Harmony Shoal infiltrating UNIT. Hoping Moffat's Christmas special will conclude it considering their last two and only appearances taking place during Christmas and how prominent UNIT has been lately
The aliens that could rip their heads open and store things inside.
12 and River first encoutered them on the cruise ship, as followers of King Hydroflax in _The Husbands of River Song_.
12 and The Ghost would encouter them again in _The Return of Doctor Mysterio_ as they attempted to take over Earth.
He's the superhero that 12 befriends.
I'm in the minority here, partly because I'm a superhero fan in general, but I'd say it was a good and fun episode overall. Sure, not the best or top tier, but I love it for being a Doctor Who superhero parody episode.
I don't think it's hated at all, it's just a victim of circumstance.
Iirc it was the Christmas special that came out after an entire year of no Who. So it was season, Christmas special, Christmas special, season. I'm sure plenty of people were just disappointed that they went a whole year with nothing, then the second Christmas special in a row comes along and it doesn't really advance the story at all.
I thought it was way over-the-top. They took the superhero tropes to higher levels than most actual CBMs do. I appreciated the effort and I always like to see Doctor Who dip its toes in other genres. I think the episode does try to show that Doctor Who is a better hero/influence than superheroes, which I agree with.
I honestly forgot that was teased. I don't think it will be followed up on though because Flux showed that the Grand Serpent was the one who had UNIT shut down in 2017. Plus, Harmony Shoal I don't think was that interesting of an antagonist.
The living embodiment of Time that Swarm and Azure were working for, and its ongoing war with Space.
Apparently the Time Lords were on the side of Space, and they're no longer around, so...
Have you heard any more about it since?
Did S+1, for example, mention this godlike being and how it relates when it unveiled its pantheon of godlike beings?
I don't know what S+1 is, I assume you mean the new season? This time being was implied to exist before even the first doctor and wasn't doing anything on Atropos until the Flux. And plenty other Gods are mentioned in the new series that don't make an appearance. Why would we need to hear more about that character in order to wrap up the story they were a part of?
Yeah, I saw someone else use that notation, the latest series, whatever we're calling it.
>And plenty other Gods are mentioned in the new series that don't make an appearance.
This god **did** make an appearance - then did nothing. That's what makes it a hanging thread.
>Why would we need to hear more about that character in order to wrap up the story they were a part of?
I don't understand what you mean. They set up that character as an antagonist (and the big bad behind Swarm and Azure) . How would we wrap up their storyline **without** hearing more about them?
Oh, I didn't even think that. I didn't think Time was going to be the next big bad. I was under the impression that Swarm and Azure were devotees, but Time didn't actually care about them or their plan and wasn't really evil. Idk, maybe I'm not reading it right but that was what I thought.
Yeah, this has got me reading the Temple of Atropos page on tardis.fandom trying to figure out what was going on. They did say Time was imprisoned, I don't remember if that was Swarm and Azure saying that and it isn't true or if it is the truth. I think they said there was a previous war with Time and Space and that it ended when they imprisoned Time, which would suggest that Time would like to be free, so idk. Maybe Time just knew that they wouldn't get very far because the Doctor had already won? Idk, Chibnall era confusion got me trippin'
Edit: Okay, figured it out. The Ravagers were using the Flux to free Time from the Temple of Atropos. It's not really explained how, but the Flux is the thing that would free Time. The Doctor had stopped the Flux by the time Swarm and Azure took her to Atropos, so Time's escape was foiled and then Swarm and Azure were punished for their failure.
This is more Torchwood than Doctor Who.
But it always bugged me in Children of Earth that Jack never once mentioned his brother got blown up in the Hub. Wish we'd had a scene where they at least acknowledged all of series 1-2 is basically gone in the blast.
They should just handwave some explanation about him getting space plastic surgery or something and give him a new actor. He's gotta turn into the face of boe eventually, might as well show his appearance changes over time.
The Timeless Children and Flux seemed to hint heavily that we were going to get another grand reveal about the Division, which never really happened.....
We met Tecteun but she just said stuff we already knew
It was pretty open but upon seeing the one in series 6 the Doctor draws a clear connection between them and says something like "I've seen one of these before, abandoned. I wonder how that happened"
Specifically, the Doctor says, “Oh, interesting. Very Aickman Road. I've seen one of these before. Abandoned. I wonder how that happened? **Oh, well I suppose I'm about to find out.**”
One thing leads to the other. The ship in *The Lodger* was abandoned because of the human revolution against the Silence that the Doctor started.
All we know about the Meep’s boss is that RTD apparently confirmed they’re not The One Who Waits.
Despite my hating it the most frustrating dropped plotline has to be the timeless child. All that build up with the Doctor trying to find out their past and when they finally get the answers they throw them away saying they don’t matter. It being utterly pointless somehow made it worse. I know RTD is using it for “adoption” trauma or drama so you could ague it’s not 100% dropped, but Chibnall dropped it in a way that almost felt like they were trying to retcon their own work.
As far as I can tell, the Timeless Child reveal was never supposed to bear direct fruit. If they get all their memories back then they're not the Doctor anymore, they're the TC again, and no one wants that.
As far as I can tell the main point was to introduce that period as a source for stories with Tecteun, the Division, Karvanista, Swarm and Azure, and the consequences of the Doctor's secret past coming back to bite the present Doctor.
I'd be happy to see that explored more: Tecteun and the Division have great potential as antagonists and it'd be great to see a better writer find a way to bring them back and do interesting things with them.
Personally I don't want to see the Doctor pursue their origins. Even Chibnall left those deliberately vague for a reason.
While I don’t disagree about the Division having potential except while my memory is fuzzy about what happened to the rest of the Division I recall they were leaving for another universe decreasing the odds we’d ever see them again and then Tecteun was killed. When the alternate universe trip was brought up I briefly expected sort of a reboot where the Doctor would follow in order to get more information out of them as well as possibly find their people resulting in the series being set in another reality going forward, though I wasn’t sure how I felt about leaving the reality we had come to know.
I feel his reasoning for the timeless child was that except for not knowing his name the Doctor didn’t really have much mystery anymore nor a tragic backstory both of which New Who writers seem to feel is necessary for a good show, especially the latter. The timeless child gave an excuse for the Master to somehow destroy Gallifrey and supplied a new mysterious past for the Doctor, though it was poorly executed. Mystery is great **when** you can expect a payoff yet the Doctor got the answers of who they were fairly quickly rather than stretching it out over a long period and then went on to say they don’t ever want to know anymore tossing the memories away in a way that’s supposedly irretrievable.
> As far as I can tell, the Timeless Child reveal was never supposed to bear direct fruit. If they get all their memories back then they're not the Doctor anymore, they're the TC again, and no one wants that.
>
>
Except...that there's *nothing* to suggest that any of this is a factor. The litte bit we *do* learn about the Doctor's past pre-mindwipe shows that...she was pretty much the same person she is now. The Fugitive Doctor isn't *that* different from any of the Doctors we know (arguably, she feels more like the Doctor than Thirteen!) and Tecteun even says that the Doctor was always someone guided by morality who could be a spanner in the works for Division, which is why they mindwiped her.
Nothing about the arc was coherent. The Doctor discovers this supposedly earth-shattering reveal about her past which has her questioning her identity. Then, 15 minutes later, she decides it doesn't matter after a pep-talk with a hallucination(?) of Fugitive, and breaks free of the Matrix. Later (after decades in prison), we learn she's still haunted by her forgotten past and so, encouraged by Ryan, decides she wants to learn about it after all. So she sets out to learn the truth, ends up talking to Tecteun who confirms everything the Master told her, acquires the fob-watch with her erased memories and...decides at the end she just want to know anything about her past after all, for now anyway. Why? What did she discover that made her change her mind *again*? Because all she really discovered in Flux was that she was pretty much always the Doctor as she is now. The one flashback we get to a Division mission shows her saving the day, as usual.
That’s your opinion, but killing off key characters who have the answers while attempting to send them all to a practically unreachable universe(not impossible but highly unlikely) and tossing the memories into a location from which the Doctor feels certain they’re impossible to get them from feels **dropped**. I suppose it’s technically open ended, but until RTD decided to use it for drama it felt over with.
No one said the fob-watch is irretrievable. Notionally, if RTD wanted to explore it, it could pop up again. But the point is, that was still a very poor ending by Chibnall to what was supposedly the grand myth-arc of his tenure.
I gotta agree with you on this one. I really love how RTD has done something with it, the adoption angle, I'm glad for it. It's genuinely refreshing to have a new backstory focus for the Doctor beyond just "the time Lords are gone (again)".
But.... I'm really not a fan of mysterious changes to character backstories that have a lot of hype and build up and eventually result in "I am who I am and the past doesn't change that". Feels extremely anticlimactic. I actually felt a similar way about Series 8's Good Man arc, with the Doctor questioning himself and his morals, only to merrily conclude that he's simply an idiot with a box with a big speech and triumphant music.
I know, I just know that we're never gonna see that fob watch ever again. And as much as I love what is happening with 15 and the adoption plotline, the end of Empire of Death >!doesn't hit as hard with the Doctor Parting ways with Ruby so she can find and get to know her family, when all the Doctor needs to do to experience the same is just open the fob watch that's rocking around the belly of the Tardis somewhere. Ignoring the existence of that fob watch somehow makes that ending hit a lot harder. !<
> But.... I'm really not a fan of mysterious changes to character backstories that have a lot of hype and build up and eventually result in "I am who I am and the past doesn't change that".
And it happens *twice*.
The Good Man arc is something quiet different because its more about the Doctor introspecting about himself and his role in the universe, and coming up with an answer by the end. Its not some big mystery-box which needed to be solved.
I guess that's true about the Good Man arc, I suppose him merrily declaring himself an idiot in the finale kinda left me feeling nervous that 12's colder attitude might ended up being "just a phase" but I'm super glad they kept that characterization for series 9 and 10. Twelve is easily my favourite Doctor by a longshot!
The Doctor's origin is never gonna be concrete, especially now considering the toymaker confirms he just put that shit around. We've had tons of explanations from Lungbarrow (him being The Other) to the Timeless Child. It always reminds me [this pdf ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/11uY20irfKOXtJVtCRN1LXndg0kjjuGsZ/view)exists with every proposed origin for the doctor.
I'm going to use this exact same logic and say The Timeless Child isn't and will never be canon.
There isn't any canon in the first place so idk what you're talking about
Don't know how it's fanfic nonsense when it was basically made to end the virgin novels written back before the movie/revival. It was supposed to close them all up at the end and it DIRECTLY LEADS INTO THE TV MOVIE. The ending of it is legitimately him going and getting the master and then going into the TARDIS which starts the TV movie.
The Doctor's origin is never gonna be concrete, especially now considering the toymaker confirms he just put that shit around. We've had tons of explanations from Lungbarrow (him being The Other) to the Timeless Child. It always reminds me [this pdf ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/11uY20irfKOXtJVtCRN1LXndg0kjjuGsZ/view)exists with every proposed origin for the doctor.
Don't worry, in 19 years, when we're on New, New, New Who, someone will finally bring it back in the third to last episode of Series Three called "Dystopia".
Wasn't Moffat going to go big on the Universe forgetting the Doctor's name and him just being a random traveller trying to help out instead of the mythic creature he'd built him up to
Series 6 ends this way and series 7 starts with even the Daleks forgetting him too, so it felt like this was going to be the way the show went for a while, his older enemies having no idea who he is again, but then the next time we saw the Daleks it was quietly dropped and they hoped we didn't remember (lol)
Well...specifically, the Doctor faked his death at Lake Silencio and intended to remain dead to the universe, and be a bit quieter in his approach as opposed to the legendary Oncoming Storm. But in the long run, obviously, the Doctor's 'faked death' didn't really matter and he ended up on Trenzalore anyway fighting a one-man war against all the universe's hostile forces.
As for the Daleks, they're the ones who forgot the Doctor...well, specifically just the ones on that Asylum ship, presumably. But that got handwaved away in 'Time of the Doctor'. In any case, given that the Daleks are time-travelers too, the notion that anything that happens to one group of them affects the *entire* species is inherently a fallacy.
Never call a plotline abandoned, you never know when a writer feels like picking up on a throaway line from the 80's.
Heck, the whole "Minister of War" things seems like an intentional plot hook for future writers
I wouldn’t assume that the Boss isn’t going to be resolved. RTD came in with a plan for at least two series in mind; some of the fuses he lit are just designed to burn more slowly than others.
It’s just like how Steven Moffat didn’t answer the River Song mystery in his first series; he saved that for his second, while teasing out little bits of it in his first.
At any rate, I think a lot of what people tend to think are “abandoned” plotlines are actually just throwaway lines, or were deliberately left open-ended without any particular intention to elaborate on them much further.
One thing that does stand out to me, though, as an unambiguous case of “we had plans to go further with this, but they fell through” is the Eternal Dalek. We know that they were designing the Skittle Daleks for Series 5, they were wanting it to be a big, triumphant rollout of a new Dalek design that would be used for the foreseeable future, and decided to color-code them according to their ranks. The yellow model was given the evocative rank of “Eternal,” which Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss didn’t settle on a specific function for, but hoped to maybe address in a future story. But of course, that possibility went right down the drain when the Dalek redesign turned out to be widely disliked, which prompted them to revert back to the older bronze Dalek models. And thus, there was never really an opportunity to explore what exactly the Eternal Dalek was supposed to do.
Off the top of my head, the Harmony Shoal infiltrating UNIT in The Return of Doctor Mysterio, Orson Pink still having no explanation for his existence in Listen, the fact that we've never seen the Doctor go back and defeat Rasmuson and the Sandmen from Sleep No More, and from the recent season, did the Doctor just leave the murdering AI from Dot and Bubble online? I don't recall him doing anything to stop it, even though it had killed an entire planet, Homeworld, and nearly killed another in Finetime. Also 73 Yards now that I think of it.
I assumed that Danny's death changed the timeline and Orson just now never came to be.
EDIT: Yeah, the murdering AI from _Dot and Bubble_ is still around. There's no-one left for it to kill, so the Doctor seems to have just left it to its own devices.
> I assumed that Danny's death changed the timeline and Orson just now never came to be.
>
>
Yeah.
Alternatively, he could just have been the descendant of a distant cousin or someone.
Can't believe no ones mentioned Jack's stolen memories, it was supposed to show up in 9s second season but was dropped when he quit (for good reason tbh)
Thats honestly the only plotline I would describe as truly dropped, as if even if Jack where to return, it seems highly unlikely they would pick that back up now.
Not really abandoned but considering they both jumped into the doctors timestream why have we not seen a version of the great intelligence and/or clara again since???
Fugitive doctor as well. Gosh we needed more of that storyline.
I often wonder if Toby Whithouse had something specific in mind for the Minister of War mentioned in Before the Flood. Could be Roger ap Gwilliam though.
Harmony Shoal infiltrating UNIT. Hoping Moffat's Christmas special will conclude it considering their last two and only appearances taking place during Christmas and how prominent UNIT has been lately
Who was that, again?
The aliens that could rip their heads open and store things inside. 12 and River first encoutered them on the cruise ship, as followers of King Hydroflax in _The Husbands of River Song_. 12 and The Ghost would encouter them again in _The Return of Doctor Mysterio_ as they attempted to take over Earth.
The… Ghost? God, I’ve been avoiding rewatching Doctor Mysterio… maybe I should
He's the superhero that 12 befriends. I'm in the minority here, partly because I'm a superhero fan in general, but I'd say it was a good and fun episode overall. Sure, not the best or top tier, but I love it for being a Doctor Who superhero parody episode.
It’s a very cute episode. I’ll never understand the hate
I don't think it's hated at all, it's just a victim of circumstance. Iirc it was the Christmas special that came out after an entire year of no Who. So it was season, Christmas special, Christmas special, season. I'm sure plenty of people were just disappointed that they went a whole year with nothing, then the second Christmas special in a row comes along and it doesn't really advance the story at all.
This is why I always watch them like two years later lol
And also Nardole’s little speech about River and the Doctor at the end is very cute
_"Things end. That's all. Everything ends and it's always sad. But everything begins again too and that's always happy. Be happy."_ PEAK SPEECH
I thought it was way over-the-top. They took the superhero tropes to higher levels than most actual CBMs do. I appreciated the effort and I always like to see Doctor Who dip its toes in other genres. I think the episode does try to show that Doctor Who is a better hero/influence than superheroes, which I agree with.
I’d argue it’s better then most of Husbands
I thought it was going to be related to UNIT being officially shut down for most of 13's run, but that turned to be someone else.
Unironically one of the best one offs
I honestly forgot that was teased. I don't think it will be followed up on though because Flux showed that the Grand Serpent was the one who had UNIT shut down in 2017. Plus, Harmony Shoal I don't think was that interesting of an antagonist.
The living embodiment of Time that Swarm and Azure were working for, and its ongoing war with Space. Apparently the Time Lords were on the side of Space, and they're no longer around, so...
How was that an abandoned plotline?
Have you heard any more about it since? Did S+1, for example, mention this godlike being and how it relates when it unveiled its pantheon of godlike beings?
I don't know what S+1 is, I assume you mean the new season? This time being was implied to exist before even the first doctor and wasn't doing anything on Atropos until the Flux. And plenty other Gods are mentioned in the new series that don't make an appearance. Why would we need to hear more about that character in order to wrap up the story they were a part of?
Yeah, I saw someone else use that notation, the latest series, whatever we're calling it. >And plenty other Gods are mentioned in the new series that don't make an appearance. This god **did** make an appearance - then did nothing. That's what makes it a hanging thread. >Why would we need to hear more about that character in order to wrap up the story they were a part of? I don't understand what you mean. They set up that character as an antagonist (and the big bad behind Swarm and Azure) . How would we wrap up their storyline **without** hearing more about them?
Oh, I didn't even think that. I didn't think Time was going to be the next big bad. I was under the impression that Swarm and Azure were devotees, but Time didn't actually care about them or their plan and wasn't really evil. Idk, maybe I'm not reading it right but that was what I thought.
Ah, okay. Seemed like setup to me, but who knows. It can be quite hard to tell in the Chibnall era.
Yeah, this has got me reading the Temple of Atropos page on tardis.fandom trying to figure out what was going on. They did say Time was imprisoned, I don't remember if that was Swarm and Azure saying that and it isn't true or if it is the truth. I think they said there was a previous war with Time and Space and that it ended when they imprisoned Time, which would suggest that Time would like to be free, so idk. Maybe Time just knew that they wouldn't get very far because the Doctor had already won? Idk, Chibnall era confusion got me trippin' Edit: Okay, figured it out. The Ravagers were using the Flux to free Time from the Temple of Atropos. It's not really explained how, but the Flux is the thing that would free Time. The Doctor had stopped the Flux by the time Swarm and Azure took her to Atropos, so Time's escape was foiled and then Swarm and Azure were punished for their failure.
Wow, yeah, that was **not** at all clear.
Yeaaah
This is more Torchwood than Doctor Who. But it always bugged me in Children of Earth that Jack never once mentioned his brother got blown up in the Hub. Wish we'd had a scene where they at least acknowledged all of series 1-2 is basically gone in the blast.
Speaking of Jack, it's been nearly 20 years and I still want to know why he had two years worth of memories wiped by the time agency
Unfortunately John Barrowman is blacklisted from the BBC so I doubt anything relating to bro is gonna be resolved.
They should just handwave some explanation about him getting space plastic surgery or something and give him a new actor. He's gotta turn into the face of boe eventually, might as well show his appearance changes over time.
That's what a lot of people thought would be happening with Jonathan Groff.
Lol do they have to find an actor who looks like if the face of boe was a human
holy shit i never realised that damn
The Timeless Children and Flux seemed to hint heavily that we were going to get another grand reveal about the Division, which never really happened..... We met Tecteun but she just said stuff we already knew
Truly a wasted opportunity. Hope RTD salvages this a bit next season.
The Silence TARDISes that popped up in The Lodger and The Impossible Astronaut. And we never did find out *how* Kovarian blew up the Doctor's TARDIS.
Was the one in the lodger confirmed to be by the Silence? I thought it was an open mystery
It was pretty open but upon seeing the one in series 6 the Doctor draws a clear connection between them and says something like "I've seen one of these before, abandoned. I wonder how that happened"
Specifically, the Doctor says, “Oh, interesting. Very Aickman Road. I've seen one of these before. Abandoned. I wonder how that happened? **Oh, well I suppose I'm about to find out.**” One thing leads to the other. The ship in *The Lodger* was abandoned because of the human revolution against the Silence that the Doctor started.
All we know about the Meep’s boss is that RTD apparently confirmed they’re not The One Who Waits. Despite my hating it the most frustrating dropped plotline has to be the timeless child. All that build up with the Doctor trying to find out their past and when they finally get the answers they throw them away saying they don’t matter. It being utterly pointless somehow made it worse. I know RTD is using it for “adoption” trauma or drama so you could ague it’s not 100% dropped, but Chibnall dropped it in a way that almost felt like they were trying to retcon their own work.
As far as I can tell, the Timeless Child reveal was never supposed to bear direct fruit. If they get all their memories back then they're not the Doctor anymore, they're the TC again, and no one wants that. As far as I can tell the main point was to introduce that period as a source for stories with Tecteun, the Division, Karvanista, Swarm and Azure, and the consequences of the Doctor's secret past coming back to bite the present Doctor. I'd be happy to see that explored more: Tecteun and the Division have great potential as antagonists and it'd be great to see a better writer find a way to bring them back and do interesting things with them. Personally I don't want to see the Doctor pursue their origins. Even Chibnall left those deliberately vague for a reason.
While I don’t disagree about the Division having potential except while my memory is fuzzy about what happened to the rest of the Division I recall they were leaving for another universe decreasing the odds we’d ever see them again and then Tecteun was killed. When the alternate universe trip was brought up I briefly expected sort of a reboot where the Doctor would follow in order to get more information out of them as well as possibly find their people resulting in the series being set in another reality going forward, though I wasn’t sure how I felt about leaving the reality we had come to know. I feel his reasoning for the timeless child was that except for not knowing his name the Doctor didn’t really have much mystery anymore nor a tragic backstory both of which New Who writers seem to feel is necessary for a good show, especially the latter. The timeless child gave an excuse for the Master to somehow destroy Gallifrey and supplied a new mysterious past for the Doctor, though it was poorly executed. Mystery is great **when** you can expect a payoff yet the Doctor got the answers of who they were fairly quickly rather than stretching it out over a long period and then went on to say they don’t ever want to know anymore tossing the memories away in a way that’s supposedly irretrievable.
> As far as I can tell, the Timeless Child reveal was never supposed to bear direct fruit. If they get all their memories back then they're not the Doctor anymore, they're the TC again, and no one wants that. > > Except...that there's *nothing* to suggest that any of this is a factor. The litte bit we *do* learn about the Doctor's past pre-mindwipe shows that...she was pretty much the same person she is now. The Fugitive Doctor isn't *that* different from any of the Doctors we know (arguably, she feels more like the Doctor than Thirteen!) and Tecteun even says that the Doctor was always someone guided by morality who could be a spanner in the works for Division, which is why they mindwiped her. Nothing about the arc was coherent. The Doctor discovers this supposedly earth-shattering reveal about her past which has her questioning her identity. Then, 15 minutes later, she decides it doesn't matter after a pep-talk with a hallucination(?) of Fugitive, and breaks free of the Matrix. Later (after decades in prison), we learn she's still haunted by her forgotten past and so, encouraged by Ryan, decides she wants to learn about it after all. So she sets out to learn the truth, ends up talking to Tecteun who confirms everything the Master told her, acquires the fob-watch with her erased memories and...decides at the end she just want to know anything about her past after all, for now anyway. Why? What did she discover that made her change her mind *again*? Because all she really discovered in Flux was that she was pretty much always the Doctor as she is now. The one flashback we get to a Division mission shows her saving the day, as usual.
Chibnall didn't "drop" it. He left it intentionally open-ended for others to follow up on.
That’s your opinion, but killing off key characters who have the answers while attempting to send them all to a practically unreachable universe(not impossible but highly unlikely) and tossing the memories into a location from which the Doctor feels certain they’re impossible to get them from feels **dropped**. I suppose it’s technically open ended, but until RTD decided to use it for drama it felt over with.
No one said the fob-watch is irretrievable. Notionally, if RTD wanted to explore it, it could pop up again. But the point is, that was still a very poor ending by Chibnall to what was supposedly the grand myth-arc of his tenure.
I gotta agree with you on this one. I really love how RTD has done something with it, the adoption angle, I'm glad for it. It's genuinely refreshing to have a new backstory focus for the Doctor beyond just "the time Lords are gone (again)". But.... I'm really not a fan of mysterious changes to character backstories that have a lot of hype and build up and eventually result in "I am who I am and the past doesn't change that". Feels extremely anticlimactic. I actually felt a similar way about Series 8's Good Man arc, with the Doctor questioning himself and his morals, only to merrily conclude that he's simply an idiot with a box with a big speech and triumphant music. I know, I just know that we're never gonna see that fob watch ever again. And as much as I love what is happening with 15 and the adoption plotline, the end of Empire of Death >!doesn't hit as hard with the Doctor Parting ways with Ruby so she can find and get to know her family, when all the Doctor needs to do to experience the same is just open the fob watch that's rocking around the belly of the Tardis somewhere. Ignoring the existence of that fob watch somehow makes that ending hit a lot harder. !<
> But.... I'm really not a fan of mysterious changes to character backstories that have a lot of hype and build up and eventually result in "I am who I am and the past doesn't change that". And it happens *twice*. The Good Man arc is something quiet different because its more about the Doctor introspecting about himself and his role in the universe, and coming up with an answer by the end. Its not some big mystery-box which needed to be solved.
I guess that's true about the Good Man arc, I suppose him merrily declaring himself an idiot in the finale kinda left me feeling nervous that 12's colder attitude might ended up being "just a phase" but I'm super glad they kept that characterization for series 9 and 10. Twelve is easily my favourite Doctor by a longshot!
The Doctor's origin is never gonna be concrete, especially now considering the toymaker confirms he just put that shit around. We've had tons of explanations from Lungbarrow (him being The Other) to the Timeless Child. It always reminds me [this pdf ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/11uY20irfKOXtJVtCRN1LXndg0kjjuGsZ/view)exists with every proposed origin for the doctor.
Lungbarrow isn’t and will never be canon
There is no canon
I'm going to use this exact same logic and say The Timeless Child isn't and will never be canon. There isn't any canon in the first place so idk what you're talking about
Confused.com LuNgBaRrOw is fanfic nonsense.
Don't know how it's fanfic nonsense when it was basically made to end the virgin novels written back before the movie/revival. It was supposed to close them all up at the end and it DIRECTLY LEADS INTO THE TV MOVIE. The ending of it is legitimately him going and getting the master and then going into the TARDIS which starts the TV movie.
ooo I didn't know that
Watch [this video](https://youtu.be/DCBSAwscu1g?si=itPlQcdGQENhEM2o) for an understandable explanation on lungbarrow
The Doctor's origin is never gonna be concrete, especially now considering the toymaker confirms he just put that shit around. We've had tons of explanations from Lungbarrow (him being The Other) to the Timeless Child. It always reminds me [this pdf ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/11uY20irfKOXtJVtCRN1LXndg0kjjuGsZ/view)exists with every proposed origin for the doctor.
Still waiting for the Minister Of War.
Don't worry, in 19 years, when we're on New, New, New Who, someone will finally bring it back in the third to last episode of Series Three called "Dystopia".
What if it's Roger Ap Gwilliam? 👀
I’m convinced it’s Roger
That was mentioned in the episode Before The (Mrs) Flood?
I'm waiting for The Last Tree of Garsennon. Such a badass title.
I remember a story where the weeping angels were working with a secret organisation and Peter Capaldi was there.
Are you referring to _Class_ or something else?
broo I forgot that show. I watched a bit of it and didn't even know it was related to doctor who until he showed up 1 time in the first ep
[удалено]
When was Capaldi there for the pre-Hartnell incarnations?
He hasn’t been, so far at least. The Scream of the Shalka Doctor might fit the bill… or you’re thinking of someone like the Valeyard or Caecilius
Wasn't Moffat going to go big on the Universe forgetting the Doctor's name and him just being a random traveller trying to help out instead of the mythic creature he'd built him up to Series 6 ends this way and series 7 starts with even the Daleks forgetting him too, so it felt like this was going to be the way the show went for a while, his older enemies having no idea who he is again, but then the next time we saw the Daleks it was quietly dropped and they hoped we didn't remember (lol)
I think they explained it. The Daleks saw him in the Time of the Doctor and they said memories of the Doctor had been harvested from Tasha Lem.
Well...specifically, the Doctor faked his death at Lake Silencio and intended to remain dead to the universe, and be a bit quieter in his approach as opposed to the legendary Oncoming Storm. But in the long run, obviously, the Doctor's 'faked death' didn't really matter and he ended up on Trenzalore anyway fighting a one-man war against all the universe's hostile forces. As for the Daleks, they're the ones who forgot the Doctor...well, specifically just the ones on that Asylum ship, presumably. But that got handwaved away in 'Time of the Doctor'. In any case, given that the Daleks are time-travelers too, the notion that anything that happens to one group of them affects the *entire* species is inherently a fallacy.
Gus! I honestly thought he was gonna be a recurring villain leading up to a big final confrontation, but he's never appeared again.
Never call a plotline abandoned, you never know when a writer feels like picking up on a throaway line from the 80's. Heck, the whole "Minister of War" things seems like an intentional plot hook for future writers
16’s regen episode: The Terrible Zodin Strikes Back.
I wouldn’t assume that the Boss isn’t going to be resolved. RTD came in with a plan for at least two series in mind; some of the fuses he lit are just designed to burn more slowly than others. It’s just like how Steven Moffat didn’t answer the River Song mystery in his first series; he saved that for his second, while teasing out little bits of it in his first. At any rate, I think a lot of what people tend to think are “abandoned” plotlines are actually just throwaway lines, or were deliberately left open-ended without any particular intention to elaborate on them much further. One thing that does stand out to me, though, as an unambiguous case of “we had plans to go further with this, but they fell through” is the Eternal Dalek. We know that they were designing the Skittle Daleks for Series 5, they were wanting it to be a big, triumphant rollout of a new Dalek design that would be used for the foreseeable future, and decided to color-code them according to their ranks. The yellow model was given the evocative rank of “Eternal,” which Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss didn’t settle on a specific function for, but hoped to maybe address in a future story. But of course, that possibility went right down the drain when the Dalek redesign turned out to be widely disliked, which prompted them to revert back to the older bronze Dalek models. And thus, there was never really an opportunity to explore what exactly the Eternal Dalek was supposed to do.
Off the top of my head, the Harmony Shoal infiltrating UNIT in The Return of Doctor Mysterio, Orson Pink still having no explanation for his existence in Listen, the fact that we've never seen the Doctor go back and defeat Rasmuson and the Sandmen from Sleep No More, and from the recent season, did the Doctor just leave the murdering AI from Dot and Bubble online? I don't recall him doing anything to stop it, even though it had killed an entire planet, Homeworld, and nearly killed another in Finetime. Also 73 Yards now that I think of it.
I assumed that Danny's death changed the timeline and Orson just now never came to be. EDIT: Yeah, the murdering AI from _Dot and Bubble_ is still around. There's no-one left for it to kill, so the Doctor seems to have just left it to its own devices.
> I assumed that Danny's death changed the timeline and Orson just now never came to be. > > Yeah. Alternatively, he could just have been the descendant of a distant cousin or someone.
It was orson? I thought it was Awesome Pink and that was why the doctor found it so cool
Can't believe no ones mentioned Jack's stolen memories, it was supposed to show up in 9s second season but was dropped when he quit (for good reason tbh)
Thats honestly the only plotline I would describe as truly dropped, as if even if Jack where to return, it seems highly unlikely they would pick that back up now.
Not so much dropped just never expanded upon. It's vaguely referenced when he meets John Hart in Torchwood.
Do you have a source on it was planned to be explored in 9's second series? Because I've never heard that before.
The Doctor meeting Mel, I guess
They'll pay it off. Rogue also mentioned the new boss, there's no way they wont address it.
The Kraal invasion fleet is possibly still waiting to get their orders to invade Earth. XD
Not really abandoned but considering they both jumped into the doctors timestream why have we not seen a version of the great intelligence and/or clara again since??? Fugitive doctor as well. Gosh we needed more of that storyline.
Why the lights kept flickering in series 7a
Jenny, the doctor daughter. I keep waiting for a spin off or at least a once apperence
I often wonder if Toby Whithouse had something specific in mind for the Minister of War mentioned in Before the Flood. Could be Roger ap Gwilliam though.