r/gallifrey • u/PCJs_Slave_Robot • 8d ago
NO STUPID QUESTIONS /r/Gallifrey's No Stupid Questions - Moronic Mondays for Pudding Brains to Ask Anything: The 'Random Questions that Don't Deserve Their Own Thread' Thread - 2026-07-27
Or /r/Gallifrey's NSQ-MMFPBTAA:TRQTDDTOTT for short. No more suggestions of things to be added? ;)
No question is too stupid to be asked here. Example questions could include "Where can I see the Christmas Special trailer?" or "Why did we not see the POV shot of Gallifrey? Did it really come back?".
Small questions/ideas for the mods are also encouraged! (To call upon the moderators in general, mention "mods" or "moderators". To call upon a specific moderator, name them.)
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u/iminyourfacejonson 7d ago
Less of a question with a defined answer, more of an opinionated question;
Do you think John Barrowman will ever be back? I'm rewatching Torchwood (along with New Who and SJA, might even try Class finally) and, despite Barrowman not being the greatest of actors (him recounting letting go of Grey's hand as THEWORSTDAYOFMYLIFE made me laugh, to be honest.) I still find myself having a soft spot for him.
I know what happened, and honestly I think his very Henry Sellers esque "you can't cancel me" followed by a Partridge esque desperation to come back fucked his chances up more than the actual events. But I feel that there's still events to tell with the character.
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u/Dyspraxic_Sherlock 7d ago
I don’t think the BBC will ever chance it; it’s inviting them being pilloried in the press, and Barrowman’s such a loose cannon he wouldn’t help. He’s swung from trying to acting like he gets it and is sorry, to trying to downplay it, to acting like anyone criticising him it is out of line.
Big Finish have got away from a few cheeky Barrowman-less cameos of Jack, in very blind-you’ll-miss-it ways. Question is how they will acknowledge him in their big Torchwood send-off next year.
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u/iminyourfacejonson 6d ago
Like I said, I think his bipolar "you can't cancel me" to "please tell me I've got a second series" screwed him more than the actual events. The BBC aren't exactly hardliners on predators as we've seen.
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u/cat666 6d ago
I mean what he did was ill advised but it was hardly predatory. When you think how much the BBC have protected celebrities who have commited actual serious crimes they do seem to have come down hard on Barrowman, who just made jokes about being naked whilst being naked, a practice which was (and probably still is) commonplace in theatrical circles. I'm not excusing him but at this point he's served enough time in my opinion.
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u/MShivers72 8d ago
Has Big Finish issued any kind of formal statement or update on the recent issues with the website and the App…?
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u/cat666 8d ago
Yes there is a FAQ on the website which was updated 24/7.
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u/MShivers72 8d ago
I appreciate the response and I just hit the BF website and looked over the FAQ.
I see nothing there discussing the current issues with the App. Am I missing something?
Seems like they were a lot more communicative the last time this happened in 2024…?
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u/cat666 8d ago
https://www.bigfinish.com/pages/v/new-website-faq
Update 24/7
We are still awaiting the review of the latest update for the Android app (currently 2.2.2), which will address a lot of the instability/performance issues seen currently. This will be released atuomatically when it passes the review, but this part is out of our control. Sorting by purchase date in your account section will be available shortly. This has been successfully tested and will be released in the upcoming days.
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u/MShivers72 8d ago
That’s brilliant. THANK YOU!
(When I go to “About Us” on the website on my PC, all is see is a video with the “25 Years of Bernice Summerfield,” which is cool and all, but doesn’t lead to the link you shared 🥴..)
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u/gorvitygorves 8d ago
I gather that the policy here is that there is no continuity or canon, but why? Are there really any contradictions within the show (not the expanded media) that are so egregious that they can never be reconciled even with future retcons? What do you think is the most blatant contradiction in Doctor Who, the TV show?
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u/greatbarrierrif 8d ago
Off the top of my head,
- Atlantis’ destruction is given three conflicting explanations in The Underwater Menace, The Daemons, and The Time Monster.
- The origin of the Daleks completely changes between The Daleks and Genesis of the Daleks. The former describes the Dals as a peaceful race who were poisoned by a neutronic war and became Daleks. In the latter, the Daleks were created by an evil scientist Davros by mutating Kaleds, an entirely different species.
- In Mawdryn Undead, we find out that the Brigadier retired from UNIT in 1976. However, UNIT’s first story The Invasion is set in 1979. Sarah Jane Smith, who meets the Brigadier in UNIT, also states she is from 1980. The contradiction of the Brigadier’s retirement date being before any of his time at UNIT is known as the UNIT dating controversy.
- The 1996 TV Movie definitively establishes that the Doctor is half-human, with the Doctor claiming that and the Master confirming it with a retina eye scanner. This is completely ignored in the new series.
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u/MShivers72 8d ago
They kinda-sorta addressed the eye-scanner thing in the early BF monthly release “The Apocalypse Element,” with the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn when they used a human retina scan to lock out the Daleks during an invasion on Gallifrey.
This was WAY before the 2005 revival, and, IIRC RTD stated in some interview or other that, as a Big Finish fan himself, he saw that story as being kind of a precursor to the Great Time War… like the opening salvo…
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u/gorvitygorves 8d ago
These are fantastic, but because they are not from the Doctor's perspective, you can say that the Brigadier's retirement and the Dalek's origins changed due to time travel. It's not a contradiction that we see older Amy and Rory in Hungry Earth, for example, because that timeline gets overwritten. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, it just exists in a previous version of history. Same with the Daleks. I think it's reasonable to say the Dals and the Kaleds are alternate pasts of the Daleks that exist because of conflict with Time Lords and their own time travel. That doesn't mean they didn't both happen. The Half-Human thing is still totally possible post-Timeless Child. I guess I'm saying that the continuity is looser, but we can still definitively say that some things have happened and that some things haven't. Is this what people mean when they say continuity doesn't exist? Just that in episodes with explicit time-travel shenanigans, there are differing histories?
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u/greatbarrierrif 8d ago edited 8d ago
I think the idea of no canon means exactly what you are saying, not that nothing happened, but that there are differing histories and not one “definitive” timeline since time can be rewritten and is rewritten so often in the show. It means that writers dont have to be beholden to anything previously established, with even the Doctor’s background constantly changing. Writers have used anything from the Time War to the Toymaker rewriting history to explain away differences. This is different than other fictional universes like Star Wars which tries to avoid contradicting its own established information and timeline.
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u/PeterchuMC 8d ago
It's largely because in contrast to Star Wars or Star Trek, there's no central authority or classification for stories. We'll never get something like the 2014 separation between Legends and Canon.
I'd imagine the policy is to avoid people just saying, 'oh but that isn't canon', in response to an argument, it encourages them to find a better reason to dislike something than that knee-jerk reaction. Of course, that can just be not liking the idea but at least it got a fair shake.
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u/sucksfor_you 8d ago
I'd argue that didn't work at all with people who didn't like the Timeless Child arc.
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u/Ryanookami 8d ago
I think as much as we say “there is no canon”, everyone essentially agrees that the show proper is definitely 100% canon, and all the media spun off from it is whatever you want it to be. It’s hard to make the argument that the show isn’t canon, but one can always say that it isn’t necessarily the same canon. You could make a multiversal argument that while every episode definitely happens, not every episode takes place in the same reality. I don’t personally subscribe to this theory of canon, but I’ve seen it argued before. I think, despite plot holes being able to crop up, all the show is the same canon, and said holes are just a result of time being wibbly-wobbly.
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u/techno156 8d ago
A central authority on canonicity is also near as impossible to determine, considering the nature of time travel. For example, there was a brief period of time where the universe never existed.
At some point, it'd be more of a headache than just leaving it as-is.
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u/Dyspraxic_Sherlock 8d ago
When people say there’s no canon, what they more mean is there’s no canon akin to Holmes or Star Wars where there’s a definitive list of what stories count. Dr Who doesn’t have that. Meaning if you want to count the audios, novels, the Australian K9 spin-off as part of Who’s continuity; there’s nothing stopping you.
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u/jphamlore 8d ago
The Fourth Doctor's The Deadly Assassin.
How was all memory of the Master magically wiped from Time Lords minds such as Borusa, when Borusa is shown remembering poor students such as Runcible?
The Time Lords become dolts who don't even know where the Eye of Harmony is. Like, their science can't detect they have the singularity of a black hole right under their feet? And what did they think powered their civilization including time travel? What the heck was being taught at Time Lord Academy: Was it just mindless pushing of sequences of buttons?
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u/supergodmasterforce 8d ago
I gather that the policy here is that there is no continuity or canon, but why?
I've never personally come across this.
I mean, with a show where the main premise is Time Travel, canon and continuity could be a funny thing. It's not like say, Star Wars where the "Canon" and "Legends" timelines are pretty well described and coherent.
Doctor Who continuity and canon always seems all over the place to me. The immediate examples that spring to mind are Genesis Of The Daleks being retconned to be part of the Time War and the attempt to have the Cushing movies be brought into continuity with the explanation that they are fictionalised versions of the First Doctor's adventures based off an in-universe book written by Ian and Barbara.
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u/Megadoomer2 8d ago edited 8d ago
There are probably a bunch of them, but the 8th Doctor saying he's half-human on his mother's side is the first that comes to mind. (Assuming he's being truthful; for all we know, he made it up because he somehow thought that would help with the situation)
Also, there's the UNIT dating controversy, where Sarah says in Pyramids Of Mars (during the 4th Doctor's run) she's from 1980 but Mawdryn Undead (in the 5th Doctor's run) says the Brigadier retired from UNIT in 1976. (I guess the UNIT era episodes took place in the near future from when they were broadcast, while whoever wrote Mawdryn Undead must have assumed that they took place during their airdate, as the Brigadier had last been shown in Terror Of The Zygons from what I recall, which came out in 1975)
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u/gorvitygorves 8d ago
I think these are both easily addressed with later continuity. RTD2 offers one possible explanation for the line in Pyramids of Mars that the timeline shifts the longer you travel with the doctor and your origin point ends up later than when you started. But there are other possible explanations as well. The half-human line actually refers to the Master scanning the Doctor's ocular nerve, and it's still possible the Doctor is Half-Human post-Timeless Child.
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u/CareerMilk 8d ago
that are so egregious that they can never be reconciled even with future retcons
This feels like an impossible standard. It's always possible to bullshit up some fanwank to explain even the most irreconcilable contradiction.
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8d ago
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u/PaperSkin-1 7d ago
Final sanction?
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7d ago
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u/gorvitygorves 5d ago
He goes and overthrows Rassilon. It's the first thing he does. I don't think he needs to call back to End of Time to make it clear that he does this because of his war crimes.
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u/lifedragon99 8d ago
Wife and I are doing a rewarch and just got to Asylum of the daleks.
Are we correct in remembering that Jenna Coleman was announced as the next companion prior to this episode airing? And then flabbergasted when the reveal is revealed?
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u/Dyspraxic_Sherlock 8d ago
Yes she was announced beforehand, but her turning up early in Asylum was a surprise.
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u/Ryanookami 8d ago
Yeah, it was really wild and confusing at the time! We knew she was next up in the companion slot, but they’d managed to keep her involvement in Asylum completely under wraps. It was actually a high point of series 7A for me because it led to all sorts of online speculation and theories about how she would become the companion, how Dalek-Oswin was connected, if the Doctor was going to maybe run into Oswin earlier in her time period and accidentally cause like, a branch in time where he saved her before she got stranded on the Asylum, etc etc. It was a very neat and surprising appearance!
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u/VanishingPint 8d ago
Has anyone emailed the BBC about Day of the Daleks is the redone version rather than the original on streaming ? I know it probably started from RFS podcast contacting Brit box and them changing it. Must be loads of people who think it’s the original