One of the newer Christmas traditions that I enjoyed was BBC America running a Dr. Who Christmas episode marathon prior to the new Christmas episode.
Then, a few years ago it got delayed until New Years and now the Dr. Who marathon is a New Year’s Eve and Day thing.
This time, rather than the best episodes, they are doing the two seasons of the 13th Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker.
She is God fucking awful and all her stories are terrible.
Her iteration of The Doctor is the dumbest yet. I like Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant.
Eccleston’s doctor was dark and brooding, having just regenerated from The War Doctor. Tennant had levity but when he got pushed he got angry, my favorite bring the Family of Blood arc.
These doctors were smart. When it took time to figure something put it’s because their heads were so full of stuff they couldn’t sort it out. Matt Smith toned that down. I didn’t like Capaldi. Whittaker was Smith with ADHD.
Giving her an entourage made her worse. One companion is necessary, but a while entourage is distracting and spreads The Doctor to thin.
Putting the 13th Doctor in Chinball’s hands was a mistake.
Where he really killed the show was his origin of the Time Lords. Fucking made The Doctor the progenitor of the species.
It sucks.
So, here was my fan theory of the origin of the Time Lords that actually relies on canon and evidence.
Things we know:
The Doctor admits that his people became the Time Lords due to exposure to the Time Vortex.
A human exposed to the Time Vortex gains Time Lord powers, e.g., Rose looking into the heart of the TARDIS and becoming the Bad Wolf and River Song being conceived in the TARDIS.
We know Time Lords look human and Earth plays a part in Time Lords mythology (End of Time arc).
There is a connection between The Doctor and Earth, and The Doctor appoints himself defender of Humanity.
Lastly, humans have some limited forms of time travel.
So…
Humans explore the galaxy, there are several human empires shown in the show.
One group of humans decides they don’t want to be a part of the human empire. They want to be left alone to be peaceful farmers and philosophers. Sort of Space Amish.
They try to get away from the empire but always fail.
Finally they get a time machine and go all the way back to the beginning of the universe and land on a lonely planet they call Gallifrey.
The Time Vortex exists there as a natural phenomenon.
Eons of exposure to the natural Vortex turns them into Time Lords.
They recognize they power they have and are both isolationist and secretive to keep others away from the Time Vortex to prevent rival species from gaining their powers.
So much so they bury their own history. No acknowledgement that they were once humans. So no other species can try to become like them by living near the Vortex.
Also prevents other species from wiping out the Time Lords by wiping out humans before they colonize Gallifrey.
That secret, that they were once human, even becomes shameful to them. How dare anyone believe that the godlike beings were once justHalliday.
Only a few Time Lords know. The connection between Earth and Gallifrey becomes buried in Time Lords legend under a cloak of enigma.
The Doctor learns of it and becomes a guardian of Humanity and Earth to protect the human race preserving the continuity of the time line, i.e., humans get wiped out before the first Gallifrey colony forms and Time Lords are wiped out.
Future arcs involve other species learning this secret – perhaps The Master finds out and broadcasts it – and The Doctor has to prevent other species from colonizing Gallifrey before the humans do. Maybe some do and The Doctor has to go back to the very beginning and reset the Time Line.
The point is, everything fits nicely with room to create future arcs.
It also doesn’t fall victim to the trope/fallacy were EVERYTHING revolves around one character.
Now all I need is a plot that allows up to reboot the 13th Doctor as someone other than Jodi Whittaker.
Hell, you want a female Doctor, I’ll give you one.
Judy Dench, Maggie Smith, or Helen Mirren. A very solemn dowager matriarch like Doctor.
She gets paired against her will with a conservative (straight, white, married, religious) SAS officer by UNIT.
There is some threat to Earth and UNIT needs the Doctor and assigns her a UNIT companion for a joint UNIT/Doctor operation.
There are natural points of conflict with room for character growth.
The Doctor doesn’t like soldiers, the male companion is one and The Doctor has to work past that. The SAS Companion is not stupid but has to learn to solve problems with a bit more flexibility than the SAS way of applying violence.
The Doctor has to come to see the soldier as a person, not just a killing machine, who joined the SAS for love of country and a sense of duty to protect, which the Doctor also feels (duty to protect).
Both learn to respect each other and see eye to eye on issues without a whiff of sexual tension.
And The Doctor doesn’t act like an idiot with ADHD.
I gave up on the show a few years ago… somewhere around the time they brought back the Master as a hyperactive giggling lunatic who jumped around a lot.
But, then, I liked Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker.
Not bad, J.Kb. You could also work in some of the older Dr. Who story arcs, e.g. the Sontaran invasion of Gallifrey, etc., into that framework.
Re Eric, I also dislike what they did to the Master, but it sort of made sense in a way. Basically, getting more and more unstable at each regeneration … plausible. What I disliked most is that they brought back Rassilon to do it to him. I liked it when he was an almost mythological figure, the one who tamed the Time Vortex and allowed the Gallifreyans to become Time Lords. (Could also fit with the J.Kb framework.) I think this was all laid out with Romana in the Key to Time arc, but it’s been a LONG time since I saw those.
No, what turned Mrs. B and me off on the series, was the wretched wokeness quotient when they brought on Whittaker. The stories got preachy, bad, and boring, and we just stopped watching after the 2nd episode.
I don’t watch Dr. Who but I was told how much of a shitshow it was.
I watch OverlordDVD on YouTube. He is a pop-culture commentator with a network of Hollywood spies. It’s how I found out that the new Doctor Who is garbage.
I would recommend checking him out on YouTube. Did you know Kathleen Kennedy was going to kill young Indiana Jones via time travel de canonizing all the old movies so they never happened and making the new Indiana Jones a woman, making a woman the only Indiana Jones there ever was? And that when Disney actually found out they put the brakes on it apparently because of what he reported? I did.
Again a good YouTuber to watch.
The Critical Drinker, on Youtube, is another quite excellent critic who pulls no punches, and is remarkably abusive and funny, you know, like comedians used to be. Kind of like Don Rickles if he was from Scotland and in modern times and drank too much.
My eyes glazed over at BBC America and you lost me…..
Where’s Omega fit into it all? He provided the Time Lord’s with the power they needed for pocket dimensions (TARDIS) and the resultant time travel.
No female Doctor, though, good actress or not. They want a female Time Lord, tell the story of Romana, or the Doctor’s niece.
I have enjoyed all the variants of Dr. Who, from the beginning. Caught one episode of Dr. Woke and, yep, compleat rubbish.
Your idea of how the Time Lords came to be works and works well.
Be interesting if the Tardii are actually personifications of time creatures living in the time vortex, or people (or souls) trapped for a long time in said vortex. Would explain “The Doctor’s Wife” episode very well.
And so many ways to do a female doctor that worked. One of the old companions coming back as the next iteration. Like an Amy Pond or so. A face already recognized as part of the franchise, and would have been a better twist.
Or might have been a perfect role for some absolute loony like Helena Botham Carter. I mean, a really ‘mad’ as in crazy doctor, she’d do it well.
Or turn the tables on the whole companion thing. Have the new Doctoresse be a total young smart hottie and the companion be the geeky kind of spazzy weird male.
So many ways they could have gone with it… and they chose wokedness.
I’m a classic Whovian, and I support your back-story
I made it to Capaldi and bailed. The PC stuff and “let’s make it more American with explosives instead of wit” was too much.