#the cartmel masterplan

[rassilon-imprimatur]

I rather like that this is much less the vague "Cartmel Masterplan" "the Doctor has always been something ancient and mysterious," (Remembrance of the Daleks et al) and is a more sinister "the Doctor is turning/evolving/mutating into/WILL BE something mysterious"

[narvin]

[timelxrd-victorious]

So, uh, with the mention of the Flux in "Wild Blue Yonder" and the brief allusion to the Timeless Child and how the Doctor doesn't know xir own species anymore...

I'm just going to post these snippets from the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Unnatural History, published in 1999. (Snippet sources.)

[genderqueerpond]

guys guys guys the short story qualia. this could be my new religion.

[wanderingmadscientist]

Just watched remembrance of the daleks, and it's so crazy, I love it.

[red-of-raxacoricofallapatorious]

sometimes I remember the looms exist then i really fucking hate my life

[macbethz]

My controversial doctor who opinion is I actually like the doctor being the Other reincarnated but only if it’s just kind of implied and means absolutely nothing. Like ok this space god-king threw themself into a baby machine but just got remade into Some Guy who occasionally gets angsty visions and uses the name for clout

[call-me-corvid]

Hot take: I ADORE the Timeless Child lore

[arcalian]

Me being fed by rtd once again alluding to the other one and really emphasizing how similar the doctor and toymaker are

[codenamesailordarillium]

Okay also .. is this ep the one where we've decided we're gonna cram in a whole load of character development we'd previously been neglecting for the "fam"?

[makiruz]

(Oh my god, the Cartmel Masterplan has a Wikipedia page)

[narvin]

the tecteun thing like. it is what it is. it’s not that bad. but the old backstory had more verisimilitude, the technobabble was better, and now where exactly does rassilon come in? why would he have been resurrected if he wasn’t the founder of time lord society? it’s so 🤷

[thenotoriousscuttlecliff]

I've seen this argument made a few times and it really doesn't hold much water because pretty much everything Chibnall did during his era was just a rehash or remix of something that had been done before like the War Doctor, Season 6B, the Cartmel Masterplan, the Celestial Intervention Agency, etc. The whole Timeless Child arc feels like Chibnall desperately trying to get those with Big Finish subscriptions on his side by creating new lore that exist mainly to explain old lore (like the Mobius Doctors) while trying to set the Doctor's origins back to a 1963 status quo. The Chibnall era was just not some great leap forward in terms of storytelling potential, if anything it was the exact opposite, weighing the show down with new forms of its already extensive lore that even the Chibnall himself quickly lost interest in.

[companion-showdown]

Whostory - Andrew Cartmel

Andrew Cartmel was Classic Who's final script editor, working on the show for the entirety of the McCoy era. While it never came to fruition on TV, Cartmel came up with what is known as the Cartmel Masterplan, a new more mysterious backstory for the Doctor, these ideas were later used by the Virgin New Adventures.

Cartmel would continue to write for Doctor Who in the form of novels and comics during the wilderness years and beyond, most recently for the twelfth Doctor comics in 2016.

[the-patrex]

Not a Timeless child enjoyer 😓

Twelve enjoyer Twelve enjoyer Twelve e-

[atopfourthwall]

What separates the deliberate mystery of a character like The Doctor from the deliberate mystery of a character like Judas Traveller? Why is one enjoyable and something you want to stay a mystery while the other is frustrating and feels like a waste of time for being so vague, despite both likely being cases of the writers having not come up with an actual backstory and just wanting a mystery for the sake of it?

In the case of the Doctor, it comes down to the answer never being satisfying. When you have a mystery that's existed for decades and decades, if you're going to answer it, you need something that'll be worth all that mystery and hype.

The Timeless Child explanation is unsatisfying for a number of reasons, not the least of which being it screws over a lot of established continuity. And sure, Doctor Who canon can be VERY loose compared to other franchises, but I think we definitely accept that, like, most of what we see on TV is at least canon and it raises more questions than it answers. The Cartmel Masterplan would have been unsatisfying both because it turns the Doctor from being an anti-authoritarian rebel against their society's ethos into one of the founding members of their entire society and culture, but also because in the end who gives a crap about Gallifreyan history? If you tell the average person just getting into the show "Well, it's later revealed that he was one of the founding fathers of the Time Lords but he threw himself into genetic looms to change himself but was still basically the same guy" they'd very slowly flip the channel over to Star Trek while staring at you in utter bafflement. With Judas Traveler, he's an antagonist - we don't see him very often anyway and the entire point of him is that he's supposed to be a mystery - thus we NEED to be heading to a point where it's all explained, otherwise we're just wasting our time. He's not the main character, after all - the Doctor can get away with it because the mystery is not the be-all, end-all of the character. With Judas Traveler, it pretty much is.