This almost certainly is less influential on the future than Revelation, but it would’ve felt weird if Who hadn’t done a big cyberpunk steal in the early 1990s.
The prologue to this book is a thing of beauty. Totally Cartmel’s character statement for the Doctor. I also love how the whole thing really comes down to him not factoring in the rogue element of two people falling in love.
There is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of this story’s Butler Institute in 2008’s The Poison Sky, when the Sontaran gas is being burned out of the atmosphere.
I do understand why you did this, but I think skipping over Time's Crucible seems odd, because if anything, that's the real 'trilogy' - Cornell established the new baseline and Cartmell shows where he might have taken the show in the future if he had had the chance, but it's Platt who pillages the past to create a Gallifrey that does what Chibnall also decided to do - re-examine the bits and pieces of the 'canon' and then rewrite the history wholesale to give a new bunch of 'loose ends' that could be taken up later (and, in the case of Faction Paradox, thrown about with great force.)
So I guess skipping it does make some sense given that, whereas Revelation and Warhead are still largely intact in the retcon game (indeed they may even be more 'canon' than some tv stories!), Time's Crucible has been very much written over (by both Hell Bent and then The Timeless Children/Flux.)
Good points all. I love the NAs so much it would have been tempting to reread huge numbers of them, but I had to draw the line somewhere so picked five, all by people who worked on the TV show at some point. Platt did too, of course, but...
The idea of mysterious never properly fleshed out origin stories for the Doctor is sort of a running theme from Remembrance right up to the present isn't it? Platt helps with that but he doesn't really invent it. If anything, his questions are among the more answered ones, it's mostly all settled by Cold Fusion and Lungbarrow.
Also I don't believe in Who stories overwriting others, they're all there somewhere
Oh sure, the whole "Who is the Doctor?" business started to become a thing during the 7th era and there wasn't any way that the NAs weren't going to embrace it, which they clearly did. All I was saying was that Time's Crucible set up things that the NAs went with - and yes, culminating in Lungbarrow - which were largely not the direction that Davies and Moffat chose to go, and certainly not the way Chibnall went.
I do take your point about not overwriting things; there is the strange nature of Gallifrey being a myth within the show, and it's always been clear (at least once e.g. the Monk arrived in the Hartnell era) that the Doctor was a part of that myth but which was still a myth meaning that any version of the story that is told is going to be 'true' - bearing in mind that, of course, we're talking about a fiction within a fiction here and that muddies the water so much!
This almost certainly is less influential on the future than Revelation, but it would’ve felt weird if Who hadn’t done a big cyberpunk steal in the early 1990s.
The prologue to this book is a thing of beauty. Totally Cartmel’s character statement for the Doctor. I also love how the whole thing really comes down to him not factoring in the rogue element of two people falling in love.
There is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of this story’s Butler Institute in 2008’s The Poison Sky, when the Sontaran gas is being burned out of the atmosphere.
I do understand why you did this, but I think skipping over Time's Crucible seems odd, because if anything, that's the real 'trilogy' - Cornell established the new baseline and Cartmell shows where he might have taken the show in the future if he had had the chance, but it's Platt who pillages the past to create a Gallifrey that does what Chibnall also decided to do - re-examine the bits and pieces of the 'canon' and then rewrite the history wholesale to give a new bunch of 'loose ends' that could be taken up later (and, in the case of Faction Paradox, thrown about with great force.)
So I guess skipping it does make some sense given that, whereas Revelation and Warhead are still largely intact in the retcon game (indeed they may even be more 'canon' than some tv stories!), Time's Crucible has been very much written over (by both Hell Bent and then The Timeless Children/Flux.)
Good points all. I love the NAs so much it would have been tempting to reread huge numbers of them, but I had to draw the line somewhere so picked five, all by people who worked on the TV show at some point. Platt did too, of course, but...
The idea of mysterious never properly fleshed out origin stories for the Doctor is sort of a running theme from Remembrance right up to the present isn't it? Platt helps with that but he doesn't really invent it. If anything, his questions are among the more answered ones, it's mostly all settled by Cold Fusion and Lungbarrow.
Also I don't believe in Who stories overwriting others, they're all there somewhere
Oh sure, the whole "Who is the Doctor?" business started to become a thing during the 7th era and there wasn't any way that the NAs weren't going to embrace it, which they clearly did. All I was saying was that Time's Crucible set up things that the NAs went with - and yes, culminating in Lungbarrow - which were largely not the direction that Davies and Moffat chose to go, and certainly not the way Chibnall went.
I do take your point about not overwriting things; there is the strange nature of Gallifrey being a myth within the show, and it's always been clear (at least once e.g. the Monk arrived in the Hartnell era) that the Doctor was a part of that myth but which was still a myth meaning that any version of the story that is told is going to be 'true' - bearing in mind that, of course, we're talking about a fiction within a fiction here and that muddies the water so much!