I'm seeing more and more that all this time he's been telling *one big* story, of vast scope, and some stories or plot elements that seem somewhat weak when taken on their own (e.g. VOTD) have actually been important building blocks in that greater story. I also think a lot of folks in fandom are too focused on the individual stories as isolated episodes to see the mosaic image that's forming, which is too bad.
I got into a bit of an argument with a friend of mine over that very point about two and a half years ago; I said that I thought the Master trilogy that closed out the third season felt like The Empire Strikes Back, and that as you saw in "Utopia" how the dominoes started to fall, then it became apparent that there was a direction to the series that wouldn't unfold for another season or two, that we'd have our Return of the Jedi before RTD was done.
His argument was that television doesn't work like that; you don't know when you're going to be canceled, so it's insane to pull a JMS and plot out a massive storyline (and, even in JMS' case, he didn't quite pull it off because he didn't know if he'd get the fifth season of Babylon 5 or not).
As for where, two years ago, I thought the story was going, it's the same place I think it's going today — the reset button. RTD is passing on the box of Doctor Who toys, and there's one toy that he took out of the box and hasn't used — Gallifrey and the Time Lords. It's not RTD's toy to take out of the box permanently, though; it was in the box when RTD received the box of toys from Philip Segal, and it was in the box of toys when Segal received them from John Nathan-Turner. For Moffat to have the same box of toys to play with that he had, RTD has to put the Gallifrey/Time Lord toy back into the box. Maybe it will be overt, maybe it will be subtle (like The Gallifrey Chronicles, come to think of it), but the toy will go back in, and Moffat will inherit a toybox with all its toys intact.
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I got into a bit of an argument with a friend of mine over that very point about two and a half years ago; I said that I thought the Master trilogy that closed out the third season felt like The Empire Strikes Back, and that as you saw in "Utopia" how the dominoes started to fall, then it became apparent that there was a direction to the series that wouldn't unfold for another season or two, that we'd have our Return of the Jedi before RTD was done.
His argument was that television doesn't work like that; you don't know when you're going to be canceled, so it's insane to pull a JMS and plot out a massive storyline (and, even in JMS' case, he didn't quite pull it off because he didn't know if he'd get the fifth season of Babylon 5 or not).
As for where, two years ago, I thought the story was going, it's the same place I think it's going today — the reset button. RTD is passing on the box of Doctor Who toys, and there's one toy that he took out of the box and hasn't used — Gallifrey and the Time Lords. It's not RTD's toy to take out of the box permanently, though; it was in the box when RTD received the box of toys from Philip Segal, and it was in the box of toys when Segal received them from John Nathan-Turner. For Moffat to have the same box of toys to play with that he had, RTD has to put the Gallifrey/Time Lord toy back into the box. Maybe it will be overt, maybe it will be subtle (like The Gallifrey Chronicles, come to think of it), but the toy will go back in, and Moffat will inherit a toybox with all its toys intact.