Due to the show's use of time travel as a major plot element, Doctor Who has on many occasions visited a past year which was still the future at the time of the story's writing. For example, various contemporary stories from the original series which were set in their respective decades feature Earth actively involved in interplanetary travel. Later episodes, the new series, and the series Torchwood are written assuming real-life progress in space travel. The UNIT Dating Controversy is an attempt to explain the confused timeline and the technology seen during those episodes.
In the series' revived era, an extra year was created when the program jumped ahead by a year in 2005. By 2007, both Doctor Who and its then-new spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures had reestablished present-day in 2007 despite Doctor Who having depicted two successive Christmasses and myriad months of events that remained in-sequence.
Read more about this topic: Floating Timeline, Television, Live Action
Famous quotes containing the word doctor:
“A doctor is fascinated by death, and pain. And how much pain a man can endure.”
—David Boehm, and Louis Friedlander. Dr. Richard Vollin (Bela Lugosi)
“A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist.... This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)