Without thinking about it, you as a writer may have employed elements of top-down writing without even realizing it at some point. So what is top-down writing?
So that we’re on the same page, I’m not talking about just planning out a story and its various arcs, outlining them from beginning to end. Unless you’re going for a truly free-form literary experience, I’d advise against going in without a plan.
No, I would say top-down writing applies to something much more specific. If you’ve heard a very similar term before in a different context, you’re correct: I claim no credit of codifying this idea, because I got the idea from Ernest Adams’ superb column from way back in the Before Days. He called the concept Bottom-Up design, and was speaking of game design, and the perils of designing a game by coming up with a singular concept for a mechanic, then slapping a game around it. (This old column continues to prove its worth because we still see this today in plenty of games released more recently.)
Now, while games and stories (be they any form of text story, graphic novels, films or shows, or, yes, stories within video games) are both forms of entertainment-art, the technical challenges that come inherent to making a video game are at once staggering and bountiful (not to say that the internal modes of storytelling don’t have various technical details that you tend to learn as you go), so I’m not going to pretend it’s a 1:1 comparison, especially because Ernest is specifically speaking to the coding and base design of games in that article. But it’s a good launching point for us.
So let’s think about how this can apply to stories. Namely, let’s think about aspects that require an element of progression from start to finish: plot and character arcs. As you’re planning out your story, you’ll probably reach a point where you’ll want – for example – a character to end up in a specific place, or to die tragically, or fall from good to evil, or to reach a certain goal. So your mindset when designing that character’s arc will inevitably be coloured by the endpoint they are to reach.
What I’m about to say is going to sound staggeringly, gobsmackingly simple: the throughline of cause-and-effect needs to justify the character’s actions from first to last, because top-down storytelling – designing the apex of the climb before the base camp, foothills and ascent – breaks the feel of the telling like an organic ascent. And this goes for any major point in a character’s arc, not just the ending. It can even be the beginning: a young and selfish Spider-Man learns a heartbreaking lesson that gears him toward a life of putting others before himself. A war-profiteering Tony Stark is thrust into the human toll of his company’s actions and vows to change. Spidey doesn’t just go from a high-school nerd to a hero, there’s a mental impetus that happens along the way. Stark doesn’t go from a playboying arsehole to nobless oblige, there’s a mental impetus.
It’s really and truly not a hard thing to get right, I think. If you’re thinking, “well sure, that’s a basic rule of all storytelling”, you’re right, and yet I can think of a few very high-profile examples of how it looks when this rule is discarded.
Before filming Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Mark Hamill took writer/director Rian Johnson aside and told him with necessary bluntness that the decisions Johnson had made regarding Luke Skywalker’s character were fundamentally opposed to everything that Hamill saw as Luke’s personality (and he’d know), but he’d still film the scenes as written, rather than kick up a stir about it.
What Johnson did with Luke in The Last Jedi was very much an example of the kind of top-down writing that I’m talking about. He really, but really wanted Luke to be embittered, lost and without hope, ever since that one moment when Luke saw darkness in Ben Solo’s heart, and for just a moment, wanted to kill him, which Ben witnessed, which sent him over the edge into becoming Kylo Ren. I’m describing for courtesy’s sake, but I mean, it’s a mainline Star Wars film, you’ve probably seen the movie.
Having had several years in which to think on it, that flashback to when Luke either has a moment where he wants to kill Ben, or outright tries to (depending on whose version of events you believe), is a perfect example of top-down storytelling, because what I’m getting at is this: prior characterization, as well as characterization after the fact, fail to justify the impetus in that scene.
After all, this is the same man who stubbornly refused to believe his father was lost to the dark side – his father being a dark lord of the Sith who was basically seen, justifiably, as Death Incarnate to much of the galaxy. And Luke was right. Anakin was redeemed, wresting his soul back from Vader at the last. And we’re to believe that Luke – having started his own Jedi academy, and thus probably much deeper attuned to the Force than when he redeemed his father – would have even the fleeting urge to slaughter a teenager, his own nephew at that, because of a pull to the dark? It doesn’t track. It’s bad writing, but more to the point, it’s top-down character writing in the worst way.
I’m not trying to make this the millionth Star Wars new-trilogy critique, because I don’t really want to write the millionth Star Wars new-trilogy critique. (Do not even get me started on the complete lack of worldbuilding that turns the destruction of the Republic in The Force Awakens into an absolute nothingburger of an event because we have no context whatsoever for anything that’s happening in that scene.)
Instead, I’m pointing to the Luke thing as a perfect example of what happens when top-down writing decides, “Damn the throughline, we’re doing it my way, and I don’t need to do the work to justify it.” Think of proper continuity and flowing characterization like someone’s arm. The bones, nerves, veins all work in harmony. When top-down writing forces the throughline to bend so far that it cannot be reconciled, the arm snaps.
It could have worked had Johnson put in the effort and wrote from the bottom up.
Had Johnson written it so that Luke had made every effort to train Ben after seeing the dark in his heart, pulling him to the light, and being so overbearing that he ended up pushing Ben away, making him embrace the darkness of Kylo Ren in a way that Luke sort of turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, the current-day scenes of The Last Jedi still could have worked pretty much as-is. Luke still could have blamed himself if Ben was pushed away, and Ben drew his saber on another student with intent to kill, then Luke took up his blade and tried to end him.
But no, Johnson wanted it his way, damn the throughline. That is when top-down storytelling becomes most noticeable, because when storytelling is done right, from the bottom up – like in most character or plots arcs in most stories that see the light of day, to be honest – you don’t notice it.
Shall we jump right to the biggest example of this in recent memory, the most flagrant, one of the most prominent, and absolutely the most how-did-they-think-they’d-get-away-with-it?
I’m talking, of course, about the Game Of Thrones episode The Bells, where Daenarys Targaryen takes the biggest screaming swan dive off the slippery slope and decides to simply snap and become Sauron, slaughtering a whole city of innocents for literally no reason, the most bafflingly bad decision in a season pretty much universally defined by the countless bad decisions made on behalf of the showrunners. (Also see an entire show’s worth of slow-burn character development on Jaime Lannister’s part being crassly discarded in a heartbeat so he could go back to King’s Landing in time for him and Cersei to die in each other’s arms.)
In the show-long leadup to The Bells, there have been scenes and moments that clearly showed Dany was not above pushing the renegade interrupt, sending a message through death and violence, and ruling with an iron fist. But she always felt to a certain extent conflicted about this, to the point of continually justifying it to herself that the ultimate ends would justify the means.
The showrunners wanted, evidently, Dany turning evil and Jon having to deal with this, to be the big climax of the show. In doing so, they completely failed, or did not especially try, to work in any kind of mental impetus. They foreshadowed her family line’s madness, but as I saw a Youtuber say about this, foreshadowing does not equal characterization or character development. That’s actually a crucial takeaway here: a Chekhov’s Gun (basically dropping something into a story early with the intent to pick it up later) does not equal the mental impetus that is required for such a drastic character turn as this.
On the note of white-haired cast members turning evil for no reason, here’s an old Spider-Man review I did where I deep-dive the problems in the top-down approach of when Dan Slott wanted Black Cat to be evil. Fortunately, due to the long-running nature of cape comics and the way storyrunning changes hands and old mistakes get revisited, this particular example did eventually get fixed.
But sometimes a soft-serve example of this can happen in a story and it doesn’t end up actually hurting the overall narrative. Let’s take a hard swerve from destroyed cities bathed in fire and blood to something more friendly, like the film Sing 2.
So the film is about a plucky theater producer basically scamming his way into the big leagues of Not-Vegas so his troupe can put on a musical with the budget and connections provided by big-shot producer Jimmy Crystal – only, Crystal turns out to be a murderous psychopath and he’s just found out that Buster Moon has been playing him for a fool. In all honesty I think it’s a super great movie with a surprising amount of things to say about that performance life, from the Kafkaesque lottery of getting past the industry gatekeepers, toxic working environments and the necessity of having talent instructors whom you vibe with, and the whole subplot with Bono’s aging rocker lion Clay Calloway reaches Peak Pixar levels of hrrrnnnnngh I’m not crying you’re crying shut up.
Anyway, Porscha Crystal is the bad guy’s daughter, and hers is a very mild example of top-down character writing, which I’m including here just to show you that this sort of thing can happen in ways that don’t really hurt the overall narrative badly at all, like when it’s cloistered inside a subplot. So she’s presented as a spoiled brat who’s used to getting everything she wants, but who has genuine singing and performative talent and way more confidence than some of Buster’s troupe – she just can’t act to save her life, but Mr. Crystal pressgangs Buster into giving her the lead role.
Stuff happens, she melts down in a spoiled rage and quits the show. More stuff happens, and when the troupe finds a way to put on the show as the big climax of the movie, they bring her back in and all of a sudden she’s totally on board and vibing with the team like nothing had happened.
Here’s the top-down part of this arc: they jumped Porscha from point A – being a spoiled brat – to point C – being a team player – without showing point B: a mental impetus for the change. She cries a lot after storming off, I suppose you can take that as her going through a necessary ego break, but that’s not really spelled out or played up like that at all.
The reason I feel like none of this really hurts the movie at all is because it is, after all, a more minor detail rather than some massive lynchpin of the plot, and at that point the movie is going along at a fair clip and it just sort of gets folded into all the other stuff happening without leaving us too much space in which to dwell on it.
But also I don’t mind because her song in the climax is my favourite part of the movie and she’s just so heckin’ cute.
I want to talk about one other big example of crazy-egregious top-down character writing in modern speculative fiction, and this one feels far more flippant and disrespectful to the story and to the audience than Luke’s Rashomon incident. It is…admittedly not as horrific an example of top-down characterization as Dany, Destroyer Of Worlds up there, but the following example is actually the biggest reason why I thought it might be useful to write a full piece about this writing pitfall, the impact of doing it improperly and how to do it right.
Let’s talk about what Doctor Who’s then-showrunner Chris Chibnall did with the Master in Series 12.
Mind you, I have a high opinion of Series 12 in general. After starting his run with an arcless Series 11, which was a troubled and ill-advised idea on so many levels, Series 12 shows him taking the TARDIS by the reins, with twists and developments that push the show into bold new places with as much pomp and aplomb as Davies and Moffat before him. This is really just my one bugbear with the season, but boy howdy does it bug.
In fact, you know what? I’ve already written a ton about this specific thing. It’s just that nobody has read any of it, because I haven’t posted it. Back in 2020, I was planning on doing a full Series 12 retrospective as a follow-up to the one I did for Series 11, but the dissonance was just too much: I loved the season as a whole yet this one thing bugged me so much that I just wrote and wrote and wrote on it, writing myself in circles, writing from here to Gallifrey, writing up my own ass and back out again, and it was the plot point that ate the attempted article.
So here, I’ll basically copy and paste the relevant stuff from my unpublished Series 12 retrospective (lightly edited) about the Master, and why his Series 12 episodes are my ultimate example of top-down writing. Roll tape:
In a rare display for two-parters even on this show, both episodes of season premiere Spyfall end with a jaw-dropping reveal, and both pull it off at face value. The first part ends with the reveal that ‘O’ is actually the Master. He blows up the plane they’re on and tells the Doctor, ‘Everything you think you know is a lie!’ before getting away.
First, the positives: Sacha Dhawan is great as the Master. The whole lower half of his face seems to be made of stretchy rubber, allowing for all that scenery he’s chewing throughout his screentime. And once he really gets into it, the way he swaggers around is perfect in depicting the Master at a time in his lives when he’s become way more unhinged than the last time we saw him/her.
And I was truly surprised by this twist. They went to lengths to keep this from us pre-release, to the extent of keeping ‘O’ off the leaked cast lists. I guess the BBC knows what’s up now after they made Stephen Moffat apopleptic by spoiling the return of the Saxon!Master in Series 10 in a bloody advance trailer. And then, when you watch Spyfall part 1 again, you see all the subtle hints leading up to the reveal, and it’s all so well-written and well-placed. This is, mechanically, a great twist.
(Hi, me from the present popping in just to say that this is another great example of ‘foreshadowing does not equal characterization’ – a twist can be mechanically fantastic, as this one is, and still have a buttload of issues with its top-down writing approach.)
And oh boy, considering the context in which we last saw the Master, do we need to deconstruct the shit out of this. (This goes for the Master’s appearances all throughout Series 12, not just in Spyfall.)
The fanosphere speculated its heart out after part 1 aired: why is the Master evil again, after Series 10’s biggest arc involved Missy’s reformation? Perhaps it’s a version of the Master from another dimension, which would fit the plot of the episode perfectly! Perhaps the O!Master is actually the next one along from Saxon, since it was only implied that he would regenerate into Missy and we never saw the regeneration, similar to how Moffat wiggled John Hurt’s War Doctor in between McGann and Eccleston!
Those would have provided super-easy outs for Chibnall. The alternate-reality Master would have allowed us to maintain the dignity of Missy’s reformation and the Master’s ‘perfect ending’, in his words, while still keeping a version of the Master as a recurring villain. Same with wiggling O!Master in between Saxon and Missy. But apparently, according to a BBC video released after Spyfall part 1 came out, this is in fact the next one along from Missy. (And, at long sight, that at least is understandable because of the season’s arc: after the revelation of the Timeless Child, there’s no going back. This had to be the ‘latest one along’ far as regeneration goes.)
So that means that Chibnall, having avoided the outs that those ideas present to him, at that point has it in front of him to shoulder the responsibility of explaining how the Master became evil again. And, yes, while the connection isn’t explicitly spelled out (which is an issue in itself), I think it does have something to do with the revelation of the Timeless Child. But that, I’ll save talking about for the second episode’s twist.
If you missed Series 10 (and you really should give it a watch if so), the arc is such: Missy, defeated, imprisoned on a planet whose resident populace specializes as executioners, facing the prospect of her Final Death, begs the Doctor (who has been selected as the metaphorical triggerman) to spare her life. She begs him to teach her how to be good, if it will spare her life. For even after everything, she really, truly still sees him as her friend.
After the Doctor tricks out the execution to keep her alive, he vows to guard her as his prisoner for a thousand years in a bigger-on-the-inside vault. She’s compliant in the process and with no ulterior motive (“I once built a gun out of leaves. Do you really think I couldn’t get through a door if I wanted to?”). Over time in her confinement, we see Missy gradually, slowly coming around: starting to bear thoughts for all those she’s killed. Helping the Doctor, even though their ways differ. And that’s the brilliance of this arc, she doesn’t just ‘turn hero’, she was never going to do that, but she starts skewing good in a way that’s appropriate to her long history on this show. When her solution to the problem of the Monks involves killing one crucial person (Bill) to save the rest of humanity, we get this great sequence where Missy sums it up perfectly:
“You know, back in the day, I’d burn an entire city to the ground just to see the pretty shapes the smoke makes. I’m sorry your plus-one doesn’t get a happy ending. But like it or not, I just saved this world because I want to change. Your version of good is not absolute. It’s vain, arrogant, sentimental. If you’re waiting for me to become all that, I’m going to be here for a very long time yet.”
So she’s a Renegade Shepard instead of Paragon Shepard. That’s a very good take on a reformed Missy/Master.
Actually, cards on the table – I’m going to be perfectly fair to Chibnall, and treat his work the same as that of past showrunners. I’m going to be consistent. In Hell Bent, I gave Moffat a pass on his unreveal of how the Time Lords managed to remove Gallifrey from the pocket dimension it vanished to at the end of Day Of The Doctor, and re-insert it into its home universe at the extreme end of the time continuum. The how was less important than the fact that it had been done successfully. The Doctor even says he didn’t ask because he wanted to make them feel clever. (Remember this plot point, by the way.)
So, I’m not going to give Chibnall a hard time for not explaining how the Master escaped the Mondasian colony ship, which World Enough And Time/The Doctor Falls took deep pains to explain was a place uniquely impossible to escape by conventional means (and with no TARDIS). The how is less important than the fact that s/he obviously did somehow. Hell, s/he is a Time Lord, so for all we know, s/he might have actually taken the Slow Path and waited it out as the colony ship backed up from the black hole over years and decades. As for Saxon telling Missy that she got the ‘full blast’ of his sonic screwdriver modded with a Dalek laser, and that she was too injured to regenerate? Well, I mean, what, we’re going to believe him at his word? (Although, while I’ve got you here, I will touch on the basic rules of writing and express my bafflement at the idea of easy, one-line explainers being somehow too much of an ask.)
So, even though there was a pretty reasonable throughline in the revival era of how the Master survived from body to body (The Doctor Falls explains what happened to Saxon after The End Of Time, the events of The Day Of The Doctor enabled the Master to leave Gallifrey once it stopped being time-locked, and The Witch’s Familiar goes into extremely specific detail on how Missy survived the Cyber-laser in Death In Heaven), and Chibnall’s answer to this throughline of detailed continuity is basically “fuck it”, you know what, I’ll give it a pass.
Rather, I think it’s entirely fair to call Chibnall out on the fact that the Doctor and the Master never once in this entire season directly address, or even behave as though the events of Series 10 ever took place at all. I kept waiting for it, for the Doctor to say something like “I helped you. I turned you away from all this destruction, all this death. I know I did. What’s changed? What happened?” But it never came through.
The events of Series 10, Missy’s reformation arc, haven’t been explicitly retconned (in fact, The Haunting Of Villa Deodati has some subtle but very effective callbacks to World Enough And Time/The Doctor Falls), but Chibnall seems very content to go out of his way to ignore the super-important reformation arc. A single line like I just wrote, which could have fit beautifully into the Eiffel Tower scene in Spyfall, would have taken care of it through acknowledgement. Even if the intent is to undo it, allowing that connective tissue to exist goes a long way. But why don’t we even get that? It just scans like Chibnall is intent on ignoring the well-written, well-received arc that gave the Master more interesting character development than s/he had in the half-century of television prior.
Even Marvel Comics, the masters (heh) of bending to the status quo, played it right in the Spider-Man books when Otto Octavius was quasi-reformed. As of the time of this writing, Otto is still an anti-hero fighting crime, rather than a Spidey villain, because of the character development he received in the Superior and Worldwide eras. And it’s better this way, because it allows those arcs of slow reformation to have enduring resonance. Marvel could have gone the Chibnall route and just found the first excuse they came across to make Otto evil again and re-insert him into Spidey’s rogues gallery – and it looked a couple times like they were leading into that, but they proved us wrong – and I’m glad they went the high road.
As of World Enough And Time, I felt like the Doctor and the Master were moving toward a relationship not dissimilar to how Thor and Loki ended up in the MCU: Loki is frequently driven by id and jealousy, but finds more reasons to fight alongside Thor than against him, at the end of the day. Of course, occasionally Loki would go too far and Thor would have to shut that shit right down. I feel like exploring a character dynamic like that would have been more interesting than just flatly making the Master baseline evil again.
And you know what, it does seem like I may be in the minority on this. A lot of the Who fans I’ve seen tend to view Spyfall as Chibnall’s finest hour to that point, with no caveats. And I want to love this two-parter, because other than the things I’m talking about here, it was the best Doctor Who story at the time of airing since the three-part whammy that closed out Series 10, but this just eats at me.
It’s like if in The Force Awakens, JJ Abrams had brought Vader back and he was evil again, and nobody questions this in-universe. It’s like, okay, Abrams could have invented some space-magic reason why Vader is now back, but then even if there’s a reason for him to be evil again, why is his turn back to the light in Return Of The Jedi never even mentioned?
If you couldn’t tell, Series 10 was my favourite Master arc in the entire show’s history, because it actually was an arc. The Master/Mistress finally got a full-blown character arc that didn’t just boil down to “s/he’s evil and crazy and the Doctor has to stop their evil and crazy plan.”
And please don’t tell me that Moffat did the same thing to one of Davies’ final arcs when the events of The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End got swallowed by the Cracks In Time. Nobody liked how those epic events were nicked from the memory of all involved (save for the time travelers with their ripple-proof memories), myself included. But they were acknowledged to have canonically happened. The Doctor being baffled that Amy had no recollection of the Daleks or the planets in the sky gave him a relevation about the nature of the Cracks. So the events were…“in-universe soft-retconned” but they are still acknowledged to have happened, if you get my gist. (And besides, the events of those episodes were directly referenced multiple times since then, so it can be said that Moffat ended up buying it back anyway.) As opposed to going out of your way on a meta level to pretend like an important arc never happened.
I suppose one could infer that the Doctor’s harsher, more fatalistic outlook on the Master in Series 12 could stem from her rage at the fact that she tried and demonstrably failed to reform him, but again, that’s not alluded to at all.
Speaking of the Eiffel Tower scene, let’s talk about the other thing. Without these two things, I’d be willing to pull the trigger on calling Spyfall a masterwork up there with any of your favourite Who adventures.
To put it into context for you, the Master asks the last time the Doctor’s gone home, meaning Gallifrey. (The answer, when discluding fare of gray-area canonicity like the comics, was of course in Hell Bent, for those on the buzzer at home, when the Doc deposed Rassilon, became Lord-President, stole a TARDIS and ran away.) The Master tells her that Gallifrey has been reduced to a nuked-out wasteland, destroyed and razed. She doesn’t believe him.
Fast forward to the last few minutes of Spyfall, part 2. With the threat of the Kasaavin quelled and the Master down for the count momentarily, the Doctor has a moment alone in her TARDIS, when the Master’s words about Gallifrey’s destruction gnaw at her. She slaps off the safeties, cranks the dials and travels to Gallifrey, which is the other big twist of Spyfall: bet you didn’t think we’d be back here in this episode, did ya?
The Doctor steps out and finds herself gazing on a ruined world, the great city-dome shattered, the world a nuked-out wasteland. She receives a holographic recording from the Master, explaining that it was of course he who killed all the Time Lords. And that he did so, because he discovered a cosmic truth about the Time Lords so horrible, so atrocious, that he had no choice but to slaughter them all. The truth about the Timeless Child, first mentioned last season in The Ghost Monument. The Master won’t tell her outright what this horrible truth is: “Why should I make it easy for you? It wasn’t for me.” This, the Doctor will have to discover on her own.
All other misgivings aside, I was so happy about all this when it aired: the season-arc was back. The whole last section of the episode was the most cinematic and darkly dramatic Chibnall had been to this point, and I love it. Maybe I just like Epic Who and Darktor Who best. Granted, I will cede that they didn’t exactly get a lot of use out of Gallifrey after Day Of The Doctor restored it before it got destroyed again – Gallifrey is fast becoming to absolute destruction what Princess Peach is to kidnappings, but, I digress.
That said, remember that initial conversation they have on the Eiffel Tower, when the Master said that Gallifrey had been razed? He mentions how Gallifrey is still in its pocket universe from the end of Day Of The Doctor, and-
Wait. Slide it on back there, Chibnall.
What exactly is going on here? Did Chibnall forget the entire arc of Series 9? Did he not care? Did he not watch those episodes at all? Here’s what I said earlier: the Time Lords managed to remove Gallifrey from the pocket dimension it vanished to at the end of Day Of The Doctor, and re-insert it into its home universe at the extreme end of the time continuum.
So is he retconning that? Or was it just a mistake on Chibnall’s part, a glorified ‘continuity typo’? The Doctor doesn’t react to that line, even though she knows full well that Gallifrey is no longer in the pocket universe.
And by and large, the TARDIS can’t just pop between realities at will, it’s usually a freak accident that causes that to happen. But when the Doctor willfully pilots right to Gallifrey at the end, it scans perfectly if we remember Gallifrey is at the end of time in this universe, because the Doctor has already been there and has the coordinates. Except, the time vortex shot clearly shows the TARDIS breaking through the time vortex and outside the universe.
The fanosphere, again, lit up with theories, trying to make sense of this dissonance (“What if Gallifrey is, like…still in a pocket universe, just at the end of this universe instead of outside of it?”), which by-and-large make even less sense.
But thing is, it should never be up to the fans to drive a cement truck up to fill the plot holes. It was literally Chibnall’s job to keep this sort of thing from happening. The best I can do is to just pretend the Master said ‘at the extreme end of the time continuum’ instead, because otherwise that line is a mistake at best, and an untenable continuity snarl at worst. (And speaking of fans taking cement trucks to plot holes, that’s again with our assumption that finding out about the Timeless Child was what re-broke the Master’s mind: with zero nods to the fact that the Doctor successfully reformed the Master, it shouldn’t be our job to fill that hole, it should be Chibnall’s.)
But you know what, at the end of the day, the line is easy enough to ignore, and just to be treated like, I don’t know, a typo in the script. Like in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, when Spider-Man: Homecoming put up the wrong number in the text in the intro. It doesn’t come up again, and everything else about Gallifrey in this season makes sense when viewed as Gallifrey being in this universe at the extreme end of the time continuum. (It especially scans perfectly when you look at Ascension Of The Cybermen, which takes place far in the future, where we come to a wormhole that leads straight to Gallifrey in its nuked-out state – and there are no indications given that the wormhole travels through time.)
And – I get it, it’s a stressful job and mistakes happen from time to time. Granted, when I trip myself into a continuity error in one of my stories because I was stretching myself too thin and trying to correlate too many things at once, it’s probably something decidedly more minor than forgetting which universe one of the main planets resides in, but, hey.
So, you know, I’m over it. I can let that slide much easier than the whole Master thing. This is me speaking as a writer, not just as a fan of this show, but the Master thing feels…crass. Careless. And sadly, it’s that one bugbear that keeps me from committing to really loving this season all-out as opposed to mostly loving the season. Taking such well-placed, well-executed character development, and trying your damndest to pretend it never happened, feels like what George RR Martin once referred to as a ‘betrayal of the reader’s emotional trust in the narrative’. (On that note, god only knows what Martin must have thought when/if he watched The Bells. Poor fella.)
It’s easy to see what Chibnall did. He wanted the Master to be evil again, so instead of putting in the effort to show the Master’s descent from the light anew over a period of time, or even just put in some explainers that clearly thread the lines of continuity such that we at least can accept what’s happening at face value, he just…made the Master evil again, and went out of his way to avoid mentioning the Series 10 reformation arc.
While he passed up every easy opportunity he had to tie these threads and make this work, at least he didn’t go with the worst possible option, which would have been to say that Missy had just been play-acting all throughout Series 10. Which would have been such an absolute fuck-you to viewers, and the only way he could have played it worse.
Bottom line so that I can just move on from this whole Master thing: in my desperate need to connect the throughline of continuity, I can accept that after the Doctor successfully reformed Missy and she was shot by her past self for it, she regenerated into the O!Master, then either did a clever thing to escape the colony ship or straight-up took the long way round. Then, at some indeterminate point afterwards, he found out the truth of Gallifrey – the truth of the Doctor, the truth of the Time Lords, the truth of them all in the Timeless Child – and every dark, selfish, angry thought the Master ever had re-asserted itself with a vengeance. His mind snapped all over again, only instead of the madness of the drums, it’s a much more personal feeling of betrayal. S/he once said that s/he needed the Doctor to know they weren’t so different. But it turns out they are. To say any more would be to put the buggy before the horse (or t’was it the other way around?) about Series 12’s big twist. With his mind broken all over again by the terrible truth, the Master relapses, and relapses hard.
That tracks, using only the information presented to us in Series 12. It’s just so bothersome that at no point does Chibnall act through his writing like this is a thing. The way his writing presents all this, is that we’re supposed to automatically assume the Master is evil from the jump, and that finding out about the Timeless Child was merely ancillary to that.
Arrrgh, Chibnall.
AND STOP TAPE. WE’RE BACK. HOLY CRAP. SORRY. I WROTE SO MUCH.
So that’s a pretty big example of how thoughtlessly top-down writing can harm a narrative.
(If you’re curious about my Who thoughts since then, I love Flux, the two specials after it are fine, and then The Power Of The Doctor is legit my favourite regeneration episode ever.)
That about wraps it, honestly. The bottom line about top-down writing is just – don’t do it. Connect the throughlines and cherish the connective tissue that brings your characters from point A to point Z, because that connective tissue is the journey.
In lieu of a big summative end-statement, I’ve tried to bake solutions to all these examples in as we’ve gone along, because this is really something that has countless simple, easy answers, but it is going to hurt your narrative if you neglect those answers. It’s just another thing to keep in mind as you write your adventure.