Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-2.26.183.189-20170416191252/@comment-24894325-20170808235839

There are several points that baffle me.

1. Why do we keep discussing what Moffat said regarding The Pilot in the inclusion debate on Friends to the Future? If continuity does not matter and it is a stand-alone story, then the postfactum intents should not matter. What matters is the intent of Moffat and director Lawrence Gough regarding Friends to the Future at the time of its shooting.

2. Regarding this intent, I don't have a quote from Moffat at the time. Here are the quotes from DWMSE 45 In other words, everyone involved in making of it were shooting a trailer/promo teaser.
 * "they just asked if I'd mind coming in to shoot this promo teaser" (director Gough)
 * "I was told we were shooting the promo" (costume designer Hayley Nebauer)
 * "Shooting the trailer was absolutely mental" (Pearl Mackie)

3. But what I really don't get is how is it a story, a stand-alone story? What is the narrative of this stand-alone story? Literally nothing happens. There was a lot of retconning upthread, but that's not how stories are supposed to work. As everyone kept saying, inconsistencies with other stories should not matter. But this promo teaser does not make sense on its own. There is no beginning, no connection to any other story in existence at the time (and for almost the next full year), no explanation for Bill's presence, and no ending. Nothing happens: it's just dialogue that gives zero new information. It's all done to introduce the character of Bill. The Doctor and an unknown female run away from the Daleks, then talk, then the Doctor says 2017 is waiting for them, they run and are confronted by a Dalek---is not a story. It is a teaser trailer as the production team rightfully called it. It does not make sense by itself from the in-universe perspective.

4. Perhaps, the argument was that FftF forms one story with TP? But for that they are too far away from each other timewise, and, despite what many were saying, they do not fit. Not on the production level, on the very content level. In the promo teaser, Bill and the Doctor are chased by the Daleks. When a Dalek confronts them at the end, it says: "Humanoids detected". This is a perfectly Dalek thing to say. But in the actual episode this was not a Dalek, it was Heather in a Dalek shape (of course, Heather did not yet exist during the shooting of promo teaser). Why would Heather, whose whole purpose is tracking down Bill call her a Humanoid? It made no sense. Accordingly, Moffat changed it to something more appropriate to Heather. In my opinion, this one phrase precludes considering the promo teaser and the episode to be the same story.