Talk:Season 23 (Doctor Who 1963)

Season format

This season is described as having a unique format because the entire season consisted of a single story. However, in spite of being titled as a single story in 14 parts, there are clearly 4 distinct stories and an overarching story for the entire season. This means the season actually bears more similarity to Season 16 and even Season 8 than it does to Children of Earth and Miracle Day; as the two Torchwood seasons did not have "sub-stories". Craigysa ☎ 19:03, January 1, 2014 (UTC)

• It may have been filmed as four distinctive tales, but the story of the trial is so overarching that I would call it a single one. Season 16 doesn't even mention the Key much in some of its tales - The Androids of Tara (TV story) for example. --Silent Hunter UK ☎ 17:38, January 2, 2014 (UTC)

• In Androids, the the desired segment of the key is found very early but is confiscated. One of the major themes of the story how the Doctor and Romana will escape without leaving the segment behind. Craigysa ☎ 10:44, January 5, 2014 (UTC)

• Every single sub-story in Season 16 involves retrieval of a segment and the difficulties retrieving them. In some cases character decisions are specifically guided by the goal of obtaining the segment. By contrast, The Trial of a Time Lord is in fact less overarching, with the Trial simply tacked-on... In the first 3 stories, you could simply delete the court-room scenes, and each story would be a self-contained, standalone adventure. So there are clearly distinct stories within the season; whereas the aforementioned Torchwood seasons have absolutely no distinct sub-stories. Craigysa ☎ 10:44, January 5, 2014 (UTC)

"Four separate stories"?

The Bluray box set for Season 23 only lists one story - "The Trial of a Time Lord". Fan and production consensus has listed the season as one complete serial since 8,000 BC. Why has this changed? BigRockCola ☎ 07:02, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

I must have missed that memo. I've always treated it as a "Key to Time" situation. LauraBatham ☎ 07:13, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Ongoing discussion at User talk:Scrooge MacDuck, User talk:NateBumber and User talk:Jack "BtR" Saxon. Jack made some edits, such as at Joan Sims, with the edit summary saying "We don't consider The Mysterious Planet to be a story". Scrooge told him we do consider it a story, and then there's been a kerfuffle ever since. Najawin ☎ 09:07, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Problem is that Jack has hugely misunderstood it all. Season 23 is a single story and should be treated as such, contrary to Jack's recent edits. Individual parts of a multi-part story are still a story. Season 23 is a convoluted and complicated instance, and we can’t just treat it as one or the other. The entirety of Season 23 is one huge serial, but it has 4 individual stories in it, but these stories are all part of one storyline, namely the Trial of a Time Lord. Danniesen ☎ 09:24, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

The same could be said about Flux. And just to be clear as to why I undid your edit, I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but it is something that requires a discussion, I think. Or at least admin approval. LauraBatham ☎ 09:34, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Yeah. Flux is the same, although that instance is a lot more obvious as it has "Chapter" attached to each… meaning that it is blatantly obvious that that series is one big story, with individual parts, which are still, individual stories, but needs to be treated as part of the whole Flux event. Danniesen ☎ 09:40, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

As for Season 23, the titles of each of these parts were never actually broadcast on television, which was meant to imply that it was to be seen as one whole serial under 1 title; The Trial of a Time Lord. That we afterwards were treated to 4 individual titles just means that we are able to divide them up, it does not mean they are seperate on the timeline of televised stories, because they are still part of one single story, which is the trial itself. The 4-parts, which themselves are divided into several episodes, are clip shows, if you will. Danniesen ☎ 09:54, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

This page previously said that The Trial of a Time Lord was one story with twelve episodes. The List of Doctor Who television stories said that "It is considered a single story by this wiki". When Scrooge said that we do consider The Mysterious Planet to be its own story and "have since forever", I amended these statements which are clearly irreconcilable with considering The Mysterious Planet, Mindwarp, Terror of the Vervoids and The Ultimate Foe to be individual stories. Jack "BtR" Saxon ☎ 10:04, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Quite honestly, I would have asked for clarification. Measure twice cut once, etc. Especially given how, uh, bizarre it would be for us to overlook something this major. Najawin ☎ 10:17, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

That was not what Scrooge said either. Jack has misunderstood the entire situation. He said they are not seperate stories, but they are still each a story. Danniesen ☎ 10:20, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

"What the devils do you mean, "we don't consider The Mysterious Planet to be a story"? Yes we do. It's right there in the dab term. We have since forever. Perhaps you think we should consider Trial one long serial, but we demonstrably don't; we treat it as a season containing interconnected, but still individually-covered, serials."

They're interconnected, but individual. Like the dab terms say, they are TV stories. Jack "BtR" Saxon ☎ 10:23, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Also, Tardis:Merging policy says about the episodes of Flux (which it compares to season 23) are "six independent stories which together form a story arc (though marketing might tell us otherwise)." Jack "BtR" Saxon ☎ 10:25, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Badly worded, yes. But nevertheless he meant that we don’t consider them each an individually numbered serial. The dab term TV story covers every single one of the TV stories, multi-part of not. One part of a multi-parter is still a TV story and therefore should have the dab TV story. Clearly you misinterpreted it as meaning that we should seperate each story. We should not. They are still a single story. And that is how they have been considered since forever. And yes, that accounts for Flux too. Danniesen ☎ 10:30, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

I don't think it's for us to say that Scrooge meant something that he did not say. Jack "BtR" Saxon ☎ 10:32, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

I meant precisely what I said: that we consider The Mysterious Planet (TV story) a story and have done from the start. We just… objectively do. It has a story page (individual episodes of serials e.g. The Feast of Steven do not), and its dab term says "story". It's also fairly intuitively a story in the T:VS sense — things definitely happen in it. We wouldn't throw it out for "not being a story" if The Mysterious Planet had somehow come into existence without the other Trial installments attached. The Mysterious Planet is "a story" — unless the proposal is to merge all the installments into one giant page (bad idea, IMO!), I don't see that changing.

Whether we can, from this, derive that Trial as a whole is not a story… I don't know. It seems to me that for a weird case like this, we could say that we have "a story made up of stories". But despite the quotes helpfully located in the above discussion, I don't think the Wiki's current policy on this point is in fact clear/consistent. To wit… well, the page is called Season 23, not The Trial of a Time Lord (TV story). That's pretty strong evidence that, de facto, we cover it as a season rather than a story! But as I said, this does conflict wit a few of the statements located above, so I'm game to treat that aspect of the matter as not yet settled, and to use this talk page to nail it down more clearly.

As regards story numbering, my personal opinion is that we should dispense with it entirely as a fundamentally confused, inherently-contradictory endeavour, and, by and large, a thuddingly useless one at that. I… recognise that this is perhaps a radical point of view, but I hope the fact that we're still arguing abour Trial numbering forty years on will give some people a sense of why I feel that way. (That being said, @Jack, for T:BOUND reasons you shouldn't have overhauled it on so many pages without prior discussion.) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 14:02, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Regarding numbering, mercifully we don't need to reinvent the wheel here. The Complete History, Doctor Who Magazine, The Black Archive, and other reference works all use the same standard numbering system, which is the official numbering. That numbering says that Planet of the Dead was the 200th story and that the parts of The Trial of a Time Lord are numbered 143a-d. I agree that this wiki's coverage of stories vs serials is weird and inconsistent, but that just means we should rethink the system (preferably in a forum thread), not that we should double down and use it as the basis for diverging from the rest of fandom. – n8 (☎) 17:41, 10 January 2023 (UTC) [edited 17:59, 11 January 2023 (UTC)]

(@Scrooge I'm rather confused. Because of what was on this page, I thought that it was current policy that The Trial of a Time Lord was one story of twelve episodes. When I edited other pages to reflect this, they were reverted because of T:BOUND.)

(Because of this and what you said, I went and edited pages such as this one to reflect that The Trial of a Time Lord is a season of four stories. And I also shouldn't have done that because of T:BOUND? That policy says that "you are bound by the rule as it currently exists" and it seems that no rule does exist, certainly not one that I've been able to find or that anybody's been able to point to.)

Anyway, if it's the case that we indeed don't have an actual policy, then I'll happily take part in a discussion to make one. I actually might agree with Scrooge about getting rid of the numbering (after all, why does The Five Doctors count whilst Dimensions in Time doesn't when they're both Children in Need specials?), but that probably is too radical. Jack "BtR" Saxon ☎ 17:53, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

T:BOUND is usually understood to refer to both written policy and "current practice". – n8 (☎) 18:01, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

That's not what T:BOUND says, though and, per T:BOUND itself: "Until and unless a rule is actually changed, you are bound by the rule as it currently reads". Besides, what is current policy? Some pages say one thing, other pages and an admin say another. Jack "BtR" Saxon ☎ 18:05, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Exactly. All the more reason to hash it out in a discussion before making dozens of changes unilaterally. – n8 (☎) 18:24, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

When an admin tells me that what I'm doing is wrong and against policy, I believe them. Jack "BtR" Saxon ☎ 18:25, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Not that this discussion belongs on this talk page. Jack "BtR" Saxon ☎ 18:26, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

This is confusing and is precisely why I loathe the story numbering with every fibre of my being, but something being a story does not mean it counts towards the story numbering. We also "consider" e.g. The Stolen Earth and Journey's End to each be a story in its own right, but they're counted together in the official numbering. When I said that we "considered it to be a story", I meant that it was bad and counterproductive to edit out language referring to it as a story, not that it should count as a discrete entity in the story numbering scheme.

As concerns T:BOUND, it has indeed long been established practice that "current practice spread across dozens of pages on the Wiki" counts as one of the things you're not supposed to upend without prior discussion. There is in fact a proposal in the Tardis:Temporary forums to officially enshrine this in the text of the page, but to be clear that's a procedural issue, not a sign that it's not already how things work. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:27, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Don't we technically consider The Stolen Earth and Journey's End to be one story, though? Series 4 (Doctor Who 2005) says that the series has 18 stories, indicating that we count two-part stories as just that: a story of two parts. Jack "BtR" Saxon ☎ 18:29, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

This is just semantics, but if something has a story page and has "(TV story)" in the title, the Wiki considers it to be a story. That's not even a causal statement saying that one implies the other: these are synonymous. The only thing I have been trying to say in this entire debacle is that given that we have "story" right there in the title of those pages, it would be pointless and confusing to pussyfoot around language that refers to them as "stories" on e.g. cast pages. We don't need to dance around sentences like "In the Sixth Doctor TV story The Mysterious Planet…" when our page is literally at "(TV story)"! (Of course, I know you have a proposal to change dab terms there, but even setting aside the fact that I would be against this proposal, that makes it a straightforward T:BOUND issue: you shouldn't be trying to implement things relating to this change until that change itself actually goes through.) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:33, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

(Yeah, I know that and wouldn't seek to change anything before a discussion had been had. That's a wholly unrelated matter that has only now become relevant.)

So are we saying that this page was wrong in saying that The Trial of a Time Lord is one story, that it was right or that we need a discussion about it? Jack "BtR" Saxon ☎ 18:35, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

I am saying that regardless of whether Trial is also (in a different way) "a story", it is not inaccurate to say that The Mysterious Planet onwards are also, individually, stories; and that it should never, under any circumstances be ruled to be inaccurate until and unless we cease to dab their pages as "(TV story)". Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:37, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Noted, but what's the current stance on The Trial of a Time Lord? Is there one or do we need to have a discussion? Jack "BtR" Saxon ☎ 18:39, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

As I said earlier, I do think it's worth having a discussion about it, yes. Though the impact of that discussion (this is a third point) should probably not affect the story numbering, so long as by story numbering we continue to mean the official BBC-given "story numbering", which is just a (bad, decaying, worse-than-useless) fact that we as a Wiki document, regardless of what is and is not actually considered a story on this Wiki. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:41, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Okay, sure, I've added it to the temporary forum requests. I'll undo my edits to the story numbering but, from what you've said, it sounds like season 23 is more accurate now listing The Mysterious Planet etc. as stories rather than "episodes 1-4" and the like. Jack "BtR" Saxon ☎ 18:48, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

For what it's worth, Scrooge, I agree with you about removing the story numbers. I'm not sure they are worth the confusion. LauraBatham ☎ 03:30, 11 January 2023 (UTC)