Forum:Inclusion debate: Death Comes to Time

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Death Comes to Time is sometimes regarded as being out of mainstream continuity. I think some of our pages indicate this. I know I personally don't give it much credence. But I can't think of any argument which would cause us to exclude it from our list of valid in-universe sources.

Just to formally get this one out of the way, does anyone know of any valid reason why this story shouldn't be considered valid? I know that the creators have declared The Minister for Chance sequel series to be set outside the DWU, but can anyone point to a statement from the BBC or the writers which indicates any valid, out-of-universe reason to exclude Death Comes to Time?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">15:46: Sat 26 May 2012 

I think that the lack of replies to this topic indicates that nobody really wants DCTT to be considered canonical, but nobody else can think of a good out-of-universe reason to exclude it either. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 05:49, May 30, 2012 (UTC)

I think the lack of replies indicates that few people have an opinion they wish to air. Not quite the same thing. Silence indicates that no one is talking, not that no one is thinking. Boblipton ^{talk to me} 13:20, May 30, 2012 (UTC)

It's valid, we should include it.

I can't see how it contains any more controversial material than anything else that is in any of the ranges. --Tangerineduel / talk 14:02, May 30, 2012 (UTC)

Nooooo, nothing controversial at all. Other than the fairly explicit death of the Doctor in his seventh incarnation, of course. Be fair, TD, it does postulate something that no other story has ever done, and this is the reason many fans do have a problem with it. But again, inclusion debates aren't about the narrative merits of the story, but rather any out-of-universe clues that the producers didn't think the story within the bounds of the normal DWU.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">18:56: Fri 01 Jun 2012 

Well, it could be argued that the simple act of creating a television series in 2005 in which the Doctor, now in his ninth incarnation, was not killed in his seventh incarnation (and in which the eighth incarnation has been acknowledged on-screen) is a statement that the producers aren't following on from DCTT in narrative terms. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 00:38, June 2, 2012 (UTC)

Now that's an interesting line of thought. I hadn't really considered that RTD pushed this thing "off the farm" simply by airing Rose. But really that is the truth. This should be gone for exactly the same reasons as Shalka.

On the other hand, maybe we don't want to set he precedent that implication of a new producer's actions can be used to DQ a previous story. So forget the new series for a moment. Does the fact that the producers of DCTT released a show in 2001 that killed the Doctor in his seventh body — when the TVM, the RT comic strips, about half the DWM comic strips, a lot of the EDAs, the NA transition to the Eighth Doctor, and the first season of Eighth Doctor audios had already been released — automatically place this thing outside our fences?

Does the simple fact that they killed of what was, even at the time, a past Doctor turn it automatically into a "what if" story? I think if they could have made it with McGann, they probably would've, right? Isn't the behind-the-scenes reality of not using McGann what marginalises this story?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">16:49: Sat 02 Jun 2012 

Switching to a more negative stance

After doing some research of my own, I'm now strongly leaning towards outright disqualification.

The DWM review — something which satisfies our rules as a legitimate resource — couldn't put the issue more clearly:

• "[In DCTT] the Doctor does and says the right sorts of things, and has the right sorts of adventures, but has as much in common with his televised predecessor as does Peter Cushing's movie Dr Who. Instead of being an outsider, the boy who ran away from the passive non-interfering Gallifreyans, he is one of the Time Lords, or Gods of the Fourth, a homeless order of wandering interventionists who work for good or evil, using the same mystical powers . . . It does feel like a pilot for a new series, but not a new series of Doctor Who." (Dave Owen, DWM review, DWM 319)

Dan Freedman, talked in DWM 314 about McGann, which I think gives some insight into why he went with the Seventh instead of Eighth Doctor. While the story of how he got Sylvester to join him on the project is one of happenstance, I think his statements about the TVM reflect a belief that the TVM wasn't "real" Doctor Who, and didn't need to be considered when producing DCTT. This puts Freedman at odds with the inclusionary goals of this wiki.

• "You can explain it away however you like, but [the TVM] still bombed. Well, everyone watched it, but only because it was Doctor Who. They didn't know what it was going to be like. Now they know what it's like, not many people are buying it."
• "The moment I get [the commission to produce DW on television], I think people will stop whining: 'Oh it's got to be McGann' — wel, it's not going to be McGann, right? No way! It might be McGann in the future, you know, a future regeneration or something. That would be a nice way to have him in it, but the next Doctor will not be McGann."

Granted, none of that is conclusive evidence as to Freedman's stance on the Eighth Doctor. But it does prove he absolutely knew who McGann was and that he chose not to consider him the current Doctor.

Nev Fountain, script editor of DCTT, also from DWM 314:

• "I think [the darker Doctor idea] can be a dead-end, but you can do a lot of things with the Doctor, especially with an online or radio format — and if you want to accept it as canon , you can. or not. Whatever you prefer."

This kind of ambiguity from a paid script editor of Doctor Who about the thing he or she personally worked on is just weird. I think he's not even trying to argue that this is "real" DW. Can you imagine Steven Moffat saying about The Wedding of River Song, "Eh, maybe it's canon?" I can see him saying, cause I think he actually has, "Eh, there's no such thing as canon". But to admit there is a canon and then to say that his work might not be in it — that's strange.

Fountain is more declarative later in the piece when he says:

• "I think Death Comes to Time is very much a one-off project as far as I'm concerned, but perhaps this online thing will prove to be a stepping stone."

To me, this is a bit of a clincher. It proves that they weren't in any way attempting to carry out a legitimate continuation with these narrative elements. But if that's not proof enough, here's Freedman again, talking about what he would do with if his bid to produce televised DW were accepted:

• "No regeneration scene, no continuity references, no nothing. You've got to get to know this character and his companions again."

Freedman also says he already had someone cast "theoretically" as the "next Doctor" for his proposal of a new series. This means, as far as I can make out, that the death in DCTT simply wouldn't have been narratively respected.

Had his proposal, instead of RTD's, been the one that carried the day, he wouldn't have even used DCTT as a part of the backstory. Ya gotta wonder, too, whether there would have been any effort at making the Freedman Doctor number nine or number eight, given the earlier dismissal of "McGann as Eight". Hell, ya gotta wonder if Freedman's first Doctor might not have been a new first Doctor. He does seem to be talking in absolutes when he says "no continuity references, no nothing". On the other hand, it could be fairly said that this was RTD's approach — for series 1.

In any event, it seems clear to me that Freedman/Fountain took a number of decisions that disqualify the piece:

• They actively chose not to involve McGann when it was clear that they had no qualms about asking other, arguably "bigger", actors to participate.
• They weren't looking to continue this continuity at all, so I think they felt liberated to do whatever they wanted with it.
• They were looking to produce DW on television at the time, and Freedman seems to be saying he wouldn't have continued this continuity on television.
• Fountain publicly backed away from definitively calling DCTT "canon" before the whole thing had actually come out.

We should be running like hell from something that has these kind of lukewarm statements from key members of its production team.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">20:07: Sat 02 Jun 2012 

In light of this information I have no issues with it being placed in the NC category and not being included in our regular coverage. --Tangerineduel / talk 16:19, June 4, 2012 (UTC)

"Canon" arguments in a franchise that specifically eschews canon are meaningless. Nobody's arguing that Death Comes to Time doesn't belong on the wiki (or that it's not "in the scope of the wiki"); you're just arguing about what labels to slap on it. Well, the BBC didn't slap a label on it. We have some quotes from people involved in making it, but those people don't control the franchise now. None of this is helpful to readers or editors, Czechout; it's misleading to those who might be given the impression the Doctor Who universe is more formally structured than it actually is. It would be simpler if Doctor Whowere a franchise in which we could confidently say that events that plainly take place outside of other continuity are noncanonical, but it isn't and we can't. -- Rowan Earthwood ^{talk to me} 14:10, June 5, 2012 (UTC)

It is a common misapprehension that this wiki is somehow trying to "define canon". But that's not our goal at all. (This misapprehension isn't helped by the fact that we have Tardis:Canon policy, an unfortunately-named document which was begun before Paul Cornell popularised the "myth of canonicity". This debate, however, is helping to inform the rewriting of that policy so that it's clearer what we're trying to do.)

It is the foundational precept of this wiki that articles about narrative elements — characters, locations, concepts — shall be written from an in-universe perspective. That's very difficult to do unless the universe is defined in some way. Otherwise, Peter Cushing's "Dr. Who" and Joanna Lumley's "Thirteenth Doctor" would have to be included when writing the article about the Doctor.

For this reason, a process — which, incidentally, I did not personally invent — emerged whereby we occasionally examine a story or range to see whether it should be considered a valid source for the writing of in-universe articles. If there's evidence that the creators/copyright holders did not intend for the story to be a part of the DWU, or if there's a question about the story's legal status, we exclude it. Even though, again, I'm not the author of this process, I do approve of it. We have to have some mechanism for defining the wiki's scope, or we'd have no defense against fan fiction, obvious parody, and things which are explicitly meant by the author and/or copyright holder to be viewed as extra-continuous.

Debates like this one say nothing about what you as an individual may wish to regard as "canon". They merely enforce the rules that we use to define a valid source for the writing of articles on this wiki. Big difference.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">16:55: Tue 05 Jun 2012 

That doesn't sound right to me. It's pretty easy to see the difference between fan fiction (not approved/licensed by the BBC) and something like Death Comes to Time (officially released by the BBC on their website). I don't have any particular fondness for the latter, and as I said it's obviously incompatible with the rest of the body of Doctor Who media, but if the wiki isn't "Dan Freedman's Doctor Who" then I'm not sure why his opinion should govern our in-character interpretation of the show. Incorporating aberrant timelines into in-character descriptions can be somewhat difficult to do, but it's been done successfully nonetheless throughout the wiki. A single line or short paragraph here and there mentioning what from an in-character perspective are obscure and dubious sources would suffice.

That said, I'm not exactly emotionally fixated on this, so I won't argue about it any further. I just don't see the utility of it, and it seems misleading for our in-character narrative to so explicitly pick sides. -- Rowan Earthwood ^{talk to me}

I hear ya. And I quite appreciate it doesn't "sound right", particularly when you're focussed on just this one story. The DWU is just a damned weird franchise. It's very hard to write a policy that has broad applicability in a fictional universe that has no single owner. If we were just trying to determine whether to include this one story, without any reference to any other inclusion debates, then what Freedman says would be of perhaps less use. But because the DWU is populated by dozens of stories that don't require the BBC at all, and because there are some BBC-licensed things that are obvious parody, we've had to come up with a policy framework that focuses on authorial intent, more than narrative content or "official status". The reason why Freedman's words are important is because it matters what Curtis and Moffat had to say about Curse, what Baker has said about K9, what Big Finish have said about Unbound, and what Parkin has said about The Infinity Doctors.

Everyone assumes that the reason there is no canon in DW is because the BBC haven't declared one. But it's not their choice. They can't declare a canon, because they don't fully own the DWU. The words of the individual producers and writers do in fact carry a weight that is, in American television production terms, disproportionate to their stations. Imagine if an individual author owned the Klingons! Or if someone other than George Lucas controlled the idea of "the Force"!

It's as simple as this: we pay attention to what producers/writers say because Steven Moffat's mother-in-law got Terry Nation effective ownership of the Daleks. That means the current iteration of Doctor Who is largely based on something the BBC don't even properly own. So we're kinda obliged to listen to what individual creative personnel say. At the end of the day, they are, more often than not, equal stakeholders with the BBC. Note that even Dan Freedman spun something outta DCTT. He controls the idea of the Minister of Chance, as we can see from his subsequent series. So, in a real sense, DCTT was "Dan Freedman's Doctor Who".
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">22:33: Tue 05 Jun 2012 

Of course, it's just a useful conceit to connect the legal concept of "ownership" with the fictional concept of "canonicity". After all, the original "canon" is the books of the Bible, and though many churches might like to claim authority over it, none of them can say that they "own" the text of the Bible. And that's really what "canon" is about: authority, actual or implicit.

Sherlock Holmes fans started the "Great Game" by pretending that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the literary agent of a real Sherlock Holmes, and began talking about the "Holmes canon" (that is, the Holmes stories by Conan Doyle) as a way of establishing the rules of that game. For them, the rule was quite simple: if it was by Conan Doyle, it was canonical, and if not, it wasn't. (As much as one might enjoy, say, The Seven Per Cent Solution, a true Sherlockian wouldn't argue that Moriarty was merely Holmes' math tutor.)

On this wiki, we're continuing that tradition. We're playing a game in which we make a single narrative out of many conflicting strands of Doctor Who stories. So it does make sense for us to have a set of rules to play by. But we shouldn't pretend that those rules have any meaning, significance or applicability beyond this wiki. We can try to make the rules line up roughly with what a plurality of Doctor Who fans "count" (though even that is probably impossible, given how many fans "count" only the TV series, how many "count" the books or the audios but not the comics, and so forth). But really all we're doing is establishing game rules for ourselves. As such, I fully support CzechOut's recent rewrite of Tardis:Canon policy.

Discussions like these help establish those rules. CzechOut has been quite admirably trying to establish underlying principles for these rules, which have in past been applied in a very ad hoc manner. But as admirable as this effort at systematization is, I wonder if it's not as doomed to failure as an attempt to resolve the UNIT dating controversy. The rule to "count" only stories which are licensed by the relevant copyright holder (as noted at Tardis:Valid sources) is a good approximation, but it still doesn't really work, because the relevant copyright holder has licensed contradictory materials. The Peter Cushing movies were fully licensed; so was Death Comes to Time. At the time that those stories were released, they were as "official" and as authorized as any story on TV. (In fact, the thing that most clearly puts Dr. Who and the Daleks outside the fence, the fact that Dr. Who is clearly human, wasn't contradicted by the television series until several years after the film's release.)

The clearest case to show how arbitrary these decisions on what "counts" are is Scream of the Shalka. When that webcast was made, the intention was that it would represent the "canonical" Ninth Doctor. And if the TV series hadn't come back in 2005, it almost certainly would have; the novels and comics would probably eventually have regenerated the Eighth Doctor into a Doctor resembling Richard E Grant, and started telling stories about him. But that's not what happened; by a quirk of timing, Shalka became a non-canonical footnote. The intentions of the copyright holder changed; from the point of view of the "Doctor Who universe", one might say that time was rewritten.

We can say that we're going by the intentions of the current production team, but even that is stretching things. As quite cogently stated by an anonymous user here, the BBC Wales production teams aren't worried about their stories contradicting past information from any medium other than television. (Frankly, they don't worry that much about contradicting old television stories, but if they do they usually throw in a line to appease the continuity cops — consider the "different subspecies" of homo reptilia, or the throwaway mention of the Nimon in The God Complex. They just wouldn't worry about things like that from the novels, audios or comics.)

All this doesn't really help with the question at hand, whether Death Comes to Time should be "counted" or not. My slight leaning is to say "no", but I fully admit that this is based on personal preference, and not on any underlying principle. Saying that the Doctor died in his seventh body but didn't is no more problematic than saying that Gallifrey was destroyed by the Doctor twice, or attempting to resolve the multiple fates of Ace — to play the game with any of these requires us to posit an unseen story in which the events of one story are undone or revealed to have been not what they appeared. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 03:23, June 6, 2012 (UTC)