Aristide Twain
One of many problems with the concept of a Doctor Who reboot is that it can't sustain. The temptation to have the New Doctor fall through a space-warp and meet an aging David Tennant in Dimension B is just too strong. Witness what happened to the Star Trek films! One of the post-Leekley, pre-McGann pitches for the 1990s reboot had already begun to plan a season finale where Sylvester McCoy would appear to explain how he had used the Key to Time to reboot the universe before the script for the pilot had even been greenlit. And all of this was before ‘No Way Home’ and the Spider-Verse films broke the bank. (I'm positively surprised that Mara Jade has yet to meet Rey and Poe.) I tell you, any attempt to simplify Dr Who's continuity by starting over would only complicate it further in the long run by simply leaving viewers with two connected timelines to keep track of. It's a foregone conclusion.
People tell new stories about old characters all the time. We all get that Ivanhoe, Robin of Sherwood, and Robin Hood Prince of Thieves are three different stories about the same character.
I think that “reboot” usefully describes a meta-story: when there is an in-universe narrative reason that James Bond used to be gruff and Scottish and has suddenly become English and posh.
(Old Doctor Who was curiously worried about providing in-universe explanations for trivial changes: Leela gets zapped in the eye by a laser when Louise Jameson wants to stop wearing contact lenses; the Doctor constructs K9 Mark 2 when the BBC wants a less unwieldy prop, and the robot gets laryngitis when John Leeson is unavailable to do the voice. You could say that the whole idea of regeneration is an in-universe explanation for changes to the production. There could have been a world where the seventeenth elderly, crotchety actor had been recast as the Doctor, and the twenty third actress had taken over the role of “Susan”.)
I think that there have been two fruitful uses of meta-narrative in other media. In both cases, the in-universe explanation was provided after the fact by writers who were not responsible for creating the revamped character.
The first, obviously, was Flash of Two Worlds. The 1956 version of the Flash was simply a reimagining and updating of the 1940 version: but the 1961 comic established that there were two separate characters, living on, respectively, Earth One and Earth Two. I don’t think that many kids in the 1950s were lying awake at night thinking “But that means that those comics my Dad used to read weren’t really, really true.” But for the next couple of decades, writers had a lot of fun with the two universes: particularly as the existence of Earth Two gave them some leeway to age and kill-off major players without harming the central canon.
It was, however, incredibly confusing and off-putting for the casual reader. “The Huntress, she looks fun….Daughter of… I didn’t know that….WHAT YOU MEAN HE’S DEAD!!!!!”
The second one, equally obviously, was the hardly less convoluted history of Captain America. Stan Lee was under no obligation to say that the Cap of the 1960s was the same fella as the Cap of the 1940s: the natural thing would have been to just start again from scratch; but he chose to imagine the defunct character had been frozen in ice after the end of World War II. I don’t think anyone watching the Captain America: First Avenger movie would have been aware that this was originally a clever splicing of two different characters together: “a World War II hero out of his time” is a very interesting and valid premise. Stan Lee’s revamp failed to take into account, of wilfully ignore, a dozen appearances of Captain America Commie Smasher published between 1946 and 1950; and we could have carried on ignoring them, but in 1972, Steve Englehart established that the 50s character was a: an imposter b: mad and c: still alive. This was clever, because it allowed the different comics to be treated as “true”; but narratively fruitful because it allowed the liberal America of the 1970s to allegorically confront the conservative 1950s America. And because the imposter, William Burnside, grew in the ensuing decades into a sympathetic, tragic villain.
But as you know, I groaned slightly when someone decided it would be a Good Thing if it turned out that Toby Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland were not different actors playing different directors' different fictional takes on the same fictional character, but literally existing Spiders-Man from different timelines. It wasn’t interesting. Nothing followed from it: it was simply an opportunity to say “gee, the different versions of the character are different in some ways and not so different in others.”
I felt the same way about the decision to say that the Ultimate Comics were part of an in-universe parallel world, as opposed to a creative take on what the classic Marvel Universe might have looked like if it had been created in the 2000s rather than the 1960s. Yes, Alan Moore very wittily said “this-is-an-imaginary-story-aren’t-they-all”, but my brain goes more easily to “an alternate world where Uncle Ben survived but Aunt May died” or even “an alternate world where Captain Kirk is a fascist and everyone wears eyepatches” that it does to “a parallel world where everyone is much more realistically drawn.”
Some people are just really uncomfortable with the idea of “fiction”. We understand that someone is making up the stories but we are not prepared to treat the stories as something which someone has made up. I can kind of see why: once you permit yourself to say “Let’s play a fun game in which we pretend that the Christmas presents are left by an old man in a red suit — you pretend to write to him and I’ll pretend to reply” then you are too old to hang up your stocking.
How does this relate to the toxicity we have had to deal with recently? If it is an object of faith that fictional works really happened or must be treated as if they really happened then it is very hard to accept a new fictional work based on an existing one. “But Helen of Troy didn’t speak English with a US accent — she just didn’t — and if you think she did you have no right to called you film the Orestia."
I wonder if this relates to an underlying Christian fundamentalism in the culture: a sense that if Moses, as a matter of historical fact, didn't lead two million people though the Red Sea, then the story is entirely worthless.
And shall I tell you what is really weird? Stan Lee had already introduced a metafictional element into his Marvel Universe: but that meta-fiction involved the Marvel Bullpen, the writers and artists who created the stories. His comics were presented, not as quasi-historical events, but as things that someone had made.
Doctor Who never did that: although it might be argued that when you saw monsters made of bubble wrap and neutron bombs counting down with flap-down digital clocks you couldn't avoid thinking “this is a story being acted out with improvise plots”. But it is very true that almost as soon as Doctor Who became popular, fans wanted to see the man behind the curtain. There were features on Blue Peter and the Radio Times about “how the special effects were done” and, boringly “amusing incidents on the set”.
And yet: canon.
It seems to me that if you were re-starting Doctor Who, you would begin with a mysterious figure trekking through space and time, who has always been trekking through space and time, and who has been everywhere once and lots of places twice. And since he is bound to talk about his previous adventures, there is no reason not to say that the previous two TV series’ represent the characters “past”. (If he says “I once met the devil” your would expect some viewers to say “ooo ooo he means the one with the ood / no no he means the one in the village with the white witch”.) It would be a bad move to make that a very important part of the new programme. Doubtless, at some point, he’ll say “Aha, my old foe, the Master, he travels in time and space but unlike me his does harm rather than good.” You would not necessarily say “Aha, the Master, he used to have a female identity called Missy and then revealed that I was the Timeless Child.”
But I just. Don’t. See. Why any of this needs to be a Plot Point. Someone on the internet proposed that the new Doctor should have amnesia — that he should only find out about previous adventures from, say, a TARDIS diary. I am not saying that an amnesiac Doctor couldn’t be the basis for some good stories. Anything could be the basis for some good stories. But I don’t get why there needs to be an in-universe explanation about why the backstory is on the backburner.
When Doctor Who was a going concern, your Robert Holmes and Terrence Dicks were against multi-Doctor stores, because there was no good way of writing a script with four or five egos all competing for attention. As long as the revival actors are still alive, I suppose there is no way we can avoid a Christopher Eccleston / David Tennant / Whoever The New Person Is crossover. And if you do it, you should do it, with the egos clashing as loudly as you can.
It is interesting that Star Wars was happy to do one of the most thorough-going reboots without providing the merest whisper of an in-universe explanation: dumping something like three hundred novels and a fairly well developed time line. And I am deeply grateful that there has never been the slightest temptation to say that there are two galaxies both equally long ago and far away; and in one Luke married a lady called Mara and had a son, and in one he stayed celibate and went to live in a monastery. When Dave Filoni wanted to incorporate Admiral Thrawn, the bad guy from the decanonized novels, into Star Wars: Rebels, he didn't make someone run at the speed of light to open a gateway between the universes: he just introduced him as a character. I like that approach. Some would say that Filoni was offering fan service to the kinds of people who felt that their life was ruined when the Expanded Universe was de-canonised. My impressions is that he wanted a big villain and though he would borrow one who already existed.
Dear Person I overheard in Forbidden Planet just after Force Awakens came out:
You said that the reboot means that all the time you spent reading the Expanded Universe was wasted: but if someone said “Hubble bubble hocus pocus make the Expanded Universe take place on an Alternate Time Line” would you get your time back?
Love ARR
But but but: suppose it turned out that New New Who was taking part in a parallel universe, and it turned out that the Very Big and Very Bad villain was actually the Doctor from a different universe, one in which the Doctor had finally, as has so often been predicted, gone bad; wouldn’t the moment where we tear Zagreus' mask off and reveal Ncuti Gatwa underneath be worth the complexity?
It might be. Anything might. Several different fans have at several times proposed a story where Moriarty rather than Holmes survived Reichenbach.
But it would, in a way, be an unearned twist: a twist that was interesting only at a meta-level. If you can make up a story without cannibalising history, maybe you should
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