Doctor (Doctor Who) - Discontinuities

Discontinuities

While over the decades several revelations have been made about his background—that he is a Time Lord, that he is from Gallifrey, among others—the writers have often strived to retain some sense of mystery and to preserve the eternal question, "Doctor who?". This back-story was not rigidly planned from the beginning, but developed gradually (and somewhat haphazardly) over the years, the result of the work of many writers and producers.

This has led to continuity problems. Early histories of races such as the Daleks were rewritten, and so on. Series writer Paul Cornell, discussing continuity errors, opines that the modern series' "Time War" can explain away (or retcon) such discontinuities, giving the example of Earth's different destructions in The Ark (1966) and "The End of the World" (2005). Writer and Doctor Who executive producer Steven Moffat has gone further, arguing that "a television series which embraces both the ideas of parallel universes and the concept of changing time can't have a continuity error—it's impossible for Doctor Who to get it wrong, because we can just say 'he changed time'".

Some of the stories during the Seventh Doctor's tenure, part of the so-called "Cartmel Masterplan", were intended to deal with this issue by suggesting that much of what was believed about the Doctor was wrong and that he was a far more powerful and mysterious figure than previously thought. In both an untelevised scene in Remembrance of the Daleks and the subsequent Silver Nemesis it was implied that the Doctor was "more than just another Time Lord". The suspension of the series in 1989 means that none of these hints were ever resolved. The "Masterplan" was used as a guide for the Virgin New Adventures series of novels featuring the Seventh Doctor, and the revelations about the Doctor's origins were written into the novel Lungbarrow by Marc Platt. However, the canonicity of these novels, like all Doctor Who spin-offs, is open to interpretation.