Forum:Validity: An Adventure in Space and Time

Index → Inclusion debates → Validity: An Adventure in Space and Time

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Introduction

An Adventure in Space and Time, Mark Gatiss' love letter to the people responsible for bringing our favourite show into the world, a dramatised account of those crucial early days of the show's production, which was decided long ago to not be a part of the overall fictional DWU. Twas all fine and good, and was one less headache to have to deal with…

And then Jonathan Morris decided that would be too easy~!

How we got here

Yesterday's new issue of Doctor Who Magazine included, among a variety of neat and interesting things, the fifth instalment of Morris' Loose Ends, a series of short stories-come-fact files that shed some light on the left over plot threads and lingering questions from classic stories. Each single-page instalment is split into three sections; Scenes Unseen (a short narrative that covers an unseen event set adjacent to a particular story), Where Are They Now? (a brief account from a different guest or minor character of an unseen part of their life), and The Unexplained (on non-narrative bit in which Morris gives his own answers for general unexplained questions). I wasn't the one who began the wiki's coverage of these sections, but the general consensus appears to be that the narrative parts are all considered valid.

Yesterday's instalment, titled Ian Memoriam, was made as a tribute to William Russell. The Scenes Unseen portion confirms Ian's in-universe death at some point after The Power of the Doctor, while The Unexplained answers the question of how Ian and Barbara explained their two year absence to their colleagues (short answer: they didn't need to, because Remembrance of the Daleks).

As for Where Are They Now?…

The suffering begins

In keeping the with the instalment being a tribute to Mr. Russell, Where Are They Now? focuses on a difference character he played; Harry, the BBC Studios security guard from the very docudrama we're all here to debate. The section outright identifies his story of origin.

It would seem very much that this little vignette just went and promoted An Adventure in Space in Time to Rule 4 by Proxy validity. But does it really?

Now, in my view, I feel it would be a lot simpler to just ignore the story citation and treat this little section as a valid story in its own right. A judgement that would basically involve renaming Harry's page to Harry (Loose Ends 5: Ian Memoriam) and rearranging the information accordingly.

Another idea I've seen involves splitting each section into separate pages just so we can isolate this particular WATN? from the rest of the instalment and slap an invalid tag on it, which I am strongly against.

And that's the long and short of it. Welcome to hell~! WaltK ☎ 16:02, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Discussion

Talk:Loose Ends 5: Ian Memoriam (short story) is the prior discussion. Najawin ☎ 16:16, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

I'll put my Tomorrow Windows point from the talk page to the side, as it appears to have been misunderstood, it was about to the extent we can break up characters, not whether we should.

But for concerns past R4, I think there are very real R2 issues here. Yes, yes, that sounds silly. But everything here is being used in the sense a real world docudrama would - it's all being used to refer to real world events, not IU counterparts of real world events, but actual real world events. This is an issue in two ways. Firstly, it's all fair use. (See here for the relevant discussion, sorta.) If I wrote a docudrama without BBC involvement, and then someone referenced it in a story later, would that become a candidate for validity? This seems... counterintuitive, to say the least. If the idea is that it's licensed because one party involved (the BBC) clearly licensed the concepts, even if the makers could have used fair use, I'm just not sure this solves the issue either. Imagine a docudrama over the wilderness years, (no, not that one) fair use applying to every licensable property, except for one, which they actually license, for funzies. Or because they're the actual licensors. A year or two later someone R4bps it. We now have to accept the entire thing, including the bits that are fair use? Again. Counterintuitive.

Secondly, this leads into the second point. Lest you say, 'oh, no, R2 says "all the license holders"', this docudrama clearly doesn't do that, Hartnell isn't licensing his likeness here. We just tend to ignore that. But I'm deeply skeptical of the idea that there's a meaningful difference in this case between Hartnell's likeness and the TARDIS's likeness, or any other licensable content present here. Certainly they're not using the IU idea of the TARDIS. It's far from clear to me that there's any licensable DWU elements present at all. Saying this satisfies R2 is like saying the OG Sherlock Holmes stories satisfy R2. Technically true, as written, but our jurisprudence has long ago held that an empty set isn't sufficient. Najawin ☎ 16:35, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

As regards this peculiar Rule 2 argument: you seem to have forgotten the bit where Hartnell has a vision of the actual Doctor (Eleventh or Fifteenth depending on the cut you're watching!); he's probably not diegetically "real", it seems at most one of those magic-realist "living fictional character" situations and more probably just a visual metaphor — but I don't think an unlicensed docudrama would be able to get away with it, even so.

Even with the old ruling on merging the fictionalised versions of real people into their real-world page, I think it's been clear ever since this thing was released that we, like, cover it. Case in point, Harry (An Adventure in Space and Time) exists as an in-universe page. We don't simply list it as a real-world documentary, we do, in fact, cover it as a source, and have done for years. Under current policy it does pass Rule 2. I think the Dalek annuals precedent is the relevant one here: this is a story made under the Doctor Who license regardless of whether it elects to use any of the elements of that license, and we cover it on that basis, like the Dalek-less Dalek-annual stories. Ergo and Rule 2 is satisfied, it's eligible for coverage, and Rule 4 is the only question. The usage of the real-world fictional TARDIS etc. doesn't enter into it one way or the other.

With that out of the way, the matter at hand: to my mind, pretending we don't know where Harry came from is a terrible idea. It'd be no better than Ninth Doctor 3 (The Tomorrow Windows) — a clear-cut case of the Wiki failing at the sort of thing that it is supposed to be. We're all about documenting connections between different sources, that's the life and soul of any Wiki about a fictional oeuvre. Moreover, even without the AAiS&T connection, it seems highly dubious to me that the segment passes Rule 4!

My personal view is that we should split the two segments — and do the same with every other Loose Ends. They're clearly different stories every time, albeit with a shared theme. There's no narrative connections between them. But that is a discussion which I still think should be happening at Talk:Loose Ends 5: Ian Memoriam (short story), or indeed Talk:Loose Ends. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 16:46, 19 July 2024 (UTC)