Forum:Validity: An Adventure in Space and Time

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

Spoilers are strongly policed here.
If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.

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. They're different stories released under an umbrella title; the fact that one of the stories in this one takes place in a completely different fictional universe from the other simply underlines it, but IMO we really should have been splitting them all along. However, all 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)

Honestly, no. That is frankly a terrible idea. These stories are not mini-anthologies of three independent and totally different works. They're one unified work with a shared theme every instalment. The DWM contents page does not list each part as a different feature.

What we need to do is have this story have the bit about AAIS&T be invalid. It is not meant to be set in the DWU, there is no R4BP case — Harry's monologue recounts the famous Tom Baker photoshoot outside the television centre. It's basically a really short, prose docudrama.

And, to answer how we can possbily have a story be both valid and invalid... we already do that with this series. One third of these stories is already invalid. The The Unexplained sections don't pass rule one, thus are invalid. Yet they're still part of the story!

Yes, it's crude how they're not given their own section on each respective story page, but they're still on the page.

Before this instalment, nobody was clamouring for these stories to be split up into three separate pages. So it is frankly absurd that we can live with a page covering both valid and invalid information if the invalid information doesn't pass rule one, but we can't live with it if the invalid section doesn't pass rule four.

In short, as we already cover 1/3 of every Loose Ends instalment as invalid, we can manage to cover Loose Ends 5: Ian Memoriam as 2/3rds invalid. We should thrash out a subclause to T:VS to allow this to be acceptable, and then we can just put {{invalid}} tags into each respective invalid page of the story page. Splitting each instalment is unintuitive, not intended by the writers, and is just a case of us not changing our rules to accommodate the works we cover, but changing the works we cover to fit into our rules.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

17:56, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

No, no, no! 'The Unexplained' is not "covered as invalid". Invalid is a very specific status awarded to sources that get complete, but {{invalid}}-tagged, coverage, as fiction. The 'Unexplained' vignettes are not that. They are simply magazine articles bundled in with stories, only "part" of the story in the same sense that a foreword or archivist's-note printed with a novel is "part" of that novel (i.e., as the Wiki sees it, not so much). That's not at all the same thing as proposing to cite both valid and invalid in-universe info to the same source page. I don't view it as determinative that they are listed as a single feature within DWM's table of content; they might very well be two stories and an article which add up to an overall magazine feature. If an Annual lists "Games on Page 5" in its ToC, and the games on Page 5 each have two completely unrelated plots and rulesets, we would uncontroversially give each game its own page, not create "Games (DWAN 2027 short story)". --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 18:02, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm very much not ignoring the scene in question. In the original cut it's entirely ambiguous as to whether that's 11 or Matt Smith. The Youtube Video for the re-cut does call Gatwa the Doctor, but you and I both know that the extent to which that's definitive is messy. And even if it is, the re-cut of that scene is a different entity from the original Docudrama. I note as well that we have pages on many fair use works that don't technically meet R2. This is slightly more unique in that it's a docudrama, but this doesn't reflect some special status of AAiSaT. I just don't see how this is compelling. Najawin ☎ 18:09, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Yes, yes, yes! @Scrooge MacDuck.

These Unexplained portions do often provide fictive information, but from an OOU perspective. If we didn't such a hard rule on "no OOU perspective media" (or whatever it is, I'm rushing this response), these would be treated as sources.

Also, your example of annuals does not hold up. There are indeed cases where two separate works are covered on one page, with the ToC only listing that page, but that is different from this — annuals may list "Games" or the title of the first work on the page on the ToC, but there is a distinct difference here, as what we are looking at is not a page with three separately titled works, but one work, under one title, with it separated into different parts, the subtitles of which are consistent between every instalment of this series — these subtitles are more comparable to chapters.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

18:21, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

For example, Loose Ends 2: The 1960s ^[+]Loading...["Loose Ends 2: The 1960s (short story)"]'s The Unexplained section provides and explanation for how a Dalek craft landed stealthily in Remembrance of the Daleks ^[+]Loading...["Remembrance of the Daleks (TV story)"], coming up with an explanation that, if we covered it as valid, we'd say

The first landing of the Dalek shuttle went unnoticed as everyone in its vicinity was watching Steptoe and Son, and the resulting shattered windows were repaired by the headmaster, who had fallen under the Daleks' control. (PROSE: Loose Ends 2: The 1960s ^[+]Loading...["Loose Ends 2: The 1960s (short story)"])

They very much contain fictive information.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

18:30, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

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.

I mean, that may be so, but I think the obvious precedent that nobody has yet brought up is the Fanboys precedent - it has no DWU licensed elements of its own except those portrayed in an out of universe manner. Also The Airzone Solution (novelisation). There is clear precedent for this sort of thing. Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 18:25, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Fanboys is set within a larger anthology, so not analogous imo, it's automatically creating new DWU IP. (I did think about Fanboys as a possible counter example, but dismissed it for this reason.) Didn't comment on the Dalek Annuals stuff before b/c I forgot. My response is that it all falls under this basic idea, and AAiSaT doesn't. Najawin ☎ 18:40, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

And, for another point in support of keeping these on the same page: each section has a particular point. The first section is to show an off-screen event, the second is to feature a character after the events of the story, and the third is to fix any sort of plot hole. Under a common theming of a time period or a character/actor, these stories set to do three very specific, very related things. They are 1000% not meant to be separate stories. The proposed split entirely goes against the content and format of the stories and is being entirely done to get around the thorny issue of one of these sections providing a monologue from a character we deem to be an invalid source — but as far as the story is concerned, each part is about characters played by William Russell.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

18:42, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

• 

  Loose Ends 5: Ian Memoriam

• 

  Doctor Who The Official Annual 2006 contents page

• 

  The Van Statten Code page

I've gone to the extent of uploading a copy of the story to the Wiki whilst redacting the text to not run afoul of copyright — but you can see the formatting of the page, and how it is not three entirely different works.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

18:55, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

@Najawin And Airzone Solution? Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 19:56, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

@Epsilon: "…and is being entirely done to get around the thorny issue of one of these sections providing a monologue from a character we deem to be an invalid source"

No it isn't! I say, don't you tell me about my own mind-states! I hadn't paid attention to these things before now, which is the only reason I didn't raise this matter earlier. Again, I do not dispute that they are in publishing terms a single item within the magazine, and formatted as such. But as fiction each section is its own little self-sufficient narrative. You can't give a plot summary that accounts for both, you're just left with two plot summaries that aren't talking about each other besides maybe having a character or location in common. Here, the Ian and Harry sections don't even have a diegetic universe in common; representing them under the same plot summary would, I think, misrepresent the intent of each individual text by implying these events are in any way, shape or form related from a fictional point of view.

@Aquanafrahudy, I don't know what Aizone Solution has to do with any of this. It's covered on the tenuous but tangibly licensed basis of mentioning an in-universe TV series about P.R.O.B.E. (not, mind you, mentioning the real-world DTV series, but an imaginary X-Files-esque TV series about the characters); and it features no DWU-fictional elements besides that. That's very different from a docudrama which may or may not be licensed for the fictional things it depicts as fictional. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 20:03, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

The invalid story that makes no pretense towards depicting the real world? I'm just not seeing the analogy, sorry. I don't even think PROBE could have been fair use in this instance! The series isn't being portrayed as it actually exists in the real world. Najawin ☎ 20:51, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Don't get mad at Epsilon, Scrooge, he's the reincarnation of B F Skinner. Najawin ☎ 20:53, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

@Scrooge MacDuck apart from anything else. We have precedent for such coverage. PROSE: Have You Seen This Man? ^[+]Loading...["Have You Seen This Man? (short story)"] (and its sequels) and all those reference books that have lots of bits of fiction united by a common character like the Doctor and PROSE: Honeymoon Horrors ^[+]Loading...["Honeymoon Horrors (short story)"], which covers many smaller pieces of fiction that make up a larger whole. The latter of which you created.

So you are not only arguing for something that unnaturally splits works of fiction from how they're intended to consume, you are advocating for a double standard that entirely contravenes a precedent you yourself argued for.

And while the common element of this story is more tenuous given its based on an actor, the rest of the series is absolutely more connected! We have stories united by the common elements of the Sixth Doctor, the 1960s, the Regency era, Ancient Egypt... these stories absolutely, 100% fall under the "shared element idea".

There is absolutely zero difference between Loose Ends 2: The 1960s ^[+]Loading...["Loose Ends 2: The 1960s (short story)"] being united by the 1960s to Honeymoon Horrors ^[+]Loading...["Honeymoon Horrors (short story)"] being united by Sardicktown and Have You Seen This Man? ^[+]Loading...["Have You Seen This Man? (short story)"] being united by the Ninth Doctor (the latter, admittedly, having a loose framing narrative). This story may be a little bit of an outlier, but what you are arguing for affects the coverage of not just this entire series, but many similar works. And we absolutely need to consider that the rest of the series is more thematically consistent.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

21:00, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

@Scrooge What fictional things does AAiSaT present as fictional? Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 21:04, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Sorry, misinterpreted that comment. What I mean to say is, in Airzone Solution, P.R.O.B.E is treated as a fictional organisation, and references the movie franchise BBV made. This is the only reason we cover it. This is pretty much the same situation we have here, with the fictional things from Doctor Who being treated, in-universe, as fictional things, and nothing else. Like in Airzone Solution. Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 21:09, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

But it's treated as fictional give or take in a way that's accurate to the real world in AAiSaT, whereas this isn't true in Airzone Solution. In the second case it has to be licensed, it the first it doesn't. Najawin ☎ 21:48, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

I don't think it has to be licensed in the second case at all, I could well put in a story that a character enjoyed PROBE , and that wouldn't be breaking copyright, it'd be a cultural reference. Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 22:00, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

If you accurately describe what PROBE is, yes. If, however, you take the creative content of PROBE, and don't merely describe it, but use it as inspiration for a different fictional series that bares the same name but is meaningfully different in various ways, that's where the issue emerges. Najawin ☎ 22:32, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

It is to be fair a mention, which would probably be fair game either way, but… never mind. The fact is that it specifically was licensed, and does not otherwise use any DWU elements from the real-world's perspective.

Anyway, @Epsilon, I still think those cases present implied narratives, or otherwise have an artistic point to the juxtaposition that justifies giving them a single plot summary. Honeymoon Horrors implicitly tells the story of Amy and Rory's honeymoon in several stages, ending in Sardicktown. Have You Seen This Man? is united by the framing device. Etc.

Whereas, again, Ian Memoriam… simply isn't a single story. It might be a single… literary work… but there is no sense in which you can write a summary that accounts for both segments without giving the mistaken impression that they exist in the same universe. Even "in another universe" would be misleading, implying that Harry exists in a parallel universe relative to Ian Chesterton, as opposed to in a completely incompatible diegetic framework altogether. You can't mention them in the same fiction-describing sentence without giving readers the wrong idea! That's my issue! --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 22:33, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

You are failing to see the bigger picture. Yes, Loose Ends 5: Ian Memoriam ^[+]Loading...["Loose Ends 5: Ian Memoriam (short story)"] is an outlier due to its overall theme being an out-of-universe one. But the previous four instalments do meet the criteria you outline! Instead of changing the coverage of the entire series to accommodate a single edge-case, why don't we just, y'know, treat the edge case as an edge case instead of treating it as a representative of the entire series?

(But for the record, I don't consider the OOU commonality to be enough of an outlier to change my stance that it is enough of a shared element to befit the overall series.)

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

22:56, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

@Najawin As far as I'm aware Airzone Solution... doesn't do this? From what I'm aware of, one of the characters mentions being a fan of the real-life P.R.O.B.E series, and that is why the series is covered? Hence it seems to be an analogous situation. Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 08:32, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm basing this off of Scrooge's characterization.

mentioning an in-universe TV series about P.R.O.B.E. (not, mind you, mentioning the real-world DTV series, but an imaginary X-Files-esque TV series about the characters)

This isn't describing series!PROBE as it is, but as it might be, which is the issue. If it doesn't do this, that's neat, but I still don't think it's a defeater to my argument, because one of these is, well, a docudrama, and the other isn't. AAiSaT has always been a weird one on this wiki. Check the early edit history, it's people disagreeing on how to handle it. The header is custom made on that page, rather than a template like {{Non-fiction}}. Frankly I think validating it would be the ultimate reductio ad absurdum against R4bp, but I'd be very happy if we could come out of this thread with some slightly more standardized rules on how to handle documentaries and docudramas. Najawin ☎ 18:00, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

I mean, I find the way we cover it rather bizarre, really. Fiction's fiction, even if it's historical and aiming for (some occasionally extremely liberal form of) historical accuracy. For my money it should be covered as a normal {{invalid}} source. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 19:35, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

I think "Fiction's fiction" is reductive. I used to watch Nova. There would occasionally be little snippets that alleged to show historical events as they happened, while the main bit of the show was really interviews and exposition. It's a documentary series. But often these historical events didn't actually happen the way Nova described them, as you realize when you learn more about them. I'll admit to not having seen The Science of Doctor Who (2012 documentary), but even if this doesn't occur here, if some time they do an updated version of it with vignettes like this, "fiction is fiction" might have us validating them. Najawin ☎ 19:50, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

I didn't say "validating" — I don't think AAiS&T should be valid, unless something really unexpected happens. I just think it should be covered as invalid fiction. What you describe is one thing, but it would fail Rule 1 — whereas AAiS&T isn't a "docudrama" in the "historian talks while stylised reconstructions of events play out", it's very much a dramatic film, more akin to a biopic or a historical film than a documentary. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 21:45, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

I mean, the obvious rejoinder is "ahem, R4bp" + "but you could put mini title cards in front of each of the vignettes and then they seem to pass R1". I do understand the differences in genre you're referring to, but the "fiction is fiction" maxim doesn't seem to allow for this nuance, is all. Najawin ☎ 22:05, 20 July 2024 (UTC)