Was That Ripoff Stealing Even More Than Usual this Past Season?
Although Doctor Who has been under the shadow of Inspector Spacetime ever since the BBC debuted it a year after BTV’s groundbreaking science-fiction–mystery serial, its “anxiety of influence” went critical with 2014’s series. Stephen Moffat wasn’t joking when he vowed to "take the rip out of THEM on OUR show."
Let’s review the cumulative evidence of this outrageous poaching of creative property:
Exhibit A: a red UK phone box for Missy’s TARDIS vs. the iconic one already established as the Inspector’s time booth
Exhibit B: the clockwork motif in Doctor Who Series 8’s new credit sequence and previously in Inspector Spacetime's
Exhibit C: Santa Claus appearing in Doctor Who's “Last Christmas” vs. Father Christmas featuring in "The 1981 Inspector…
Return of the Time Wave—Celebrating Doctor Who's 50th Anniversary with Inspector Spacetime
The funny thing about Inspector Spacetime’s Time Wave was that it started out even vaguer than Doctor Who’s Time War. Back in 2011, all we had to go on was scattered hints about it from Russell T. Davies in the lead-up to "The End of Time" (which hardly showed it at all). I had the idea of substituting an ambiguous word, one that could refer to either something concrete, like a "tidal wave", or abstract, like a "wave function"—plus I liked the loose pun on "crime wave".
Although that sufficed for Stephen Moffat's first three series while he was writing about the Silence, now that he's brought the Time War back to centre stage for the 50th anniversary, we have to flesh out the concept of the Time Wave a bit more. We'll see how exactly Moffat …
Credit Roll for Inspector Spacetime
Updating this wiki with all the details of the Inspector Spacetime canon established in the on-going TV Tropes project is an impressive reminder of the many collaborators there who have built it up from its 30-second inspiration in Community. For instance, while Geoduck may appear to be a newcomer here, he's been with the Inspectrum from the beginning, way back in September of 2011, and has come up with numerous details about the history of this entirely fictitious TV programme. He is of course one in multitude of tropers who gathered together on that site to collaborate. There are too many to list here, but some of the most dedicated contributors include ailelie*, iaminspectorspacetime12, iamthedoctor, and setavulos. TV Tropes proved to be…
Inspector Spacetime & the Case of "Reifying the Fan"
Crazy as this is, there's a scholarly study of the Inspectrum fandom "Reifying the Fan: Inspector Spacetime as Fan Practice"*, even though the show does not, of course, exist anywhere except in our imagination.
Then again, I disagree that the essential text for the understanding of Inspector Spacetime is Roland Barthes' essay "The Death of the Author". In the first place, Dan Harmon is still alive, after all, and has returned as Community's showrunner. More important, Harmon dislikes the traditional "one-way transmission" model of television and has openly embraced the Internet as a way to communicate with his audience and as a medium for collaboration, from his voluble Twitter and Tumblr accounts to his pre-YouTube video site Channel 101 an…