"An account of a Time Lord's adventures through SPACE AND ONLY SPACE"

November 24, 2023 1:43 PM

Tomorrow (Saturday November 25) starting at 3pm PT (6pm ET/11pm GMT) and running for approximately 24 hours, Laser Webber of the Doubleclicks (several previouslies, dating back to 2011) and Becca McGlynn (with some special guests) will be participating in a charity livestream that watches Doctor Who in chronological order -- but NOT chronological order of the airdates. This chronology is presented in order of when each event took place, from the perspective of the show's internal universe.

This revised fanedit, dubbed "Stitches In Time", is the long-term project of McGlynn, who is also a filmmaker and playwright (“Asexuality! The Solo Musical” recently ran at Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2023). The methodology of how she produced this timeline is a 7500+ word document available here. Suffice to say she has shown her work, and yes, she is aware the whole thing will need revising soon.

During the stream, Webber and McGlynn will be raising money for the Los Angeles LGBT Center, which launches in 1969. Guests will include Doctor Who writer Paul Cornell, podcaster and D&D player Travis McElroy, and musician Marian Call. It will run tomorrow on Laser's Twitch channel.

posted by The Pluto Gangsta (43 comments total)

This is the sort of committed nerdery that the internet is for.
posted by mhoye at 1:50 PM on November 24, 2023 [20 favorites]

the Los Angeles LGBT Center, which launches in 1969.

Uh whoops, that should say "launched in 1969", unless you are in fact a time traveler who is journeying back to see it happen.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 1:55 PM on November 24, 2023 [16 favorites]

XXX. The K9 Distinction

Each version of K9 is a distinct companion.

Each time he is rebuilt by the Doctor, he is a distinctly new being (K9 Mk I, Mk II, Mk III, and Mk IV).

The exception to this is in the K9 (2009) TV series, in which he is a self-regenerated version of K9 Mk I.

Since there is already a K9 Mk II, this regenerated version is referred to as K9 Mk 2.

----

This is perfect. This is absolutely perfect.
posted by egypturnash at 2:05 PM on November 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

"1851. England. The Second Tenth Doctor teams up with a mysterious man who shares his memories to stop a Cyberman invasion."

The Second Tenth Doctor. God this is exactly the kind of mess I am not surprised to find exists in sixty years (minus the sixteen years between Old Who and New Who) of cranking out episodes.
posted by egypturnash at 2:12 PM on November 24, 2023 [8 favorites]

I hope they randomly cut to one second snippets of "Heaven Sent" periodically after passing present day.
posted by justkevin at 2:53 PM on November 24, 2023 [7 favorites]

By the way, if you've never heard the music of the Doubleclicks (or Laser's solo work), each of their albums on Bandcamp can currently be bought with a 90% discount using the promo code "FRIDAY", but you need to put in the code for each album when you put it into your shopping cart.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 3:03 PM on November 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

I have tried unsuccessfully several times to get into Dr. Who, but have always found it baffling, and all the multiple reboots and productions and different actors is exhausting.. Like having to jump into a river that's flowing just a little too quickly. Maybe this is just what I need.
posted by zardoz at 3:13 PM on November 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

I wrote this guide a few years back - "The Many Convolutions Of Space, Time And Mind: A Brief History Of Doctor Who" - if anyone would like a brief history of Doctor Who from its earliest beginnings up to the present day (the mid 90s).
posted by dng at 3:29 PM on November 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

Wow! Wow. Wow.
posted by Going To Maine at 4:07 PM on November 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

The Curse of Fatal Death was a documentary and its regenerations happened in real-time.
posted by delfin at 4:17 PM on November 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

I have tried unsuccessfully several times to get into Dr. Who, but have always found it baffling

I think this is how everyone feels about Doctor Who [abbreviations aren't part of the show title] until they just decide to go along with the ride and then a few hours in you start to parse some of the rules of the universe and eventually you are fine with whatever.

Because being "fine with whatever" is part and parcel of being Doctor Who fan. The show has been going on for so long and is so internally inconsistent that you just decide "this is a milieu in which a story will be told" and you're fine with it. I don't think it was ever designed to be internally consistent. It was, I believe, designed to be a show which combined SF/F elements with actual history lessons, to be appealing to kids as a vaguely educational thing. Time travel means, by its nature, inconsistency.

I'll watch this thing, simply because the amount of work it must have taken to try to resolve all these timeline things much have been mammoth. I hope it's an entertaining presentation, because 24 hours is a long time to hold audience attention unless you've planned very carefully.
posted by hippybear at 4:17 PM on November 24, 2023 [10 favorites]

I wrote this guide a few years back ... (the mid 90s)

The word "few" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
posted by hippybear at 4:18 PM on November 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

@zardoz the beauty of Doctor Who is that knowledge of canon isn't necessary. It might be best to not think of any time period of the show as a reboot - every stretch of the show is part of the whole. The structure of the show is amazingly flexible, given it's overall framework: a time traveler, who belongs to a very long lived race, who have the ability to regenerate their bodies when near death, who stole a time machine, from his home world, in defiance of them.

It really is just like @hippybear says above, if you allow yourself to along for the ride, you will be onboard quick.

But to that end, let me suggest a couple episodes that can ease that even further:

"Rose" - first episode of the new Doctor Who era, and a perfect introduction.

"Blink" - an episode that features the Doctor the least, and paradoxically is one of the greatest.

"The Eleventh Hour" - Matt Smith's first episode, and was written almost like a reboot (it is not), since the show runner and actor playing the Doctor changed.

"Vincent and the Doctor" - Just a simple, brilliant episode, that requires no backstory.
posted by kmartino at 4:50 PM on November 24, 2023 [10 favorites]

The Curse of the Fatal Death was excluded because it's about the actual real-life Doctor Who, not the fictional character Doctor Who, just as Arnold Schwarzenegger meeting Ronald Reagan is not considered part of the Terminator franchise.
posted by phooky at 4:52 PM on November 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

I hope it's an entertaining presentation, because 24 hours is a long time to hold audience attention unless you've planned very carefully.

To be clear, hippybear, the livestream will only be about 24 hours, while the entire "Stitches In Time" playlist is approximately three weeks long.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 4:52 PM on November 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

Alternately, I'd say if you really want to get into Doctor Who, go back to Season 16 with Tom Baker, known as The Key To Time. It's a 26 episode run that covers six stories in serial, that form a giant story arc all together. It's Doctor Who storytelling at its best, and Tom Baker is truly one of the great Doctors.
posted by hippybear at 4:54 PM on November 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

I have tried unsuccessfully several times to get into Dr. Who, but have always found it baffling, and all the multiple reboots and productions and different actors is exhausting.. Like having to jump into a river that's flowing just a little too quickly. Maybe this is just what I need.

I can assure you it's almost certainly not.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 4:57 PM on November 24, 2023 [18 favorites]

If you decide to try getting into Who via the Key to Time season, skip The Power of Kroll. It is slow, completely lacking in the humor that's an essential part of what makes Who work, and is also a really ham-handed attempt to try and process the British Empire's massive guilt complex about how they colonized and subjugated everyone they ran across. The rest of it's pretty fun, it's great to have a companion who is able and willing to call the Doctor out on his bullshit, and there's a Douglas Adams story.

Really though Old Who it may be hard to take for a modern viewer, it is a zero-budget show from the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and there has been a lot of cultural drift since then. Honestly I'd just say watch the new season when it starts and see what you think; all you really need to know is that the Doctor (never "Doctor Who", always "The Doctor") is a nigh-immortal space god who likes to take an ever-shifting collection of young adult Earthlings on his adventures through time and space.
posted by egypturnash at 5:22 PM on November 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

Event One: hydrogen inrush.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:13 PM on November 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

The 2024 season is being pitched as another sort of soft reboot (it's been deemed "Season One") so it may be an even more reasonable time to get into modern Doctor Who than usual (the 60th Anniversary specials airing this month not so much; they may well be fairly incomprehensible as an introduction).
posted by BungaDunga at 7:01 PM on November 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's a time travel show with an emphasis on dialogue - hence the 'canon' is easily changed/ignored/treated as a fib and not worth sweating over.
posted by jjderooy at 8:49 PM on November 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

"The triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism"
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:18 PM on November 24, 2023 [11 favorites]

Mod note: [btw, this post has been added to the sidebar and Best Of blog]
posted by taz (staff) at 2:37 AM on November 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

The 2024 season is being pitched as another sort of soft reboot (it's been deemed "Season One")

That link is paywalled and the Wayback doesn't have it, is there any other way to read it?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:04 AM on November 25, 2023

That link is paywalled and the Wayback doesn't have it, is there any other way to read it?

Here you go. Essentially, the renumbering is as much about the platform on which the seasons are available as the narrative.
posted by goo at 3:17 AM on November 25, 2023

@justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow just reminded me of one of the greatest Doctor Who primers:

YouTube: Craig Ferguson - The lost "Dr. Who" cold open. 2:47 will tell you all you need to know :)
posted by kmartino at 4:36 AM on November 25, 2023 [9 favorites]

So do we start with Terminus, the explosion of which caused the Big Bang? Then Castrovalva which starts with them hurtling back towards the Big Bang?
This task is just as impossible as putting all the Spider-Man comics in order, because they don't all fit together and aren't meant to. Some of them are meant to fit with some others, but there is no cohesive whole.
There are several large divisions (but even they aren't internally consistent) the original Doctor Who (1963-1989), The Dalek Movies, the Virgin New Adventures of Doctor Who books, The FOX TV Movie, The Eighth Doctor Adventures books, BBV Audio Adventures in Time and Space, the IDW comic, the massive ongoing Big Finish audio productions, Doctor Who The Stageplays, Nu Who (2005 TV reboot), BBC Books Doctor Who, etc.. this in not an exhaustive list of all the different media that has been made around Doctor Who.
The only consistent thing has been somewhere there is usually a character called The Docotr who is a Time Lord (usually but he has been a human), and a time and space vessel called the TARDIS.

Doctor Who has been my favorite show (with Blake's 7 clos3 behind) since the early 80s.
posted by MrBobaFett at 5:06 AM on November 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Also if it wasn't clear, this is critically important, there is no canon. Pretty much any Doctor Who story can more or less stand on it's own. And any writer can pick and choose which if any other Doctor Who stories they are going to include in their continuity.
Except BBC scripts they are required by their charter to ignore anything that happened in any non BBC media.
Which might be a part of why Big Finish is the best producer of Doctor Who media since the early 2000s.
posted by MrBobaFett at 5:20 AM on November 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Boba, the “7500+ word document” link in the original post explains the rules of this project, including which media it covers (it must be *video*, either from an actual episode of the show, or with well-defined links to an episode of the show), and how a lot of the ambiguities acquired in several decades of largely making up new shit as the show goes along were resolved. All the comics, books, and radio plays are left out. You may or may not agree with the editor’s choices but they are laid out pretty clearly.
posted by egypturnash at 6:04 AM on November 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

It all becomes crystal clear if you just consider the Doctor and their companions as a time-travelling, thrill-seeking "ship of Theseus" polycule where people come and go but the basic setup persists forever. The beeb is too uptight to put any of the goings on on screen, but there's plenty of fan fic to help fill in the gaps. Hope this helps.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:07 AM on November 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Important clarifying detail: not everyone who travels on the spaceship is part of the polycule, but the spaceship always is.
posted by bettafish at 6:59 AM on November 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

just consider the Doctor and their companions as a time-travelling, thrill-seeking "ship of Theseus" polycule where people come and go but the basic setup persists forever. The beeb is too uptight to put any of the goings on on screen, but there's plenty of fan fic to help fill in the gaps.

Or don't, since a ~2000-year-old Time Lord having goings-on with a rotating cast of ~19-year-old humans would be a pretty gross show?
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 9:58 AM on November 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Eh, fans of vampire romance know how to argue their way through that thicket if needed. (2000 may be the equivalent of 19 in Time Lord years! Maybe every regeneration resets his emotional maturity level to a baseline level of 20! Every companion is actually somehow secretly an amnesiac immortal, and there is probably fanfiction backing that up!)

(Ace was not his lover, though. Ace was his adoptive daughter, underlined, full stop, I will hear no arguments otherwise.)
posted by kyrademon at 1:09 PM on November 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Okay well, this discussion went in a direction that is leading me to just close the tab.
posted by hippybear at 1:57 PM on November 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think Who will mostly be offscreen during the fundraiser, sadly.

Organizing hundreds of hours is an interesting, formidable challenge. I wonder how much time overlap there is between doctors. How many epochs are needed, like, Big Bang, Gallifrey, Earth, etc.
posted by Pronoiac at 3:53 PM on November 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

I realized the post link for Stitches in Time, or Doctor Who and the RDIS includes links to watch it. It's 21 episodes long, each one being about 24 hours long, which, uh, some browsers aren't entirely on board with. (Firefox is working for me, Mobile Safari just stared in incomprehension.)

Part 1 of 21: 13.8 billion BC - 1000 BC. "Only" the first nine parts appear to be up right now.
posted by Pronoiac at 6:03 PM on November 25, 2023

The big secret to Doctor Who is that every few years they write an episode that's intended to be a jumping-on point, particularly when a showrunner changes and they have both a new Doctor and a new companion, but you probably could jump on with either any new Doctor or any new companion change at the start of a season, because inevitably it's going to be about "working out who this person even is" and with a show as fluid as Doctor Who, writers have a lot of options.

There is a special delight, amongst Whovians, to see how they're going to put a spin on the new companion working out the Doctor's very strange ship casually breaks physics.

I think the suggestions up-thread for the reboot series are all quite good, but if you are the kind of person who is a completionist who has to start at the beginning, "Rose", the first episode of the reboot, is both a pretty good indicator of how the series means to go on and is fairly accessible. (One of the genius parts of the reboot was is structure, realising that it has to establish what kind of show this is. The episode that reintroduces the most iconic Doctor Who villains takes pains to directly address the 40 years of jokes people have been making about them. As a result, watching that series gives you a good idea of the range of the show, from sci-fi to fantasy, and, alas, also that its quality can vary a lot from episode to episode.)
posted by Merus at 7:53 PM on November 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

I've just realized what this reminds me of: Of Oz the Wizard, the alphabetized Wizard of Oz.
posted by BiggerJ at 9:22 PM on November 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

Wow, BiggerJ, that is... something else.
posted by inexorably_forward at 1:35 AM on November 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

"Blink" - an episode that features the Doctor the least, and paradoxically is one of the greatest.


This is where I get to mention that there's a single line in that episode ("It's the same rain.") that's one of the finest bits of TV writing ever and can consistently make me burst into tears just by thinking about it.
posted by longtime_lurker at 5:20 AM on November 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

> I've just realized what this reminds me of: Of Oz the Wizard, the alphabetized Wizard of Oz.

I've seen that on a much smaller scale, with songs:
* Toto's "Africa"
* Weezer's "Say It Ain't So"
* Jack Black's "Peaches"
posted by Pronoiac at 1:11 PM on November 26, 2023

In the mid-90s, the definitive book everyone on the Doctor Who UseNet groups referred to was called The Discontinuity Guide. At the time, we knew it was the perfect title: the show had been discontinued for several years by that point, and showed no signs of ever coming back. It was also a sign of the utter folly of trying to assemble a complete continuity thread for a show that ran for 26 years and focused on time travel of all things. And it let us all hang fun imaginary lampshades on that one moment where the Cybermen showed a scene of a far-future episode in a very near-future episode.

And it let us celebrate the death of the Cartmel Masterplan and laugh at the novels that tried to Make Fetch Happen. But nobody nailed the coffin shut, alas.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:44 AM on November 27, 2023

Parts 10 through 16 have been uploaded, taking us up to the year 3935. We've yet to plunge forward into deep time - and the temporally relocated history of Gallifrey.
posted by BiggerJ at 1:02 AM on November 29, 2023