Forum:Inclusion debate: Death Comes to Time

Forums → Archive index → Panopticon archives → Inclusion debate: Death Comes to Time

This thread has been archived.

Please create a new thread on the new forums if you want to talk about this topic some more.
Please DO NOT add to this discussion.

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 /> ☎ ✍ 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 /> ☎ ✍ 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 /> ☎ ✍ 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 /> ☎ ✍ 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 /> ☎ ✍ 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 /> ☎ ✍ 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)

I think the "game" itself disturbs me. What is this wiki intended for? Is it supposed to be an objective (insofar as it is possible), encyclopedic reference for a broad readership or a game played by the editors purely for their own amusement? Czechout referred to the timeline pages as "fanwank"[1], but I'm not sure how defining a "canon for the purpose of this wiki" is any less fanwanky. If it is less fanwanky, the difference is only in degree, not in kind.

I like that this wiki is presented from an in-universe perspective, since reiterating that each element is fictional like Wikipedia does would be silly. But it's child's play to express doubt from an in-character perspective, and as I said the wiki does it all the time. None of the problems that Czechout mentions (the need to mention the Joanna Lumley or Peter Cushing Doctors in the main Doctor article) are actually problems as far as I can tell. We could mention those incarnations from an in-character perspective with the necessary caveats (for example, "there are records of a female Thirteenth Doctor that are difficult to reconcile with other known histories of the Doctor" would be fine).

As for the BBC being unable to declare a canon, well of course they could. They can't control the licensing of elements they don't own, but they can certainly define what "canonical" means for those Doctor Who stories that they do control. That they've chosen not to (at least not publicly) says more about their laissez-faire approach to canon than it does about legal issues. If they wanted to, they could issue a statement saying they don't consider the events of the Australian K-9 TV show to have happened from the perspective of the BBC Wales TV Show, and the fact that they don't own the character of K-9 has no bearing on that. This wiki could ignore them, of course, reasoning that the owner of the K-9 IP has more authority than the owner of the main Doctor Who IP, but it remains true that an official canon of sorts is possible.

All that said, I agree that if we must have a wiki canon, then going by the statements of the creators is the least fanwanky way to go about it. The argument for decanonizing Death Comes to Time is therefore much, much stronger than the argument for decanonizing Dimensions in Time, so assuming I can't convince everyone to stop trying to label officially licensed things as noncanon I'll vote to decanonize this particular one.

So I guess this is a vote for yes from me, provided that "going by the statements of the creators" is the consistent standard we employ. -- Rowan Earthwood ^{talk to me} 23:02, June 22, 2012 (UTC)

On the other hand, The Gallifrey Chronicles refers to elements from Death Comes to Time (Tannis and a character matching the appearance of the Minister of Chance), so one could make the argument that this novel makes at least part of that series canonical from an in-character perspective. But then, The Gallifrey Chronicles also refers vaguely, at least by implication, to Scream of the Shalka and Curse of the Fatal Death as existing in the Eighth Doctor's possible future (again, from an in-character perspective). This wiki could use that as an excuse to follow suit. -- Rowan Earthwood ^{talk to me} 02:52, June 23, 2012 (UTC)

I strongly resent the implication that the process of fomulating a valid sources policy is a "game" or that it in any way is done "for the amusement of admin". This is the least enjoyable thing I've ever done on the wiki, and I'm sure that any admin who's ever thought about this issue would agree. The wiki, as a whole, has been trying to figure out a solid, coherent policy on this matter since the day it opened. Every wiki does this to one degree or another. All Doctor Who fan sites have to decide, at some point, what they're going to cover. It is not in any way an unusual practice.

I think you're wrnong, Rowan, to suggest that the BBC can in any way set a canon policy. If they don't control the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Sontarans, the Rutans, the Zygons, the Macra, the Brigadier, Nyssa, and dozens of other characters and species, to what extent can they be said to control the canon of the DWU at all? What makes the DWU challenging is that ownership isn't by story; it's by element. So as soon as you say, I dunno, "The Daleks fought the Time Lords in the Last Great Time War", you have to recognise that the BBC don't own the Daleks, so if Terry Nation's estate decided to remove access to the Daleks, that fact would no longer be something the BBC could assert. And what's more central to canon than the enmity of the Daleks and the Time Lords?

I'll say again for the thousandth time that because the BBC can't set a canon policy, neither can we. In no way are any of these inclusion attempts attempting to do so. All we're doing is trying to figure out what the universe contains, since it is our goal around here to write articles from an in-universe perspective.

And the thing is, even the most generous of fans — like Rowan — have some kind of idea of the universe's edge. The border has to be somewhere. Even if you keep Dimensions in Time around, would you really keep Doctor Who? Are you prepared to let The Stranger in, cause it kinda/sorta feels like Doctor Who? Will you allow really good fan fic? If there's a Doctor Who play that's performed differently in Birmingham than it was in London, which performance counts — or is it better just to go with the Big Fnish version to which everyone (with money) has access? If the Sixth Doctor claims to be from Gallifrey on one night and Shallifrey the next, does the article Sixth Doctor attain greater or lesser clarity for the end reader by noting the two planets as coming from "contradictory accounts", or by saying that the only definitive edition is the Big Finish play?

See, there have to be some rules, somehow. It's really, truly not a game. It's an honest attempt at reasonable and considered editorial policy that is firmly rooted in the idea of clarity for the end user of the site. It's really quite disingenuous to, for example, represent the Peter Cushing Doctor as "a Doctor from another account", since it's well established that he was deliberately created as a different and explicitly human character to avoid confusing the American audience who had never seen Doctor Who. Cushing is simply not the Doctor. It's flatly inaccurate to say that "according to other accounts, the Doctor was female", since that implies that the "other accounts" are of DWU stories — something which cannot fairly be said of either Exile nor Curse. Having a well-defined edtiorial policy on what counts and what doesn't makes our writing clearer and more accurate.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 06:00: Sun 24 Jun 2012 

When push comes to shove, the BBC controls the current Doctor Who TV show and they control the licensing for all stories and games that feature the Doctor. If they wanted to they could publish a Doctor Who timeline and say "this is what canon is for the parts of the franchise that we control. Other people can do what they want, but we won't pay attention to anything else. In fact we'll likely contradict it." No matter who owns Nyssa or the Daleks or Bernice Summerfield, in the end the people who control the Doctor and the show have the most voice. If they wanted to, they could make use of that voice and no one but the most pedantic fans would be able to look at their work and say "You can't do this!" They own or have access to all the rights they'd need to construct such a thing; maybe Lawrence Miles would tell them they couldn't use his Faction Paradox stuff (even the parts that were in the EDAs), but I imagine they'd be fine with that. The fact is, though, that they've chosen not to.

Do you really think the only thing stopping the BBC from publicly announcing that the Doctor Who? comic strips or Dimensions in Time aren't canon is rights issues? They don't need to own the rights to everything to announce that as far as they're concerned, in their capacity as the owners of the Doctor character, that the events of the Peter Cushing movies didn't happen to the Doctor and Gallifrey was only destroyed once. And if they did, well, it's true that we could ignore them if we wanted. People can ignore J.K. Rowling if they really like to imagine Dumbledore with a girlfriend, but I think the official BBC canon would have the most weight among the fandom and beyond.

The thing to remember about writing a wiki in an in-universe voice is that it doesn't really matter at all. It isn't any more important than the decision to write everything in past tense or third person. It's more convenient in some ways because it means we can just write "the Doctor went to Mars" instead of "in the fictional universe of Doctor Who, the Doctor character (who isn't a real person in the real world) traveled to a fictionalized version of Mars." But it doesn't mean we have to pick and choose what our in-character voice thinks is true or not. No, we don't have to tell the readership that the human Doctor that Peter Cushing played was definitely not the result of an unchronicled use of the Chameleon Arch, because we don't know that (and, of course, neither should we suggest it had anything to do with a Chameleon Arch when no official source remotely implies it). If the copyright holders didn't feel like it was important to tell us that, then who are we to make that decision? We don't have to tell them that the parody comic strips didn't happen, because maybe they did. We just need to, probably in the 'Behind the Scenes' section, give the reader enough information so that they can work out for themselves the same thing everyone else worked out, that it doesn't fit very well with the rest of the franchise and is therefore not in continuity. If writing "other accounts" is misleadingly vague, be more specific. If it's so obvious that something doesn't fit that you feel safe making it part of the TARDIS wiki's policy, then it's probably obvious to the casual reader too, once they're given the tools to understand it. They don't need their hands held.

I feel like fan fiction and things that are only "sort of" like Doctor Who are a red herring in this argument. I can't think of any argument for keeping them out that would require us to make decisions on which BBC webtoons or charity TV shows are "within the scope of the Wiki." I'm not arguing against all rules, but I'm saying that in cases where the relevant rights holders didn't deign to specify what is 'real' in their universe and what isn't, we don't need to either. I get that it can be a bit fuzzier in cases like Iris Wildthyme, Bernice Summerfield, and Faction Paradox, where some of their stories are officially licensed by the owners of the Doctor and some of them aren't, and I don't mind that we have to make a judgment call in those instances. But I don't think we need to subject everything to similar scrutiny just to keep out fanfics.

I used the word 'game' only because Josiah did, not to offend anybody. I don't mean any disrespect.

Back to the discussion at hand, I'd suggest the following rule of thumb: it's fair to mention something from an in-universe perspective if a source that we agree is valid also mentions that thing from an in-universe perspective, to the degree that the other source mentions it. So in The Gallifrey Chronicles, Marmal says that the Doctor "Has three ninth incarnations. I've never seen anything like it," thereby making it legitimate to write the same thing in the main Doctor article (that Marmal believed he had three ninth incarnations) and have our in-universe narrator suggest this may have referred to the Rowan Atkinson and Richard E. Grant doctors via links. It'd be wrong to waste much space on that sort of thing, but it's fair to say "this Ninth Doctor is possibly one of the three mentioned by Marmal" in the in-universe section of the wiki. It'd be too much to state definitively that these characters exist, since the novel only hints at it, but a mention is, I think, warranted. Similarly, since the Minister of Chance and Tannis get referenced in The Gallifrey Chronicles, it's fair to say from an in-universe perspective that they existed, even if we're not completely certain if their adventures happened as Death Comes to Time recounted. But since statements within the narrative take precedence over statements made by the creators and producers outside the narrative, the fact that they're referenced in a novel gives the story more weight than the creators saying "we didn't intend for this to be in continuity" takes away from it. -- Rowan Earthwood ^{talk to me} 19:55, June 25, 2012 (UTC)

I agree with most of what Rowan Earthwood wrote just above, except that where he writes

It'd be wrong to waste much space on that sort of thing

I would replace "wrong" with "dumb." It's not a matter of morality, after all.Boblipton ^{talk to me} 20:39, June 25, 2012 (UTC)

Rowan, I'm really sorry, but the fact of the matter is that the wide ranging change you're proposing to policy comes a little late in the day. Over the past 8 years that this wiki has been open, we've been moving slowly but inexorably towards the conclusions that have now been finally codified in tardis:canon policy and tardis:valid sources. Both place the out-of-universe statements of creators above narrative. We've already specifically ruled on whether The Gallifrey Chronicles makes The Curse of Fatal Death something we can use to write our articles. In a well-attended debate, our user base resoundingly said that Gallifrey in no way clearly made Curse a valid source. The basic concept of using production team comments to judge a story's validity for our purposes has been long and widely accepted. The time to debate the method by which we exclude licensed stories is really over. We simply can't keep re-litigating this issue every time a new user starts to contribute here. And we're definitely not going start allowing a mention in a valid source make an invalid source suddenly "okay". If we went down that path, we'd have to re-integrate the Faction Paradox material into this wiki, which, lemme tell ya, ain't happenin'. Your suggestion, though undoubtedly well-intentioned, would be an administrative disaster, because it would obviously admit fan fiction, parodies, Doctor Who Unbound and various other things.

No, the policy we've been groping towards for years is much simpler than what you suggest.

If a story licensed from everyone who needs to license it, then it can be used to write in-universe articles — unless convincing evidence can be supplied that it wasn't intended to be continuous with other DWU stories.

You're right in that it may not matter so much what exactly the rule is, but there has to be some rule, and this is what 8 years of debate has gotten us. It's reasonable because it doesn't focus on the quality of the narrative, but rather authorial intent and the legal right to publish the story. Obviously, you can avail yourself of the "behind the scenes" sections where necessary, as you've suggested. That's what BTS sections are for. But if a source isn't valid, then please don't quote from it in the main part of the article.

We've had a good talk about broader policy in this thread, but it's time to get back on track. This thread is about Death Comes to Time. I'm not seeing strong opposition to ruling DCTT an invalid source. Tangerineduel has agreed with the proposal, as has Rowan. Josiah has indicated slight leaning in that direction. This thread will therefore close in favor of declaring DCTT an invalid source one week from today, in order to allow others a chance to offer specific reasons why they think DCTT should be included.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 01:14: Tue 26 Jun 2012 

I had an edit conflict with CzechOut, mainly because I was being so long-winded. On the merits of DCTT as a valid source, you're right that my leaning is towards "no". But on the larger philosophical question, we should remember that although precedent matters, and the opinions of the people who're actually willing to do the work matters even more, consensus can change. None of us should be so wedded to established policy — even policy determined over 8 years of debate — that we can't reconsider it.

And now for my original blathering response to Rowan and Bob. Feel free to ignore it, but having typed it out I didn't want to lose it completely.

I mostly agree with Rowan too. And since I'm the one who introduced the word "game", I'll clarify: we're all playing a game here. We're trying to make nearly 50 years' worth of stories by hundreds of writers fit together into a single narrative, with a minimum of contradiction. And we're doing it largely for our own entertainment as fans of Doctor Who, and for the entertainment of other fans. We think it's fun to create a resource listing every example of, say, a time loop in Doctor Who and Doctor Who-related stories, and we think that it might be fun for other fans to be able to find such a resource.

Determining which stories are valid sources isn't a game, or the game. It's part of determining the rules of the game. Just like when you were a kid playing tag, you need to know where the boundaries are. And just like when you were a kid, arguing over the rules isn't the fun part of the game — but you can't play unless the players more or less agree what the rules are.

Since the BBC has never chosen to say "these Doctor Who stories count and these don't", we have to make that determination ourselves. My general preference is for wider boundaries, but I accept that not everybody agrees with that, so I play by the rules that have been established. If everybody else editing here suddenly decided that we should cover only Doctor Who on television, those would be the house rules, and I'd abide by them (though I'd probably start looking for a fork with a wider remit).

Talking about intellectual property and who owns which elements of the Doctor Who universe (itself a fairly dodgy concept, if you really consider it) is only important because that's one of the tools we've traditionally used to determine what we're going to count here. And it's a sensible tool: if the people who own the rights to a character or concept allowed such-and-such a story to be told, it's fair to treat that story as a valid extension of that concept. But, as we see here, it's not an infallible tool. Our activity here is based on the premise that it's possible to construct a more or less logical single narrative out of all the authorized Doctor Who stories. Death Comes to Time violates that premise. You can't fit it with other stories unless you invent some other element, like a parallel universe or divergent timeline, or saying that the Seventh Doctor's apparent death was merely a ruse. So either we accept that contradiction (and allow our readers to resolve it as they choose), or we place Death Comes to Time outside the fence. Either way, we should acknowledge that we're making an exception to our general principle, because we have to.

I don't really have strong feelings about the matter, in part because DCtT isn't a story I particularly care for (despite the presence of Stephen Fry, the Doctor who should have been). I'm willing to go along with any decision that's made here. But none of us should be under the illusion that either choice is more logical or less arbitrary than the other. Either we admit flatly contradictory material into the so-called Doctor Who universe, or we exclude a BBC-authorized narrative. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 01:49, June 26, 2012 (UTC)

I think Czechout might have misunderstood what I was driving at earlier. I don't think a story being referenced in a valid source makes that story also a completely valid source; I just think it makes the bit that was referenced valid. So the War against the Enemy being mentioned in Interference doesn't make This Town Will Never Let Us Go or The Book of the War into valid sources; it just means the War itself can be mentioned based on what we know from those sources that we've deemed valid. The mention of Tannis in The Gallifrey Chronicles doesn't make Death Comes to Time valid; it just makes Tannis himself fair game. The fact that Marmal thinks the Doctor has three ninth incarnations doesn't mean the stories featuring the alternate Ninth Doctors are all valid, but it does mean it's fair to mention that Marmal thinks the Doctor has three ninth incarnations. The appearance of various Eastenders characters in Dimensions in Time doesn't make all of Eastenders canonical for Doctor Who; it only means the Doctor and his companions met people with those names and descriptions. The appearance of various Star Trek: The Next Generation characters in comics crossovers doesn't make all of Star Trek acceptable, just the bits we see in the comic. I'm under the impression that this isn't controversial. Where we differ is that I think that while we can't state definitively that The Gallifrey Chronicles makes Death Comes to Time "real," we also can't state definitively that it isn't (Faction Paradox is another issue, and I'm not trying to reopen that debate). But, like I said earlier, if this is something most of us feel we must do, then I guess I vote yes. -- Rowan Earthwood ^{talk to me} 17:49, June 26, 2012 (UTC)

Oh, I think you're saying some fairly controversial things. First of all, Dimensions in Time is flatly, completely outside our fences. It's not a valid source, period, in any way, shape, or form. It may only be mentioned in the behind the scenes sections of articles, and on articles clearly labelled with the {{notdwu}} boiler plate. So, no, the Doctor never met anyone with the names and faces of EastEnders characters. (As I've recently said at tardis talk:Canon policy, it's not actually a BBC-licensed story, as the BBC no longer retain the rights to it in any way. It was a "legal charity" event, but the BBC don't own it, in the same way that they own Time Crash, for example.)

I also think you're wrong when you say that a reference to the Second War in Heaven is the same thing as a reference to The War. The two are completely different events, as has been exhaustively discussed during the Faction Paradox debates on this wiki. Again, if you want to leave behind the scenes notes at the Second War in Heaven article, that's fine. But they are not the same wars. Miles has no right to use the Second War in Heaven in his FP series, because he doesn't own the Time Lords or Gallifrey — vital elements in the "Second War in Heaven", but not at all a part of "the War".

The specific point you mention from The Gallifrey Chronicles about the "three Ninth Doctors" thing has been explored in detail at Forum:Is The Curse of Fatal Death canon?, where lengthy passages of the book were put on display for all to judge. The resounding result of that debate was a finding that this in no way positively referenced the Atkinson Doctor or Emma. Thus a mention of "alternate" Ninth Doctors is acceptable, but an identification (or even suggestion) that these Ninth Doctors might include Atkinson (or Grant-Shalka) is not. Chronicles definitely does not make "okay" the Atikinson or Grant Doctors.

Your Star Trek reference is not at all germane to this conversation. Obviously, the comic does make the whole Star Trek universe a part of the DWU. That's clear from just reading the first issue. Even if later it's all revealed to be a dream, the STU and DWU are indeed intertwined. (And really, it's not going to be a dream. That would piss off IDW's base, some of whom see it as an ST comic with DW elements, and others who see it as a DW comic with ST elements. Both sides will be respected in the writing, or IDW will have a riot on their hands.)

Our position of only going with what's in the source has nothing to do with the mixing of universes. It's just following the basic policy of the wiki: don't go beyond what's actually stated in a source.

We're not saying that, for example, there isn't a Neelix or an Icheb in the DWU. We're only saying that they've not been named in a source, so we can't start an article about them. The way we're handling ST concepts is simply the way we should handle any topic: it's gotta be definitively named in a valid source for it to get an in-universe treatment here. If Neelix were mentioned in, say, issue 6 of Assimilation then we'd be obliged to start an article for him. Until then, we don't start an article just to say that his existence was implied by Assimilation.

And that's really the problem with most of the examples you've given from Chronicles or FP source. There's no definitive statement of anything in these books. No Atkinson. No Shalka Doctor. No War that's depicted in the FP series. No nothing. It's all implication and innuendo. And that's perfectly fine to explore in a behind the scenes section. But not in the main body of in-universe articles.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 19:46: Sun 08 Jul 2012 

The phrase "Second War in Heaven" comes exclusively from the Faction Paradox line, which is why there's a proposal by Tangerineduel on that page's talk page to rename it for the Tardis wiki. For the purposes of the Tardis wiki, we really ought to just call it the War or the War against the Enemy to distinguish it from the Last Great Time War. I'm not going to get into an argument over how close the Great Houses from the Faction Paradox line are to the Time Lords in Doctor Who, since it isn't relevant here, but clearly the things written about the war between the Time Lords and the Enemy are the same things that happened in the war between the Great Houses and the Enemy up to the just prior to the events of The Ancestor Cell. I'm not at all suggesting that the Faction Paradox stuff be combined with the stuff in this wiki, but if you've ever read The Book of the War and the Eighth Doctor novels, you know what I'm talking about.

Since "the BBC has to own it" isn't a requirement for anything else to be considered in-continuity from our in-universe perspective, that's not really germane to the question of Dimensions in Time's status as a legitimate source. Nor does owning it have anything to do with whether or not they licensed it. The arguments against Dimensions in Time are all really awful, in my experience.

It's actually pretty clear from the Star Trek/Doctor Who crossover comic that the Doctor has somehow ended up in a parallel universe. That's why in the second issue he notes that he doesn't know what a Klingon is and how wrong it is that he knows every planet but doesn't know any of the planets that've been mentioned. Star Trek thus becomes part of the greater network of parallel universes to which the Doctor has traveled, but not part of the Doctor Who Universe as such. It's possible that you might be using the word "universe" differently than I am.

On the primary topic, you seem to have misunderstood. "Don't go beyond what is actually stated in the source" is exactly what I was trying to convey. So if The Gallifrey chronicles mentions three incarnations of the Ninth Doctor, we can't state definitively that the other two were the Shalka Doctor and the Fatal Death Doctor, but neither can we state definitively that they aren't. -- Rowan Earthwood ^{talk to me} 01:37, July 9, 2012 (UTC)

I don't understand the point you're trying to make. What good does it do us to not be able to definitively state something? All I'm saying is that if we can't definitively say something, then we don't mention it in the in-universe portion of the article. That said, my reading of our debate on Fatal Death is that we noted that the exact passages of Chronicles do not match Emma, at the very least, and in no way even vaguely suggest Atkinson.

And, I'm sorry, but you're just wrong about licensing. Ownership is required before licensing is possible. That's just basic copyright law. Since the BBC don't own Dimension in Time in any sort of conventional way, they are not in a position to license it. The license holders are the participants, and they have withheld all future rights.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 02:26: Tue 10 Jul 2012 

What good does it do definitively state something that isn't definitively stated in the text? I'm just saying that where the source is vague, we should be vague. The Gallifrey Chronicles doesn't say 'One of his ninth incarnations will have a companion named Emma," but it doesn't say he won't, either. I think saying "this is definitely not a valid source" when it's not warranted is as bad as saying that it definitely is.

As you know, the BBC owns the character of the Doctor, and presumably licensed that, unless Dimensions in Time was done without permission. The question isn't whether the BBC owns every different story (they don't own any of the Bernice Summerfield New Adventures, for example, but we consider those to be valid sources), but whether the characters in the story were properly licensed by their respective copyright holders (as I presume is the case in Dimensions in Time, since they dropped the Daleks from the story due to licensing issues). Since the characters in Dimensions in Time were properly licensed, it's a valid source regardless of who owns the resulting work. -- Rowan Earthwood ^{talk to me} 15:22, July 10, 2012 (UTC)

Closing time

Anyway, guys, this thread is about Death Comes to Time. It would appear that there is consensus on the nation that DCTT is not within this wiki's scope. If you want to go on venting about canon in general, you know the way to tardis talk:canon policy. Unless there are specific arguments for keeping Death Comes to Time, this thread will close in 48 hours from the following timestamp.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 02:26: Tue 10 Jul 2012 

(By the way, Rowan, I'm not trying to have the last word on the above points. Feel free to have the honor of the final reply, cause I'm genuinely interested in what you see is the utility of the "indefinite negative". But we do need to get this thread closed, since we haven't really talked about Death Comes to Time for quite a while.)