Continuity - the inconvenient truth

I have just heard Mark Gatiss talking about continuity on the Utter Shambles podcast with Josie Long and Robin Ince (I know, I know, slightly out of date - I have just discovered it and am catching up with the backlog).

Anyway, in the podcast Mark Gatiss (who has written scripts for Doctor Who), refers to continuity and says that in his opinion, "if continuity gets in the way of the plot, f*ck it".
I can't really agree with this sentiment and to hear it from a long-standing fan of Doctor Who and (now) writer on the show, is a bit disappointing.

The one thing that annoys me about watching films and television programmes is where things happen that aren't logical or don't make sense and therefore break the suspension of disbelief, even if only for a second. Sometimes this is down to unfortunate editing but sometimes it is down to sloppiness within the script.
This is especially true of long running series and particularly with science fiction series, where huge amounts of facts have to be invented from scratch to explain how the fictional universe works.

I have a great deal of respect for Mark Gatiss as a writer and for the ideas that Russell T. Davies had when he was a writer for the show, but one thing that spoils the magic for me is when credibility is stretched to breaking point or when logic is thrown out of the window for the sake of following their vision.

A good example of this (and an example of why it was right for Russell T. Davies to leave Doctor Who) was the comment made by him in a commentary for the Waters of Mars special. Ignoring the incredibly silly and logic-defying ending for a moment (which merits another article on its own), the comment he made referred to the scene where the Doctor has suited up and left the base, but decides to go back and walks back through the debris of the recently exploded escape shuttle, complete with fires.
The comment was that the script editor (Gary Russell) had pointed out that Mars has no atmosphere, therefore you wouldn't have any fires on the surface. Rather than correcting his script or coming up with a justification that would allow a fire, Russell just over-ruled his own script editor because that was what he wanted to see.

If writers are happy to ignore even scientific facts then it isn't surprising that they are also happy to ignore fictitious facts.
However, this attitude does them no credit because it breaks the spell for any viewer who is aware of the inconsistency and makes the writer look ignorant for not being aware of the mistake or lazy for not trying write around it.

In the case of a fictitious universe (such as Doctor Who), established facts (either based upon our own current scientific facts or upon statements made as facts in earlier stories), should be treated the same - as an established truth like gravity.

Of course this doesn't mean that writers can never do anything that would result in someone or something defying gravity, but anyone writing for anything other than a programme aimed at young children should at the very least come up with a justification for it when they do.

Getting back to the Mark Gatiss Interview, he cited that there was recently (over a year ago now) a furore over the a line that Russell T. Davies added to one of the Sarah Jane Adventures, in which Matt Smith made a guest appearance as the Eleventh Doctor. The line related to the maximum number of times Time Lords can regenerate and contradicted a statement made in a 1976 story that said Time Lords can only regenerate Twelve times.
(By the way Mark if you read this - the reason The Master was able to regenerate again after reaching this limitation was given in the Peter Davison story The Keeper of Traken. The later incarnations of the Master were all written without any reference to previous versions for no very good reason and probably for the same reasons that different versions of the fall of Atlantis has been depicted in the programme - sloppy writing.)

The issue of the maximum number of regenerations is a thorny one, especially as we are not that far off having a twelfth Doctor , so it is entirely natural that the program makers should look for some way to remove that particular hurdle.
But rather than just pretending it never existed, how difficult would it have been to think up a reason for it no longer applying?
For example, it could have been stated that "Regeneration taps into the energy of the time/space vortex and that the Time Lords were able to restrict this beyond the twelfth regeneration to discourage people with potentially unlimited regenerations from behaving recklessly with their bodies, but with the Time Lords gone, who knows what the actual limit is?"
A more extravagant option would have been to write in a specific plot point that allows the extension of his regenerations.

Of course writers shouldn't be slaves to previously established facts, but neither should they weaken the narrative credibility of the setting they have created by blatantly ignoring them.
Writers (especially those who are self-proclaimed fans of the shows), should be aspiring to a higher standard than that.