I was looking at the comments section on my latest lists article for Comic Book Resources, ranking the 10 most powerful Gods in Doctor Who, and was surprised that Omega proved to be a controversial choice. I had never seen any debates in the fandom before about whether or not Omega counts as a God (to me, from what is shown on TV and in expanded media, there’s no question about it that Omega is a God who happens to be a Time Lord).
It’s made me wonder what other random topics there could be that fans disagree on. I don’t mean the obvious things like the regeneration limit or the UNIT dating controversy, but are there any other obscure fandom debates anyone has noticed that took you by surprise?
I think the real question here is ‘what do Doctor Who fans agree on?’ and the answer to that is probably, very little. I know a lot of people debate whether looms are a good idea or not (personally I’m pro-loom), and I wonder if anyone still seriously considers the Doctor to be half human (on his mother’s side) (Lungbarrow spoilers: and I cannot bear the implication of Leela being his mother, that is something I gleefully reject in my personal canon)
It actually has very little to do with Torchwood and is all about Rose missing 12 months and that completely destroys the timeline because so many writers forgot about it, and that timeline just so happens to include Torchwood.
The real Torchwood dating controversy is how long Jack was gone! I usually go with six months but if anybody has evidence to the contrary I’m willing to amend that.
I’d say that holds more weight after the Timeless Child, now that we have no idea where the Doctor came from, as they weren’t originally a Time Lord. The Doctor could have been a human hybrid with an alien race, and the mixing of their DNA with the extraterrestrial DNA could be what caused the regeneration ability to become prevalent, leading to Tecteun to experiment on the Doctor to discover how they were able to do it and give the ability to the Time Lords.
I used to think the War Chief is the Master nonsense stemmed from the FASA role play game whose author(s) decided to conflate the two. But I was educated that the suggestion first appeared in a DWM article.
But…
Seeing as Terrance Dicks wrote an entire novel which more or less confirms the WC is not the Master, I’ve always seen it as a done deal.
I will say that when I watched War Games for the first time I was sure the War Chief was going to be revealed to be the Master. I still think it would make sense.
Someone blocked me on Tumblr because I debated the concept of whether Ianto and Gwen were “best friends”. I disagreed and said there’s more evidence to suggest they’re friendly coworkers than besties. And gave my own interpretations of certain scenes across expanded media.
They got pretty mad and said “bye forever” and blocked me.
