RogerAckroydLives wrote: Indeed, Dicks does often "correct" production and continuity errors. What actually occurs is down to personal taste, but novelisations are not relevant to this wiki. Yes, First Frontier can be construed to dismiss DiT, and similar things can be construed same from various references. But errors are errors, and choices are choices, so no retroactive changes are "better" than the original. Everyone can have their own opinion, but this wiki cannot decide that an adaptation can act as a "correction," it can only include new info. And therefore this thread is becoming a little irrelevant.
You seem to misunderstand. Dicks' act of writing these patch-ups makes it an official explanation. Official novels write in stone what actually happened. I'll give you an example. The novel The Eight Doctors sees the Eighth Doctor losing his memory and so he has to go up and down his timeline to meet himselves and restore it.
He bumps into the First Doctor during The Unearthly Child episode 100,000 BC. One of the cliffhangers during this episode is that the First Doctor lifts a rock and is prepared to cave a caveman's head in with it. The following episode, we're just expected to believe that the Doctor has simply put it down and all's okay?
Dick's writes in a scene where the Eighth Doctor meets the First Doctor during this scene. The First Doctor mind-links with the Eighth Doctor and the First Doctor gets a chance to reflect on the path he's going down. This reflection causes him to remember who he is (which, on retrospect is a nice metaphoric link to the adventure the Eighth Doctor's going through) and he puts down the rock.
That's an official plot from an official novel. Between those two televised scenes, that event happened in the Doctor's timeline. Unfortunately with Doctor Who, people seem to pick and choose what they wish to believe but this scene happened. This Wiki doesn't treat the numerous scenes as a "correction", rather a valid event from a valid source. It was never wrong in the first place haha.
Where does that relate to this discussion? We've wandered off a bit. It relates to this discussion because just because something looks like it's breaking the fourth wall, it doesn't mean it is. It's just a visual representation of something else. It could be that the Doctor's putting us in Clara's place and giving us a glimpse at what it's like to hold a "conversation" with the Doctor from the companion's perspective rather than us being the fly on the wall.
Or, it could be him talking to himself and we represent that other part of his brain that he's talking to just to satisfy himself. He does it a lot. Such as in Partners in Crime and in The Mark of the Rani. Until we know, and until we're given a valid explanation from a valid source, we can't treat this an a breaking of the fourth wall.
That's how I see it.