Howling:Revisiting the why of the cracks (view source)
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:::::::::::One of the problems I have with the behind-the-scenes "explanation" is that it was sweeping. It said that a '''lot''' of stuff had been erased from history but it didn't say, & nothing since has said, what was erased & what was not. We're left not knowing what the history of the everyday world (from the point of view of the characters in it) actually is. It's not simply the history of the real, out-of-universe world. It's not the world you'd expect from having watched the classic series, the TV movie & the RTD-era stories -- unspecified but important parts of '''that''' history have been erased. What is it? We still don't know. Why don't we know? Because Moffat hasn't followed up. We've nothing to work with in understanding the world the characters live in. '''Presumably''', the Dalek invasion & the transport of Earth halfway across the universe didn't happen. We at least have a clue to that from Amy's failure to remember the Daleks in ''Victory of the Daleks''. What about the Sycorax? What about the Slitheen? What about the "ghosts" who turned out to be Cybermen? What about ATMOS & the Sontarans? We simply don't know. Moffat said he was resetting the in-universe everyday world to make it close to the out-of-universe real world. He has not done that. What he's done is to make the in-universe everyday world into '''a world with an indeterminate history'''. --[[Special:Contributions/89.241.68.117|89.241.68.117]]<sup>[[User talk:89.241.68.117#top|talk to me]]</sup> 07:23, September 28, 2012 (UTC) | :::::::::::One of the problems I have with the behind-the-scenes "explanation" is that it was sweeping. It said that a '''lot''' of stuff had been erased from history but it didn't say, & nothing since has said, what was erased & what was not. We're left not knowing what the history of the everyday world (from the point of view of the characters in it) actually is. It's not simply the history of the real, out-of-universe world. It's not the world you'd expect from having watched the classic series, the TV movie & the RTD-era stories -- unspecified but important parts of '''that''' history have been erased. What is it? We still don't know. Why don't we know? Because Moffat hasn't followed up. We've nothing to work with in understanding the world the characters live in. '''Presumably''', the Dalek invasion & the transport of Earth halfway across the universe didn't happen. We at least have a clue to that from Amy's failure to remember the Daleks in ''Victory of the Daleks''. What about the Sycorax? What about the Slitheen? What about the "ghosts" who turned out to be Cybermen? What about ATMOS & the Sontarans? We simply don't know. Moffat said he was resetting the in-universe everyday world to make it close to the out-of-universe real world. He has not done that. What he's done is to make the in-universe everyday world into '''a world with an indeterminate history'''. --[[Special:Contributions/89.241.68.117|89.241.68.117]]<sup>[[User talk:89.241.68.117#top|talk to me]]</sup> 07:23, September 28, 2012 (UTC) | ||
::::::::::::OK, you're right, the confusion is my fault. Anyway… | |||
::::::::::::Moffat didn't accidentally make the everyday world of Doctor Who into a world with an indeterminate history. He very intentionally forced fandom to accept that it had always worked that way. Let me quote the Doctor: "The thing is, Amy, everyone's memory is a mess. Life is a mess… Time is being rewritten all around us, every day. People think their memories are bad, but their memories are fine. The past is really like that." | |||
::::::::::::That's the first time we heard it from the Doctor's mouth, but it's Moffat's view, and RTD's, and Cornell's and Shearman's and most of the other new series writers. (The classic writers just didn't give a damn either way, because nobody had videotapes yet to check up on them.) In non-TV stories and out-of-universe comments, RTD was never afraid to say so. But he knew from experience that some fans just wouldn't accept that, so he was careful to make sure every line on TV could, if you really wanted to, be interpreted in some other way. Moffat didn't care, and thought the tiptoeing was getting in the way of good stories, so his first season was always going to be about "history can change". | |||
::::::::::::Both RTD and Cornell have argued that this is why Doctor Who can set stories in the present day after 49 years of future history, while Star Trek had to give up after 20. Zoe's city clearly doesn't exist in Donna's era, and that's not just ok, it's the way the show _should_ be. Lance Parkin has practically made a career of trying to fit all the contradictory continuity together, but it only takes a pages of AHistory to realize that it's a fun game, but a fool's errand if you take it seriously. | |||
::::::::::::So, if I'm defending Moffat against your charge, what am _I_ bothered by? He's the one who made me recognize what the problem was in the first place, the "ho-human, more alien invaders, what's for supper" thing, and he apparently just un-solved it, and he didn't even give us any episodes in between where we got to see how things could be better. --[[Special:Contributions/70.36.140.233|70.36.140.233]]<sup>[[User talk:70.36.140.233#top|talk to me]]</sup> 03:19, September 29, 2012 (UTC) | |||