10 Doctor Who Storylines That Fans Pretend Never Happened
Prepare to be deleted.
It's not surprising that with more than 50 years of adventuring under its belt Doctor Who has featured storylines that many fans choose to pretend never happened. Viewers get caught up in the rich history of the programme and then react badly when something happens that contradicts the previously established "facts" they've committed to memory. After a while, each fan realises that Doctor Who is a confusing jumble of events that can't possibly coexist in an internally consistent universe, at least not without a lot of "time can be rewritten" timey-wimeyness. For a start, there seem to be three Atlantis's and two reasons for the Big Bang, and that's not even counting the accumulating pile of impossibilities that is the revived series. To cope with this madness, fans develop individual "head canons", internal universes that only include those stories or even bits of stories that fit in with what they think is proper Doctor Who. When fans decide to toss something out of their head canons, it's not a matter of consigning isolated bad moments to oblivion (there are plenty of those that they resign themselves to accepting), it's more that they think entire stories or ideas are fundamentally misguided and can't fit in with the core concepts of the programme they love. One reason a story idea might be unacceptable is that fans judge it's not a direction the programme should go in. Alternatively, the execution of an idea might be so bad that fans wish the story had happened differently and promptly start to make up their own much better versions in their heads. Matt Smith getting such a poor swansong story and the Tenth Doctor meeting his end with uncharacteristic cowardice are commonly cited examples of misguided or botched storylines for many fans (whilst others thought all these choices were fine). But here are 10 even more loathed storylines that were instantly rejected by a large number of fans. Let's start with a very famous change to a central icon of the programme that really didn't go down at all well in certain quarters. Be aware, there will be spoilers ahead!