And actually the comic-book reference here is totally apt -- and maybe helpful to the conversation, since it's a bit more removed -- because you have the same thing: People who like Claremont or Morrison's run on X-Men, who can drop it and pick it up a hundred times, and then the people who will always love the X-Men, in whatever form they take. And the conversations, the real ugly ones, the ones that get into death-threats and all manner of social ineptitude, are I think because of our preference for staying wherever we live.

Because in terms of the apologists, you can get to a really ugly place really fast where any criticism of the thing on a weekly basis becomes a criticism of the thing itself as one huge monolithic beast, and interrupts the "fun" nitpicking that continuity hounds love, and generally just means getting repetitive and apologist and ad hominem in terms of protecting the sacrosanct thing that is larger than its parts: If you only liked the show since the reboot, for example, probably this means you are a stupid shipper and a girl -- who shouldn't even be here anyway, like those Twilight bitches that ruined the concept of fan conventions for all time -- but in any case, you have no reverence for the history here and thus no valid references for your concerns, so please shut up while we get back to our intense debate about whether the Red Humanoid from that one Peter Davison story could be related genetically to some other stupid thing. I always felt like RTD gave a healthy bunch of slack to those people, but I had no idea what actual fan service could look like until this year, of which I objectively approve because it makes people happy, and basically is a continuity playground with lots of fun ideas and nothing, really, that interests me personally.

And similarly, if you're working from the other angle, those people seem insane, because you get to be arrogant about how you would never have watched that bullshit with the rubber suits, and that this season seems to have been born as bullshit with rubber suits, and all the other benefits that come from living the neurotypical lifestyle. Missing the point -- and I say this as one of them -- entirely. How crude it must seem for those of us in Group B to barge into a sandbox that has been sitting there for sixty years, True Fans playing quietly among themselves, and we start throwing around Gay Agendas and Companion Worship and making the Doctor action figures kiss each other and demanding bathos and pathos and emotions and religion, when all Group A wanted were imaginative playtimes with complex intellectual toys and a little science and a little history and a lot of running around and a consistent episode-grading scheme that could be endlessly discussed.