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The Daleks p4, Gallifrey Gals Get Wibbly Wobbly! Classic

🕑 Added 2023-03-30 17:00:05 +0000 UTC

Comments

Keith Goodnight

It's easy to head-canon WOTAN's line but it's harder with the human villain who repeats it. I personally just avert my eyes until it goes away-- although it's actually interesting to look behind the scenes and realize why it happened: Calling him Dr Who is not the only lore problem The War Machines has: in the first episode of the story, the Doctor is welcomed into the computer center with people saying how honored they are to have such an eminent scientist visit them, as if he is well-known and famous on present day Earth. Later, government officials turn to him as an advisor in the crisis that develops without any need for him to introduce himself. The explanation is that at the time, tie-in comic books and merchandising would always describe the character as "that famous scientist and inventor Dr Who" and would essentially imagine him as being a human celebrity scientist, like (then) Einstein or (later) Hawking.The incoming producer and script editor had heard of all that but had no idea (until letters from fans clued them in) that the series' actual continuity was different. It's a sign of how different things were back then for the show, and for the BBC as a whole, that a production team could just be assigned to run the show without any thought to whether they knew anything about it. Partly that happened because it was a last-minute shakeup where the prior producer quit unexpectedly due to personality conflicts with Hartnell, but partly it was just a different world for BBC productions. Anyway, I'm always fascinated by these behind-the-scenes stories. As for an in-universe rationalization: I figure the Doctor had the psychic paper, even though we wouldn't see it until decades later. He used it to make them think he was that famous scientist and inventor Dr Who.

Josef Schiltz

My own way of rationalizing this is that WOTAN was a computer. It had the honorific 'Doctor', but a space where it was programmed to expect a surname. The only logical thing it could do was to fill that space with the question 'who?' - lower case - in order for the sentence to be complete.

Nicole Mazza

DOCTOR WHOOOO IS REQUIRED!

Bill

Fear breeds hatred. Hatred breed passion. Passion gives me strength. With strength I gain power. With power I gain victory. Through victory my chains are broken. The Force will set me free. >.> Wrong universe? Le sigh Wrong universe.

Christopher Jones

How fun is it remembering the scenes from "An Adventure in Space and Time" when Verity Lambert saw the children playing "Daleks" on the bus and they found out about the show's leap in ratings and thinking that these are the episodes the public was seeing at that time?

Keith Goodnight

Do you recall which episode that was? I'm jittering with the urge to go check it out.

Mark Ten

i think Tom Baker was also once called Doctor Who on a loudspeaker.

Mark Ten

And lets not forget that individual pacifists who refused to fight were imprisoned and in some cases executed. With an entire country at war people turned on those who refused to fight. Remember the Christmas Armistice that the 12th Doctor saw? Both sides were so frightened by the idea of soldiers not fighting that their commanders made sure it could never happen again by threatening death to their own men. Pacifism was defined by some military courts as cowardice in the face of the enemy... subject to execution.

Keith Goodnight

He was "Dr Who" in the credits all the way until the 80s, but he was "The Doctor" in dialogue— except in one notorious episode late in Hartnell's run when he was called "Dr Who" onscreen and the BBC got flooded with letters from fans pointing out the mistake the following week. (The mistake happened because a new producer and script editor had just come in, who didn't know the series lore, something it's hard to imagine happening now.)

Mark Ten

Dont be hating on Ian, a couple of days before he teaching chemistry to teenagers. He was probably too young to serve in WWII. Heart is in the right place, but doesnt have the skill set. Paula, you are probably right about pacifism being a cultural thing. This is less than 20 years after WWII and Britain had gone through a period of appeasement of Hitler prior to 1939 to avoid war at any cost - they gave him almost everything he wanted to stay at peace but it was never enough. PM Chamberlain allowed Hitler to seize the Rhineland & Czechoslovakia in spite of existing treaties which eventually led to war anyway. Pacifism had a bad name in England by this point.

Firefly24601

I love that the Dalek giving orders had to reiterate the exterminate order to the Dalek in the lift. They weren't well-known for exterminating at this point. "When you find them, exterminate them. Your orders are to exterminate!" "So, just to be absolutely clear, you want me to exterminate them?" "YES, EXTERMINATE!"