It’s not because I’m obsessed with continuity, or because I’m a hardcore fan… It requires more explanation than a soft reboot. Normally when you reboot something, you can tell it’s a reboot… But with Doctor Who, the fact it’s a new actor doesn’t tell you that at all, so most people casually watching would just be assuming, ‘Oh, it’s the next version of Doctor Who, he’s changed again’… You’d have to keep reminding the audience, ‘We started from the beginning again.’
Completely fair for Doctor Who specifically, and as others have pointed out, utterly trivial to handwave things into however much of a reboot the new writers decide they want to do. Audiences of legacy SF properties will roll with whatever nonsense they need to if the resulting stories are compelling.
One thing that I appreciated about Doctor Who over the decades and also is why I’m not a big fan is how loose it is with lore and previous episodes. There’s some continuity, but there’s also a built in acceptance that things might change because of “reasons”. Try that with Trek or Star Wars or lord help you Tolkien and the fans will kill you, but for Who fans they’re always waving their hands around. It’s about the atmosphere and campiness, not hard facts that would deter a story. I’ve always seen Doctor Who as like a collection of scifi short stories all sort of tied together but not needing to be.
Granted, I again am not a big fan, mostly watching the older stuff, so maybe that’s not an accurate assessment now, but that was the “feel” I always got from it whenever I would catch an episode here and there. If Doctor Who had lyrics to the theme, it ought to be something similar to MST3K’s “it’s just a show”.
That’s part of the fun though. It lets them do massive epic story arcs without needing to constantly be writing around those consequences later on. Especially with stories that are so nonlinear and time travel oriented, every tedious plot would basically hamstring every future plot, unless you are willing to play fast and loose with the lore. Then you can really get creative, while sticking to a handful of “fixed points” in the lore, which themselves can also be changed if the plot is sufficiently dramatic.
Completely fair for Doctor Who specifically, and as others have pointed out, utterly trivial to handwave things into however much of a reboot the new writers decide they want to do. Audiences of legacy SF properties will roll with whatever nonsense they need to if the resulting stories are compelling.
One thing that I appreciated about Doctor Who over the decades and also is why I’m not a big fan is how loose it is with lore and previous episodes. There’s some continuity, but there’s also a built in acceptance that things might change because of “reasons”. Try that with Trek or Star Wars or lord help you Tolkien and the fans will kill you, but for Who fans they’re always waving their hands around. It’s about the atmosphere and campiness, not hard facts that would deter a story. I’ve always seen Doctor Who as like a collection of scifi short stories all sort of tied together but not needing to be.
Granted, I again am not a big fan, mostly watching the older stuff, so maybe that’s not an accurate assessment now, but that was the “feel” I always got from it whenever I would catch an episode here and there. If Doctor Who had lyrics to the theme, it ought to be something similar to MST3K’s “it’s just a show”.
That’s part of the fun though. It lets them do massive epic story arcs without needing to constantly be writing around those consequences later on. Especially with stories that are so nonlinear and time travel oriented, every tedious plot would basically hamstring every future plot, unless you are willing to play fast and loose with the lore. Then you can really get creative, while sticking to a handful of “fixed points” in the lore, which themselves can also be changed if the plot is sufficiently dramatic.
If it’s a big enough problem, it gets eaten by the time pterodactyls. Easy peasy
Or the time knife
Wait, wrong show