It’s now over a week since I should have updated this blog
to mention that I’ve got a few articles in the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine. A few. My mum gets
the magazine, mainly to keep track of whether I have any work coming in, and
when I spoke to her on the phone her reaction was “It’s all you!”
Well, thankfully, that’s not quite the case, but I’ve written the main feature, about ‘Controversial Continuity’, which takes up 16 pages; a general introduction, plus specific pieces on the Doctor, Gallifrey, the TARDIS, the Daleks and the Cybermen. The idea is fairly simple; to examine how extensively ‘facts’ get established within the series, only to be immediately discarded if they don’t fit or close off storytelling opportunities (such as the Daleks being killed off in their very first story) or if they turn out to be false turnings (such as the revelation that the Doctor is half-human on his mother’s side in the 1996 TV Movie). The point, though, is that really nothing is forgotten or closed off forever, as things which don’t fit, or are regarded as false turnings or ‘mistakes’, can always end up being revisited and used as a source of ideas – for instance, Steven Moffat going out of his way to reconcile Cyberman continuity in The Doctor Falls (2017) and Chris Chibnall writing a revelation about the Doctor’s past that incorporates the faces of pre-Hartnell Doctors seen in The Brain of Morbius (1976) – and which might also explain the voices of other ‘subconscious’ Doctors heard in The Time Monster (1972) and The Face of Evil (1977). Because I find that the more you dig into these things, the more you take a fresh look back at what exactly we are told in the TV stories (rather than the received opinions that get handed down from coffee table book to coffee table book).
Of course, I’ve now written my own Doctor Who coffee table book, The
Monster Vault, which does the same thing (indeed, some of the theories in
the DWM article were inspired by
researching the book). Are the Cybermen on Telos are the ones from Mondas? When
exactly are the Silurians from? Why do Sontarans all look different if they are
clones? What sort of evolutionary process could end up with a six-foot-tall
sentient biped fly? That sort of thing. I have lots of fun with it. You can pre-order it here.
I find you can always come up with an explanation if you try hard enough. Contradictions are not problems, they are opportunities to open things up, and take things in a surprising new direction.
Anyway, the article(s) seem to have gone down very well. I apologise for taking up so much of the magazine but because the articles are quite involved they kind of all had to be by the same person to avoid repeating the same points. That’s my excuse, at least. There may be some more articles in a similar vein in future issues, as it turns out there are even more controversial areas of Doctor Who.
And the point is, there’s no need to get angry at developments you don’t like, because some things stick, and some things don’t. Good ideas are remembered, bad ideas get forgotten. I’m particularly proud of the box-out on page 15 which explains how pretty much every Doctor Who script editor or showrunner has contradicted something fundamental established by the predecessor (and I didn’t have room to include Victor Pemberton and his wild idea that the TARDIS lands by falling from the sky and departs by taking off like a rocket).
(By the way, you may have noticed I’ve started putting dates after stories. It’s part of the DWM house style but it turns out to be one of my real blind spots when it comes to Doctor Who. My brain is just incapable of retaining whether The Face of Evil was broadcast in 1976 or 1977, or which Christmas it was that was Last Christmas. So I am trying to lodge the dates of certain stories in my noggin. For example, I really need to remember that the 1996 TV Movie was not broadcast in 1997.)
I digress. Pick up the latest issue of DWM now. You can subscribe here, so you don’t even need to visit a newsagents’.
