Project: Magnus

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The return of Doctor Who

(Nor­mally I will post this on Mon­day, how­ever due to not feel­ing well yes­ter­day I'm a day late)

Let me start this off with two bits of information:

1. I have split seasons.
2. I truly dispise ret­cons^[1] Espe­cially when it feels con­trived and used sim­ply as a plot device.

With that said I wanted to talk about the lat­est episode of Doc­tor Who, Let's Kill Hitler. With­out giv­ing too much away, we find out more about River Song and get a fairly empty feel­ing res­o­lu­tion to the fate of the girl from the first episode of the sea­son. We also learn who River killed that landed her in prison

I actu­ally came away from this episode annoyed. Annoyed because it felt like they came up with this fab idea halfway through the writ­ing process and decided to shoe­horn all this in and thought we wouldn't notice. Thought we would just accept that the new 'his­tory' of Rory and Amy was the really real his­tory and the pre­vi­ous his­tory, which had made no pre­vi­ous men­tion of any of this was not quite right.

Don't get me wrong, there were some gen­uinely hilar­i­ous moments (Rory putting Hitler in the cup­board for instance). And if you removed the ret­con aspect the entire episode could have stood on it's own quite well.

I guess my non-​​happy mostly comes from the fact it feels like they wrapped up a bunch of loop­holes and ques­tions about a multi-​​season arc in the span of 20 min­utes. Very less than satisfying.

1. ^[1] a.k.a. 'retroac­tive con­ti­nu­ity', refers to the alter­ation of pre­vi­ously estab­lished facts in a fic­tional work. Ret­cons are done for many rea­sons, includ­ing the accom­mo­da­tion of sequels or fur­ther deriv­a­tive works in a series, wherein newer authors or cre­ators want to revise the in-​​story his­tory to allow a course of events that would not have been pos­si­ble in the story's orig­i­nal con­ti­nu­ity. Other rea­sons might be the rein­tro­duc­tion of pop­u­lar char­ac­ters (via wikipedia) ↩