as small as a world and as large as alone, I'm illiterate about classic who and I love how...

2:47pm September 26, 2014

Anonymous asked: I'm illiterate about classic who and I love how much you care about it and research and stuff, and it just makes me second-hand outraged at moffat cause he doesn't care about detail accuracy to even a fraction of what you do. So um. Just. Keep up the awesome!

charamei:

Awww, thank you, Nonny!

I know how you feel, though what makes me angry isn’t so much that the New Who team doesn’t seem to care about the detail as much as I do - it’s that the more I look into the Classic Gallifrey eps, the more I realise how much detail the Classic team put into things, and just how much has been thrown away.

Like. Let’s talk about these two guys:

They’re both bit parts, although we do know that the one on the left is the Surgeon-General. But let’s leave aside the script. Here’s what I can tell you from this picture alone:

They’re both Time Lords.

They are both Prydonian. The guy on the right is a Cardinal and the guy on the left is not.

The guy on the left, however, has some kind of important job on the Council.

How can I tell this? Because Classic Who’s visual language is fantastic. Only Time Lords have ceremonial collars. Prydonian colours are maroonish red and orange: Cardinals wear red (ergo the guy in red is a Cardinal) and everyone else wears orange. And the little bit of gold trim on the collar tells me the guy on the left is a Councillor, while the guy on the right is not.

And they were consistent:

These guys are both Cardinal Borusa (he regenerated). On the left is Deadly Assassin, where he’s a Cardinal but not Chancellor: on the right, Chancellor Borusa from Invasion of Time. In Deadly Assassin, Chancellor Goth has the gold trim but Cardinal Borusa doesn’t. In Invasion of Time, Borusa is now both a Cardinal and Chancellor, so he has both.

The combination of colour-coding, addition and removal of trim, and above all consistency honestly just blows me away. The Classic team might not have had much of a budget, but they made up for it by knowing exactly what the fuck they were doing. The same is true of the writing: there’s a tremendous amount of depth in the Gallifrey worldbuilding eps that really gives you the sense of a vast, complex world outside the Panopticon even though we never really get to see it.

Not only has the New Who team thrown all of this fantastic hard work and consistent development away, but what they’ve replaced it with is so inconsistent and infuriatingly nonsensical that it makes me want to scream.

It wasn’t broke. Stop fixing it.