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From: The Last Doctor <mike@xenocyte.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.drwho
Subject: Re: From the Archives .....
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2024 15:15:43 -0000 (UTC)
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Blueshirt <blueshirt@indigo.news> wrote:
> The True Doctor wrote:
> 
>> On 27/04/2024 08:57, Blueshirt wrote:
>>> The True Doctor wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Where's Doctor Ruth among the faces of the Doctor? She's
>>>> not there because there's no Doctor Ruth. The Doctor's
>>>> regenerations begin at Hartnell. Where's Ruth's before his
>>>> face? It's not there because all the faces after Hartnell
>>>> are those of Morbius, and Hartnell is declared as the
>>>> beginning of the Doctor, not Ruth.
>>> 
>>> Ah c'mon Aggy at least try and be serious. How can the face
>>> of a woman from a 2020 episode of Doctor Who be featured in
>>> an episode of Doctor Who from 1976 when the idea hadn't even
>>> been thought of? 
>> 
>> How can an abused child from another dimension that was turned
>> into a monster possibly be the predecessor of Hartnell when
>> the idea wasn't thought of until 2018?
> 
> Fiction my boy, it's fiction about a time travelling alien... so
> outside of the real world a writer can write any scenario he
> wants to in retrospect if he thinks it's good for telling the
> story he wants to tell. You don't have to like it, believe it,
> or think it makes sense. Chris Chibnall doesn't care if his
> ideas don't fit your idea of Doctor Who, or mine even. But it's
> what he chose to do.

Insisting that an idea that wasn’t thought of fifty years earlier can’t
change the course of the show is a bit bonkers anyway.

Where was Aggie’s complaint when The Deadly Assassin made a lie of the
Second Doctor’s statement that his people could live forever?

Where was Aggie’s complaint when Utopia made a lie  of the Deadly
Assassin’s assertion that for Time Lords, twelve regenerations was “the
end”? (Before that, the Master’s continuing existence was due to body
stealing - but Yana was a reincarnation of the Master - with all the
memories of his previous incarnations (once the watch was opened).

Where was Aggie’s complaint when The Pyramids of Mars explicitly made a lie
of the Doctor’s statement in the Aztecs that “you can't rewrite history!
Not one line!”?

Seems to me that the show is allowed to retcon anything as long as Aggie
approves of the change, but if he doesn’t he’ll resort to all sort of
ridiculous nonsense to claim that the change is impossible.

> And guess what? RTD is going to write his own scenarios in the
> next few years and he won't care if you don't like them either!
> 
>>> It's quite simple, read slowly if it helps. In 1976 a Doctor
>>> Who producer had an idea, forty plus years later another
>>> Doctor Who producer had a different idea. It's all fiction
>>> at the end of
>> 
>> Fiction has to make sense in order to be believed. Where is
>> the face of Doctor Ruth if she came directly before Hartnell
>> according to Chibnall and Big Finish? The least Chibnall could
>> have done is chosen a white male actor to play the Timeless
>> Child monster if he claims it was one of the faces shown in
>> The Brain of Morbius.
> 
> I'm not sure she was 'directly' before Hartnell... the term
> pre-Hartnell could mean anything if we assume there was a whole
> cycle of regenerations that were wiped from the memory of the
> First Doctor. I have no desire to re-watch those episodes at the
> moment but I don't think it was ever stated that Ruth was the
> incarnation just before Hartnell... and with a blue Police Box
> being her TARDIS I'm not even sure how she could get that if she
> was pre-Hartnell. (But that's a different discussion!)

There’s nothing except Aggie’s desire to make it so that says the Fugitive
Doctor immediately precedes Hartnell. But even if there was - in the middle
of the sequence where the Doctor’s faces are flashing up in Morbius,
there’s a short cut away to show the Doctor’s concentration and Sarah
Jane’s concern. Enough to add a face or two that we never saw at the time.

As to the police box TARDIS - there are at least two reasonable
possibilities in the context of the narrative.

1) the TARDIS wasn’t a Police Box when the Fugitive Doctor buried it. But
the TARDIS recognised Jodie when she approached and chose to assume the
form she would recognise so that she’d know this was HER TARDIS straight
away. This does require a high degree of sapience on the part of the TARDIS
but some stories have previously suggested that.

2) the TARDIS has had a tendency to assume a Police Box form for a very
long time, especially when visiting Earth. Maybe this is one of the issues
that had it in a repair shop when Clara told Hartnell to steal it - knowing
as she did that it was already very much HIS TARDIS. So the problem
observed by Susan and her grandfather in The Cave of Skulls wasn’t a new
one - it was a recurrence of an existing foible that the Doctor had
forgotten about.

>>> the day but expecting Phillip Hinchcliffe to know in 1976
>>> what Chris Chibnall was going to do in 2020 is not a rational
>>> argument.
>> 
>> Stop being stupid. You're just as bad a Squealer. Chibnall
>> knew what Hinchcliffe did in 1976 so why didn't he choose to
>> subvert it?

Interesting slip of the pen by Aggie there - Chibnall indeed didn’t subvert
what Hinchcliffe had orchestrated in the Brain of Morbius - he embraced it
and came up with a way of making it true while keeping the rest of the
pointers we have had down the decades also true - from a certain point of
view. It’s a Sixth Sense or Usual Suspects kind of reveal - (and no, I
don’t think it was as clever or as well done as either of those examples) -
that what we have always believed was not quite the true situation.

> 
> Obviously Chris Chibnall liked the idea. Maybe he always had
> done and was just waiting for his chance to build upon it?
> Clearly if he didn't like the idea of pre-Hartnell incarnations
> he wouldn't have came up with his own version of the idea.
> 
> That's my logical interpretation anyway. Oink Oink.
>  
>>> A sixty year old TV show contains layers, and each producer
>>> adds different layers to a show's lore at different times.
>>> You don't have to like it, but that's how it is.
>> 
>> There were no incarnations of the Doctor before Hartnell
>> period. Proof is by contradiction. Either the unknown faces
>> are those of Morbius, or one of them should be a fat black
>> woman that is shown immediately after Hartnell's face. She
>> isn't therefore there are no incarnations of the Doctor before
>> Hartnell.

Here Aggie is using two invalid arguments and trying to finesse things so
you don’t notice: 

1) Aggie is claiming that Chibnall placed the Fugitive immediately before
Hartnell. There’s no evidence for that. 

2) Aggie is claiming that if this is the case, then a “fat black woman”
should appear in the Morbius sequence. No reason why that should be true,
we can’t expect a 100% concordance with every tiny element of the history
of the show. Otherwise the show would have imploded the second time
Atlantis was destroyed.

-- 
“The timelines and … canon … are rupturing” - the Doctor