Talk:Ulysses

truth

Is Ulysses really the doctor's father? --Ceryu 04:33, September 25, 2011 (UTC)

If you accept the novels as canonical, then almost certainly. (It's never completely confirmed, but the hints are very clear.) Of course, since Doctor Who doesn't really have a canon, everybody's free to pick and choose what bits of the mythos to accept and which bits to ignore. It's up to you, really. But that was the intention of the authors who featured him. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 02:51, April 26, 2012 (UTC)

Move

Shouldn't this article be named Ulysses? The policy is to use the most common name.I can't say with certainty which is more common as I have not read the novels, but nearly every mention of him in this article uses Ulysses. CloneMarshalCommanderCody ☎ 21:50, September 1, 2014 (UTC)

If you think it should be renamed, put a {{rename}} tag on the page. Not many people patrol the talk pages, and maybe a tag will attract someone who actually knows which one is the common name. Shambala108 ☎ 01:04, September 2, 2014 (UTC)

Appearance in Listen

The information about his appearance in Listen keeps getting removed. Apparently this is confirmed in Doctor Who Extra (I haven't seen it yet) but if you watch it will say. But I'm not 100% sure. Lewody1 ☎ 22:06, September 13, 2014 (UTC)

I'm the one who removed the info. First, nothing in Listen says the man in the barn is the Doctor's father, let alone a guy named Daniel Joyce. Second, even if DWE says its him, we can't include that because it is not a valid source for in-universe articles. P&P talk contribs 22:10, September 13, 2014 (UTC)

Quite correct, PicassoAndPringles. I don't think Listen allows us to even call the "male voice" in the scene the boy's father. He speaks of "the other boys" in a way that seems more like someone running an orphanage than someone talking about his own children.

In any case, this article has become massively confused. It should likely be separated into four articles: Ulysses, Daniel Joyce, Chronotis and The Doctor's father, with an attempt made to include in each of those article only information that is directly stated about those people. In other words, we should assume that they are different individuals until absolutely convincing proof is put forward. At that point, and only at that point, we could talk about merging whichever ones need to be merged.

It's important to remember that Lance Parkin, the writer of the only two books I can find to directly mention Ulysses, The Infinity Doctors and The Gallifrey Chronicles, firmly says in the former that Ulysses is not the Doctor's father.

Indeed the connection between Ulysses and Joyce is very tenuous, coming through an offhand remark in Infinity. After Parkin says that the Doctor's father is not Ulysses, he then goes on say "but a professor in Berkley". Well that is not the same thing as saying Ulysses is Joyce. And even if it were, Infinity has an unusual setting that makes it difficult to consider a part of the "normal" DWU, as witnessed by a multi-month discussion on this wiki.

As for Daniel Joyce, that name is only in Unnatural History, so far as I can tell, and if he's meant to be the Doctor's father, the Doctor is surely acting awfully formally towards him. Indeed, in Interference, Larry Miles posits that Daniel Joyce is Chronotis, and there's zero hint, much less explicit statement, that Joyce is the Doctor's father in that novel. As far as my skim over the material is concerned, they really seem like acquaintances, not father and son. And of course, if Joyce is Chronotis, then the Doctor's behaviour towards Chronotis in Shada is obviously not that of a son to a father. Indeed, we'd have to read that story fundamentally differently than we do.

And there are zero instances of "father" in The Gallifrey Chronicles which refer to the Doctor's father. Joyce's name doesn't appear there. Only Ulysses appears — and Parkin has already said, though it's unclear whether it "counts", cause it's in the strange Infinity Doctors, that Ulysses is not the Doctor's father.

So this is a case where we need to go back to the source material, and rewrite these articles, adhering as closely to the text as we possibly can. We're regurgitating a lot of half-remembered material here, and it's really rather important to return to fact-based writing.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  23:39: Sat 13 Sep 2014

Just for the record, Doctor Who Extra doesn't say anything about who the two people were. Slughorn42 ☎ 22:11, September 14, 2014 (UTC)

Merger proposal

I'dd like to reopen the conversation from the above section. In 2014, the decision made to split the pages was undoubtedly the correct one: there's no reason to think that the male voice in Listen is the Doctor's father; and in all my time reading Interference, I've never noticed a reason to think that Ulysses is Chronotis (unsurprising, as such an identification would contradict everything we know about both characters!) However, I believe there were a few splits too many. Specifically, there is more than enough evidence in valid, narrative sources to confirm that Daniel Joyce is the same character as Ulysses, and that he is the Doctor's father.

(For the sake of brevity, I'm abbreviating The Gallifrey Chronicles as TGC, The Infinity Doctors as TID, and Unnatural History as UH.)

• In UH, the Doctor says that Joyce is a "fitting" name; in the real world, James Joyce wrote the book Ulysses. Additionally, Daniel Joyce's fictional career backstory says he comes from Ithaca, NY; Ithaca is the home of the mythological Ulysses.

• In TGC, Larna meets Ulysses and helps him study a temporal cicatrix. In UH, Larna is still working with Daniel Joyce and studying a temporal cicatrix.

• In TID, the Doctor reflects that his father is "a professor at Berkeley." This is Daniel Joyce's exact profession in UH.

• In TGC, Ulysses is described as "a powerfully built man with white hair and a clipped beard". In TIH, the portrait of the Doctor's parents above the fireplace depicts a man who's "powerfully built with rugged features, a weathered face with dark eyes". In UH, Daniel Joyce has a "neatly trimmed white beard and creases round the corners of his eyes from squinting." White hair, a short beard, "powerfully built": these are the same man.

• In TID, the Doctor reflects that "his mother's name had been Penelope," and that she was "a redhead, a little plump." In TGC, the human woman Penelope Gate is Ulysses' wife, and they have a son together; she has "red hair hung wild to her waist." In the same book, the Doctor remembers his mother's "long red hair and her cut-glass voice." This is the same woman.

• In TID, the Doctor also thinks that "he knew his father's name, at least: his father's name wasn't Ulysses." Above, CzechOut used this as evidence against Ulysses being the Doctor's father. However, consider the strange phrasing and emphasis of the quote, along with the scene from UH where, after the Doctor recounts a memory of his father and Saldaamir, the boy asks: "Is this the version where they banned all mention of his name, and yours, for consorting with aliens? Or the one where he got every record of himself deleted from the files?" The Doctor knows his father's name, but that name has been banned and deleted, so he knows it isn't his name. Given that TID was originally conceived as a two-parter with the book that became UH, it's unsurprising that Parkin would include this kind of connection.

• Saldaamir is stated to be an associate of the Doctor's father in UH, and in TID he's a friend of the Doctor's family. When Saldaamir subsequently appears for the first time in TGC, he's working closely with Ulysses and Penelope Gate. Additionally, in Beige Planet Mars, Saldaamir says that he's going to San Francisco, which is where Daniel Joyce is teaching at UC Berkeley in UH.

This is just the material from valid sources, and it makes it more than clear that the Doctor's father is Ulysses and that Ulysses is Daniel Joyce. However, just to reinforce the case, opening our search to invalid sources -- such as Lance Parkin's unpublished Enemy of the Daleks, the ample authorial statements from Kate Orman and John Blum, or the unproduced Eighth Doctor television scripts where the Doctor's father was first conceived as the Berkeley professor named Ulysses -- further cements the equivalence.

Many moons ago I created a hypothetical merger of Ulysses, Daniel Joyce, and The Doctor's father at my sandbox. However, given the ample precedent we have since developed of "By another account" language on pages like The Doctor's species and The Doctor's early life, I would also be okay with just executing the merge I've requested via the template, then adding a significant "According to some sources, the Doctor's father was Ulysses..." section to The Doctor's father. What do others think? – n8 (☎) 22:20, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

This makes a lot of sense, and is in accordance with the texts. This merger would be an improvement on the wiki's current coverage of the subject, and (as someone who's read all these things) I fully support it! CoT ? 22:37, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Although the evidence just from PROSE: Unnatural History and PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles chronicles was already rather compelling, I was originally hesitant upon reading this argument, due to it seeming not to do enough to justify the usage of The Infinity Doctors as a source. But, in light of Talk:Alternate timeline (The Infinity Doctors), I now see fully what you had in mind, and this makes sense. I won't perform it just yet for the reason I will explain in a moment, but yep, we ought to merge Ulysses and Joyce at least.

But as to whether those two ought to be merged into The Doctor's father, I'm of two minds. In theory I can see how it would insure us against future stories which may describe the Doctor's father in ways clearly irreconcilable with the "Ulysses" strand, but I'm not sure we have enough conflict there yet to justify a The Doctor's species-type hub. I'd kinda be of the opinion of merging everything for now, but keeping an eye on the option of recreating an independent The Doctor's father page from scratch, under the The Doctor's species/The Doctor's ninth incarnation template, if sufficient conflict to justify it does arise.

Thoughts? Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 14:36, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

I agree that the only purpose of a separate page for The Doctor's father would be futureproofing; as it currently stands, all information about him is either (a) tidbits from Parkin/Orman/Blum's EDAs, which is intended to be about Ulysses; or (b) memories of stargazing from the Eighth Doctor movie or copied from it, which is practically wedded to (a). I can definitely get behind the approach of the page as it currently exists being merged into Ulysses, with the option of creating a disambiguation page at a later point. (If we're going this route, I'll update User:NateBumber/Sandbox/Ulysses so you can merge those three pages into that one, then move it to Ulysses.) – n8 (☎) 14:59, 1 February 2021 (UTC)