Talk:The Power of Three dating controversy

The Point

What is the point of the creation of this page? Somebody explain... am I missing something? --DCLM ☎ 17:37, September 9, 2018 (UTC)

There are already similar pages for the UNIT dating controversy and Aliens of London dating controversy. TheFatPanda ☎ 17:26, September 11, 2018 (UTC)

I agree with DCLM. The UNIT dating controversy is a well-documented fan term. We can't just make up dating controversy pages for every story that contradicts other stories. Shambala108 ☎ 05:08, September 14, 2018 (UTC)

True, but the dating of the Steven Moffat era got hard to follow after The Power of Three, what with the the Year of the Slow Invasion that was never mentioned again.BananaClownMan ☎ 20:13, September 23, 2018 (UTC)

Well... given the fact that much of Eleven's one doesn't really take place on (then-)present day Earth, you can work around it. Many of the same days could easily have been relived by Amy and Rory multiple times. The Year of the Slow Invasion is a 12-month(-ish) event and the following story takes place in 2012 and the past. The (then-)present day Earth bits in Series 5, 6 and 7-pt. 1 can easily be said to be taking place at the same time given that we hardly see their lives at home. --DCLM ☎ 20:43, September 23, 2018 (UTC)

Deletion rationale

Looking at the deletion rationale provided by @Shambala108, it claims that the content of the page "cannot be verified by a valid source". Pardon, how is this relevant? This was an out-of-universe page about a very real dating conundrum of the Steven Moffat era of Doctor Who. I think that the page should be undeleted.

Epsilon📯 📂

13:13, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

Rename?

I don't know if the current title is taken from a secondary source or entirely conjectural, but I've always felt a much more appropriate title would be The God Complex dating controversy, as that is where the discrepancies truly begin. WaltK ☎ 17:33, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Rory's age

Isn't there a story where Rory mentions his age and it is wildly out-of-sequence? Why is that not included? Is it because it doesn't match with other evidence? OS25🤙☎️ 20:18, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

It's there, in the first bullet point. – n8 (☎) 20:29, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

This is obviously not what I was talking about. I mean the age reference in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. OS25🤙☎️ 02:21, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

"Obviously"? I'd hardly say that, especially given that I'm not sure the Dinosaurs reference has relevance to this page. It was a recurring plot point in series 7 part 1 that Amy and Rory were spending so much time traveling with the Doctor that they were aging faster than calendar years, hence Amy's gray hair and glasses in Angels. So I don't think professed ages should be used as evidence for the calendar date. – n8 (☎) 13:28, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

Excessive information

We do NOT need a full laundry list of ages and how far in the future and past Venice and Starship UK are to note that Amy's time is simply described as 2010 and 2011. Especially when the point of contention is about series 7-9, not series 5 and 6. -- Tybort (talk page) 23:05, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Wholeheartedly disagree that huge removals after an arbitrary limit of words or bytes should be prohibited in of themselves. This isn't page blanking or even removing any section, it's reducing redundancy and/or speculation and/or waffle. -- Tybort (talk page) 23:19, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Thorough listing of all possiblities permitted by the text is not "waffle" and every edit I have seen from you which you have justified using that word has been wrong-headed. Please reexamine your notion of relevance and understand that it does not correspond to this Wiki's much more inclusive standard. Information which is not actively fictitious/misleading should not, as a general rule, be removed from a page, even if it's not crucial.

I don't have time to read through all your edits just now, so possibly some of your removals were justified, but I have seen enough wrongful deletions to see that not all were, and it's much much more serious to have some missing information than some redundancies, hence the reversions. Feel free to defend individual points you think should be removed here, but please do not edit the page yourself again to make such changes until this is resolved. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 23:25, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

I'll pretend that I haven't just had that discussion about the Wife in Space while you mention removal of misleading and fictitious subjects. But I'll get to this another day. -- Tybort (talk page) 23:37, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

And here it is. Another day. In no particular order:

The literal entire point is that the controversy is about the date Mike Bond provides in DWM 447 for the end of The Power of Three, namely July 2016. Early 2011 + two years of Christmases later + April through August + 10 months + July through July. July 2016. With reasonable rounding down for the "two years" bit, July 2015.

Series 5 consistently giving 2010 without a single contradiction (barring the briefly seen ID badge I guess? But that has nothing to do with what the initial dispute was.) is unnecessary to point out in depth. Honestly, series 5 and 6 aren't vague AT ALL, besides maybe the dropping off in God Complex. The wedding is 26 June 2010, the astronaut shoots the Doctor on 22 April 2011. Over and over. Counting later episodes from 19 or 22 April 2011 is perfectly acceptable, what came immediately before may be the least disputable part the of series 1-7 timeline.

As for The Hungry Earth. The scene of the waving is obviously overwritten by any one of Rory's several deaths, and in The Power of Three, Amy mentions "We think it's been 10 years. Not for you [the Doctor], or Earth but for us [her and Rory]. Ten years older. Ten years of you. On and off." Which also, along with Amy's implied ageing to the point of needing reading glasses in The Angels Take Manhattan means that there's no reason to consider Rory's age in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship to be a mistake, nor is it unambiguously feasible that the waving in 2020 likely still occurred after the Big Bang Two.

Usually by my understanding "it is unknown" is by and large a delete on sight. Which I have no apologies calling "waffle". -- Tybort (talk page) 18:49, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Your understanding, then, is faulty.

The wave is mired in the ambiguities and conflicting opinions about the degree to which history can be written, an ever-contradictory and contentious subject within Doctor Who. It's certainly a possible piece of the puzzle and it should be present for the sake of presenting all available evidence for those it may interest. You or I might be happy to say "eh, time is rewritten, no biggie" but there are theorists who prefer to make everything a self-consistent fixed-loop until explicitly shown otherwise. Such people would want the wave to be there, and we must cater to them as well.

Regarding all instances of 2010 in Series 5, I think those are there to tell theorists who would be willing to ignore one set of data for the sake of affirming another just how many sources for "Series 5 is 2010" they'd have to mentally overlook if they tried to find leeway that way. Seems sound to me, if inessential; and that's, as I said, no cause for deletion. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:57, 14 December 2023 (UTC)