Rocky and Bullwinkle and Doctor Who are very similar shows. Action serials with unusual internal rules.

- Bullwinkle is a self-absorbed gloryhound with no sympathy for others. He destroys entire cities in every serial, yet his fame is reset when he returns to Minnesota for the next one.

- Rocky suffers from severe Cassandra syndrome and usually expresses an opinion which could save the day in the first episode of the arc, but immediately ignores it and just does what Bullwinkle asks. Rocky always has stage fright and fear of the limelight.

- Pottsylvania doesn’t actually want to win a war with America. Mr. Big wants to lose any war with America so they reap the benefits of American post-war rebuilding. Fearless Leader is this tasked with the Cobra Commander problem: fabricate enormous and ridiculous schemes that he knows are doomed to fail anyway. This is why he keeps hiring Boris and Natasha, because they’re incompetent nincumpoops.

- Boris can teleport. Natasha is hinted to be a man in drag.

- Captain Peachfuzz is a consistently successful ladies man and entrepreneur, and in the new series he’s a fan of dark meat.

- Gidney and Cloyd are omniscient, omnipresent, and would atomize Earth if they felt like it.

- Chauncey and Edgar are trapped in a Tom Stoppard style metafictional narrative.

My personal theories about the most basic rules of Doctor Who, for the two basic roles:

- When you become the Doctor's companion, eventually, you either become the main or co-main character of your own series, for bettor or for worse (whether or not it is actually made in real life), or you die. The Doctor oozes cosmic importance at all times, and it's contagious. This is because...
- Doctor Who is, whether any of the creators know it, the origin story of the one true God. Evidence: the Doctor set out to, among other reasons, figure out how good can keep winning while entropy is a thing, forgot that mission, and became that very mechanism. Their universe is as internally inconsistent as the Bible, and for the same reason (multiple authors). And of course, The Secret Name Thing.

And my favorite pet theory, one that deconstructs one of the great fanfiction tropes:

- The Master has multiple non-mutually-excluisive origin stories (the Drums in the show and Death the Eternal in the expanded universe, at minimum), but could have resisted them all if he wanted to. But he didn't want to. Because he believed, perhaps rightly, that he needed to become evil, because he knew what the Doctor was going to become. The one thing nobody must ever become: an imperfect one true God.

Talk about never getting over your ex-boyfriend.

(steps out of cloning chamber) IT TURNS OUT THE TROPE IS SLASHFIC.