic to piss off other fans as a way of gloating about their own undeserved power.
Ner ner ner ner ner as a substitute for professional writing.

Tanmann wrote:The New Series has butchered more than its share of sacred cows about the show, about the Doctor's character, about the lore.

I think you're telling porkies.

The Doctor/Rose love arc was pretty bad. I wasn't as annoyed about her being infatuated with him, it's only when he started returning the affection which was when I felt that ''Yeah, this is something that can't be repaired''.

Some scared cows are important to me - yes.

Twelve Doctors - yes. Which is why a 2014 quote from Moffat where he said it was just in the fans mind pissed me off so much. And then Chibnall o-fcourse ...

Male Doctor and gender differentiation in Time Lord race - yes.

The Tardis is a police box - yes.

The Master is a bloke - yes.

The Master and the Doctor are not hot for each other. They are just two blokes who were friends when they were students together at the Academy in their teens back in the day when two blokes could be friends without people questioning their sexual proclivities. Days long gone now.

The Doctor is a Timelord - Yes. I didn't mind the half human bit in McGann's film but not now with Chibnall.

Chris Chibnall is a dickhead - yes.

I love excessive fan service. I want my buttons pushed as often as possibly.

Again, as I said, the problem with fan-service is it invariably privileges some fans with their own cliquey proclivities over others, and leaves the more casual fans and non-fans who don't see the show that way, out in the cold and out of the conversation. So I can like it to a point, but if it takes over, it ceases to really be my show or everyone's anymore, because it makes the show become, in a sense, petty.

Anyway, stengos has reminded me of the regeneration limit issue.

I always had it in mind that if the new show got to the end of Doctor number twelve, I would've been comfortable with them just going past the limit fine. Just ignore the issue.

The alternative seemed that the show just has to end there, and I'd rather that didn't happen, and ergo I would rather the limit was just ignored. As far as the new fans are concerned there was no limit (at least not until Matt's Doctor finally alluded to it). It would be difficult to even raise an issue of in the show, given the speed with which the show moves, and in that sense would just make things cumbersome.

Hell, for the first two years of New Who, it seemed that the revival could easily be (like Halloween H2O), picking up where the show's late 1970's prime years left off, with everything after scrapped, and that allowed for my head-canon that Eccleston could therefore easily be the Fifth Doctor, which allowed for more room for future regenerations.

It could just be a changed premise I could accept. Sci-fi franchises are full of them. It could just be put down to 'it mattered at the time, but that was long time ago now, and long enough ago to do a revision on it a bit'. It could be that there's an off-screen possible explanation to guess at, and probably best not to draw attention to it.

But what does RTD do?

He doesn't ignore it, instead he obnoxiously draws attention right to it with the stupid and incendiary "507" line (I fault Moffat a lot but at least he was good enough to overwrite that nonsense and recanonize the 12 limit).

All the concessions I would've made above were based on being charitable, to the fact the makers have to keep the show going and that they would be handling it as delicately as they can. RTD decided to spit all over that just for the sake of dickish in-series trolling, and that bothered me.

And what was worse was seeing the maniacs on rec-arts and GB obsequiously proclaim RTD's 'genius' with that line, and showing fanatical belligerence at the fans it had deliberately antagonized for no good reason. Even though it was clear to me that RTD was determined to antagonize even the moderates.

Moreover I realized it bothered me because it cheapened much of what I'd watched of New Who already. When Tennant gives away twenty years of life to repower the Tardis in Rise of the Cybermen, that sounded like a genuine big sacrifice that conjured the fact the Doctor was mortal and wasn't going to be here forever. And yet with that one '507' line, Russell rendered it a meaningless nothing drop in the ocean. Seemingly willing to cheapen his own era to spite fans he didn't like for nothing (how the hell did such an unprofessional idiot get the job?).

Moffat did fix it, but in a stupid way. You can't just, halfway through the Eleventh Doctor's final story, just start saying "actually I'm the thirteenth really, so I've always been doomed and this is suddenly my last ever, ever story". It was too late to care by then.

Nonetheless the solution I thought was acceptable enough.