Discussion TheArtifact / LiveActionTV

Removed:

• Doctor Who:
  • Susan Foreman, slightly. Despite having left the show in 1964, returning only on-screen for 20th anniversary story "The Five Doctors" in 1983, her very presence now throws up various questions. When the Doctor is an Ambiguously Human mad inventor, everything about his personal life is a Riddle for the Ages and he's the main character of a children's show only intended to run for a couple of years, his having a granddaughter by the name of Susan (and his eventual leaving her on a future Earth promising he will come back) is just a bit of added history that averts the Unfortunate Implications of an old man travelling around with an Audience Surrogate child. However, when it's revealed the Doctor is a Time Lord Defector from Decadence from the planet Gallifrey with Psychic Powers and two hearts whose name may be Unpronounceable who stole his ship and likely was politically tortured by his own people, many additional questions are raised about her. For the most part, she seemed to only be mentioned in Broad Strokes, except for the occasional cameo such as in the aforementioned Five Doctors and Big Finish audios, when the Doctor needed to remind us that he'd had a family.
    • Seeming subverted as of season 10, which did not shy away from mentioning her. Susan became not just indirectly but also directly referenced again, with pictures shown of her.

Susan left 54 years ago, only appearing in photos or cameos. Examples are not "slightly" or "sort of" or "seeming". And Susan herself showed psychic powers before the Doctor did iirc.

• The TARDIS's police-box exterior. Initially, the TARDIS was stuck in that shape and couldn't blend to its surroundings because to build a new prop each week would be impossible on the show's budget. They had a decent hand-wave, though — the TARDIS was a broken-down piece of junk by the standards of the Doctor's race, and the Doctor could barely even make it go where he wanted to, so it was plausible that some of its intended functions (such as camouflage) wouldn't work at all. These days, the show has a far more vast budget, and the TARDIS has a much higher success rate, but the police box is so iconic that it's continued to stick no matter how little sense it makes. The Doctor has attempted to fix the chameleon circuit on several occasions but never with any success. On one occasion (in the Colin Baker era), he did manage to get the TARDIS to change its exterior appearance but was relieved when it returned to its familiar police box shape at the story's conclusion. According to Donna in the series 4 finale when she had gained the Doctor's knowledge the Doctor does know how to solve it. To judge by how she was speaking of it, it would be a fairly trivial fix, so we can assume that the Doctor keeps it as a police box out of choice.

Doctor Who's budget is not "far more vast" to the point where they can create loads of different TARDI Ses like that. And also, the TARDIS didn't stop being an outdated piece of junk by his race's standards. It's the same ship.

• The Doctor's "thirteen lives" limit seemed to be heading the way of the artifact. It's there, all right, but since "The Time of the Doctor" he's kept going on thanks to a plot device that's been mentioned all the way back in The Five Doctors. (Which perhaps isn't so bad, as the twelve regeneration limit was a plot device only intended to explain the Master's predicament in the even earlier serial "The Deadly Assassin".)

This doesn't make any sense if there's been ways around the 13 regeneration ""limit"" for over three decades.