TeeVee! We Talk TeeVee!

[kingandy]

Oh, a few quick notes re this week's Doctor Who ...

• Part of me hopes they will take this opportunity to tie all the Dalek survival into one big lump. Currently there are three distinct instances of Daleks surviving the Great Distaster From Which No Dalek Could Possibly Have Escaped, which is somewhat stretching the bounds of credibility. From 1930s New York, it would be quite easy for (a) one gold Dalek to end up, broken and confused, in Van Statten's museum in 2012, and (b) the others to escape, hide in subspace, decide one of them is the Emperor and start converting humans into Daleks^[1] to build up their empire (in their Long Game). I half-suspected the human-to-Dalek conversion process was what the Great Experiment was going to be ... it's still not out of the question for Dalek Sec to become the Emperor, he does have that big throbbing brain after all.
• I still don't see the advantage of leaving behind your impervious flying battle-suit with built-in ray-guns, even if you do get "imagination".
• Why wasn't it called "The Daleks Take Manhatten!"?

Still, it was all good fun and I quite liked the musical number. Loved those wings...

[1] Or "Using human cellular matter and protein chains as raw material from which to grow new Daleks"

Comments

[mrssshhh.livejournal.com]

Just a notion in reaction to all of the above, what you're missing is that it's already happened. You've got your notions of time wrong, especially in light of the "anything can happen" nature of time, now that it's caretakers are all dead.

Sec can't be the Dalek Emperor.

The Dalek Emperor is already dead. Yes, the actual even doesn't occur for tens of thousands of years, but it has already happened from the perspective of both the Doctor and Sec; it's "past" for them, and out of reach.

If you lock yourselves into the way of thinking as you're doing now, then you're making a mistake. If the confrontation between the Emperor & Rose is "yet to happen", then the Daleks at Canary Wharf and in Manhattan would have been gathered by the Daleks in the Time War; where they assembled all Daleks from throughout time and space.

In the aftermath of the time war, we're off the page, off the beaten track and up shit creek.

The only "time" that matters now is the Doctor's personal chronology. Everything else, if you want to think of it this way, isn't actually "real".

[kingandy]

"anything can happen"
"Sec can't be the Dalek Emperor."

Hmm, yeah.

See, this is the thing. It's a long-standing narrative convention in Who that you always encounter fellow time-travellers in the same subjective sequence as they do (anniversary specials notwithstanding), but personally I see no reason for this to be. Perhaps with fellow Gallifreyans (who could conceivably have such safeguards installed in their TARDISes), but such conveniences are, as you point out, all the less likely now the Lords of Time are all but gone.

I like how half your post is about how things are less rigid and more open now, and the conclusion you draw from this is that things can only possibly happen in one way.

[mrssshhh.livejournal.com]

"I like how half your post is about how things are less rigid and more open now, and the conclusion you draw from this is that things can only possibly happen in one way."

Exactly.

[myki.livejournal.com]

Actually no. Consider if you will the Queen Elizabeth meeting in the Shakespeare Code. It's a fairly good example of how the show is not always about the Doctor's personal timeline.

Although the Destruction of the Dalek's has happened in the past for the Doctor - it's still the future for Sec and the Cult of Skaro (potentially)