Spoilers for Series 12 (2020) of Doctor Who follow.

I quite liked the continuity-light approach of the Thirteenth Doctor’s debut season. I felt that relying on new aliens and monsters rather than dredging up the old standards provided more of a focus on who the Doctor was and what was important about her.

That said, my favorite moment in the Thirteenth Doctor’s run definitely comes from the climactic moment of Season 12’s “The Timeless Children,” which is anything but light on continuity:

 

So even as I celebrate a continuity-light approach, I lose my mind when the show plays a 30-second montage that acknowledges the Doctor’s long history. Why does continuity have that effect, and when does the show’s 50+ years of baggage drag it down?

The Dangers of Continuity Poisoning

As much as I love Doctor Who, I feel like it sometimes suffers from what I call continuity poisoning. That’s when the show cares more about its own continuity than the emotional impact of the story.

A good example of this is the Eleventh Doctor’s swan song, “The Time of the Doctor.” While it has its moments, the show spends a lot of time re-establishing the rules of regeneration (which hadn’t been brought up since 1976), to the point where the second act has an extended scene with Clara and the Doctor debating about how many regenerations he’s had. Meanwhile, the show skips over several hundreds of years of the Doctor’s life, glossing over the emotional ties we’re supposed to have to his mission on Trenzalore.

I’m not dissing anybody who likes “The Time of the Doctor.” But for me, an episode that introduced a lot of new characters I was supposed to care about and a big plot involving the Time Lords possibly returning got bogged down in debates about whether the Tenth Doctor used two regenerations or not.

The regeneration limit was an arbitrary plot device used in the 1976 story “The Deadly Assassin” to provide a reason for the Master to appear as a zombie-like creature rather than the recently deceased Roger Delgado. It could have been written out with a line saying that the limit disappeared when the Time War ended, or it could have been ignored completely. Instead it took up a significant portion of an hour-long special several decades down the road. The time spent on that bit of obscure continuity could have gone toward fleshing out the relationship between the Doctor and Tasha Lem, explaining how the Doctor acquired Handles, showing more of the Doctor’s time among the people of Trenzalore, or maybe explaining why the Silence, who were created to be the perfect confessional priests, also have the ability to shoot lightning out of their hands.

Arbitrary Continuity

The other problem I have with heavy use of continuity is that what counts and what doesn’t seems completely arbitrary. For example, “The Brain of Morbius” introduced the idea that the Doctor had eight additional regenerations before the First Doctor that we know and love.

Because that scene runs counter to the limit mentioned in “The Deadly Assassin,” it just got quietly ignored for years. So one piece of continuity gets dropped without another mention but another, more problematic piece, becomes so significant that it gets its own Christmas special.

Similarly, certain fans get incensed at the suggestion that the Doctor might be half-human, even though the Doctor himself said this was the case in the TV movie. Nothing else really contradicted that, but fans didn’t like it and so mentioning this bit of continuity became verboten.

The picking and choosing emphasizes that continuity is, by and large, an illusion. Fans care about it right up to the point where they don’t. But what counts as in-continuity and what doesn’t is often completely arbitrary.

But What About that Montage?

But if continuity really meant nothing to me, that montage of the Thirteenth Doctor summoning up her memories to overload the Matrix would do nothing for me. So what’s the deal?

The truth is, continuity does matter, but it shouldn’t be the point of the story. As a child of the 80s, I watched a lot of TV shows made by people who didn’t think kids’ memories were limited to 22 minutes plus commercials. It was frustrating when my favorite franchises ignored character details and events they had just established only a few episodes ago. It became equally annoying when a character saw significant change in one episode only for those developments to go unmentioned forever after.

Continuity matters because it gets us emotionally invested in the character. The fact that Doctor Who often acknowledges its long history is a strength of the show because it rewards long-time fans for their investment in the series. When Paul McGann reprised the role of the Eighth Doctor, it was like the return of an old friend.

The montage in “The Timeless Children” was appropriately dramatic, but what really made it pop for me was the sight of the Doctor’s previous incarnations. The series had already made reference to the Doctor’s old adventures and brought back notable villains like the Master and the Cybermen, but this was the first time we got a glimpse of the previous doctors. It served as a reminder that they’re all still in there and that the Doctor hasn’t forgotten who she is. More importantly, the creative team behind the show hasn’t forgotten that stuff either. The next series will build on this decades-long journey rather than ignoring it…although some things may change along the way.

The Doctor as the Timeless Child

Of course, the big bombshell of “The Timeless Children” is that the Doctor isn’t a Time Lord after all…or, if she is, she’s the very first of them. That means that our Doctor, the one whose adventures people have followed since 1963, represents only a few thousand years out of a life that extends millions or even billions of years back.

Miraculously, this actually brings back some old forgotten continuity while not invalidating the stuff that contradicted it. The other Doctors seen in “The Brain of Morbius,” for example, are probably old lives of the Doctor that he didn’t know he had. The mention that the Doctor’s retinal pattern isn’t Gallifreyan in the TV movie makes sense because he was never really Gallifreyan (although he’s still not half-human, either).

Narratively, though, the montage existed as a character moment for the Doctor. Despite learning that the Time Lords had hidden an extensive past from her, she chose to focus on who she knew herself to be. Meta-fictionally, it reinforced the same thing to fans. The Doctor’s past has changed from what we thought, but the character we’ve been following is the same. New revelations await, but the moments we already hold dear remain the same.

The Final Verdict on Continuity

Any piece of fiction needs continuity. Too much focus on continuity, however, takes away from a story’s emotional weight. The Thirteenth Doctor’s stories have served as an interesting exercise in balancing continuity. The first season peeled back the character to the most basic, avoiding detailed dives into the past in order to bring in new viewers. The second season delved deeper into the past, but also spun that history toward something brand new. This has allowed the show to embrace a very big past while focusing more on what makes the Doctor who she is. Horizons have been broadened and many new mysteries await even as the past remains intact.