Talk:2008

1st May 2008 - Election day?
If I'm reading this correctly the 1st May is an assumption based on the UK system now?

According to some of the info on the Torchwood website; TW: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang occurs on the 16th January 2008. Assuming the Doctor doesn't travel back in time to drop Martha and Jack off after the events of Last of the Time Lords this would suggest that Last of the Time Lords; Smith and Jones, The Lazarus Experiment, 42 (when Martha rings her mum), Utopia (TV story) (when the Doctor stops in Cardiff) and The Sound of Drums occurs before the 16th January 2008. --Tangerineduel 12:49, November 18, 2009 (UTC)

Well, it should be noted that dialouge in series 3 Doctor Who placed it in 2007, dialouge in Doctor Who series 4 (along with an article) placed that in 2008, the 2009 specials spoke for themselves, and series 5 Doctor Who is in 2010. One could say the events of Aliens of London created one of the biggest continuity errors in the show's history - the year dispotition controversy. It's the UNIT dating of the revived series: should have been one year ahead, but the writers ignored it every series both in-universe and out-universe, and even the spin-offs ignored it.

The ultimate explanation would be that the crack erased the events of aliens of London, removing the year thing, but that's me wishful-thinking. Delton Menace 05:05, June 19, 2010 (UTC)
 * So you're basing this all on "info on the Torchwood website"? C'mon, no way that counts.  The year gap thing does work; I dunno why people are so desperately trying to make it not work.  Show me some evidence from actual dialogue in the television programmes themselves that makes the year gap untenable, please. Enumerate hard evidence from an indisputable primary source.  There is no controversy that I can see unless you're willing to look very hard in secondary sources or by freeze-framing things, like the news reports in The Waters of mars, that have been clearly identified as having been done by very junior members of the crew.  Czech Out   ☎ | ✍  06:39, June 19, 2010 (UTC)
 * Wait a minute. All of that stuff about 1-3 May is complete garbage.  Here it is, just to preserve it for the record:


 * 1 - Election Day begins and Harold Saxon is voted British Prime Minister (DW: 42 / The Sound of Drums; Note: This is likely a by-election, perhaps to replace whoever was appointed interim PM after the ouster of Harriet Jones per DW: The Stolen Earth))
 * Election Day is generally held on the first Thursday in May. In 2008, the first Thursday was 1st May.


 * At, or around this date, Saxon orders Torchwood 3 on a "wild goose chase" mission that takes them away from Great Britain (DW: The Sound of Drums) to the Himalayas where they are told (apparently by 'the highest authority') that another Rift has been discovered halfway up K2. When they get there, however, they find out that it is a trap and they almost get killed in an avalanche while distracted by a 'Jack-in-a-box' (http://www.bbc.co.uk/torchwood/sites/arg/pages/episodes.shtml?folder=tw_case_ep01&tab=2)
 * 2 - U.S. President Winters is killed by the Toclafane. (DW: The Sound of Drums)
 * Under US law, upon the death of a sitting president, the vice-president takes office. As it has been established that the US presidency timeline differs from that of the real world, it would appear that Barack Obama becomes president at this point. (DW: The End of Time)


 * 3 - The Year That Never Was begins during which the Master builds a Time Lord Empire and Martha Jones travels the world executing a plan of the Doctor's to defeat his enemy. Ultimately, the year is negated and the clock reset to just after the Master kills Winters. (DW: The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords)
 * 2 - Harold Saxon is killed by his wife Lucy. (DW: Last of the Time Lords) Lucy is subsequently arrested and imprisoned; unknown to her, a group of Saxon's followers retrieve a ring from Saxon's funeral pyre and begin preparations for eventually restoring the Master to life the following year. (DW: The End of Time, Part One)
 * after 2nd May - Martha Jones returns home to her family and leaves the Doctor on his own (DW: Last of the Time Lords).
 * The problem here is that the assumptions on the 1 May date are totally spurious and not supported whatsoever be either DWU evidence or even real world common sense. Mainly, I'm striking the whole thing because the DWU is totally silent about the date of the election.  This whole thing is therefore conjecture based on the real world, but whoever wrote this tosh doesn't understand a damn thing about the British system of governance.  Let's start with this:  "A likely by-election"?  What the hell?  A by-election never selects the British PM.  Ever.  It's not mathematically possible for a single seat to change the leadership of the House in a multi-party system.  [Well, okay, it is, but, assuming just three parties, which is actually less than what the UK has, two would have to have equal numbers of members (n) and the third would have to have n-1.  Then, the by-election would have to result in one of the two parties in coalition losing that member in the by-election, therefore resulting in the coalition slipping into the minority.  And then, the party of the PM would have to fail to establish a new coalition, or would have to remain in coalition, but become the junior partner.  But all that's pretty damned unlikely.]    Whoever wrote that doesn't know what a by-election is.  And election day isn't set in the UK, because the PM controls the date of the election.  It was in October in 74, May in 79, first week of June in 83 and second week of June in 87, and April in 92.  It's only been in May for the last three cycles because Labour have allowed each of their three terms to go the full five years.  But it's definitely not set as a May thing; it's only cause John Major fudged his term a bit in 97 that the last three elections have appeared to be "set" in the first week of May. (The present coalition government intends to abolish the PM's power to unilaterally call elections early and to set fixed election dates, but this wouldn't have been known to RTD when he worked on DW — and it's not law yet.)


 * When we look at the DWU, there's not one scrap of evidence that plumps for a 1 May date. In fact, I'd argue it can't be that.  Whoever got killed in Aliens of London clearly didn't finish their natural term.  The election of Harriet Jones would have happened very shortly after that.  Jones was clearly of the same party as the previous PM, because she described herself as a "faithful back bencher".  An opposition back bencher wouldn't have access to Number 10 in order to get something placed on the Cabinet agenda.  So the "landslide majority" in the election she references in TCI was almost certainly just a party leadership thing, not a general election.  So she's serving out the term of the PM who got killed.  She gets deposed at Christmas, almost certainly pursuant to a no-confidence motion.  So again that same party chose a new leader.  Saxon is the first PM in "new Who" to accede following a general election.  He does so after a new Christmas passes.  But we don't know anything about the conditions that led to the calling of that election.  Did the original party in power have to call a general election because their five years were up?  Did they call it early because they'd had three leaders in the space of a year and a half and the PM who succeeded Jones need to get a personal mandate from the people?  We simply don't know, and we shouldn't be saying anything like the election was held on 1 May.  We have no way to set the date of this election anything like as precisely as "1 May".  Czech Out   ☎ | ✍  07:38, June 19, 2010 (UTC)