User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-31010985-20190102002350

The broadcast of Resolution has reminded me of an issue I have been intending to bring up for a while: when the time period stated is the "present day".

This seems like a grey area in the wiki's policies because surely the phrase "present day" can mean nothing according to our strict policies for in-universe evidence because to extract a date for it we are using the out-of-universe evidence of the broadcast date but in contrast the setting in the present is the blatant intent of the author.

It is also highly ambiguous to the actual date. In the case of Resolution, Chris Chibnall did intend for the story to take place on the literal present day (1 January 2019) but I highly doubt that the authorial intent of Rona Munro when she wrote the "present day" sequences in The Eaters of Light were for them to take place on 17 June 2017; the much more likely case is that the intent was for sometime in 2017 or even an undisclosed point in the 21st century. Going even further, in comparison to the age of the universe any setting in the years, AD could be argued to be present.

I have always treated these sorts of stories as being set at some point in the same year as release, not to say that is necessarily the right decision in the circumstances. I am curious to hear the opinions of others on the matter.