Breaking the fourth wall is a Doctor Who tradition - the First, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors all directly address the camera in addition to the Fifteenth, as do River Song, Martha, Clara, and various Classic villains. I don’t understand why people suddenly need some sort of in-universe explanation for it. It’s a narrative technique, and Doctor Who is a goofy camp show that’s always been flexible enough, playing with various tropes, that it works. Davies explains it perfectly in the link: “I mean, you would [be taken out of the story by it] if it was Pride and Prejudice, that would be odd. But there’s something showy about Doctor Who, there’s something proscenium arch about it. There’s something arch about it, full stop.”
This sort of needing an in-universe explanation for every theatrical device or inconsistency is how you get garbage like Trek’s Klingon augment virus.
“It’s just something I thought would be cool, there’s defo a reasoning behind it but mostly just me wanting to do it.” 🙄
He’s being his usual cheeky self, but I have to assume the fourth wall bit will make a kind of sense once we know what her deal is, right?
…right?
🙂
I think we’re better off just enjoying single episodes now, I’m realising that RTD never had a good grasp of his season arcs…
I tempered my expectations quite a bit when they announced he was coming back. He can produce some stellar individual episodes, but I’ve never cared for his big, “event” stuff.
Agreed. I really liked Years and years, which is probably the closest he’s done to science fiction in the past decade? So I thought maybe he’d gotten a better grasp of those longer arcs, but apparently with Doctor Who he just throws stuff at the wall and hopes something will stick.
They can later just cut back to that scene, and slowly pull back and reveal that it was watched by another being who at the time unknown to all was a viewer stand in, but now has significance too the story. They did stuff like that before. Once they recorded the first doctor talking to the screen in an abstract environment about nothing in particular. Much later writers built a story involving all the doctors up to that point and stitched it around these clips. Something similar can still be done here
Oh yeah, didn’t the Hartnell Doctor once wish the viewers at home a happy Christmas?
