Forum:Deleted Scenes and Rule 4 By Proxy

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Introduction

Oh, Davros, I am far more than just another Time Lord.Seventh Doctor, thing he never said.

Many moons ago, we codified into T:VS the concept of "Rule 4 By Proxy." The rule, relatively new compared to others, states that even when a piece of fiction's intention of being in the Doctor Who universe is dubious or disputed, having a valid source reference these events is enough to bring said piece of fiction out of the INVALID section of the website. So, for instance, PROSE: Storm in a Tikka is a sequel to TV: Dimensions in Time and a prequel to TV: Search Out Space, so we now consider all three stories valid.

Since then, we have had numerous interesting discussions about the lengths that this rule goes to, how small or big a reference has to be to apply, and so on. Well, today we're here to discuss perhaps one of the most controversial topics.

Since 2008, we have had a thoroughly-followed rule that Deleted scenes can not be valid on the site. This dates back to Forum:Are deleted scenes canon?, where it was ultimately judged that as deleted scenes were removed from the final product, they were not intended to be canon.

Oh, sorry.

-it was ultimately judged that as deleted scenes were removed from the final product, they were not intended to be set inside the Doctor Who Universe. Additionally, User:Tangerineduel argued, and then ruled, that deleted scenes should not be considered valid unless they are featured in an extended "special edition" of an episode.

Now, surprisingly, I am not here to unravel this argument, and although I do disagree with Ye Admins of Old about topics like What defines something being a deleted scene and Do reconstructions of unfinished material count as them being completed, I generally do not think we should widely validate every deleted scene included on a DVD or VHS.

Instead, today's topic is how we deal with things we have deemed "deleted scenes," and their relation to a theoretical and non theoretical Rule 4 By Proxy argument.

This is possible because most DVD releases of deleted scenes sort them into groups, and thus give titles for all the segments. And the argument (which was originally pitched by User:Pluto2 in T:TF) is that some of these "deleted sequences" should be given pages and then made valid, on the justification that future stories reference them.

A good reason to revisit this now is that we have just changed Rule 1. Arguably, our old Rule 1 would have made this debate a null discussion, as few deleted scenes could be called completed narratives. However, now that our rules state that we validate Fiction in general, this is entire possibly as a route for us to take.

Again, we would not be validating all deleted scenes, just those which can be justified. Additionally, we would only validate deleted scenes which were "produced", and thus can be viewed. The idea of a deleted scene, something that was written and then scrapped before filming began, would not be something that could be validated. We would still require these scenes to have been commercially licensed and released in some way, especially things on DVD.

Also, quite obviously, if this suggestion passes this will need to be codified in T:VS.

There are a few examples of this I've come up with to help everyone understand the idea here.

Remembrance of the Daleks

In the TV story Remembrance of the Daleks, the Seventh Doctor and Davros have a showdown which ends in the destruction of Skaro. In the original script, which was filmed, this exchange takes place:

Davros: Are you threatening me? If so, it is most unwise.

The Doctor: Every time our paths have crossed, I have defeated you.

Davros: (laughs) You flatter yourself, Doctor! In the end, you are merely another Time Lord!

The Doctor: Oh Davros. I am far more than 'just another Time Lord.'

This was ultimately deleted from the episode, but was later featured in the documentary 30 Years in the TARDIS and its sequel edit More than 30 Years in the TARDIS. Because of this, any child or adult introduced to Doctor Who in the 1990s probably saw this clip, and many presumed it was in the episode and was, er, "In the Doctor Who universe" already.

Now, according to our page on the story, no special edition has ever edited this into the episode. Many fans claim to have seen it air in the story on PBS, but until we find a copy that proves this, it seems to be a false memory caused by 30 Years. If we do find an off-air VHS with the scene intact one day, it would be valid regardless of this debate. For all I know, there is proof of this out there... But for the sake of this debate, please allow me to use this as an example. :)

Regardless, it is a fact that this scene has been referenced in future fiction as if it really took place.

The easiest to reference is Doctor Who: The Novel of the Film, a Doctor Who novel of the Film.

[The Master] swung round to Chang Lee, his dark glasses gone, bearing down on the Chinese boy with green serpentine eyes. 'Did you know, the Doctor once boasted of being "more than just a Time Lord"?'

Change Lee was bewildered now - this was getting slightly out of his league. 'Oh, yeah, right. What?'

'He really should have said "less than a Time Lord"! He's half-human - a hybrid. [The Master then calls the Doctor a racial slur meant for people who are mixed-race].'PROSE: Doctor Who: The Novel of the Film

So as you can see here, the Remembrance deleted scene is here used to justify the "Doctor is half-human" retcon. Typically, however, fans like to use this as evidence of The Other/Timeless Child stuff, and I imagine this quote has been referenced in more stories than this.

Regardless, this is a key example of what would typically be enough for Rule 4 By Proxy. If this scene hadn't been cut from Remembrance, and for some reason the Rule 4ness of this story was put into doubt, we could use this quote to say "Hey, that TV story is valid."

Instead, the question is does this validate the deleted scene?

I personally think that there is an argument to made that saying "The Master said the Doctor once said this thing" is a lot more clunky than just saying "The Doctor once said this, (HOMEVID: title) which the Master lated referenced. (PROSE: title)" Since articles are already likely to use situations like this to reference the deleted content, it's fair for us to simply allow the citing of moments like this.

So how would we go about covering something like this, regardless of if it's valid or not?

Some would likely prefer that we keep all deleted scenes on the story pages themselves. However, I disagree. Since we're only covering deleted scenes which were officially released (thus passing Rule 2) and were referenced in future releases (thus passing Rule 4) it would not be good enough to have all deleted scenes from a story grouped together. There would just be no proper way to indicate which deleted scenes we've agreed to cover, which ones have official releases, and even which ones were filmed and not just scripted.

Instead, I think we need a story page for every deleted scene we cover. In this instance, I have no idea for a title to this sequence, as the DVD copy I've found kind of groups all the scenes together. But I imagine some title has been given at some point, even if just in an article, just enough to give a page name. If not, we can simply go with something awful, like Deleted scene 12 (Remembrance of the Daleks home video).

The point is that we would then validate the scene based on its continuity to the 1996 novel of the TV movie, and likely other references as well.

Journey's End, scene 135

Next, let's discuss a case study where we actually have some authorial intent to cite!

In Series 4's finale, Journey's End, the so-called Meta-Crisis Doctor is left on Pete's World to live his life with Rose Tyler. Originally, the sequence was going to show the Tenth Doctor giving the M-C Doctor a piece of TARDIS coral, with the intention of him growing a second TARDIS for Rose and him to explore the universe with. This was actually filmed! In the recorded scene, the Meta-Crisis Doctor complains that growing a TARDIS takes thousands of years. But Donna explains:

Donna Noble: If you shattify the plasmic shell and modify the dimensions stabiliser to [something something something] 6.3... youuuu accelerate the growth power by 59!

Which means that growing a TARDIS should only take 30 or 40 years. This moment doesn't really make sense, it's a little fan-fictiony in my opinion, and it was ultimately deleted only because it threw the pacing of the episode off. However, it was the opinion of writer Russell T Davies that the scene always had a chance of "being set inside the Doctor Who universe" and that it could be revisited later.

We argued over this, and part of me still wishes it was in. But Julie was right though it was just getting in the way of so many complicated endings and so many complicated emotions. It did just throw you in the middle when you suddenly start talking about a new TARDIS... So I like to image this still happened though. So one day we'll come back and put this one back in! Okay...Russell T Davies, discussing "Episode 13 Scene 135".

Since this all came out, at least one Big Finish audio, AUDIO: The Siege of Big Ben, has directly shown the Meta-Crisis Doctor actively growing a TARDIS. To quote our own Wiki page on the story:

Inside, Jackie saw the contents of the Doctor's lab. Three of the walls had shelves on them, all containing some combination of books, test tubes, and "loads of science stuff." The fourth wall had a plethora of computer and television monitors on it. In the middle of the room was the TARDIS coral that the original Doctor had given to the Meta-Crisis Doctor and Rose on Bad Wolf Bay.

Taken off guard by the sight of the growing TARDIS, Jackie scolded the Doctor again. Concerned that the Doctor was planning on leaving Rose behind and breaking her heart again, she told him that she would not allow it on her watch. She even told him that he was not to take Rose with him as she has a family here so if he took Rose, he would have to take her entire family. Though she also added that "Tony has sports day tomorrow so we're going nowhere." The Doctor just looked away from Jackie and mumbled that the TARDIS wasn't growing as fast as he'd thought it would, so it didn't matter anyways.The plot to AUDIO: The Siege of Big Ben, according to our wiki.

I would be willing to bet that there are more stories that reference this, but I'm not sure. I'll admit that the Meta-Crisis Doctor is perhaps the topic that I have the least interest in across the entire DW franchise.

But the general point is that this alone is enough to argue that Rule 4 By Proxy and some sort of twisted authorial intent apply to this scene. Luckily for us, the DVD bonus features give us a (slightly) acceptable page name: Episode 13 Scene 135. So we could go with Scene 135 (home vid) or Episode 13 Scene 135 (home vid) or Scene 135 (Series 4 home vid) or Scene 135 (Journey's End home vid). My money is one one of the first two.

I think this is my strongest example. Allowing users to cite this scene when it's relevant is much more helpful and in-line with authorial intent than asking users to patch together context of this scene from tertiary reference without the scene itself.

P.S.

Okay, so here's a controversial one. Not because people will disagree with me here, but because I am so deeply connected to the history of this topic.

P.S. was an "animated" webcast which saw a conclusion to the story of Brian Williams and arguably the entire Pond clan. In the story, Brian learns of the fate of Amy and Rory, and that he will never see them again. The only silver living is that he meets his grandson, Anthony Williams, who is older than he is.

Because the webcast is depicted as a rotating series of drawings which clearly originated as storyboards, there was speculation that it was a "deleted scene," and that this was originally the ending to TV: The Angels Take Manhattan. However, writer Chris Chibnall revealed that the scene was actually intended as a DVD live-action bonus feature. Mark Williams was not available for filming, so the dialogue was recorded and it was turned into a webcast. Ultimately, in all regards other than the quality of the art, it somewhat resembles the early DW webcasts, such as WC: Shada.

Now, we previously had a heated debate about over 11 years ago at Forum:P.S. You'll notice I was one of the most vocal defenders, so again I am not without bias here. Ultimately, User:CzechOut ruled against the story. Now, when you start reading the really really old forums, a surprising thing you'll discover is that "closing statements" are kind of a more modern invention... So instead of there being a clear paragraph wrapping up the entire topic and clarifying site policy, we all just started debating about Shada and the Restoration Team and Canon and all this other stuff until it was shut down randomly one day.

So instead, I believe this passage from earlier was the intended, spiritual closing statement.

Look at it from the other side. If we allow P.S., then we have no creditable rule preventing the admission of deleted scenes that are on a high percentage of DVD releases in the classic and modern series. Not only that, but we would have no real protection against the ramblings of RTD in The Writer's Tale (or even his column in DWM) about scenes he was considering. We'd have to say that the Eighth Doctor's regeneration we saw in the extra features of Endgame (graphic novel) was in fact the "real" regeneration of Eight to Nine. We'd also have to conclude that the actual title of The Claws of Axos was The Vampire from Space, since there's an officially released title card on the DVD. Of even greater difficulty, we'd have to somehow have to grant the TV version of Shada some kind of legitimacy, even though major parts of it — really, most of the narrative's concluding scenes) — were never filmed at all.

It would be a major sea change in the policy we currently have to allow storyboards to substitute for story. As our policies sit now, it is an absolutely simple call — which doesn't even require discussion — to say that P.S. doesn't count. I changed the coverage we gave to P.S. in absolutely the same way that I would change the spelling of color to colour.

If you want P.S. to count, then you will have to change the underlying policy by starting a thread arguing for the inclusion of all deleted scenes. We absolutely cannot have a situation where this single failed project gets to be counted but others aren't..User:CzechOut, what was probably the closing statement, Forum:P.S..

Anyways, so now that we've changed the underlying policy of the website, and we've found a way to validate some deleted scenes without blindly validating all of them, let's re-tackle P.S..

So the biggest piece of evidence we have as of this moment is that Anthony Williams, introduced in P.S. and in no other real sources, has been codified as existing inside of the Doctor Who universe past this. Most remarkably, in Rory's Story, Amy is stated to be pregnant and Rory begins recording messages for "Baby Anthony." This means that we essentially have a valid prequel to P.S. currently on the website.

However, I do have to say for the record that I disagree with Czech's statement above as much today as I did was I was 14. The P.S. webcast was clearly put together to be presented as a "finished" animated version of the story. Yes, it uses crude sketches as animation, but almost certainly because of budgetary reasons. As narration was commissioned from Arthur Darvill, this story was produced. Recording new narration just for this webcast is enough to call this a completed production in my opinion.

Saying that WC: P.S. is a deleted scene of HOMEVID: P.S. is like saying AUDIO: The Song of Megaptera is a deleted scene of TV: The Song of the Space Whale. It makes no sense.

But, if we're going to put that aside, and just accept the precedent that P.S. is a deleted scene...

Then in this case, Rule 4 By Proxy would clearly validate it under this theory. The continued presence of Anthony Williams in Who fiction confirms what should have been obvious in 2012: the P.S. webcast animation was created to clarify that these events did happen inside of the Doctor Who universe.

But I do understand if there's hesitation. As Czech said, if we cover P.S., then one day we might cover the TV version of Shada too.

"The Pilot Episode"?

Okay, now THIS will be the most controversial thing in this forum post, without a doubt. But, it's been referenced in the T:TF submissions by two different users, so I thought I would highlight it here.

The Pilot Episode is the official name given by BBC to the first episode of Doctor Who ever produced. The real title is An Unearthly Child, as it really is the first "take" of the actual episode 1: An Unearthly Child, which itself was part 1 of 100,000 BC.

Basically, everyone working on the show filmed a version of the script... and Sydney Newman hated it. So he ordered details be changed, technical failings be fixed, and additionally William Hartnell was able to adjust his performance.

Now, we judge Rule 4 by the authorial intent at the time of release. And "The Pilot Episode" was first released in 1991, on the VHS The Hartnell Years. By this point, it was clearly not the intent of anyone that this story took place in the Doctor Who Universe understood to exist in the 1990s.

If you're wondering why validating it would so controversial, here's the most infamous quote that didn't end up in the second version of AUC:

Susan: I'm not lying! I loved your school. I loved England in the 20th century. The last five months have been the happiest of my life.

Barbara: But you are one of us. You look like us, you sound like us.

Susan: I was born in the 49th century.

Ian: What? Now, look, Susan. I've had enough of this. Come on, let's get out of here.

Obviously it was decided this was too specific, and in the final episode the dialogue is:

Susan: It's not! Look, I love your school. I loved England in the 20th century. The last five months have been the happiest of my life.

Barbara: But you are one of us. You look like us, you sound like us.

Susan: I was born in another time, another world.

Ian: Now look here, Susan, you. Oh, come on, Barbara, let's get out of here.

Which is a much better Who origin if you're the kind of person who likes to watch the first episode and go "Gallifrey! Gallifrey! She's talking about Gallifrey! That's a Gallifrey reference right there!"

So yeah, the general thought has been that the "Pilot Episode" is simply one big deleted scene, and not a stand-alone episode by itself. This is so true that the admins have historically declined to give it a DAB (as arguably the title should read "The Pilot Episode" (home vid)) as it simply hasn't been viewed as a "story" at all.

However, there's recently been talk of validating it despite this. And this all comes down to Rule 4 By Proxy and, more specifically, the BBC novel PROSE: Unnatural History. This novel has a member of the Faction Paradox directly speculate that, um, actually... "The Pilot Episode" is canon, it's just a defunct timeline.

(Boy): Maybe you weren't always a Time Lord. But now you've always been a Time Lord.

(Boy): Maybe you originally came from some planet in the forty-ninth century. Fleeing from the Enemy who'd overrun your home.

(Eighth Doctor): I said I'm not listening! Laa laa laa laa laa-

(Boy): -and you've just been written and rewritten and overwritten, ever since.

It should be noted that this directly follows several other examples the Boy already knows of "alterations" made to the Doctor's past, as he also alludes to the Loom origin being overwritten by the Ulysses stuff.

Now, I do want to say that this is not really a topic I care deeply about. And if the consensus is that we don't count this as R4BP, I don't think this should overrule everything I've pitched above. BUT... While this reference is very vague, I do think the authorial intent is clear. Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman are clearly implying that "The Pilot Episode" is a long-defunct timeline, as tracked or caused by the Faction Paradox.

Now, the big question at this stage is coverage. I think if we validate The Pilot Episode, this would be a case where it's best to split character pages off. This might just be me, but having Susan Foreman (The Pilot Episode) with Susan Foreman's page simply referencing it as a potentially erased timeline sounds a lot less headache inducing than the two versions of AUC arguing with each other for several paragraphs. In this case, we would also have The Doctor (The Pilot Episode), which would probably redirect from First Doctor (The Pilot Episode). Additionally, as I pitched above, it would be best to have The Pilot Episode moved to The Pilot Episode (home vid), regardless of if we make it valid or not.

I also strongly believe that we should discuss TPE not as "the retroactive first Doctor Who story," but as an oddity released in 1991. So pages like Susan Foreman and indeed the Doctor should retain AUC as the "first appearance" listing.

Novelisations

Now, this is less an example and more a small hiccup in the plan which is important enough to split into its own mini-debate.

Looking into this, I haven't been able to find a specific example of this happening. BUT it probably almost certainly has happened.

Until I find evidence of a specific case, here's the full theoretical...

1. A scene is written.
2. The scene is filmed.
3. It is deleted from the final edit for pacing or for not working.
4. The scene is retained by the BBC
5. The scene is never edited into any special edition of any kind
6. The scene is featured in the novelisation of the story
7. The scene is commercially released via a DVD bonus feature

In the above situation, should this count as Rule 4 by proxy? Should a novelisation be able to validate a deleted scene?

Again, I tried to find an example of this, but it's not easy. Few episodes before Shada have enough surviving raw footage to include on DVDs. Most deleted scenes heavy episodes from the '80s have extended special editions, which already put the scenes back in. 1996's The Novel of the Film does include several deleted scenes, but despite being in the work print of the TV movie, these have never been released commercially and have only been leaked. So I dunno.

But generally, I think this is a separate question than the rest of this thread. Originally, I was quite worried bout this as I feared it could be destructive to the website. But as I haven't been able to find a single example of this, it's probably not something to get bent out-of-shape about.

Conclusion

So that's my proposal. We now have five questions I would like to have your thoughts on:

Should Rule 4 by proxy apply to deleted scenes?

Should Rule 4 by proxy apply to "The Pilot Episode" itself?

Should Rule 4 by proxy apply when the source of validation is a novelization?

Should P.S. be valid, because of or regardless of Rule 4 By Proxy?

And finally, is there any other part of the OP you want to comment on?

Also, if you have any examples that might qualify under this potential rule, please bring them up in the debate. I didn't pick the four best examples for this argument, I picked the literal only four examples that I could come up with. So if you believe this is a "slippery slope," I'd love to hear the most outrageous possible things you're assuming we could validate with this idea (keeping in mind that we still expect these scenes to pass the first three rules). Personally, again, this OP represents every example I could think of.

The only exception is actually that User:Pluto2 thinks that the Spider Dalek bonus feature should qualify for this, as this Spider-Dalek has been retconned as being from an alternate universe by two separate stories. I'm a little iffy, because this is test footage and not a deleted scene per se. It would ultimately be harmless, but it is the one extra example I left out of the OP.

A final point is that it might be a good idea for us to use this forum's outline for deleted scene coverage to also allow these scenes to be discussed in the non-valid subspace, but at the moment this is just a concept and nothing more concrete.

Thank you for reading. OS25🤙☎️ 23:44, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

T:VS as it currently stands says that deleted scenes violate R3 as well. This is a more modern invention - the original write up of T:VS didn't have the "exceptions" as violating any of the 4 rules, they were seen as independently flawed, regardless of whether they fell into the 4 rules or not. But are you saying that this current rewrite is wrong? Indeed, this is part of the policy Czech says you would have to amend in what you quote from Forum:P.S.

We'd also have to conclude that the actual title of The Claws of Axos was The Vampire from Space, since there's an officially released title card on the DVD. Of even greater difficulty, we'd have to somehow have to grant the TV version of Shada some kind of legitimacy, even though major parts of it — really, most of the narrative's concluding scenes) — were never filmed at all. [...]

It would be a major sea change in the policy we currently have to allow storyboards to substitute for story.

Perhaps I'm misreading this part of the thread, but it seems to me that Czech is claiming that there are Rule 3 concerns in validating deleted scenes, not just Rule 4 concerns. (Obviously while this language was in its infancy.) So R4bp wouldn't move the needle one bit. Najawin ☎ 00:00, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

I support validating the deleted scenes mentioned in this OP, and codifying this addition to R4BP. In response to Najawin, the proposal is not blanket validity for all deleted scenes, just a few specific ones. Pluto2☎ 00:14, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

But if deleted scene -> invalid is due to R4 and R3, and you try to say "well, these scenes now pass R4 because of R4bp", they're still invalid because of R3. The fact it's only some rather than all is completely irrelevant to this issue, you'd need to maintain that deleted scenes in general don't have R3 concerns. (Since, obviously, we're discussing deleted scenes we can view, not ones that are left on the cutting room floor and never come to the attention of this wiki.)

Now, look, maybe we want to reject the R3 concerns here! But I think they were part of the reasoning presented in Forum:P.S., and I think Czech is right that showing people a glimpse behind the camera, into the storyboards, isn't necessarily the same as "officially releasing a scene". Maybe we want to say it is! But there's some daylight here. And it's reasonable to discuss, and it's simply not addressed in the OP, when it's part of the reason, it seems, deleted scenes are invalid. Najawin ☎ 00:26, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

I think that we should change T:VS to make deleted scenes only partially break rule 3 (rectifiable by an explicit, rather than presumed, r4 pass), and to write in a 'special case" that r4bp can make the deleted scene in question valid. However, I do think that a thread should be needed for every deleted scene validation.

Additionally, I fully support the validation of the Journey's End deleted scene and that ha about the strongest authorial intent ever. I also support the Remembrance of the Daleks and P.S validations, and from the information provided here (which of course may not be fully accurate) agree with OS25 that P.S isn't even a deleted scene, instead it's an adaptation of a "really long deleted scene", a la Shada / Shada / Shada.

However, I do not support validating The Pilot Episode, because I believe the Unnatural History reference isn't intended to unambiguously imply that the Original palmpset universe is The Pilot Episode, but perhaps anything, as the "42nd century" was an idea that wasn't fully contradicted until much later. Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 05:30, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

P.S. is an "adaptation" insofar as the webcast is a bunch of storyboards cut together with music, and then Arthur Darvill speaks when it's the letter from him. (Okay, I'm being a bit reductive, there's a slight amount of animation put into like one or two of the shots, and there's some typography. But this is as close as you can get to Czech's criticism of substituting storyboard for story.) Like, all of this work was already for the scene, there's no adaptation, there's absolutely no similarities to the three Shada's. (I guess the only thing you can argue over is the typography, the splicing together of storyboards, and the minor, minor animation that exists in one or two scenes, but if that's an "adaptation", then any deleted scene compiled for public consumption is an adaptation and the term is meaningless, since you have to do some amount of editing to make them viewable.)

(Let me note that I quite like P.S., but I think there's some issues here. It's definitely not an "adaptation" of the deleted scene in any way like we normally use the term. I think P.S., The Pilot Episode, and Journey's End/Remembrance are all different sorts of things from each other and each have interesting problems with their own sorts of R3 concerns. Fully willing to be talked around to supporting some or all of these! But I think there's some stuff we need to think about here.)

On a more general note, Etty, what do you mean when you say "partially break R3" and the next comment about R4? I don't see how any of the other rules would impact their status on R3 - if we knew that someone absolutely, definitively intended their work to be in the DWU but it didn't pass R2, we still wouldn't consider it valid. Obviously the inverse is true as well. Authorial intent only applies to R4. Najawin ☎ 06:06, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

I don't understand how any of these fail Rule 3 though. They all literally had an official release. And Rule 3 is specifically meant to prevent spoilers from leaks or trailers, not deleted scenes, anyway. This feels like a bizarre misreading of Rule 3 that some admins mandated that was never even written into Rule 3 afterwards! Pluto2☎ 06:58, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

Full on support of this proposal. These should be valid. However, I’m not as keen on those names for individual scenery. I’d rather we created "/Deleted Scenes" subpages for those and thus cover them there. Danniesen ☎ 07:15, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

So technically in the early days of T:VS the list of exceptions was just that, exceptions. They're things that people had specifically "voted off the island" through community discussions, and they didn't violate any of the 4 little rules, people just didn't want to cover them. While Czech is gesturing towards R3 concerns, they're not explicit ones, and they're more subtle than just "the thing can't be seen". There's been a recent attempt to try and justify all of these exceptions through the 4 rules, which just isn't historically appropriate, which explains why you get R3 and R4 being invoked, when neither of them were exactly the reason why, and it wasn't either of those, per se. At least not as we currently use them.

Let me be very explicit as to my opinion here. I do not believe that deleted scenes violate either R3 or R4, I believe this is a modern invention to justify why they were deemed invalid - I've read the threads in question, I see gesturing towards R4 and R3, but no explicit statements. I do believe there are concerns for both R3 and R4; however, and if we're discussing R4bp as being the reason why we should validate certain deleted scenes, we must also address the R3 concerns. Najawin ☎ 07:24, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

@Najawin - I was going a bit far to call P.S. an adaptation, your right. And I think a better solution that whatever I was going for with "partial R3 breaker" is what Pluto said - us changing R3 so that it no longer has the deleted scenes part, and making most deleted scenes fail by R4 (as they were published as "this is what *could have* happened, but didn't). Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 10:11, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

But this isn't part of R3. It was added to T:VS in late 2020 by Scrooge as an explanation for why Deleted Scenes aren't valid. At the risk of perhaps being accused of falling afoul of T:POINT, see his recent comments at Tardis:Temporary forums/Slot 4: The Daft Dimension and Doctor Who? as parallel universes:

If there is a part of T:VS which does not in fact logically flow from the 4LR by at least some intelligible argument, that part of T:VS stands in error, and should be corrected.

This is a modern interpretation of T:VS, and is one that is only tenable after the 2020 rewrite. Prior to that absolutely no effort was taken to explain the exceptions in terms of the 4 little rules. Why would there be? They were exceptions. Indeed, this can be seen in wording still present in T:VS to this day:

Our simple little rule [sic] works to help you understand what works of fiction "count" on this wiki well over 90% of the time. The rest of this document is concerned with the other 10% — the marginal cases that are a little less clear.

Let me be clear that I actually quite like this policy change qua policy. The old way caused a lot of headaches when the old forums were up, and I found it very annoying. But, you know, procedural quibbles, as always. More importantly for the context of this thread is that it causes confusion as to why certain things have been ruled invalid or not covered, since those decisions were made in a time period in which this standard wasn't being applied. (I went on to write another two or three paragraphs about how we should do historical analysis of things on this wiki, but deleted it because it was getting super far off topic and we should focus on the issue at hand.) Najawin ☎ 18:35, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

I my self come down hard on validating two of these soft on one and not at all on the last. this is because is do not think three of them truly are deleted anymore.

I believe that the Pilot should be validated as it has been officially released several time and never on those releases has it been called a deleted scene or a deleted story (as far as I am aware) in is reference both in Unnatural History and the Infinity Doctors, they imply that it is not the original but that the Doctor Who memos are (and the memo can not be validated as it is out of universe) we thus can avoid having to say that it is the original universe. They events of the Pilot to me seem like just another “according to one account” I much the same way as we cover novelisations (not viewing it as the original retroactive first episode, but as a latter 1991 home vid)

I would also like to argue hard in favour of P.S. is it called a deleted scene? It may not be an adaption but to mean it falls into a similar category a farewell Sarah Jane Smith in that is is mostly an audio story with some movement, in the case of Farewell it is a mix of live action and narration whilst in P.S. it is animated with narration. It could also be compared to the animated stories that also got audio versions both tell the same story using mostly the same words yet we cover both P.s. is an equivalent in which one of them was never made and so only one of the two parts was released.

the next one whilst I would like to be valid stands on flimsy grounds I think is should be covered as a 30 years in the TARDIS Minisode not as a deleted scene as unless someone’s can say that in 30 years it was referred to as a deleted scene I think it should be covered as a Minisode in much the same way as the other 30 years minisodes are covered.

for the Journeys end scene I am apathetic towards however I would like to argue against it’s validity. It is a deleted scene it has never been released as a deleted scene it is alway in the deleted scene sections of the DVD yes authorial intent wants it to have happened yes other stories do imply it happened however until it is released separately not as a deleted scene but as a webcast (which dose not include the words deleted scene, unless it says formally deleted scene) I am against it.Anastasia Cousins ☎ 21:02, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

P.S. was explicitly stated to be a DVD extra that wasn't filmed, yes. What we see comes from the storyboards and the narration from Darvill that would have been used for the final project anyhow. There is a minor amount of animation and typography added. It is not similar to Farewell, Sarah Jane, as that was always intended to be in that form and commissioned new production elements to create it. Both the narration in P.S. and the storyboards were production elements that would have been used had the scene actually been made. Nor is it similar to the audio dramas you mention as it only has narration from Darvill, not from other people, who do have speaking roles in the script. Najawin ☎ 21:25, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

I support validating the Pilot. From what I can tell, it is fairly straight forward R4bp. Time God Eon ☎ 22:38, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

To respond to Najawin's posts above, I actually don't think that T:VS does say that deleted scenes fail rule 3. I think it says they "arguably" might fail rule 3. There is no fine text or clarification, and it is my belief that in this case this statement is being universally made about deleted scenes which exist but were never released. For instance, the many deleted and alternate scenes from the 1996 TV movie (i.e. the Master meeting the security guards). I believe I effectively represented Rule 3 in my opening post numerous times by stating quite directly that these products do need to have been officially released, which is pretty much all that Rule 3 actually states.

I also think I'm not deeply moved by Czech's argument that the inherent slippery slope of validating some "deleted scenes" is that eventually we'll validate the Tom Baker broadcast of Shada because... We already do that? And furthermore, if Shada hadn't been re-done in 2017 and we weren't all so burnt out on the debate, I suspect we'd have already validated the 1992 Shada by now.

I do respect Najawin's dedication to being thorough so that we're accurately covering every potential argument here, but I do not think the "rule 3" argument holds any ground and I also don't really think Rule 3 was actively cited in the forum I linked.

As per PS... You have indeed shown that PS was intended to be a bonus feature. But what you, and no one else, has ever shown is that releasing this segment online with very little alterations was anything but an attempt to get this out there so it would count. In other words, I think the webcast was released so this scene would exist and would thus pass Rule 3. If you think it was released as a "what if?" or something that wasn't meant to count, I'd love actual evidence to support this.

Look at it like this. When the BBC releases a reconstruction of a lost Troughton story, is that a valid source? Yes. So why is this reconstruction, clearly released so the story would still be out there, considered a lesser beast? I think there's no sound logic to it.

I feel the same way about the upcoming Big Finish releases of the "early drafts" of Genesis of Evil and The Ark. These stories do not fail rule 3 because they are about to be released! Now, perhaps they might fail Rule 4 or Rule 1 depending on how Big Finish presents them, that's another topic. But them not airing on TV should not disclude them from valid space coverage. If there's some other angle to this I'm not seeing, please advise.

Also, sorry to the late reply to this one. I honestly considered this to be a low-importance OP and I'm shocked we have got to it this soon. OS25🤙☎️ 23:24, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

No, no, of course. Look, I get what you're driving at with the R3 issue here, but I think there's a real concern. (Again, I want to note, I do not believe that R3 itself is a reason for invalidating these things, nor was it the reason at the time. I think it's R3-adjacent, which I think is what Scrooge is getting at with his quote in the other thread. It's not an explicit violation of one of the 4 rules, but it's close enough that we really should be thinking carefully about it.)

Consider this. We have scripts that were released for a lot of different episodes of the BBC Wales show, yes? Many of these scripts are different than the final production. (For instance, in the Hell Bent script, it's stated that 12 remembers Clara as he sees the painting on his TARDIS at the end.) These are "Official Releases" if you want to call them that, they're all available on the BBC's website. What would happen if one of them mentioned something that didn't make it into the final production, if it was cut, and then a later story then used that same concept? Would we have to validate this previous draft of the script? Would we have to make sure that everything in this script is now covered on the wiki as an alternative account to what actually showed on TV? After all, it meets R1, R2, (apparently) R3, and now R4, through R4bp.

What if I told you this already happened? Twice? With two different iterations of the same story? Both the first draft and the shooting script of The Pilot mention Carnathon, which was later named in a web short story. Now, maybe this is an overly strong reading of what R4bp would require from us, but I think we might be forced to concede at least the shooting script would be valid if this is what "officially released" means. This... seems bizarre to me. (And even if you think the authorial intent to bring these "into continuity" isn't demonstrated by a mentioning of Carnathon, and this is merely using a name, well, first, let me say that this strategy hasn't proven very effective for me in previous threads, but you're welcome to try it. But even were this true, the problem still remains in principle, and it seems radically counterintuitive that we would validate a script that was released to the public as an attempt to let people get a glimpse behind the curtain - a script that the people at the time decidedly did not release in their professional capacity as the ones making the show - simply because a later author decided he wanted to pay homage to it.) Does this give anyone else pause? If it's just me it's just me. But I can't imagine that this is an intuitive interpretation of our rules.

Why would I think that P.S. was intended to be a "What If"? I absolutely don't think that. I think that it was a combination of the material they had on hand for a scene they were working on, made into a form that was watchable for normal audiences, that they then released for the enjoyment of the fans. Similar to every deleted scene ever. If Darvill had come back to record lines after they knew about the availability issue, that would change things, but there's no evidence of this. If the drawings were done after they found out that would change things, but there's no evidence of this. It's literally a half finished product stitched together for fans' enjoyment. I like it! But that doesn't mean that there aren't massive R3ish concerns. It's not even slightly similar to anything that anyone else has compared it to in this thread - it's not a reconstruction, it's a preconstruction. You can't reconstruct something that never existed. Najawin ☎ 00:27, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

I think it has to do with intent. The planet Carnathon having its name used was meant to merely solidify a detail from the script. The person who wrote that short story would never say that they intended that every single detail in the shooting script be "canon" because of this easter egg.

Whereas Anthony Williams being name dropped in Summer Falls, Rory's Stag and even The Lonely Assassins is clearly a series of reference to the viral webcast. I think this was the writers saying "The events of this story really happened." And the PS short does exist in some presentable form, it's not just a script PDF online. The two cases just don't feel comparable. OS25🤙☎️ 02:28, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

As stated, you are more than welcome to shout "Easter egg" over and over and hope it gets you further than it's gotten me. I wish you luck, I truly, genuinely do. But it just fundamentally doesn't solve the problem that the change to our rules that you're proposing would seem to force us to do this if, in the future, someone truly did intend to reference a script to "bring it into continuity". A script is a presentable form insofar as P.S. is. Would this extend further to script extracts? Because Davies mentions one in The Writer's Tale that almost has Donna reference a particularly racist book title. Meets R1, R2, (maybe) R3, and it could meet R4 if someone wants to R4bp it.

I think there's a difference between something that is written and released in a literary universe that resembles the DWU we normally talk about but isn't intended by its creators to be, and something that might have once been intended for the actual factual DWU but was then purposefully erased from the DWU. Allowing people to later get a look behind the curtain, so to speak, see how the sausage is made, shouldn't change that this decision was made, even if later people want to reference it. (Now, I note that this particular reasoning doesn't apply to P.S., but it does apply to every other case you've discussed here.) And we could go back and amend R4bp again, which I think was a mistake and we're going to have to fix eventually. But the other option is just to say that these aren't "real" releases for the content, the content will never "really" be released, because it was purposefully deleted. Najawin ☎ 03:06, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Here's my opinion on all of this (before I go back to my real world obligations). In my mind, the trouble with deleted scenes as far as our four little rules are concerned lies in Rule 4. Under most circumstances, a deleted scene that has seen an official release already satisfies Rules 1 and 3. For Rule 1, even if they are short or crude in nature, I would say a deleted scene could be described as a complete work of fiction for our purposes. If a scene is released without VFX, I would be more concerned about the Rule 1 of it all. Looking specifically to the Journey's End deleted scene, it is a completely filmed scene --a complete work of fiction --despite not having music or polished sound mixing. It's not just a factoid in isolation, it is an exchange of dialogue. It was released through official avenues (coming out on the DVD) and thus satisfies Rule 3. As for Rule 4, I want to be clear that RTD's musings do not and should not on their own satisfy Rule 4. I believe that it's The Siege of Big Ben that brings it in through R4BP. To note one of the potential slippery-slopes that this standard could lead to, a novelization including a deleted scene should not R4BP a deleted scene into validity --for the purposes of Wikification, those scenes could simply be cited INSTEAD of the deleted scene, but moreover I think that it would be in ignorance of the nature of the novelization process. I believe it takes a firm intention to bring something in through R4BP. Turning to the Rule 1 question for P.S., which I assume is the only contention, I actually think that one's easier. It's not like we were simply given the storyboards out in a Tweet --it's an animated video with specially commissioned voiceover from Arthur Darvill. The storyboards were edited together, vaguely animated, and included animated dialogue, audio foley, and voiceover to make a complete and discreet work of fiction. It is a complete work of fiction, albeit one in the medium it was not intended to be released in. Rule 3 is similarly easy, it was released officially. I actually do wonder if you even need R4BP to validate this, but I think it is pretty evident that we've got the stories necessary to bring it in through R4BP. The Pilot Episode passes Rules 1-3, but it fails Rule 4. A Rule 4 by Proxy argument could be used to bring it in, but I am not convinced that an off-handed reference to a previous take on the Doctor's backstory constitutes bringing the entirety of the Pilot Episode into the DWU. Our official position on the matter should be that Deleted Scenes are invalid due to a failure of passing Rule 4. Even when they were released as deleted scenes, they are (typically) presented as not intended to be legitimate contributions to the DWU. They may be validated through Rule 4 By Proxy, but a novelization of the original work in question including the deleted scene would not be sufficient to do so. NoNotTheMemes ☎ 18:24, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Real quick, even if we don't validate The Pilot Episode, can we all agree to give it the (home video) DAB? I think it's actively needed now that we also have The Pilot (TV story). OS25🤙☎️ 18:58, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I definitely agree with giving it a dab. I should note that I feel like The Pilot Episode should be valid but with the treatment that OS25 proposed - it should be covered as a home video release from the 1990s, and thus not the "first appearance" of any character. Pluto2☎ 19:24, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

The release on home video from the 1990s would not and should not be enough to validate the Pilot Episode, as it would still (at minimum) fail Rule 4. It was released as a deleted scene, with Verity Lambert even having a running commentary on why parts of the pilot episode were changed for An Unearthly Child. It was not released as a meaningful contribution to the DWU, but as a matter of production history --it is a deleted scene (or rather, several deleted scenes). It's a production oddity. A more poorly produced version of the episode that was actually released. It's not even a "deleted scene" that was cut for timing purposes, but one that was deleted because it was not of the written or production quality necessary to justify its release. And that is a shadow that hangs over literally every release that it comes out on. Verity Lambert isn't sitting there in the commentary saying "We wanted to get that scene of William Russell knocking over a prop in there, but it just fussed with the pacing so we got rid of it." She's sitting there saying why they changed things. It amounts to trying to validate the three alternative takes of David Tennant saying "I don't want to go." I also feel I should bring up my concern that validating this would lead to rather obtuse coverage regarding the First Doctor's first episode. Editors shouldn't need to cite this alongside An Unearthly Child as equally valid, but validating it would encourage editors to do so --which would ultimately lead to over-coverage. Bringing The Pilot Episode in under Rule 4 By Proxy as a palimpsest universe more merit, but I maintain that trying to slot this in under Rule 4 on its own would be irresponsible. And to address OS25's question, yes we should give it the (home video) DAB. NoNotTheMemes ☎ 21:05, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

That...is the same position that I have, though? And that OS25 proposes? That under R4BP we cover The Pilot Episode as a depiction of the original palimpsest universe, and create separate The Doctor (The Pilot Episode), Susan Foreman (The Pilot Episode) pages, etc. Pluto2☎ 21:31, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

The Pilot Episode was aired on Bbc2 in 1991. The home video dab would be silly imo the 81.108.82.15^{talk to me}

Yes, but its primary and first release was on home media. OS25🤙☎️ 01:50, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

As the so called ancient admin of the original discussion, I still disagree with most of what OS25 has proposed.

The deleted scenes proposal, I think fail Rule 1, 3 and mis-uses Rule 4 by proxy.

The deleted scenes on their own fail as a work of fiction, as in isolation they're not a contained work of fiction. They only work as part of the story they're the deleted scene of. And without being included in a special edition or other release like that aren't a contained story. So they fail Rule 1 and Rule 3. Yes they have been officially released, but they aren't in a fictional story – and sometimes they're missing sound mixing, picture grading and other elements.

With The Pilot Episode, as our own page points out there's several versions of this story with different versions having been packaged up over the years for different releases.

I think Rule 4 by proxy has the potential to be mis-used in this sort of discussion, as it should have a higher bar for brining a story in than references like those cited. There needs to be clear authorial intent and indication, not just references / nods to fans. --Tangerineduel / talk 06:03, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

I've changed my opinion quite a lot now. Some deleted scenes arguably fail rule 1, as they might not be complete works of fiction, but I don't feel adept at defining the barriers there, and also think it's probably a case-by-case basis. I agree with the general idea in this thread that deleted scenes should not be considered to fail rule 3, as by us seeing them they have been released. I think that all deleted scenes should fail rule 4 by default (as they were discarded), but that authorial intend and maybe proxy can countermand this. The "Tardis coral" scene in Journey's End is the prime, and quite probably only, example of a deleted scene outright passing rule 4, as RTD said he still considers it to "count" (he may even have used the word "canon", I'm not sure) and that it was only the length of the scene that cut it. So if deleted scenes are ruled by the closing post as passing rule 1, then I believe this scene should pass as valid. However, the Remembrance of the Daleks scene I am less comfortable about - and The Pilot Episode I am strongly against - as it was only referenced. I say this as an avid supporter of r4bp, i do not think that deleted scenes should be validable by r4bp. However, if an admin decides that making exceptions for r4bp isn't good, I can accept the validity of Remembrance of the Daleks, but I do not think that Unnatural History was trying to bring The Pilot Episode into continuity.

Finally, I do think that P.S. should be valid, however I do not think that this is the thread for it, as I do not think it is a deleted scene. However I have not watched it, so my opinion there is of low worth. Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 07:36, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

I am with Ettolrhc on most of their point. I do think some of these should be valid but not under rule four by Proxy. I think some of these deserve a forum to debate it they are deleted scenes of not and whilst I would like the pilot to be valid it would be very hard to do as I don’t know which versions we would cover or not. But the ones that I think should be valid I would argue are not deleted scenes and this is thus not the place to debate it. Anastasia Cousins ☎ 16:30, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

So. This is an interesting one. My opinion on this is that deleted scenes pass rule one, as T:VS does not say "Only complete works of fiction count" but "Only works of fiction count", and if a work is not a work of fiction, then it must be a work of non-fiction, and none of the examples above seem to pertain to this description. Please correct me if I am wrong. My opinion is also that officially released deleted scenes, such as the Journey's End and Remembrance of the Daleks ones above, should pass rule three because, well, they've been officially released. Right. Let's tackle the cases above individually. Remembrance of the Daleks: I do not support the validation of this scene, because for 4bp you need clear authorial intent, and I do not think that misremembering something counts as clear authorial intent. Again, please correct me if I am wrong. Journey's End: This, I think, is by far the clearest, either by rule 4 or 4bp, both seem pretty clear to me. I support validation. P.S.: Support validation. Nothing much more to say, except that this isn't really a deleted scene, so should've been left for a speedround or something. Still, no matter (probably). The pilot episode: I do think that this is clear authorial intent. We should probably cover this as an alternate timeline, though, and have pages like the Doctor (The Pilot Episode) etc. I support validation. Aquanafrahudy ☎ 20:56, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

To clarify, the reason why P.S. has to be treated as a deleted scene is because there was a debate on this already, and it was ruled to be one. Unless there's new evidence to dispute this ruling not present in these original discussions T:POINT applies. R4bp isn't applicable for this, since that can't make it not a deleted scene. If we pushed P.S. to another thread, it just wouldn't get discussed - it would violate T:POINT to do so. You have to treat it as a story that solely violates R4 (through being a deleted scene) but now passes it through R4bp in order to get it validated. But, as stated, it's non obvious that this is true. Tangerine has stated that he thinks deleted scenes also violated R3, and Czech was definitely gesturing to R3 worries as well. Najawin ☎ 21:28, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Oh, sorry. But if something can be experienced, if it has been released on the official YouTube channel or whatever, then surely it looks passes rule 3? Isn't that what rule 3 means? Aquanafrahudy ☎ 07:18, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Maybe? Things don't tend to fail R3 - it's not usually invoked to remove something from validity, I think there was maybe a comic or a book that only got a limited release at a convention and was considered to not be an "official" release, or something?

As stated before, I think applying any of the 4 rules to the issue is anachronistic, that's just not why these were invalidated, but certainly it's R3-ish, User:Tangerineduel, who was the admin involved in the original deleted scenes discussion, has already said he thinks they fail R3. User:CzechOut suggested something clearly R3 adjacent as well in Forum:P.S.:

We'd also have to conclude that the actual title of The Claws of Axos was The Vampire from Space, since there's an officially released title card on the DVD. Of even greater difficulty, we'd have to somehow have to grant the TV version of Shada some kind of legitimacy, even though major parts of it — really, most of the narrative's concluding scenes)[sic] — were never filmed at all. [...]

It would be a major sea [sic] change in the policy we currently have to allow storyboards to substitute for story.

The conflation of storyboards and story seems to me to be an almost archetypal R3 concern.

But, like, yeah, maybe they pass. We don't really have a ton of R3 jurisprudence. Maybe just being able to go read/watch the thing means it passes R3. (And for the closing admin here, note that I do mean maybe in the strictest possible sense, I don't think this is a good position to hold.) But I think that has some counterintuitive implications about old script revisions and such. I just don't see why showing us the scrapped product, a look into what definitively didn't happen, but allowing us more access into the bts production fun, is being treated as on par with an actual released product, even one that's invalid. It seems a category error to me. The product was just never released. What was released was a work print, not an actual product. Najawin ☎ 09:09, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Fair enough, I think I agree with you there. You've convinced me that deleted scenes maybe shouldn't be validated due to R3 concerns, although ultimately I'm neutral on this point. However, with P.S., I don't think it actually counts as a deleted scene. I know it was ruled to be one, but policy can be overturned, right? And User:OttselSpy25's argument against it being a deleted scene seems pretty convincing:

Because the webcast is depicted as a rotating series of drawings which clearly originated as storyboards, there was speculation that it was a "deleted scene," and that this was originally the ending to TV: The Angels Take Manhattan. However, writer Chris Chibnall revealed that the scene was actually intended as a DVD live-action bonus feature. Mark Williams was not available for filming, so the dialogue was recorded and it was turned into a webcast. Ultimately, in all regards other than the quality of the art, it somewhat resembles the early DW webcasts, such as WC: Shada.

Ultimately, I support saying that P.S is not actually a deleted scene, and I'm now neutral on deleted scenes and R3. Aquanafrahudy ☎ 15:19, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Apologies if the message placement here interferes with the thread's pacing, but I've some points on this matter. Another example of a single deleted scene adapted into released fiction would be Planet of the Rain Gods (comic story), which (like the Big Finish adaptations) contradicts the relevant TV episode but could be covered validly as 'another account'. As has already been discussed, similar deleted-scene-caused-TV-contradictions appear in many novelisations, which we already successfully cover with account language. Is this complicated by "Rain Gods" later being re-adapted into Rain Gods (home video), which drives to not break with the televised continuity? I don't think so, but it's worth discussing.

Additionally, regarding The Pilot Episode, I do see value in its use as a valid source. It'd help fleshing out what exactly the Fourth dimension meant back then, at least! I'm uncertain, however, if the changes between the Pilot and aired episode are of the same level as Dr. Who and the Daleks (theatrical film) for separate pages to be an advantage; the shift from the Pilot's characterizations to those of later episodes is more gradual and part of the journey that was aired, and even the backstories given in the Pilot have relevance to the aired episodes (it's not like we're living in the universe of The Pitch of Fear). Regarding Palimpsest universes, as was already mentioned in the opening post, the idea expressed in the late '90s novels was that all the shifts in backstory lore were in-universe temporal shifts, including the half-human and loom stuff, that resulted in the universe being in-universe as contradictory and multi-possibility as it is in reality; we cover those later things in "accounts" language, no [Seventh Doctor (Lungbarrow] and [Seventh Doctor (The Enemy Within)], and I believe the same would work with the Pilot (same introductory story and events, just with different speeches). The core idea of Unnatural History is that the Doctor is in-universe the same character in all their versions and overwritten timelines: the human of the 1960s becomes the Time Lord of the 1970s becomes the half-human of the 1990s, a form of "continuity of consciousness" even if the 1990s Doctor doesn't usually remember his other backstories. Perhaps this argument interferes with the careful balance being sought here, but that's my two cents. Never hurts to explore the horizon, said Icarus. CoT ? 16:21, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Wow, I almost missed this thread! After reading through the above, I agree with Aquanafrahudy's analysis of the Rule 1 concerns, Pluto2's comment on Rule 3, and OS25's treatment of Rule 4 (especially given CoT's comment, which I believe heartily bolsters the case for The Pilot Episode). For these reasons, I support the coverage of P.S., The Pilot Episode, and the scenes from Remembrance and Journey's End as valid DVD extras. I have many further thoughts regarding R4BP, Carnathon, and {{NCmaterial}}, but I'll save them for a different occasion. – n8 (☎) 17:11, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

So to clarify User:Aquanafrahudy, P.S. is a deleted scene, or at least it's formed out of the remnants of the work gone into a scene that was supposed to exist - cut when Mark Williams was unable to make it for filming - which is what we usually say when we mean "deleted scene". The storyboards were for a scene that was intended for a DVD extra, as was the voice over. (Think about the scene. It needs the voice over. Having the voice over is not evidence of completion, you need to show actual production details about when that was done.) Insofar as there's anything new there's some minor animation to make characters have a bit of a parallax effect and some typography. Najawin ☎ 18:05, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

So in summary, something new was added (however "minor"), and the video with this new material was officially released as a webcast on the BBC Youtube channel. – n8 (☎) 19:35, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

But, again, by this metric every deleted scene "released" ever is an actual new piece of content, because you always add at least some editing to the product and "release" it. So now our prohibition against deleted scenes doesn't invalidate anything, which is clearly not the intent of the actual ruling. Regardless, this is very much T:POINT on P.S. in particular. Najawin ☎ 19:47, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

By referencing T:POINT, do you mean that there's been no new information brought forward to justify a reconsideration of the status of P.S.? I don't see how that's the case. Rory's Story hadn't been released the last time we discussed it, and also the validity rules have changed since then. (You may not like or agree with R4BP, but frankly, no one's ever accused our validity rules of internal logical consistency.) Reconsidering P.S. in light of these developments seems sufficiently justified. – n8 (☎) 21:37, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Conclusion

Hello! This note will seem fairly trivial to future readers, but I do so apologise for the lateness of the present closing post. A huge, controversial thread and a busy time in my life (as well as in those of all the admins who could plausibly have closed it in my stead) make for a dangerous combination.

Background and T:POINT

As User:Najawin reminded us multiple times in this thread, it is worth remembering that deleted scenes were not initially excluded from the site for any actually proper reason. As he puts it, "in the early days of T:VS the list of exceptions was just that, exceptions, (…) things that people had specifically ‘voted off the island’ through community discussions, and they didn't violate any of the 4 little rules, people just didn't want to cover them". This sort of thing is thoroughly unconscionable under the modern T:VS paradigm, and modern policy-making paradigm in general; it bespeaks an embryonic, often biased era of the site. It suggests that if we were right to rule such things out, it was more in a "stopped clock" way than anything else. I exaggerate — as Najawin himself further notes, discussion of points adjacent to the 4LR was involved in the old thread, because it just makes sense to think about these issues; I'm not saying the old users & admins were throwing darts at the wall or anything — but it wasn't done by the book, that's all.

So in terms of whether this thread passed T:POINT, forget the R4BP question — reviewing the coverage status of anything which was ruled out in discussions that predate the modern, impartial, universalised form of T:VS is warranted by default. We should be extremely, extremely careful about invalidating anything; we should be downright neurotically cautious about ruling anything non-covered, and by and large this is what has been done with deleted scenes.

(I do not believe the current T:VS contradicts the modern paradigm in saying that the 4 Little Rules "help you understand what works of fiction 'count' on this wiki well over 90% of the time [while] he rest of this document is concerned with the other 10% — the marginal cases that are a little less clear": by "a little less clear", it is meant that although there is a robust sense in which our coverage of these marginal cases flow from the 4LR, the rationale is not obvious at first glance and bears spelling out.)

And I think a similar logic also justifies reviewing P.S.. From what I've seen of the previous discussion, and indeed the controversies we've seen here, I just don't think we had a robust definition of what a "deleted scene" was at the time. P.S. is the storyboard workprint of a whole short; it's not a "scene" that was "deleted" from anything. Things get even crazier when we're asked to think of shooting scripts as "deleted scenes" — we might think of specific bits in the scripts as deleted scenes, but validating a script in gestalt would not by any sane use of language constitute "validating a deleted scene". Come on now. Our discourse on all of this is hopelessly confused if this is the sort of conclusion it's outputting.

All this being said — stopped clocks are sometimes right, with proverbial frequency. It would be completely crazy to validate every deleted scene ever; or indeed every deleted scene that got an official release. So let's move on to analysing these things through the lens of the modern Four Little Rules, and see what that leaves us with, if anything.

Rule 1

I am shocked at how little discussion there was of this. I believe a lot of the intuitions that had people (including me, in the 2020 redraft) pointing helplessly at Rule 3, are actually about Rule 1. And when we consider this, it starts to make a lot more sense that a bunch of deleted scenes lack pages altogether. Stuff which breaks Rule 1 goes un-covered all the time.

Partially-quoted script extras — bloopers and other unused shooting clips — those things all fail Rule 1 before you move on to any of the others. They're not complete works of fiction, any more than musings on in-universe questions partway through a "letter from the showrunner" in DWM are.

The slightly problematic thing is of course that "completeness" is, sometimes, more of a state of mind than a fact. A slideshow of still images might be an artistic choice; we can't start judging BBV and Reeltime productions "unfinished" if they lacked proper colour-grading. Doctor Who and the Time War passes Rule 1, while an actual snippet of an unfinished novelisation draft wouldn't. (This is, of course, why How The Monk Got His Habit was so controversial in its day.) Nor can you retreat to "completed to the standard that was initially aimed for" — some of the VFX work in Orphan 55-as-broadcast was infamously rushed or unfinished relative to the original plan.

Still, when something is released as "Deleted Scene #22" on a DVD, I think we can reasonably conclude that there is no intent to release it as a coherent, bounded work of fiction. Ditto unnamed script extracts quoted in The Writer's Tale, a piece of concept art printed in DWM, or whatever else. To a first approximation, if its purported "official release" is untitled, it's out. There could be imaginable exceptions, but I don't know of any at the moment, and they can be discussed in individual threads.

So it's here that we must say goodbye to the Journey's End and Remembrance deleted scenes, I fear. Especially the latter, which does not seem to have ever had a standalone release separate from the context of a documentary. It's not about level of completion — if, however ungraded and unscored, the Journey's End scene was put on YouTube as, I dunno, Parting Gift or something, and the blurb said "in this exclusive mini-episode, discover one more thing that might have happened before the Doctor left Pete's World for the last time", then sure, we could give that a page; and validate it by R4BP when a later story changes that "might" to a "did". But as things stand it's not coverable as fiction, valid or otherwise.

This rule isn't symmetrical — the presence of a title of some kind does not necessarily mean that something passes Rule 1. A blooper that's released on DVD as Sylvester Trips and Falls is being released as "its own thing", but visibly framed as "look at this accident that happened during filming", not "look at this short work of fiction where the Seventh Doctor hurts his leg". And, of course, a script or workprint of a full episode will presumably bear the title of the finished product for its own!

Scripts

Okay, what about complete scripts, then?

Uhm… pass?

Sorry, sorry. But this question is much too peculiar and wide-ranging in itself for this discussion to resolve it, IMO. There's been too little discussion of Rule 1 at all, let alone in relation to full released scripts, for me to feel comfortable resolving this. The de-facto, T:BOUND view is that "real" scripts written for production ‘are not fiction’, even when we have pages about them. The Masters of Luxo (script) has borne a {{non-fiction}} tag since 2012 — not an {{invalid}} one. To a degree this makes sense — scripts, as a reading experience, are often written from a real-world perspective. They're practical guides to wrangling your actors, not themselves a work of art.

But then again, writing things in in the manner of a script is a legitimate way of writing prose — look at something like The Crikeytown Cancellations. And the lines are blurry — many notable literary playwrights from the 19th century wrote primarily for print, not to be performed (my reference for this is very French: Alfred de Musset's concept of the "armchair theatre"), and yet their works are still perceived as "plays", not "novels written in the style of a script" as we would dubiously dab such a thing. And of course, writing "this isn't meant to be performed by actual flesh-and-blood actors" on your script is the surest way to ensure that every up-and-coming director on the planet will try it. It's all terribly blurry.

And I do think, sometimes, an official release of a full script is done in this spirit — that even if it wasn't initially intended as such, it is being printed here with the intention that it may be enjoyed as a reading experience, as a way of experiencing the story (i.e. fiction) rather than a historical, BTS document of what might have been. Just look at the foreword of the aforemenetioned script release of Masters of Luxor:

When I first started to read Anthony's rejected script, The Masters of Luxor, it was with a mixture of excitement at experiencing a 'new' first-Doctor adventure and an expectation of it perhaps being, somehow, 'second-rate'. However, within the first couple of pages I was hooked and I did not stop reading until I reached the final page of the last episode. Far from being a weak story, it is one which is not only a gripping read, but which contains at its heart a most fascinating science fiction concept which would work today every bit as well as when it was first written, nearly thirty years ago.John McElroy

…Okay, Rule 1's wording no longer limits itself to "stories", but still, it should count for something that McElroy, this book's editor, keeps referring to the script itself as "a story". No?

Of course, intent to be read as a story does not mean intent to be read as a DWU story, about which more later. But supposing there had never been a Lost Stories version of Luxor, and then somebody wrote a valid Return to Luxor audio story, sequelising its events with the understanding that this was a story that fans had experienced, via the scriptbook… well, validating a script on a R4BP basis then would not, to me, seem unwise or unwarranted.

What about things like the shooting scripts — i.e. first drafts of later-released works? I think it is rarer for such things to get official releases presenting them as works of fiction. Looking at the ones on the BBC website, the framing is much more along the lines of "get a peek behind the scenes". But I could see a world where the unabridged The Faction Paradox Protocols scripts get a release that frames them as "experience the stories in full!", instead of "here is an exclusive BTS look at things which didn't happen". (For all I know BBV's Faction Paradox: The Scripts books are that, although I haven't bought them so I don't know what, if any, critical apparel they contain.) Maybe that release would itself pass Rule 4, or maybe it would pass Rule 4 By Proxy when someone at Obverse decides to pick up one of the bits of lore in the unrecorded bits, and runs with it. Why then couldn't that be something that could potentially be validated through a thread? Why not?

…But again, all of this is hypothetical and will bear discussing in a further thread, which I intend to start myself. The above outlines how treatment of scripts would fit into the paradigm I'm establishing here — but all of this is conditional on a future thread explicitly tossing out the notion that scripts can never be treated as fiction at all. In the meantime they remain non-covered.

Rule 2

Not one we need to worry about very much, I think we're all on the same page and it sort of blends into the "official" bit of "officially released" in Rule 3. Still, it's worth saying explicitly that if we're proposing to treat a "deleted scene" as valid fiction, albeit retroactively valid fiction, then its official release needs to be licensed as fiction. A professional-grade, documentary effort like Vworp Vworp! might be legally allowed to print, say, the deleted prologue of a novel, which might, perhaps, have a title attached, insofar as it is a BTS document — even though they are not allowed to release it "as" a new work of fiction featuring the Seventh Doctor. Such a thing would be a non-starter on validity or even coverage, even if it is framed in such terms that its exact twin printed in DWM with the same blurb could be a candidate for coverage as its own released thing.

Rule 3

As I believe I've outlined by now, most of the so-called "Rule 3-adjacent" concerns really resolve to Rules 1 and 2; a few more will resolve to Rule 4. As concerns the sheer question of whether a thing like this was "officially released" we should, as has been stated many times, follow common sense. Deleted scenes which have had official DVD releases (or the like) have been, um, officially released (whereas leaked ones are non-starters for coverage, even if we have reliable sources for their contents). The question is just whether they were released as clearly-delineated works of fiction, and if so, as works of fiction set in the DWU. But sure, they pass Rule 3 itself. Plenty of thoroughly uncoverable things pass Rule 3 — in many cases that old bugbear, the off-handed interview quote, passes Rule 3! If the interview is printed in DWM or broadcast in Confidential, how could it not?

Rule 4

So when "unfinished" or previously-deleted material gets an official release presenting it as fiction, can that be valid? It's a very narrow case. But yes, I think so. We'll come to R4BP in just a moment, but I believe such things can pass regular Rule 4 just fine. Look at the succinct blurb on P.S.:

"Find out what happened to Rory's dad and the Ponds in this unshot scene by Chris Chibnall."The Official Doctor Who YouTube Channel

Not only are is this blurb not presenting the video as just a way to find out what a scene-that-might-have-been would have been about, but it's explicitly presenting it as a window into the actual lives of the character, not just a might-have-been or suggestion. Viewers are invited to see the "unshot scene" as a way to "find out what happened to (etc.)". That is how it is framed: as an account of definite events in the Whoniverse.

(Okay, I can just feel that someone will come along and say that there's linguistic ambiguity here, and the blurb might be saying "find out [what happened in the unshot scene]", as opposed to "find out [what happened] in the unshot scene". I find this unlikely for a variety of reasons, but if that were true, it would just become a R4BP case, so it doesn't change the bottom line for P.S.; and it doesn't affect the hypothetical point of how we'd treat a release with a blurb that's similar to my redfing, but non-ambiguous.)

Thus P.S. is hereby ruled an example of a valid release primarily composed of previously-discarded material. It passes Rules 1, 2, 3 and 4, in a way that the vast majority of "deleted scenes" and other similar material do not.

This opens the door for at-least-{{invalid}}, and potentially valid, coverage of other things in the same case — but such cases will need individual debates. As per Rule 1, everything rides on the spirit in which The Pilot Episode, 1991 ed., was released — one long outtake, or a live-action narrative they didn't want you to see? And then there's the concerning matter of its multiple cuts. I don't think they're the end of the world (the various Special Editions are a similar puzzle!), but I would feel better validating it if we had a sound theory of coverage here. In short, more research is needed, and it should remain covered on a singular page, as a BTS piece, until that research is performed. Only then would we be able to think about "/Non-valid" coverage, let alone validation by proxy.

Rule 4 By Proxy

Once again we see some fairly heated debate about the boundaries of that humble little clause in T:VS. Unless one leans on the possible ambiguity in the YouTube blurb, it is irrelevant to the only validation effected by the present thread — P.S. — which is ironic given the title it started from. However, the principle is hereby affirmed that Rule 4 By Proxy can apply to "deleted scenes" that pass Rules 1, 2 and 3 to the standard outlined above.

Furthermore, this time, I think the back-and-forth has generated an opportunity to clarify an important aspect and limitation of R4BP.

R4BP applies when the natural assumption is that the validating story is making a continuity reference to the validated story. Not just when the valid story "coincidentally" has facts in common with the would-be-validated one because they're both drawing from the same source.

Case in point, it seems wildly unlikely to me that a Missy bio using the name "Carnathon" is doing so with the intent of coming across as a continuity reference to the Pilot shooting script. (To begin with, I don't think the script was publicly out yet when the bio was released.) It is in fact using that name because the name was presumably given to BBC copywriters in relation to the plot of Extremis; the deleted Pilot line is a call-forward to a factoid which was meant to come into play in Extremis. It was ultimately left out both of Extremis and The Pilot, but the copywriter wasn't to know. This is analogous to the pretty uncontroversial points made about novelisations: if a noveliser going off the original shooting script includes stuff that's left out of the TV version, they're not R4BP-ing a deleted scene which probably had yet to be released to the public by that point anyway.

Of course, this is doubly moot in this case: first because of the ruling I made above regarding scripts, and the BBC-website shooting-scripts in particular — but also because… I don't think the redlinked "Missy" thing that's used as a source on Carnathon is or should be a valid source? I believe it's this thing, and I just don't think that passes Rule 1. Notwithstanding Carnathon, it's strictly a restatement of her TV history, with no attempted new spin or extra details or anything — and at a glance, although this one doesn't explicitly acknowledge "in episode so-and-so…", this seems incidental, as other profiles of the same source, written in the same sort of style, do so freely (the profile for the Master talks about how "we first encountered the Master during a period when…"). When we hear "Missy was tried on Carnathon", the implication is "in the episode Extremis, Missy was tried on Carnathon"; not "in the space year 6789.ApplesauceDelta, Missy was tried on Carnathon".

Right, I think that's everything! As always, thanks to everyone who participated, and please do chime in on the talk page with any questions if I've left anything out or been unclear in some way. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 20:31, 10 June 2023 (UTC)