Talk:Eighth Doctor
Canon debate
When I encountered it, article had this dubiously helpful information:
- Due to the nature of the 1996 movie, and certain continuity-bending issues raised by it, the place of the eighth incarnation within canon remained a matter of sometimes heated fan debate for more than a decade, until the revival of Doctor Who in 2005 directly addressed the issue.
- In the 2007 episode TV: Human Nature, a drawing of the eighth incarnation, as played by McGann, was briefly glimpsed on one of the pages of John Smith's "A Journal of Impossible Things", alongside drawings of other established incarnations. Later, the 2008 Christmas special, TV: The Next Doctor, put the issue to rest fully by including brief footage of Paul McGann from the TV movie in a recap of the Doctor's first nine incarnations. A similar on-screen appearance, again using footage from the movie, occurred in the 2010 episode TV: The Eleventh Hour in another "roll call" of past Doctors. An image of the eighth incarnation appeared yet again during a sequence in the later Series 5 episode, TV: The Lodger, which also included a line of dialogue explicitly identifying the incarnation played by Matt Smith as the eleventh, and therefore accounting for the incarnation portrayed by McGann.
This seems to have survived from the Dark Times on this wiki, but it's not particularly relevant now. It's been a long damn time since anyone in fandom seriously posited the notion of Eight being "unofficial" in any sense. We've known since Rose that Eccleston was the Ninth Doctor. RTD made that very clear when he stepped in and declared Shalka invalid. The BBC website has always referred to Eccleston as Nine from day one. Yes, there was long the narrative possibility that he wasn't, but, realistically, it's always been production intent that he be viewed as Nine.
Point is, this passage seems to unnecessarily drag us into a "canon debate", and there's really no point to it. What the article could use, instead, is a well-annotated explanation of how the specific issues of "half-human-ness" and kissing were controversial. But "canon" shouldn't be the main focus of it. It's hard to say fans ever had an argument for him being non-canonical when they saw McCoy regenerate into him. The issue is just that (some) fans didn't like these two aspects of his character.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 13:39: Mon 12 Nov 2012
