hairy_hen said:
...good grief, what a bunch of bollocks.
It was rather underwhelming on first viewing but it did improve on second viewing.
I think the fixed point was history recording the Doctor's death.
Imagine if Princess Diana hadn't died but the had successfully faked her death?
Imagine if the JFK that drove through Dallas was a wax work dummy filled with red paint.
Everything plays out the same.
The shock, the tears, the conspiracy theories, only the eye of the storm hadn't really died at that point.
It would still make an impact and punch a hole in the history books, it would still have a ripple effect on real events.
The sort of critique you are applying here is nothing new.
I was watching The Invisible Enemy the other night and remembered writing a letter to the BBC about it (when I was seven) saying that the 'clone Doctor' and 'clone Leela' weren't true clones and that injecting them into his brain was silly.
The other night I came up with the ideal story fix for that tale.
Telepathically patterned avatars 'injected' into the Doctor's mind (not brain).
That way the stupid giant prawn could have been a similarly constructed avatar of the Doctor's psychological impression of the virus pulled into the real world (his way of turning the virus into something laughable and easy to defeat).
Basically the same story but told in a way that could have been done well on a 1977 budget and wasn't a cheap rip-off of Fantastic Voyage.
I'm now working on a way of sending that idea backwards in time.
The episode in question was so rich in fun ideas but it was let down by the budget cut meaning the bizarre 'everything happening at once' world had to be squeezed into a few moments of screen time.
If it was a two parter with a bit more money, little moments like traveling through the Egyptian desert on the Orient Express could have really shined.
As it was the blinds were down and there wasn't enough time to even imagine what the world outside contained (Sutekh and Mark Anthony rubbing shoulders with Moses and the Suez Crises?).