My problem with modern Who dealing with old stuff is that they leave it ambiguous. They play around with answering big mysteries such as the Doctor's name,
Which was corny enough when "The Mysterious Planet" tried it, in a way that was also so far beneath and unworthy of scriptwriter Robert Holmes' talents... but it is some proof that old stuff was dealt and played with even "back then".
Draaaaaaaama! And plot fodder too! The 70s set up a lot of hoops and hurdles for cheap dramatic points, and then came the 80s that dug into it even more. "Mawdryn Undead" and "The Five Doctors" utilizing the idea the most effectively, better than the 70s since I've retried watching key stories that set up regenerations and all and the 70s do suck eggs in that regard (more on that later), but the 80s are when the show looked too far inward for ideas, though even then sequels with established monsters is always more preferable to regurgitating the identical plot elements over and over (e.g. Silver Nemesis = Remembrance of the Daleks being an easy example of this, and Nemesis had JNT ordering retakes and putting his foot down on ideas as he deemed they would do the show a disservice...)
Raaaaaaaaaatings graaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaab! Amusingly, apparently, "The War Games" was supposed to be a bookend - in case the show was to be dropped. Star Trek took over Doctor Who's timeslot, but the show got renewed with hopes that an exile, tighter scripts, avoiding the production problems season 6 had, etc, would lead to greater success. Which it didn't but were given one more chance, hence season 8's format changes and the Master was exactly what the Doctor ordered (see what I did there, it's soooo clever like how it never was?
)
Draaaaaaaaaaaaaaama! (and, yup, this one was incredibly hokey too. The hokiest and laziest. Topped off with sappy 4th wall comedy by interchanging clips with Frankenstein (har har) with a MadTV actor to ensure the audience it's all played up as a joke, it all proved the 1996 movie has far more in common with the 21st century revival/reboot than the McCoy era ostensibly had.)
etc.
But they never give a definitive answer. By touching on the lore without answers they're just adding more confusion to it.
I think they want to try to answer one thing but make something new that remains vague, for the sake of keeping the character "mysterious". While "The War Games", likely due to budget constraint, kept some ambiguity about the Time Lords, the 1970s were increasingly quick to dive right in for plot opportunities. After changing regeneration from a TARDIS function to being biological, then imposing a limit to the number of times it can be done, and expanding the home planet's lore with "Celestial Intervention Agency" and other campy nonsense that actually makes most 80s camp (prior to 1987, certainly) nullified as a result, some of today's complainers would surely have to concede the 70s were also doing this demystifying deconstruction pretty badly too.
Problem is, after so much diving into the pool of demystifying, remystifying then has to occur. Assuming audiences still care since wallowing in continuity only works for a certain period before the return on exploring the origins falls flat. A reboot can arguably bypass all of this, though a rose by any other name smells the same - ditto for a skunk, even if your pet skunk is called "Perfumella" and never had its stink glands removed. Whatever that means I no longer know because the smell generally has to change with a reboot to make it feel 'original' again despite it being the same name, then add in decades' worth of produced material and things only begin to get a little bit exponentially complicated. It's why we got Babylon 5, Firefly, and Firescape as original tv shows instead of "the third time Blake's 7 got a reboot". That's all I'd know or guess.
Or one so inconsistently recolored that so many costumes and sets were left untouched (War Chief not wearing maroon? Great opportunity missed. Or the War Room's alternate backlit walls are also untouched, lighting and all, and if "surrealism" is a descriptor, it's probably not in the "60s surreal" way.)
