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Was it really? It makes a little more sense, then.

I think it'd have to be a flux-point. According to one of them - Danny, I think - everyone has an Ood.

That's interesting theorizing and all, but... how does 43K2.1 become January 4302? If we assume 'k' = kilo = 1000 (like 2K = 2000), then doesn't that come out to the year 43002?

I think I'm going to chalk this up to a gaffe, and that the intention was for this story to occur after the events in The Satan Pit, not realizing that the earlier story was implied to be set in the 43rd century. I mean, I could be wrong and not giving the writing staff enough credit for expanding upon the idea of 'flux points' and wibbley-wobbly timey-whimey whatever... but I doubt it.

At any rate, this wasn't the most watched show in Britain on Saturday. That went to "Britain's Got Talent". Not being in the U.K., I have to ask... is this the reason why the BBC decided to move "Doctor Who" to an earlier timeslot (i.e. to avoid a head-to-head competition with a very popular show)? And, more to the point, does Britain actually have any talent? xd

I don't know about anyone else but I'm taking an optimistic (if not naive) view on Sigma's "prophecy," for lack of a better word.

Did anyone notice that whenever an Ood referred to the song it was always called "Doctor Donna?" I think that could mean the song of the Doctor and Donna and that song ending could just simply mean a change in TARDIS passengers like, oh say, Martha and Rose coming back?

I suppose that deep down I just really don't want the Doctor to regenerate anytime soon. I mean, classic Doctors were around for years. Although those were 30 minute runtimes and the typical story was 4 episodes making one story 2 hours and the new series has a 1 hour runtime and the typical story is resolved in that 1 hour with a few exceptions so it should be expected that a new series Doctor would regenerate sooner than a classic series Doctor while still going through the same amount of stories.

Did that make any sense?

Well they're the ones who actually broke the circle, and saved the brain from when Halpen was going to blow it up. But other than that nothing, really more was done by the Ood and that scientist "friend of the Ood".

It's sort of like that.

But it's more like... well, I read a thread on a comics board in which people were discussing whether or not a particular Green Lantern was a jerk or not. One poster offered a list of jerk-like things he had done, and another replied with, "Yeah, but that's not his fault. Writers made him do those things."

You'll immediately notice the problem (well, I say 'problem' but what I mean is Big Red Glowing Sign saying 'Breathe on Me and I'll Teeter over into the Chasm of Psychosis at which I stand'). Everything that character had ever done, said or thought was the product of a writer. The heroic things he'd done and the jerk-like things he's done were all equally true because they all happened for the same reason; Someone wrote them.

Speaking very roughly, there's two different kinds of criticism you can do with a story. Evaluative or Interpretive.

Evaluative criticism asks, "Is this any good?"
Interpretive criticism asks "What does this mean?"

So what was going on in that superhero converstion was that some interpretive criticism was going on ("If we look at his stories do they say this character is a jerk or not?") and then someone changed the rules by half-switching to evaluative criticism ("Some of those stories are bad so they don't count").

Bringing it back to Doctor Who and continuity errors. Those pesky Cybermen in Earthshock have records of the events of Revenge of the Cybermen which they really shouldn't because its set centuries in thier future and they don't have time travel.

If you're making an evaluative criticism of this then you might say this was a mistake and that Eric Saward's a bit rubbish. You might go on to blame Eighties Who for its obession with throwing in continuity references to pander to the hardcore fans regardless of whether or not they made sense. You might want to have a b***h about Ian levine's influence on the show. There's all sorts of things you could talk about with regard to how that scene is a mistake.

BUT... if you're making a interpretive criticism of the story then it's nevertheless true within the Whoniverse that the Cybermen from Earthshock somehow have records of the events of Revenge of the Cybermen. What caused this to be the case was a mistake outside the fiction but that doesn't change the fact that within the fiction that's what has happened.

Trying to explain how it happened by coming up with complex fan theories is kind of an optional extra. Nobody has to do that and there's never any reason to do that other than that it can be fun.

But you can't say "That didn't happen because it was a mistake." However it got in the story, its still there. You can ignore or gloss over it, because everyone's free to pick and choose which bits of a story they focus on, but you can't say its not there. Planet of the Ood probably shouldn't have been set in 4126. But it was. So that's when it happened.

Some things a writer puts into a story on purpose. Some things a writer puts into a story unconciously. Some things a writer puts into a story because he ******** up.

If you're trying to evaluate a story ("How good is this?") then the difference between those things can be important. If you're trying to interpret a story ("What does this mean?") then there's no difference between those things at all. It's all just 'stuff that happened in the story' regardless of what real world circumstances caused them to.

Further reading...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_fallacy

Maybe the Ood were just thankful to them because they were the only ones who were (visibly) opposed to enslaving them. The "friend of the Ood" guy was undercover for most of the episode.

But the Doctor and Donna actually made an effort to befriend and understand them.