Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon?

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I move that we rule The Infinity Doctors non-canonical, in the sense that it can't be used as a valid soure for other articles.

• The incarnation of the Doctor is uncertain, with different reviewers saying "it's definitely the Eighth Doctor", "it may be the First Doctor prior to leaving Gallifrey", or it may be a future or alternative timeline version of whom we've never heard elsewhere

He's clearly not the eighth Doctor of mainstream continuity. He does look like Paul McGann.Lance Parkin

• The time setting is, by the author's admission, intentionally vague. With no clear setting, how can we possibly speak of any of the events with anything like certainty?
• Reviewers can't seem to agree whether the book even happens in the normal DWU
• Lance Parkin said in an interview with the old BBCi that it was meant to be book one of a two book series, with the second book containing a "reset button" that would allow the story to return to the "normal" DWU. Without this reset button, the story languishes in a weird nether world
• Because of the vast narrative uncertainties, it is extremely problematic to allow even basic information from this story into our other pages. Basic factual writing requires that we define the who-what-when-why-and-how of situations, but the novel doesn't allow us to precisely know the who, what or when of almost any statement we'd care to craft.

Obviously, I'm not suggesting that we delete the page The Infinity Doctors, but I think we do need to quarantine it from the rest of our pages. Thoughts?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">04:57: Fri 20 Apr 2012 

I agree. It doesn't make any sense in the context of DWU canon. Tardis1963 talk 01:02, April 22, 2012 (UTC)

I also agree. Just makes pages weird and confusing. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 12:17, April 22, 2012 (UTC)

I vehemently disagree. If we start picking and choosing what is canon we're no better than the Trek people. If the BBC breaks its longstanding rule and comes out and says it's not canon, then OK. Otherwise what's next - the entire Eighth Doctor Adventures line? "Fear Her"? What about all the comic strips? Don't fall into that trap. Simply police the thing to remove speculation based on facts not in evidence, and restrict the use of events in the book to something like "during an unknown incarnation XYZ happened". Simple. If this licensed book or any other licensed work is declared non-canon just because it's inconvenient or difficult to work with, then delete everything that isn't directly taken from TV, or simply kill this website because it'll be useless. 70.72.223.215^{talk to me} 19:36, April 22, 2012 (UTC)

You do have a point there... But I think the problem here is that nearly everything written about the book would have to be either speculation or very careful. But you do have a point. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 19:59, April 22, 2012 (UTC)

Also keep in mind that Telos published 2 novellas with unspecified Doctors too - The Cabinet of Light being one. And that one pegs the entire Time Hunter continuity. So you can see where a domino effect is possible. 70.72.223.215^{talk to me} 20:13, April 22, 2012 (UTC)

I think you've missed the point, 70.72, that the author himself does not believe the book to be in continuity. If the author doesn't believe it's the "real" continuity, why should we?

I'd point out, too, that the issue isn't that it's an "unspecified" Doctor. It is, rather, that the author has explicitly said that it's "not the eighth Doctor of mainstream continuity". There's a big difference between an unidentifiable Doctor and a Doctor who's positively identified as being out of mainstream continuity. We also know details about how there was supposed to be a second book, and that the second book was going to show the relationship between the universe in which The Infinity Doctors took place and the genuine DWU. Because that second book didn't happen, however, there was no "reset button" and The Infinity Doctors was left out on its own island of continuity.

Though I understand your concerns about bad precedents being set, you're overreacting. This thread is only talking about the very narrow issue of this one book, where there is significant evidence — just as there is with The Curse of Fatal Death — that the piece is not a part of the normal continuity.

That said, thanks for raising the issue of precedents so that I can categorically state that the thread is not setting one.

I think, too, you're misapprehending the current usage of the phrase "Is X canon?" on this wiki. We're not trying to stop anyone from believing what they want to about their personal canon. Nor are we actually trying to define what canon means for DW fandom in general. What it really means is, "Is X allowable under our canon policy?" All we're saying is that there must be limits to what this wiki covers. The flip side of what you're arguing is very much scarier for me. If we have no limits, then the wiki will become unmanageable. There must be some metric by which we define our borders, or we'll be pickin' Rose/Dodo lesbian fan fic off the walls. This is why we have recently introduced the very simple notion that the fiction must be licensed by an appropriate copyright holder and it must not be parodic or obviously intended to be out of continuity. This arose from a longlived and productive discussion that's ended with formalisation about which specific BBV releases are covered here and which aren't.

All of this still lets in a heck of a lot of stuff, and firmly protects the EDA range, the John and Gillian stuff, and most everything you've mentioned above. In fact, I've probably uploaded more John and Gillian-related stuff to the wiki than anyone!

So don't worry, this isn't the first battle the long campaign to turn this into a TV-only DW wiki. Nor is this an effort to actually delete the page. The Infinity Doctors will always be on this wiki. It's just that it will not be a valid source for the writing of other articles. This will force all information about The Infinity Doctors to be on that page, which will make that page much better and clearer.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">23:56: Mon 23 Apr 2012 

I disagree with this suggestion as well, though perhaps not as vehemently as the anon above. I think that the key phrase in the Parkin quote is "of mainstream continuity". The Infinity Doctors exists as a sort of side-step from the main EDA range, but it's not parodic and it's just as authorized.

In terms of continuity, I think it's similar to the situation with the Faction Paradox range. Thanks to The Ancestor Cell, pretty much all of the FP-branded fiction — and indeed some of the previous EDAs touched by the War — take place in an "aborted timeline." But we include information from the FP series, with appropriate caveats. Now, we don't know exactly what the relationship between TID and the rest of the Eighth Doctor stories is, but the possibilities include an alternate timeline for the Eighth Doctor, or a young Doctor prior to An Unearthly Child. It could even be the Eighth Doctor of the regular timeline, between The Gallifrey Chronicles and the Time War. That's sufficiently outside of any established narrative to be apart from mainstream continuity, but it could conceivably still be part of the same timeline.

I think that saying "we don't count this" is too easy. I agree that including it is a challenge, but I don't think it's an insurmountable one. Overall, I think that OS25 has it right when he or she says we have to be "very careful". Rather than excluding TID altogether, we should just decide on a standard phrasing ("according to one account", perhaps?) which allows for TID's ambiguous status, and allows the reader to decide whether and how to fit it in to the larger narrative. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 15:00, April 24, 2012 (UTC)

I also agree with the above 70.72 anon.

It's not speculation and we can't take what the author says to be a ruling on whether it's canon, it was published by the BBC, it's a narrative published by the BBC, it's got Doctor Who stuff in it. That is how we've worked through the canon policy and how we've worked through the BBV stuff that CzechOut mentions. This novel was published and licensed and approved by the BBC.

Authors in the past have declared their Doctor Who fanfic to be canon and we disallowed that. Isn't that just the reverse of this statement? What of the many things Lawrence Miles has said with regard to the Enemy arc and the Faction Paradox related stuff?

So the argument is it should be got rid of because it's TOO HARD?! to fit into article??!

What of The Dalek Factor which is also ambigious about its Doctor and outcome?

I do agree with OS25, we need to be careful with how we use the information in this novel, and refrain from using vague information, but explicit information like any other narrative source should be used. And as Josiah Rowe says we can also fall back to our "one account states" phrasology when conflicting information is present. --Tangerineduel / talk 15:55, April 24, 2012 (UTC)

I think The Infinity Doctors is a legitimate source for descriptions of Gallifrey and Gallifreyan culture, but not necessarily a legitimate source for describing events that happened in the life of the Doctor of "mainstream continuity." The background detail is in accord with other references to Gallifrey, but the particular events of the novel may have taken place in an aborted timeline. For example, one of the founders of Gallifreyan civilization mentioned in The Infinity Doctors was also mentioned in The Ancestor Cell. That said, people are free to disregard the source if they want to in their role as viewer/reader/interpreter. It may be appropriate to warn readers of the wiki that the legitimacy of the novel is in question, but I don't think it's appropriate to "quarantine" the novel entirely. -- Rowan Earthwood ^{talk to me} 16:06, April 24, 2012 (UTC)

I sympathize, Rowan, but that's setting the boundaries a bit fine, don't you think? Boblipton ^{talk to me} 19:10, April 24, 2012 (UTC)

I'm not quite understanding the level of negativity to this proposal. This is a perfectly ordinary part of our normal processes, consistent with other specific inclusion debates. We've had enough of them that there's a whole category of them. Yes, we have a general rule that goes something like, "As long as it's licensed, it's included". But I think the last few posters have forgotten that we do make exceptions. We have to. The BBC has played with its property in ways that are clearly outside its own continuity. The Curse of Fatal Death was decisively rejected by our community, with only one anon user voting in its favor.

There is no difference between Curse and this. Both are fully licensed stories. But we reject Curse totally on grounds of authorial intent. It was intended as something out of continuity. The same thing happens in other fandoms, as with Star Wars' "Infinities" or DC Comics' Elseworlds ranges. And lest you consider responding with "we're not Star Wars or DC Comics," don't forget that we have Unbound and a few comic stories that are absolutely parodic. I mean, Dicky Howett's entire body of Doctor Who work — which spans years and years — is outside of what we allow to be used to write in-universe articles. Why? Because it's not licensed? No. Because it's not professionally published? No. It's solely because Doctor Who? is parody, meant to be read as out-of-continuity. Similarly, we don't run around talking about the time the Doctor was a woman who worked in a grocery store, because the non-parodic, fully licensed Exile is clearly labelled as Unbound. Also, we reject Scream of the Shalka, not because it's parodic, not because it's unlicensed, not because the BBC told us it wasn't canonical, not because the producers (initially) told us it wasn't canonical, but because RTD told us not to believe in it.

Tangerineduel has made the point that we can't believe a writer who says that their work is canonical. That's very true. But, in my opinion, he's incorrect on the reverse. I think we do have to believe a writer who declares, "Look, this isn't a part of the mainstream continuity." After all, we've believed it before. I don't see any rational argument for doing something different in this case. Moreover, it's kinda stupid to say that as the author, unless you mean it. Saying something is out of continuity will have a negative impact on sales. So if someone says it, you do take it seriously, because they're acting against their self-interest.

I think for reasons of easy administration, we've got to cut this thing off at the knees. Otherwise we'll get a completely unmanageable situation, like the thing Rowan Earthwood is suggesting. Do we really want to count what the book says about Gallifrey, but not what it says about the Doctor? That's tantamount to assigning "semi-canonical" status, which isn't really possible. Yet I suspect that's what people actually want to do, and why there's so much resistance to this proposal. I think people are reluctant to let go of The Infinity Doctors because it's arguably the most detailed description of the mysterious Gallifrey. But if those revelations are made through the use of a Doctor that isn't a part of normal continuity, they're no better than the descriptions of Tersurus in The Curse of Fatal Death.

My argument is absolutely not "it's too hard to fit into articles". Obviously, inconsistencies are the rule in DW canon discussions, not the exception. I am only after the bath water, not the baby, so I'm in no way suggesting anything that's out of line with a series of other steps that have been pretty easily accepted by the community. The Infinity Doctors exactly fits the arguments used to rule other things out of our canon policy. It's simply illogical to deny the BBC-licensed The Curse of Fatal Death, Doctor Who?, A Fix with Sontarans, and Dimensions in Time but keep this.

Generally, everything licensed is an acceptable source for writing articles. I firmly believe that's the best metric for shaping the boundaries of the wiki. But there are exceptions. And this is one of them.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">21:03: Tue 24 Apr 2012 

I'm not sure why you're lumping this in with licensed-but-parodic works like The Curse of Fatal Death. Dimensions in Time is perhaps a closer fit, but even that isn't quite the same. The Infinity Doctors was published as part of an ongoing line of novels, but doesn't fit with that line in terms of narrative continuity. To my mind, that makes it more like The Shadow of the Scourge or TV Action! ... or even Mission to the Unknown, if that hadn't been followed by The Daleks' Master Plan.

I think you may be reading too much into Parkin's use of the word "continuity". In context, all that I think it means is that it doesn't fit into the ongoing narrative of the BBC Books Eighth Doctor Adventures, not that it's any less a part of "real" Doctor Who than they are. We've got several other versions of the Eighth Doctor, whose narratives may or may not be compatible. This could just be another one. (Or a pre-Susan Doctor.) I don't see why this should be treated any differently than The Cabinet of Light or The Dalek Factor. They could fit into the ongoing narrative of the Doctor's life — we just don't know exactly where or when. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 22:01, April 24, 2012 (UTC)

I hear ya. But the flaw with it, in my opinion, is that it requires an assumption you could only make after about 2000 — and Infinity was written in 1998. If this book were written after there was Big Finish, after the EDA range had started to lay down some continuity that was a bit incompatible with the comic books, and especially if it were actually an EDA, then there might be an argument for the idea that it was some sort of meta-textual riff on the Eighth Doctor's continuity issues. But it's a very early PDA, written most likely in 1997/early 1998, prior to the establishment of much of anything' in the great "tripartite" Eighth Doctor continuity. There was no Big Finish at this time, and the books and comics were just getting started. Moreover, this was commissioned and published as the 35th anniversary story. So it's really just a book that's trying to do something "clever" for the anniversary, by going out of continuity in order to examine Gallifrey in a "safe" way that doesn't actually establish anything that .

I think, too, that the fact that it's part of the PDAs, rather than the EDAs, makes it more vulnerable to dismissal from our canon policy, since we put another PDA —  Scream of the Shalka — outside the fence, too. And the PDAs that are novelisations of audio stories are nominally the inferior, or secondary, versions of those stories. The PDAs are just a different editorial deal, because there is no "BBC Books continuity" going on with them, except maybe with Fear Itself. They're all self-contained adventures, so pulling one out doesn't invalidate the whole range.

And I'm not lumping this into "licensed but parodic" works. I'm saying it's a part of the "licensed but outside continuity" gang, which includes not just parodic stories but also Unbound, Shalka and other "serious" stories. I stressed its relation to The Curse of Fatal Death largely because there was a clear and well-remembered forum discussion about that particular story in our recent past. Also, the issue of whether a story is comedic or straight really has nothing to do with whether we consider it allowable under our canon policy. A story is a story is a story. So therefore you can hold up a parodic example against a straight story, and vice versa.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">05:00: Wed 25 Apr 2012 

Just a brief discussion of Czechout's statement that the story being a PDA rather than an EDA makes it more liable to dismissal as non-canonical. While there are undoubtedly issues that would make a PDA more likely to be dismissed -- mostly due to lack of eidetic memory causing the author to contradict something on the label of a can of pasta, a problem that grows with the antiquity of the can -- the general rule should be:

1: All licensed narrative works are canonical until removed from canon. 2: Once removed from canon, nothing in a work is canonical.

Please bear with me while I discuss these points at length. The basic issue is that this Wiki need a relatively easy set of rules to follow -- there is far too much detail, I am convinced, in the manual of style as it is. However, back to the point I am trying to make: if you have a canonical work in front of you and are adding information to the Wiki, just add it. Other requirements would be unreasonably onerous.

Likewise, once an item has been declared non-canonical, a "semi-canonical" status is simply too difficult to parse. Some people wish to include the descriptions of Gallifrey from The Infinity Doctors. I have not read the book, but filtered through the lens of a non-canonical overview, every chapter, every sentence, every comma would be subject to examination to see if it be suitable for inclusion. Does this statement contradict anything in canon? Do any of the implications contradict? Is that a serious statement or a joke? Might it be a typographical error?

The net result would be to get into Talmudic arguments that are not worth the time and energy of almost all the people involved -- as an aside, this is why I think we should declare the TV movie non-canon while leaving the novels, audios and strips canonical, but that's another issue entirely.

I appreciate that people would like to include the information offered by The Infinity Doctors on Gallifrey. However, even if we were somehow to decide for our purposes what information should be included, could we do so with any sense of certainty? The author has stated that the book is not mainstream continuity -- id est riddled with lies. We see a building. Is that building there in mainstream continuity or not? I can't tell. We can argue about it endlessly. I do not wish to argue about it endlessly.

Likewise, the suggestion that we add "according to some accounts" is a complete crock. "According to some accounts" is an acknowledgment that someone screwed up and we are in trouble -- check the article on Anji Kapoor and Lance Parkins' comments. "According to some accounts" is a kludge to deal with problems. It should never be an excuse to create more problems.

Finally, let me note that I have an issue with the lines of reasoning in support of including some material from The Infinity Doctors in canon. It is Bat Logic. It is starting from the conclusion -- "this "fact" should be in the wiki" actually, "I want this fact in the Wiki" -- and searching desperately for a line of reasoning, no matter how specious back to a proposition. It is intellectually despicable. Boblipton ^{talk to me} 12:23, April 25, 2012 (UTC)

Well, I'm convinced. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 14:08, April 25, 2012 (UTC)

I'm not. To be clear, I'm not arguing for "semi-canonical status", whatever that might mean. I'm arguing that we treat The Infinity Doctors as fully canonical but of uncertain placement in the Doctor's timeline. We would be saying, "Everything in this happened, but we're not sure which Doctor it happened to." It's exactly the same as The Dalek Factor.

We exclude Scream of the Shalka, The Curse of Fatal Death and Death Comes to Time because they're just not reconcilable with the rest of the Doctor's life. That's not the case with The Infinity Doctors. It can fit in at least two spots in the Doctor's long life, putting it in roughly the same narrative position as Shada. Including TID is far less problematic than saying that Human Nature happened twice to two Doctors, but we live with that. Why is this different?

Finally, I strongly reject the accusation of intellectual dishonesty.The difference of opinion on this hinges on two debatable points: how much weight to give the author's statement that this is "not the Eighth Doctor of mainstream continuity", and how to interpret that phrase. In light of the splintered nature of the different narratives told about the Eighth Doctor, I think it's perfectly reasonable to suggest that a remark made by Parkin in 2011 could indicate that this should be treated as yet another "strand" in the tangled rope of the Eighth Doctor's history, rather than as a point on one of the previously established strands. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 14:54, April 25, 2012 (UTC)

I would also like to state that I did not mean to apply semi-canonical status to The Infinity Doctors in using statements like "some accounts state", I was merely alluding to how we deal with contradictory information like information concerning Leela presented in Lungbarrow and the Gallifrey (audio series). I didn't think the suggestion would cause any more problems than the ones we already face with similar information.

I was under the impression we removed Shalka because of the BBC's statement of non-canon evident between the first and second editions of Doctor Who: The Legend Continues and not anything that RTD said (I wasn't even aware that RTD had said anything on the subject).

I disagree with lumping this in with other stories CzechOut has mentioned; Fatal Death etc are all parodies or things like it.

I'm a little confused about CzechOut's argument in response to Josiah Rowe, about where this could fit in. Does it matter? There are enough references in the novel I believe to make a good attempt at placement of much of the information.

Lance Parkin says himself in AHistory (Second Edition) about The Infinity Doctors "is a story set on Gallifrey that takes all information from every previous story (in all media) set on Gallifrey - and other references to it - at face value and incorporates them into the narrative". This would suggest that if we look at the wider stories there shouldn't be anything problematic in incorporating it into the wiki. I admit he also says "The Infinity Doctors' super-adhearance to established continuity actually makes it impossible to place at a particular point in continuity without contradicting something established elsewhere." This, I don't consider an issue because we deal with contradictory information all of the time. He also states in the same body of text that "References in Seeing I, Unnatural History, The Taking of Planet 5, Father Time and The Gallifrey Chronicles all make it clear that The Infinity Doctors (or at the very least events identical to it) took place in the "real" Doctor Who universe." --Tangerineduel / talk 16:08, April 25, 2012 (UTC)

One further point: if TID is declared non-canonical, Patience (which is already confusing) will become completely nonsensical. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 20:44, April 25, 2012 (UTC)

I really can't believe some of the arguments I'm hearing with this topic. It's clear to me that most of you haven't actually read the book, and therefore you should really learn more about the content of the book before making these opinionated judgements. It has never been the policy of this wiki for us to base the majority of an argument on what writers say about the product, in fact, quite the opposite, we make policy on the sources themselves and the in-universe content of them. So really, what Lance Parkin has said about the book, in large part, is irrelevant. I agree entirely with Tangerineduel on this one, several sources which are listed above refer directly to events that take place within TID, and some even have characters that overlap with the book. Seeing I is more or less a sequel to TID where the I are concerned, and certainly without TID, most of Seeing I's plot wouldn't make sense. And then we have the example of Larna; who crosses from TID into both The Gallifrey Chronicles and Unnatural History. Therefore from an in-universe perspective, it is clear that TID does have quite a large overlap with the DWU; even if there is doubt as to whether it takes place within the same timeline as our "mainstream Doctors". --Revan\Talk 22:15, April 25, 2012 (UTC)

I strongly disagree with you, Revan. Everything we've put outside the canonical wall has been placed there precisely because of out-of-universe arguments. We throw out Curse of Fatal Death because we've made a judgement its genre is parody, aided by what Moffat and Curtis told us in the "making of" video. We've thrown out fanfic because it has no license by the BBC, not because of anything to do with its narrative. We've thown out "analagous literature" like The Stranger for much the same reasons. Rejection of material from our canon policy has always, and will always, be because of out-of-universe reasons. We must have an out-of-universe reason to throw it out. Otherwise, we're making a value judgement about the narrative. I'm not saying there can't be other, narrative reasons mentioned in the inclusion debate, but we have to have a valid out-of-universe rationale for exclusion. What Parkin says about his work, what scholars of the DWU line say about the work, are vital to this discussion.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">15:28: Sat 28 Apr 2012 

I apologise to others for being away from this discussion for a few days. I'm still rather stunned by the amount of opposition to this rather simple idea, and wasn't expecting to have to devote so much energy here. Before I get into detailed responses, I would again urge people not to get hung up on the fact that I used parodical examples initially. There are equally valid comparisons to be made to "serious" stories, if you need those, as I think there's no reason to keep this while debarring Shalka, the Dalek movies, and the Unbound range.

Authorial intent is obviously important to whether we consider a work a firm part of the DWU. In my view, Parkin is far, far too hesitant about whether this is the DWU as we know it. Let's take a look at a couple of things from AHistory which Tangerineduel has usefully supplied.

• "...The Infinity Doctors (or at the very least events identical to it) took place in the "real" Doctor Who universe." Well, which is it? Did The Infinity Doctors or merely events identical to those described in The Infinity Doctors take place in the DWU. The distinction is massive. Plot elements might be shared between two stories, but that doesn't mean the significant descriptive details are. The Infinity Doctors is known for its elaborate prose regarding Gallifrey. I'm not prepared to admit those details as read if the author can't even decide whether they're true, or whether merely the events that occurred against that backdrop are true.
• "... impossible to place at a particular point in continuity without contradicting something established elsewhere." Guys, that's the definition of anti-canonical. It's not that it's been eclipsed by later stories (though it has). It's not that it's fallen out of continuity. He wrote the story in such a way that it was canonically impossible in 1998.
• "... takes all information from every previous story (in all media) set on Gallifrey — and other references to it — at face value and incorporates them into the narrative." This doesn't mean that they've been incorporated into the narrative in a way that makes sense. It just means they're there. As he admits by the quote immediately above this one, the references aren't put together in a way that confirms then-existing continuity. Not the mention the fact that he's writing before the existence of Big Finish, before there's an audio series called Gallifrey, and while the DWM comic strip is still monochromatic, so the "in all media" proviso means a helluva lot less than it appears to.

As to Josiah Rowe's recent and well-made arguments, well, lemme start with the Shada/Human Nature one. I found this a fascinating argument, but one that's not quite as close as you're making out. Human Nature is really two different stories with the same name. To my mind they aren't in (major) contradiction at all, because they happen to two separate Doctors — well, except for the bit where the supposed 10th Doctor makes an appearance to the 7th, but that's hardly a major plot feature. Much of the detail of the plots is quite different. As for the Shadas well, we've ruled at Forum:Are deleted scenes canon? that the Tom Baker version of Shada is essentially one big deleted scene, and therefore not within our canon policy. Another case like this is of the TVCs with the Fourth Doctor that were initially drawn with the Second or Third Doctor. But we've basically taken to just saying "either the Third or Fourth Doctor did such and such". None of this really fits into what's going on with Infinity. The aforementioned stories are told twice with known incarnations of the Doctor. Infinity is a single story told with multiple, unknown versions of the Doctor. Maybe it's the Eighth Doctor. Maybe it's the First. Maybe it's McGann as the First Doctor. Maybe it's the Third Doctor in exile on Gallifrey instead of Earth. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I'd again point out that the issue here isn't simply that we don't know which Doctor is present. You can quite easily have a story with an unknown incarnation of the Doctor as long as you know approximately when the story takes place If we're told that the story features the 21st Doctor, that's fine. Or if we just get enough references to know we're "after the one with the ridiculous bow tie", that's cool. We have a frame of reference that lets us place all the other details in the book. So we'd know, for instance, that the Gallifrey being described is one that existed after the planet's restoration following the Last Great Time War. Without being able to even generally say which Doctors are represented here, "there's no context", as the genuine Eighth Doctor once said. And we really do need context in order to be able to use the information the book gives us.

But this contextual confusion is the authorial intent. The book is a metaphor for Doctor Who. This is what DWM are getting when they say in their 1998 review:

this Doctor [is] an embodiment of the character's ethos rather than a specific representation. The same appplies to all the book. This is not a coda to already-sung Doctor Who but a fugue — an improvisation based on known themes, and not an extra verse. Once assimilated, this notion is truly intoxicating. The author has the freedom to be more explicit than would otherwise be possible with the Doctor's recollections of his family, and he can assume the role of romantic lead without the shock of 1996's televised kisses. The Infinity Doctors is a fugue not only on the series' broader recurring themes, but also on some of its most specific passages . . . The meaning of the title becomes clear; this is how it might have happened — the details and even some of the broader facts are different, but the essence of the Doctor remains.DWM 271

So, no, Revan, it's not a matter of ignoring the contents of the book. It's rather the reverse. Having paid close attention to the book, I oppose its continued inclusion as a valid source because it's just not meant to be read for details of plot, incident or description. As an anniversary tale, it's a celebration of the meta-fictional concepts related to Doctor Who. By treating it like any other book in the range, which we mine for picky li'l details, we're doing it a disservice. And we're confusing the hell out of our casual readers.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">19:30: Sat 28 Apr 2012 

CzechOut, you are correct in what you say about the metafictional value of TID, but you're wrong in suggesting that that value precludes using it as a narrative. To my reading, that's the genius of the book: it works both as a commentary on 35 years of Doctor Who in multiple media and as a Doctor Who story in its own right. The one does not prevent the other; in fact, each level enriches the other. It's like a fractal, with the larger continuity image containing an image of the smaller within it, and vice-versa.

• I disagree strongly with the statement that there is a "massive difference" between saying that the events of The Infinity Doctors took place in the Doctor Who universe or events identical to them took place. If the events are truly identical, then by definition there's no difference. The suggestion that what Parkin means by that is that the plot may have taken place against the backdrop of a different Gallifrey is, as far as I can see, unsupported. To me, it looks as if what Parkin is saying is that the fact that major plot elements in TID are drawn from previous novels (e.g. Cold Fusion, Seeing I) and are carried on into future novels (e.g. Unnatural History, The Gallifrey Chronicles) shows that it's part of the overall tapestry of the Doctor Who novels.

• " '... impossible to place at a particular point in continuity without contradicting something established elsewhere.' Guys, that's the definition of anti-canonical." How is that any different from Mawdryn Undead saying that the Brigadier retired in 1977? Or, more recently, Amy Pond having two contradictory histories (with and without parents)? The Doctor Who universe contains contradictions. We have to accept that, or we'll go crazy. Once we start cutting out bits that seem not to fit, we're no better than Light or Griffin.

• "Human Nature is really two different stories with the same name. To my mind they aren't in (major) contradiction at all, because they happen to two separate Doctors ... Much of the detail of the plots is quite different." But not the essential details: hiding from alien hunters, the Doctor becomes a human teacher named John Smith at a public school near Farringham, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. While in this identity, he falls in love with a nurse named Joan Redfern, and one of his students, a boy named Tim, steals the receptacle of the Doctor's identity and takes on aspects of his Time Lord nature. The aliens pursue the Doctor, and in order to save the local residents, the Doctor's companion must convince John Smith to become the Doctor again. Yes, there are differences (1913 vs. 1914, Farringham School for Boys vs. Hulton College, etc.), but the story is similar enough that it's absurd in a strictly linear sense to say that it happened to the Doctor twice. And yet, we don't exclude either version of the story, because they're both valid. They were both authorized Doctor Who stories, and they both "count". And we muddle through. TID is no different.

We should accept that there will be contradictions like this in the Doctor Who universe, in part because it's a universe in which history can be re-written. In attempting to codify everything that's happened as if history hadn't been re-written, we're playing a sort of Jenga game, and at certain points (like UNIT dating) the Jenga tower will collapse. But that doesn't mean that we stop building, or that we exclude a certain block because it makes the tower more likely to fall down. We just start over, and rebuild, because that's what the game is about. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 02:22, April 29, 2012 (UTC)

Okay, not exactly about the novel, but I completely disagree that Shada (TV story) is non-canonical. The story is not really a deleted scene at all. Think of it like this, if someone were to post a picture from the special EDition of The Five Doctors (TV story), then it would be okay, because that falls within our canon policy. In the same way Shada is just a really sisapointng special edition. Besides, the BBC sure seems to think that the TV story is the indefinite article! Besides, because Shada is a TV story, despite never airing, it would be silly to mark it as non-canon. Think of it like this, many people who visit the wiki use the "TV stories only" clause, meaning that the TV stories are the only or the main continuity, so to mark one as non-canon would be silly. That'd be like if we made stories that have been wiped as non-canon. It's a silly clause that needs to be further discussed. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 15:35, April 30, 2012 (UTC)

@OS25, start a new thread on the matter of Shada if you like. This thread is already complex enough without throwing in a full scale revisitation of established policy on another story.

@Josiah Rowe: The phrase, "events identical to it", doesn't mean that the details are the same. Just because the main plot events might be the same doesn't mean that we should trust the (largely plot-irrelevant) musings about Gallifrey. It doesn't mean, either, that his account of the Doctor's physique is correct. It doesn't mean any descriptive passage is correct. Let's look at the simplistic plot description, "Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water." That phrase could be applied to any Jack, any Jill, any hill, any pail, any fetching methodology, and any need for water. Events aren't detail — and it's detail that this enyclopedia cares about.

Meta-fiction is okay narrative. Is it? It means we have to separate the meta from the fiction. We have to declare which parts of the book aren't meant to be read literally and which are. As Boblipton has stated upthread, we can't have a book be halfway in and halfway out of our borders. It's either all in or all out.

" '... impossible to place at a particular point in continuity without contradicting something established elsewhere.' Guys, that's the definition of anti-canonical." You've missed the point of what I was saying. The author is telling us, flatly, that at the time he wrote it he knew the story was going to be out of continuity with several stories. He intended it to be out of continuity. This is different from Mawdryn in that Grimwade wasn't trying to be out of continuity. He, Saward, JNT and everybody else were just ignorant of continuity. And in series 5/6 it's a point of the narrative that Amy has dual lives, and that her "life doesn't make sense". In other words, it's a part of continuity that her existence is discontinuous, as proved by the Night and the Doctor sketches. I don't actually think this Amy example has much relevance at all to Infinity. What's different about Infinity is that the author knew full well as he wrote the work that he was creating something discontinuous. By trying to include all these little nods to everything he could put his hands on — and particularly things that weren't a part of canon, such as plot elements from unmade stories — he knew he was creating something that "fit" nowhere.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">14:25: Tue 01 May 2012 

Just to go back over something, CzechOut are you saying because an author deliberately wrote something knowingly that it would contradict common continuity that we should disallow it?

Would that not also nullify works like Verdigris, while I don't recall if Magrs stated in an interview that he did so, the content of it and its references make it quite difficult to place the events accurately due to the various references to stories.

There's also John Peel's War of the Daleks which is written to nullify the events of Remembrance of the Daleks through gigantic retcons, none of which really line up with any other story. --Tangerineduel / talk 15:03, May 1, 2012 (UTC)

If metafictional applicability were cause for eliminating something from the wiki, we'd have to delete every instance of the "Doctor Who?" running joke. When the Doctor told little Amelia about his adventures in The Big Bang, it was also a commentary on the ongoing adventure of Doctor Who — but it simultaneously worked in the story's plot. I don't see why the metafictional aspects of TID are any different.

If continuity is, as Terrance Dicks put it, "what the writer can remember", then TID is in continuity, because later authors referred to it and wrote plots which develop out of it. And I'd maintain that the apparent discontinuities of The Infinity Doctors are just as much part of the novels' overarching narrative as Amy's contradictory pasts. Heck, it's right there on the book's back cover:

Sing about the past again, and sing that same old song.
Tell me what you know, so I can tell you that you're wrong.

Maybe the Gallifrey of TID is the same as the Gallifrey of other stories, and maybe it isn't. But it's hardly alone in that: the Gallifrey of the comics, for example, bears very little resemblance to that shown on television. But we include material from the comics, appropriately sourced, so that readers can make up their own minds about what 'counts'. I don't see how Parkin's remarks change that at all. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 02:08, May 2, 2012 (UTC)

An afterthought: if a story's metafictional content means that it can't also be part of the fiction, we'd better start getting rid of just about everything with Iris Wildthyme in it. <Groucho>Personally, I never metafiction I didn't like.</Groucho> —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 19:37, May 2, 2012 (UTC)

Guys, I can go ten rounds with you on all this stuff, and we'd have fun, but we probably would spend so much time lookin at the rabbit holes that we'd end up goin' hungry. Let's take it as read that I in no way agree with either you, Josiah or you, Tangerineduel. I've spent a week or so trying to convince you of my position, but to little avail. So let's turn it around. I think you boys should spend some time convincing me.

I think — and by that, I mean it's my opinion —  you've got to agree that Parkin himself has said that he was writing something that didn't fit into continuity — precisely because it was trying to fit everything and the kitchen sink into the novel. I think you also have to agree that he's said that the star of the book isn't the mainstream Eighth Doctor. He even shows us on his personal website that he is, to this day, ambiguous about who stars in the book, since he classes the book as both First and Eighth Doctor. Every single damn person who has ever written about this book professionally always hedges their bets as to whether it actually occurs in the DWU. I think you further have to agree that there is a degree to which this book is definitely metaphor, not reality.

So explain to me why something like this should be given the same weight as a story that is unambiguously intended as a narratively ordinary speck of continuity? What is so damned special about this alternate reality that you guys wanna make the writing of articles about Gallifrey so much more difficult and confusing than it needs to be? Cause I don't understand why I should be forced to accept anything in this book as "real". Everything in my bones tells me it's like that great Star Wars Tales story where Darth Vader meets Darth Maul on Tatooine. Why is it not that? What's the logical grounds on which I can accept the description of Gallifrey in this book, but not the description of Tersurus in The Curse of Fatal Death? (And please don't use the words, "Because Curse of Fatal Death is parodic".) What makes this account of Time Lords more believable than those we see in Exile? At this point in the discussion, I really don't understand why this book is such a sacred cow, when it bears all of the hallmarks of other things we've readily eschewed.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">00:57: Thu 03 May 2012 

As I noted above, I've never read it, but allow me to anticipate: it's a well written work of fiction that fills in a blank area in people's vision. I don't find that a compelling argument, but some might. On another point, some people have accepted it as part of their personal canon. Without saying anything about the right or wrong of this particular issue, a decision to remove this from canon could be seen as a statement that those who accept it as canon are wrong, just as a decision to leave it in canon could be seen as a statement that you are wrong.

Of course, neither course would be a statement about one or the other. However the distinction is rarely so clear when one is in the middle of a heated argument. For example, there's been a lot of discussion of the metafictional qualities of this work. As metafictional details concern themselves with things outside the incidents of the story, it has no reference to the in-universe "facts" of the story, any more than, say the references to Narnia in The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe: perhaps a "behind the scenes" note, but no more. Boblipton ^{talk to me} 01:23, May 3, 2012 (UTC)

Thank you, Bob. You're absolutely right about the metafictional elements: they're really irrelevant to this discussion, a complete red herring. However, you're wrong in saying that I want this included because of its quality, or because of my own vision of the Doctor Who universe (I abhor the phrase "personal canon", since it's a complete oxymoron, but that's neither here nor there). I want this included because there is textual evidence in several other novels, both prior and subsequent, that it should be included. The Infinity Doctors either introduces or gives key information about Patience, Savar, Marnal, the I, Daniel Joyce, Larna! Saldaamir and probably many others, all of whom appear in other novels; and in most of those cases, their other appearances are informed by their roles in TID. In several of those cases, removing TID would critically diminish the entries for these characters. This, I think, is what Parkin means when he says that "References in Seeing I, Unnatural History, The Taking of Planet 5, Father Time and The Gallifrey Chronicles all make it clear that The Infinity Doctors (or at the very least events identical to it) took place in the "real" Doctor Who universe." And I maintain that it's not impossible to reconcile either the events or the details of TID with other stories in the Doctor Who universe.

That's not the case with The Curse of Fatal Death. The Rowan Atkinson Doctor clearly says that he's in his ninth incarnation, and he then proceeds to regenerate four more times. It's just not possible to reconcile that with, say, the Matt Smith Doctor explicitly saying that he's in his eleventh incarnation. The uncertainties of TID are of a completely different quality from that.

It's possible that we're at an impasse here. CzechOut, Tardis1963 and (I think) OS25 say it should absolutely go; Tangerineduel, 70.71 and I say equally strongly that it should stay. To me, that looks like "no consensus". Now, on Wikipedia, "no consensus" defaults to "keep", but that may not be the case here. (I don't know whether a precedent was set while I was inactive here.) But I think that we're not likely to get much further trying to convince each other on the grounds of TID; perhaps we might get farther on the question of "what do we do if there is no consensus in an inclusion debate?" —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 02:45, May 3, 2012 (UTC)

Okay, my last take on this: I don't think it's our role as wiki editors to declare things as canon or noncanon. First of all, we don't have the authority; only the BBC has that authority, and they've declined to exercise it. Any vote from us boils down ultimately to "it's uncanonical because we say so," and that's not very satisfying. What does our vote on the matter prove other than the personal opinions of a relatively small group of fans? It's fair to point out any continuity problems that a given source represents, but in my opinion not meaningful or relevant to say "we don't think this is canon." Why should the casual reader care what we think, or how we voted? So absolutely we should point out that Lance Parkin thought of his story as taking place in a separate continuity, but we don't have the authority as a community to say "this isn't a legitimate source." I think that applies equally to something like Dimensions in Time, Scream of the Shalka, and Curse of the Fatal Death. Sure, they may be difficult to reconcile with other sources, and that's relevant to mention, but our opinion is simply our opinion. Why should anyone else care that random people on the internet took a vote? I say we should present the issue to the reader and let them decide for themselves. Our opinions aren't relevant. -- 24.231.182.206^{talk to me} 15:54, May 3, 2012 (UTC)