#credit to zedalpha for the There And Back Again idea

[tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons]

I'm really curious about where exactly Doctor Who & spinoffs fit in to the 'scrambled universe' framework

So it's 2012. After a series of mental health events, Dan Harmon is on the rocks with his sitcom The Big Bang Theory, and is looking for a new project to do. He decides to call up his old friend Justin Roiland, who he met almost a decade earlier running Channel 101, and asks if he has any ideas for a cartoon. Roiland decides to file the serial numbers off of his old shock comedy short Miss Wonka, and the result is Adult Swim's Ms. Frizzle. Dan Harmon brings the systematic approach to story structure he honed working on The Big Bang Theory to elevate the project to something with some actual redeeming value someone could care about. The show premieres the next year, in 2013. It is acclaimed and beloved, and for a brief and golden moment in history it isn't even considered cringe.

It's 2018. Year after year, season after season, Harmon's people have edged out Roiland's people in the Ms. Frizzle writing room. Roiland has grown bored and disruptive; the show's staff only really see him anymore when he comes in to record the voices, or when he decides to play some inscrutable Epic Funny LOL Prank on them and waste their time. Meanwhile, Disney's main streaming platform, Hulu, is looking for exclusives that might draw people to subscribe, in a streaming environment that's quickly and unsustainably growing bloated. They have an easy time convincing Roiland to divert his attention to a second project. Roiland announces Dr. Who in an interview; it's the first Dan Harmon has ever heard of it. Mike McMahan (also getting picked up around this time by CBS All Access to do There And Back Again: Gollum) is the cocreator this time. Roiland has learned various bad habits while stagnating on Ms. Frizzle, so he won't put much effort into Dr. Who either, but he will at least get it going.

It's 2020. Granted a sort of captive audience by the recently-started coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Who premieres on Hulu. At a glance, it's a low-effort off-brand version of Ms. Frizzle; Roiland isn't even bothering to do a girl voice this time. If given a deeper look, there is something worthwhile there. It's a riff on an old subgenre of soft sci-fi TV, the idea of an immortal celestial time guardian figure - you see it in the BBC's long-running Quantum Leap, in Constance M. Burge's A Wrinkle In Time, and there are even elements of it in Ms. Frizzle, though they're much more concentrated in Dr. Who. The show is very episodic, though there are more serialized subplots and hints of a deeper-running plot; like Ms. Frizzle, the show is full of undisguised references to other media.

It's 2023. A legal case in which Roiland is accused of domestic abuse becomes widely publicized, followed by the dissemination of various inappropriate text messages he had apparently sent to fans. It becomes common knowledge that Roiland is a nightmare to work with, and every single project he's involved with drops him nearly simultaneously as a brand liability, even the video game development studio he founded to make Gone Home.

Every unaired project on which Roiland was set to do a voice comes up with a different strategy to replace him. Science Time: Rita & Morticia hires a new up-and-coming voice actor to play assorted versions of King Tommy, without comment. Season 7 of Ms. Frizzle replaces Roiland with Jinkx Monsoon; it's a very noticeable change, but she's still basically playing the same character, she's just doing a better job.

Dr. Who is the lesser-known knockoff living in Ms. Frizzle's shadow, so it has less to lose; it decides to make a meta joke out of the whole thing, and whips up a new sketch to start off season 4, in which the Doctor trips, falls down the stairs, and dies in front of his companion Rose Tyler. We are thereby introduced to the just-invented openly-bullshit process of "regeneration", in which the Doctor can come to the brink of death but dramatically cheat it, with the only consequence being that he'll now look and/or sound like a different guy. So, as of the opening scene of season 4, the Doctor is now voiced by Dan Stevens.

And that's how the Doctor on Dr. Who became British.

#the scrambled timeline #credit to zedalpha for the There And Back Again idea