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YMMV / Doctor Who 30th AS "Dimensions In Time"

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  • Critical Backlash: At the time it aired, the episode was a crushing disappointment for fans who'd hoped it might herald a revival of the show and it's seen as the Who equivalent of The Star Wars Holiday Special. While no sane person would consider it to be good, now the show has been successfully revived it's much easier to appreciate the episode as just a silly load of nonsense for charity and enjoy the nostalgia of all the returning actors.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: Whovians and EastEnders fans alike pretend that this crossover never happened. Even The BBC considers it non-canon.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • The Rani's line about the fate of the captured First and Second Doctors: "Fated to wander a dismal corner of the universe for twenty years. Helpless. Paralysed. It will drive them insane!" This took place in the abyss when Doctor Who was off the air, which lasted from 1989 to 2005 and only truly broken by a single TV movienote , for a grand total of almost twenty years. And the fandom felt helpless, paralysed... but hopefully not driven insane from all the waiting for the show to come back.
    • Pauline Fowler is shown alive and well in 2013. In actual EastEnders canon, Pauline would go on to be killed in 2006, and her actress Wendy Richard would die in 2009.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • Just before the start, there is a brief segment of Jon Pertwee (as the Doctor) visiting Noel Edmonds; the Doctor tells Edmonds that he's seen him in year 2010. In 2010, Edmunds was still on television and presenting (among other things) Deal or No Deal, the Doctor's answers to Noel asking if he does serious programming ("I travel through space and time, I don't visit Fantasy Island!") is another point to consider here. Even funnier considering how Edmonds takes his relatively low-brow daytime gameshow as Serious Business.
    • The Seventh Doctor's line "I— I mean, we— are difficult to get rid of" was more true than he knew. Doctor Who would soldier on through the "Wilderness Years" in the books, then the disastrous '96 TV Movie, then bringing the old cast back for new adventures in audio format, before finally coming back as a storming success in 2005. Seems not even the real world can get rid of the Doctor!
    • This wouldn't be Bonnie Langford's last visit to Albert Square - she joined EastEnders as Carmel Kazmemi in 2015.
    • Kathy Beale's presence on the Square in 2013, and how it ultimately ended up becoming a subversion of Harsher in Hindsight. In actual EastEnders canon, Kathy left Walford and moved to South Africa in 2000, before she was revealed to have died offscreen in 2006. The show's writers largely stuck to this event as being truth in canon, until 2015, where Kathy shocked audiences nationwide by returning alive and well, with it being established that her death was faked in a desperate attempt to escape her controlling husband. In other words, Dimensions in Time correctly predicted that Kathy would still be alive by 2013, but not even the EastEnders writers would be aware of this fact.
    • If it weren't for the fact that this was recorded in 4:3 aspect ratio and on analogue videotape, one can see that the scenes set in 2013 are weirdly prescient as not being as futuristic as the production tried to make it out to be when made in 1993 (despite the effort to make "sleek" the digitally-added train that one can see passing on the background overbridge/overpass in one shot). The only things that are missing/weren't thought-of is cell phones and the abundance of them in public, and the idea that we would be talking about past culture as if it had happened last week. Plus, there were indeed comebacks of certain late-century popular culture in the New '10s.
  • Narm Charm: Look...it's not good. But everyone involved seems to be having a great time gleefully camping it up, and seem completely aware this is a silly novelty charity skit. And they were all doing it for free in order to raise money for a children's charity, which they did with great success. It would be churlish to dislike it merely for being bad.
  • What Do You Mean, It Wasn't Made on Drugs?: The plot is so fast-paced it can be hard to tell what is even happening and the special is filled to the brim with bizarre and nonsensical special effects, including floating CGI heads of the First and Second Doctors. You can't help but wonder if the entire production team was smoking something.
  • WTH, Costuming Department?: In so much as there was a costuming department; several of the companion actors were simply wearing what they showed up in on the day, irrespective of how much sense it made in-universe.


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