It's super effective.
Aside from "Mission to the Unknown" and maybe location-hopping stuff within serials like The Keys of Marinus, none of the TV series' stories are contained within one twenty-five minute episode. I'm not sure what the equivalent of 3-7 episodes is to page count, and I'm aware that most of the episodes weren't made with marathon viewing in mind, but saying that the TV series stories are only 20 minutes long seems misleading.
Moving to the discussion page, so it can be discussed:
- Compressed Vice: No Future claimed that the Doctor had developed a habit of relying on messages containing hints from his future self, to the point that he was seriously out of his depth when his opponent in that novel found out and intercepted the messages. This habit is not apparent in any of the other novels.
- Although it was established Fanon prior to this - possibly based entirely on a Doctor Who Magazine comic strip which claimed he'd arranged for that convenient mattress in "Survival", and the note from Merlin!Doctor in "Battlefield". Paul Cornell's previous novels had alluded to the idea of the Doctor travelling back to set up his adventures, most notably the epilogue of Timewyrm: Revelation, where we see it happening (including leaving a message for Ace).
The thing about both "Battlefield" and Timewyrm: Revelation, though, is that getting help from his future self is not something the Doctor plans on, or even expects — it just happens, and then later he goes and helps his past self because that's what he has to do to close the time loop. I don't know of any story where getting help from his future self is a deliberate part of the plan, let alone something he absolutely depends on.
Fair point. The mattress reference is sufficiently wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey to defy analysis: the Sixth Doctor put it there, because the Seventh told him to ... and we're not told when in his timeline the Seventh did this, but he subsequently told Sixth he was hoping for something more subtle, suggesting it was before it actually happened...
So, I'm roughly halfway thru this series, having previously only read a book here and there, and a recurring theme was starting to annoy me. Am I the only one who feels that the 7th Doctor's reputation as the ultimate chessmaster is a bit of an Informed Ability? He loves his manipulating, sure, but I haven't noticed a single occasion where his plans haven't blow up in his face, leaving someone else to come along at the last moment and save the day for him. It feels like a cheap way to add a moment of drama at the expense of the character. Does this change at all as the series goes on?
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No idea. But his plans do succeed in Birthright and Conundrum.
Edited by FreelanceEditor
I disagree it's at the expense of the character; the fact he's not quite as clever as he thinks is what stops him being a God-Mode Sue. And since he doesn't have an Omniscient Morality Licence (although he sometimes thinks he does), his companions' What the Hell, Hero? moments have some validity.
Also his plan worked perfectly in Love And War ... he just hadn't thought through the side effects.
Edited by DaibhidC
Regarding the David Troughton regeneration. From what I remember, it wasn't so much a matter of the BBC refusing to let them do it, it was that the Telemovie came out around this time, and a real Eighth Doctor sort of made it redundant. And they were planning to press the reset button after a number of months by introducing the concept of Retro-regeneration (which had already been mentioned in State Of Change.)