Talk:Ulysses

truth

Is Ulysses really the doctor's father? --Ceryu 04:33, September 25, 2011 (UTC)

If you accept the novels as canonical, then almost certainly. (It's never completely confirmed, but the hints are very clear.) Of course, since Doctor Who doesn't really have a canon, everybody's free to pick and choose what bits of the mythos to accept and which bits to ignore. It's up to you, really. But that was the intention of the authors who featured him. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 02:51, April 26, 2012 (UTC)

Move

Shouldn't this article be named Ulysses? The policy is to use the most common name.I can't say with certainty which is more common as I have not read the novels, but nearly every mention of him in this article uses Ulysses. CloneMarshalCommanderCody ☎ 21:50, September 1, 2014 (UTC)

If you think it should be renamed, put a {{rename}} tag on the page. Not many people patrol the talk pages, and maybe a tag will attract someone who actually knows which one is the common name. Shambala108 ☎ 01:04, September 2, 2014 (UTC)

Appearance in Listen

The information about his appearance in Listen keeps getting removed. Apparently this is confirmed in Doctor Who Extra (I haven't seen it yet) but if you watch it will say. But I'm not 100% sure. Lewody1 ☎ 22:06, September 13, 2014 (UTC)

I'm the one who removed the info. First, nothing in Listen says the man in the barn is the Doctor's father, let alone a guy named Daniel Joyce. Second, even if DWE says its him, we can't include that because it is not a valid source for in-universe articles. P&P talk contribs 22:10, September 13, 2014 (UTC)

Quite correct, PicassoAndPringles. I don't think Listen allows us to even call the "male voice" in the scene the boy's father. He speaks of "the other boys" in a way that seems more like someone running an orphanage than someone talking about his own children.

In any case, this article has become massively confused. It should likely be separated into four articles: Ulysses, Daniel Joyce, Chronotis and The Doctor's Father, with an attempt made to include in each of those article only information that is directly stated about those people. In other words, we should assume that they are different individuals until absolutely convincing proof is put forward. At that point, and only at that point, we could talk about merging whichever ones need to be merged.

It's important to remember that Lance Parkin, the writer of the only two books I can find to directly mention Ulysses, The Infinity Doctors and The Gallifrey Chronicles, firmly says in the former that Ulysses is not the Doctor's father.

Indeed the connection between Ulysses and Joyce is very tenuous, coming through an offhand remark in Infinity. After Parkin says that the Doctor's father is not Ulysses, he then goes on say "but a professor in Berkley". Well that is not the same thing as saying Ulysses is Joyce. And even if it were, Infinity has an unusual setting that makes it difficult to consider a part of the "normal" DWU, as witnessed by a multi-month discussion on this wiki.

As for Daniel Joyce, that name is only in Unnatural History, so far as I can tell, and if he's meant to be the Doctor's father, the Doctor is surely acting awfully formally towards him. Indeed, in Interference, Larry Miles posits that Daniel Joyce is Chronotis, and there's zero hint, much less explicit statement, that Joyce is the Doctor's father in that novel. As far as my skim over the material is concerned, they really seem like acquaintances, not father and son. And of course, if Joyce is Chronotis, then the Doctor's behaviour towards Chronotis in Shada is obviously not that of a son to a father. Indeed, we'd have to read that story fundamentally differently than we do.

And there are zero instances of "father" in The Gallifrey Chronicles which refer to the Doctor's father. Joyce's name doesn't appear there. Only Ulysses appears — and Parkin has already said, though it's unclear whether it "counts", cause it's in the strange Infinity Doctors, that Ulysses is not the Doctor's father.

So this is a case where we need to go back to the source material, and rewrite these articles, adhering as closely to the text as we possibly can. We're regurgitating a lot of half-remembered material here, and it's really rather important to return to fact-based writing.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  23:39: Sat 13 Sep 2014