I'm not sure what to make of this, even more so than my current attempt not to form an opinion on new Who until a second viewing. I felt like most of my energy was spent on trying very hard not to care about the retcon, mostly because it felt like Chibnall was deliberately trolling old-style fans like me and I didn't want to fall for it. I don't really believe in 'canon' these days, and I think a lot of what was said isn't actually irreconcilable with traditional continuity if you try hard enough, but I couldn't see what the point of it all was, beyond, "What if the real founder of Gallifrey wasn't pale, stale, male Rassilon, but a woman?"
And I confess that I also like 60s Who where the Doctor was some guy flying through time and space and not a quasi-mythic figure of importance to the universe, but I think that boat sailed a very long time ago.
I suppose I was unconsciously expecting the Omelas thing too
( ... )
In principle I don't object to retcons and reinterpretations - particularly in something as long-running as Doctor Who, but something about this one I really don't care for - and maybe it is that its really not all that obvious what it adds (beyond opening up a whole load of pre-Unearthly Child storytelling space which is definitely a nice thing - certainly for Big Finish).
I wrote a whole big thing for my Doctor Who blog which I couldn't post (I seem to be locked out...) saying basically this: that previous retcons have added something either to the series or at least told a good story, but here it's hard to see what it adds even to this particular story, let alone the whole series.
Oh, one last thing. Philip MacDonald wrote in a DWM special years ago that the whole Cartmen Masterplan thing basically boiled down to "the Doctor wasn't a mysterious Time Lord as we thought, but a completely different mysterious Time Lord!" (quote from memory, but that was the gist) It feels a bit as if Chris Chibnall has fallen into the same trap.
Philip Purser-Hallard suggests that the Master was absent from an earlier version of the story (and Sacha Dhawan was only approached to do this story some time after making Spyfall). The Master's role was perhaps (I suggest rather than Philip) assembled from storylines originally intended for Ashad and the Doctor, who becomes less proactive as a result.
That's interesting. I can certainly believe that Ascension of the Cybermen was originally building to a rather different second half - and in fact that The Timeless Children consisted primarily of the Doctor being exposited to by the Master may be indicative of a rushed script rewrite where originally she was taking a more proactive/investigative approach.
The more I think about it, the more I feel what we got in The Timeless Children was not as interesting as was hinted in the run-up, but I'm not sure I can yet articulate very well where I feel it fell short.
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And I confess that I also like 60s Who where the Doctor was some guy flying through time and space and not a quasi-mythic figure of importance to the universe, but I think that boat sailed a very long time ago.
I suppose I was unconsciously expecting the Omelas thing too ( ... )
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The more I think about it, the more I feel what we got in The Timeless Children was not as interesting as was hinted in the run-up, but I'm not sure I can yet articulate very well where I feel it fell short.
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