Doctor Who has always been a series that points and laughs at fans who want to try and piece together a consistent continuity across all its stories, but even by Doctor Who standards, forgetting an entire global invasion barely more than a decade ago (y’know, just before most of the show’s viewers were born, you absolute fossil you) might seem like a stretch.
Of course, the real reason Jo Patterson couldn’t remember the Daleks is that unlike say, the MCU, where weirdness layers upon weirdness to create a world that almost counts as alt-history, Doctor Who is, on some level, always reaching to be set in “our” universe. The key conceit of the show is that you might turn a corner, find a blue box, and suddenly be whisked away through space and time to a world of adventure. Which doesn’t really work if the British town squares of the Doctor Who universe all feature memorials to the victims of the Daleks and diet pills have to be tested for Adipose DNA.
But at the same time, Doctor Who just loves a great big Hollywood space invasion, and making these two core ingredients of the show mesh is a nightmare for continuity.
Let’s, for instance, take a look at the life of recently departed Doctor’s companion, Ryan Sinclair.
Life of Ryan
Ryan was born in 1998 or 1999. As a child, he attended Redlands Primary School at around the same time London was hit by a “terrorist attack” when shop windows dummies started shooting people. A year later a spaceship crashed into Big Ben, although this was later dismissed as a hoax. That Christmas Day, when Ryan was around eight years old, every human with O negative blood got up in a trance and went and stood on a tall building while a gigantic spaceship hung over London.
