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Post by bumbles on Sept 2, 2022 8:22:07 GMT
Let me start by stating my core premise: the Doctor is a meta-fictional virus that infects any story they’re in (or even connected to) and makes it about … the Doctor.
Take “Rose”, it starts out as an average London girl encountering High Strangeness, but then, enter stage left, comes the Doctor and suddenly the focus shifts to him.
Take the first episode of “Class”, it stops being about the students and the focus shifts to the Doctor every time he’s on the screen.
Take “Torchwood: Children of Earth”, which is literally a story that can only be told in a universe where the Doctor does not exist AND STILL his absence is noted and has to be explained in a stunningly hamfisted and out of character and previously established tonal manner.
So let’s introduce our setting - there’s a War that is literally impossible for “lesser species” (ie us) to comprehend. It’s big. It’s nasty. The established Big, Nasty monsters are explicitly positioned as being small fry compared to the impossible to understand “enemy” (with or without a capitalisation). The established “superpowers who might as well be gods” are either on the run, extinct or losing the War. It’s a war being fought on all arenas, from fronts to fonts. Even ideas are weaponised.
And into this is thrown the Doctor.
It takes roughly 150 pages for the Doctor to infect the story to position himself as the most important player in this War. He went to Mictlan and outwitted beings who are composed of spite and legalese. He was there on day one of the war and potentially on both sides of the War. The Homeworld? Need him to reboot their weapons. The enemy? Think he’s the mutt’s nuts. Faction Paradox? Totes fans.
The Doctor is explicitly told he cannot get involved because he was already involved in his future.
what happens?
“Somehow” he encounters another soon-to-be-important player in the War and the wider Cosmos (Compassion). He enables them to undergo the change that inevitably makes her the mother/guardian/home of the future of all humanity.
“Somehow” he encounters Tineships from that War who despite the risks cannot help themselves reveal things to him about the future.
Because he was (albeit unaware) incubating Compassion, the war found him in the form of The War Queen of the Homeworld, who just happened to ALSO be a former friend and companion.
Eventually he ends up on one of the Nine Homeworlds, the one that occupies the original position in history, causality and so forth as the original Homeworld… on the very day “the first message from the enemy” occurs that wipes out that Homeworld.
Despite the fact previously it was very clearly established that none of this happens to the Doctor until a lot later in his life.
However, this is important. This is where the fiction strikes back to sever the Doctor before he infects everything, he has, after all, already made himself into Grandfather Paradox and turned the Faction into his idea of what a “secret organisation” should be (basically - Bond Villains).
For Faction Paradox to continue as a fiction that isn’t a side story to the Doctor, it had to sever that connection. And it did so violently. The consequences changed the fiction for both Doctor Who and Faction Paradox.
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Post by miss//bearbrass on Sept 2, 2022 13:19:55 GMT
Ooh this brings up many thoughts! I hope you don’t mind me toying with this and thinking aloud here.
Do you think this severance is linked to the Last Great Time War? I mean, it’s a war conveniently centred around the Doctor and their most recognisable foes, with events that seem to echo notable events in their past (another Time Destructor, another Valeyard). Is the LGTW what happens when the Doctor-virus is left to run free and overrun every aspect of a time war? Because the post-LGTW universe does seem rather improbably centred on the Doctor.
I’m reminded of fragmentation, where a bit of an organism (like a coral) can break off and grow into its own separate-but-whole organism. If I may run with this imagery, perhaps the fiction corralled (so close to a good pun) the Doctor-virus (at least twice over: first with Mictlan!Lad, then again with Eight to be sure) into one corner of the universe and severed it, allowing the infected fragment to grow into its own fiction. (Been a while since I touched Interference, but Three on Dust feels like the piece de resistance here: a little push to loosen the virus’s grip.)
Maybe it’s more of a ‘chase the virus through the body into the arm, sever the arm, watch as the arm grows into a bizarro version of you that’s obsessed with this one guy’ deal.
My bigger question is: does the fiction know it’s doing this? Is it a doctor(!) actively treating an illness or is it someone passively letting their body fight off a cold?
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Post by bumbles on Sept 2, 2022 21:37:41 GMT
I’d say TLGTW is what happens when the Doctor ISN’T severed from the fiction, he ends up turning this great epic, mind warping, weird extravaganza into “me versus the Daleks. Except this time it’s like … really big and important and everyone dies except me. And the Daleks. And my best mate/worst enemy.”
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Post by miss//bearbrass on Sept 3, 2022 6:45:09 GMT
Mm, and now all I can think of is TLGTW being used as an over-dramatised cautionary tale PSA on what happens if you don't treat meta-fictional viruses. "Watch out, Jimmy! If you're not careful, you might end up with a levitating David Tennant!"
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Post by bumbles on Sept 3, 2022 8:16:26 GMT
Mm, and now all I can think of is TLGTW being used as an over-dramatised cautionary tale PSA on what happens if you don't treat meta-fictional viruses. "Watch out, Jimmy! If you're not careful, you might end up with a levitating David Tennant!" “Do you want to get spat on by Timothy Dalton? Because this how you get spitty Timothy Dalton”. |
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Post by doctornolonger on Sept 7, 2022 17:28:08 GMT
Love this interpretation. I'm a big fan of theories that bridge the Doylist-Watsonian gap, so to speak, by giving an in-universe explanation that mirrors the real-life motivations of the writers, and this "Doctor as virus" idea is a perfect example in how it reifies the tendency of Dr Who writers to make everything revolve around, well, Dr Who. Previously I've speculated that the Doctor's greatest enemies becoming Gallifrey's enemy in the TV show was a retro-effect of the Moment, enabling the Doctor to collapse the quantum superposition of the Enemy's identities with the easiest answer, the one most personally connected with him, which echoed backwards in time to turn the whole War in Heaven into a Last Great, much lesser, Time War. But the virus interpretation explains this phenomenon and a hundred others besides. It reminds me from this quote from Weapons Grade Snake Oil, attributed to Godfather Morlock's "Book of the Truce" (future anthology title? lol): The use of the word "quarantined" prefigures this virus concept nicely: the obvious implication is that the Doctor is one of these narcissistic patients whom the Houses have locked away in an isolated timeline, simultaneously enabling the Doctor to live out a fantasy future in which the universe revolves around him (which, in reality, it always had) and freeing the War from the Doctor's influence, allowing the Houses to grow from merely a backstory to an independently conceived civilisation in their own right. (I tried reinforcing this perspective and reconciling it with SBJ's "Faction Paradox Stands" via my BotP Dossier piece "A Prelude to Arms": "All of the newly-created, specially-primed “lesser Homeworlds” were given their own enemies to fight in microscopic models of the greater War. Confined as they were in bottle universes and oxbow timelines…") The Doctor needn't be the only example of an oxbow timeline, either. Cwej after a certain point in his history (maybe the Mt Usu Duel?) might be another candidate: I love the Cwejen rebellion on the Homeworld in the Cwej series, but that series being oxbowed would at least explain what exactly happened to the War! Not to imply that oxbows are any less "real" or "important", of course. Isn't the FP series itself, with its divergence from the EDAs timeline around the arrival of the War King, perhaps itself an oxbow of the Master War King's design? |
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Post by Aristide Twain on Sept 7, 2022 18:33:24 GMT
All of this fits in rather nicely with the fact that as per Alien Bodies, the Doctor's fate, even post-mortem, is to turn into the most important macguffin in the universe. Even stiff as a doornail, his essence contrives to bend everything around itself, like a sort of narrative black hole. (I am personally fonder of that sort of framing, the Doctor as a walking gravity well who deforms normal probability around them on a subconscious and massively effective level, than the “viral” one, though both metaphors have their merits and can easily overlap. In my view, the Doctor is only an extreme, pathological case of something that is in the nature, in the very essence of all Time Lords; it is only logical that living keystones of the structure of History do all sorts of horrible things to the web of causality when they traipse around in it instead of staying put at the geometric centre of the Spiral like they're supposed to. As McCoy put it in Death Comes to Time - "we can't walk amongst them… we never really could.") doctornolonger , I've seen you propose the “FP timeline” as the War King's Oxbow before, but I'm still not sure it makes sense. In this framing, much as the Doctor of NuWho keeps winning, surely one would expect the War King's oxbow to be one where everything goes right for him, which manifestly isn't the case as of True History. |
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Anastasia
Cousin
Liberating the oppressed of the Houses and toppling regimes.
Posts: 154
Preferred Pronouns: She/They
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Post by Anastasia on Sept 7, 2022 19:30:19 GMT
(I am personally fonder of that sort of framing, the Doctor as a walking gravity well who deforms normal probability around them on a subconscious and massively effective level, than the “viral” one, though both metaphors have their merits and can easily overlap. In my view, the Doctor is only an extreme, pathological case of something that is in the nature, in the very essence of all Time Lords; it is only logical that living keystones of the structure of History do all sorts of horrible things to the web of causality when they traipse around in it instead of staying put at the geometric centre of the Spiral like they're supposed to. As McCoy put it in Death Comes to Time - "we can't walk amongst them… we never really could.") Doctor Who and the Kirikkitmen all but confines this briefly when Borusa speculates about how Gallifrey, as he called it, had never been invaded at all but when the Doctor became President it was invade twice in as many week and earth was not invaded once, whilst as soon as the Doctor left things went back to normal. Borusa continue ps to speculate that their is finite luck in the university and the Doctor absorbers most of it from those who surround him, leaving those around him very little luck, it also suggests that the Doctor always regenerates heroically whilst Borusa regenerates in rather humorous events because of this. Like the Novelisation of Shada (which has an appearance of Shada) I would recommend this book to War scholars as whilst not heavily involved with it they both include little clues, not surprising and LM was probably inspired by the stories backstory. |
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Post by bumbles on Sept 8, 2022 9:31:08 GMT
All of this fits in rather nicely with the fact that as per Alien Bodies, the Doctor's fate, even post-mortem, is to turn into the most important macguffin in the universe. Even stiff as a doornail, his essence contrives to bend everything around itself, like a sort of narrative black hole. (I am personally fonder of that sort of framing, the Doctor as a walking gravity well who deforms normal probability around them on a subconscious and massively effective level, than the “viral” one, though both metaphors have their merits and can easily overlap. In my view, the Doctor is only an extreme, pathological case of something that is in the nature, in the very essence of all Time Lords; it is only logical that living keystones of the structure of History do all sorts of horrible things to the web of causality when they traipse around in it instead of staying put at the geometric centre of the Spiral like they're supposed to. As McCoy put it in Death Comes to Time - "we can't walk amongst them… we never really could.") doctornolonger , I've seen you propose the “FP timeline” as the War King's Oxbow before, but I'm still not sure it makes sense. In this framing, much as the Doctor of NuWho keeps winning, surely one would expect the War King's oxbow to be one where everything goes right for him, which manifestly isn't the case as of True History. The probability warper Doctor is how the Doctor is presented in “Camera Obscura”, which also explains how he (and Compassion) exist despite Gallifrey never actually existed (currently, book continuum wise). He makes the reality he’s in accept his existence, because he exists he has to exist. |
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PI9090
Cousin
I was loomed this way.
Posts: 91
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Post by PI9090 on Sept 8, 2022 21:50:19 GMT
Let me start by stating my core premise: the Doctor is a meta-fictional virus that infects any story they’re in (or even connected to) and makes it about … the Doctor.
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Post by bumbles on Sept 9, 2022 3:14:00 GMT
ohh hello!
“Alien Bodies” introduces the idea of Sam (the companion, almost an archetype for companioniness, to the point of blindness) has two sets of biodata -one a natural blonde miss goody two shoes the other a natural brunette, troubled, drugs using etc teen.
In effect, one the sort of person the Doctor would travel with and the other … not.
Sam even describes the Doctor as a virus that infected her life while trying to understand her two sets of biodata/history.
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Post by bumbles on Sept 9, 2022 3:15:37 GMT
Let me start by stating my core premise: the Doctor is a meta-fictional virus that infects any story they’re in (or even connected to) and makes it about … the Doctor.
Or to quote the current TV series…. The Timeless Child, the renegade and …. well who knows. it’s the same idea. |
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