Talk:The Pilot (Doctor Who)

Location, anti-gay synopsis POV and the mini-sode

• "St Luke's University in Bristol"

With neither the name of the uni nor the city spelled out in the episode itself, if we are going to mention either in the synopsis, we should have a reference to the official website, which is where this supposed location is identified. While this is from a sort of horse's mouth (the official website), I cannot find anything close to such a place in real world UK on the web, and everything's got a web presence these days. Nearest I can find is the St Luke's campus, Exeter, a part of the University of Exeter (or there's St Luke's in Islington but that's even further removed). Is this a goof on the part of the BBC or were the city and university names edited out of the final cut?

• Anti-gay POV pushed in synopsis?

At the moment it says Bill's crush on Heather is "precocious" (a term used to denote premature aptitude, which has nothing to do with sexuality) and that she is "struggling" with her sexuality. How so? She doesn't seem the least bit confused, she's just an average every day lesbian in her late teens or early twenties. Heather is not even her first female love interest. She went on about another girl she'd 'fatted up' by giving her too many chips at the beginning of the episode. There are other grammar/diction problems in the synopsis but they'll get sorted out through everyone's editing as usual.

• Friend from the Future - minisode

The segment which introduced Bill on 23 April 2016 is unlike any minisode we've seen before--and is missing from the article at present. Possibly it's been mistaken for a trailer. While it's not the usual prequel-type we've seen so often in the past, in that the action does not take place before the episode, it's not just an edited 'trailer' either, in that there's a whole chunk of dialogue and action in it which is (apparently) not shown in the broadcast episode--unless those bits were carefully edited out here in Canada. Whatever's going on, it should be noted, but I defer to those of you in the UK. Besides, I don't really know what to call it.

ZarhanFastfire (talk) 03:22, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Well I made a stab at it anyway. I'll be interested to see how it turn out eventually.ZarhanFastfire (talk) 07:49, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Mystery solved thanks to Dresken's useful edit. ZarhanFastfire (talk) 01:38, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

No worries - though I didn't know I was solving mysteries at the time though. It might have been the "Becoming the companion" featurette that went into a bit of detail on filming the minisode as well. Cheers, Dresken (talk) 09:01, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

Continuity ≠ Easter Eggs ≠ Outside references

So much of this going on lately, it's taken several of us to keep up. Thought it might be worth attempting to nail down some helpful notes.

Please slow down (WP:NORUSH) and think before you add. If Continuity were simply a fannish list of "Easter eggs" over which to (well, whatever it is people do), we'd have a section called "Easter eggs". We do not. We have a section called Contintuity and another called Outside references, and we have critical reception, and if any exists, notable analysis of some sort. Continuity is back references to previous episodes that are (at minimum) relevant to understanding the episode or the storyline. A couple of things for your consideration: 1. The people who write for the Times and Den etc. are not producing the show, they are interpreting what they see in the show and coming to their own conclusions. 2. Sometimes what they notice is unambiguous and can be used as a reference for genuine contintuity notes, but other times what they notice is either ambiguous or not actually relevant to the section--and to be brutally frank, sometimes it looks like they've pulled it out of their collective arses because they needed to reach a quota or other magical number and I imagine the collective readership of the site experiences a massive IQ drop afterwards. 3. Occasionally, if it's written as proper criticism, it could be added to an interpretative analysis section at some point. Most often though it's a passing fancy, so it's not worth noting. But then it would also not be continuity or references, but interpretation.

Rule of thumb: verbal references to things that happened outside the scope of the episode, or verbatim quotes, may be back references or outside references. A really good example is Barbara saying "Not again!" when something happens when nothing similar has occured in the episode: that can only make sense because it's referring to the previous episode. Pictures of characters, ditto. Iconic objects or symbols, ditto. Things which require interepretation, on the other hand, like a model of something vaguely resembling something else, or anything which is a commonplace outside the context of the series, such as terrestrial locations, cannot be considered an unambiguous reference. Things like actions (dangling out of the TARDIS), references in passing to real people (the Queen giving a speech on TV with no comment from the Doctor would not be a reference to his having met her as the 7th Doctor, for example).

Here's an example from the previous series: when the 12th Doctor and Davros share a laugh together, one of the sources pulled up a panel of Batman and the Joker laughing together. Nothing else, just put up the panel and I guess let that speak for itself. Well, ok, that's vaguely similar but... Someone here then took this and added it to the wiki page for that episode as an Outside reference. Well, no. Just because two things look kind of similar doesn't make for an outside reference to the other. The writer at the website was not arguing for it being a ref anyway, he was essentially saying that Batman/Joker scene is a sort of template for the Doctor/Davros scene, that it's an influence on the DW story. Pretty major claim. As no cogent argument was actually made for this other than, "oo'er, they be kind of like each other", the analysis is too superficial to be notable as analysis either.

ZarhanFastfire (talk) 09:03, 4 May 2017 (UTC)