User:Scrooge MacDuck/The Lost Closing Post

For context, please see the original thread, at Thread:270437, and my announcement linking to this page, at this link.
Thank you for reading.

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Introduction

Alright. This may be a big step, but with the apparent necessity to clear out the Forums, so that we have a clean slate for whatever may come next — I'm closing this one as generally successful. TV: The Curse of Fatal Death is now a valid source for the purposes of writing in-universe articles — within certain guidelines, about which more later.

The thing is that in the five whole months this thread has been open, the only opposition has been from User:Najawin playing "Devil's Advocate". Not a single user has raised themselves in actual opposition to this shift in policy. And that shouldn't surprise us, considering the strength of User:Borisashton's well-researched opening post.

I'm going to divide this closing post in three sections: Part 1 will address Najawin's devil's advocate objections, Part 2 will clarify some things about T:VS, and Part 3 will give a clearer roadmap to moving forward.

Part 1: Addressing Najawin's Objections (Not That He Believes Them)

“The Old Discussion”

As the first section of his hypothetical objections to the OP, User:Najawin writes:

It's stated in Thread:267931 that even though the terminology was distinct and the concepts were not quite the same back in 2011/2012, the rudimentary ideas of validity was still present, even if it was argued through the lens of canonicity. (…) It was just a mess. So we can't rule out everything said in the old forum thread just because the language used is archaic, we have to carefully sift through to find what is and isn't relevantNajawin

He's right, of course; the shift from "canon" language to "validity" language wasn't as easy as flicking a switch. Even when the Wiki got Tardis:Canon policy to its current state and established Tardis:Valid sources from its ashes, the last word had not been said — I'd estimate that it was only with Thread:212365 that we finally expunged the last of "canon"-based thinking from our validity policies and procedures.

Equally, however, this is irrelevant. The "messiness" of the original debate (as Najawin puts it), all on its own, could arguably have warranted reopening the debate. But the thing is, User:Borisashton presented oodles of new evidence warranting a retrial. Whether the old thread was up to scratch doesn't even enter into it.

“The New Discussion” and 'alternative Doctors'

Next, Najawin argues that the Russell T Davies social media interaction is a useless non sequitur because it also applies to the Shalka Doctor, and yet, due to certain authorial quotes, Scream of the Shalka is unlikely ever to pass T:VS.

Again, he is right, but — so what? The quote is only meant to establish that the matter is more relevant to current Doctor Who (or to then-current Doctor Who, anyway; "Doctor Who: Lockdown!" is, by this point, pretty clearly over). It's an aside emphasizing that this problem is genuinely something we should be thinking about, not part of the object-level argument itself.

“Filming the Actual Programme?”

I mean, this is just an obvious response to make, the same sentence juxtaposes "filming the actual programme" with "a little sketch". All she's saying here is that this was an extensive filming process, not that she's filming the actual show.

That's true. What we have here is a fundamental confusion.

The Curse of Fatal Death is placed by authorial intent within the DWU.

That does not mean it's necessarily a part of the Doctor Who television series. Nobody but some higher-up in the BBC could possibly have a say about that. But you know what isn't part of the Doctor Who television series, either? TV: A Girl's Best Friend. Or, if you want something with the Doctor in it, TV: Death of the Doctor.

Julia Sawalha's comment establishes an atmosphere on-set that Curse of Fatal Death was more than "a little sketch", which is interesting when read in light of Moffat's comments. But it doesn't matter if it fails to prove that she's "filming the actual show", because that's not really what's up for debate here.

See also the section of Borisashton's OP entitled “What defines a 'real' episode?”.

“What makes a parody?”

Like any word, "parody" can have several meanings. The meaning we care about in Tardis:Valid sources when we say "parody isn't allowed" hews closer to the dictionary definition than Najawin seems to realise.

PARODY: An imitation or version of something that falls far short of the real thing; a travesty. Alternatively, an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect."Parody"

By some loose definition, The Curse of Fatal Death is probably some kind of parody. But is it that kind of parody? The kind of parody we care about? That question can be answered in several ways.

If we ask: "Is Curse of Fatal Death a real episode of Doctor Who?", then as quoted by Borisashton in the OP, the Moff himself admits otherwise. In that sense, Curse of Fatal Death is a parody of the Doctor Who TV series.

But by that same standard, TV: Twice Upon a Time is a "parody" of the William Hartnell era of Doctor Who. It fits both prongs of the definition: it exaggerates some traits of it for comedic effect (the First Doctor starts spewing misogynistic remarks every five minutes to lampoon his era's occasional failings in that respect), and it obviously falls short of being a new episode of Season 4.

The reason this doesn't make Twice Upon a Time invalid is that Twice Upon a Time isn't trying to be an episode of Season 4. It's a Twelfth Doctor story. And while it's a parody of a First Doctor story, it's earnest in being the thing it's actually intended to be: a Twelfth Doctor story.

So since we're not trying to prove The Curse of Fatal Death is an episode of Doctor Who, but merely a story set in the DWU — let's ask a different question: is Curse of Fatal Death a parody of a story set in the DWU?

When something's that kind of parody, it shows. Various episodes of Doctor Who?’s parodical nature is emphasised by the way in which the setting itself loses all coherence — the Doctor is on-set filming an episode of his own show, yet treats the monster as real; the Sixth Doctor cites Roberta Tovey as his archnemesis; etc.

By contrast, Moffat on the set of Curse has compunctions about ad-libs naming the Doctor as "Dr Who" — even though, as he points out in the same quote, he knows there are official stories which call him that. He is going above and beyond not to break the rules of the setting, even if he is stretching the rules of an episode of the show.

Part 2: About Canon Thinking

This Wiki's statement of intent

We're not here to define a canon.

We're not here to tell you which stories "count" and which don't.

Really, we're not.

We're here to document what everyone has ever said about the DWU while

• having the rights to do so (that's Rule 2),
• doing it in the proper manner (Rules 1 and 3), and
• meaning it (Rule 4).

We're here to choose a certain body of DW-related work, and, whenever it says anything about a given imaginary concept like "the Second Doctor", "Raston Warrior Robot" or "City of the Saved", we're to take notes and put all that info on one easily-browsed page.

We're like librarian monks sorting scrolls by what they're about — filing accounts into the section labelled, for example, "Tersurus", if they mention that word. Sometimes the writers of those scrolls reference each other, and sometimes they viciously disagree. But unless we're zealots, we're not going to choose one scroll over its fellow, and burn the other one. If at all possible, we file both alongside one another. Patrons of our library are free to read both and draw their own conclusion.

Canon Thinking? In your brain? It's more likely than you think

Speaking to the future readers: even with everything you've been shown, perhaps you're skeptical. Perhaps you're thinking:

Come on. You're treating the story with fart jokes, the Rowan Atkinson TV pecial where Dalek bumps are compared to breasts, as…………You?

And there you trailed off. In my thought experiment. Because you were about to say "canon," weren't you?

But we're not here to give a definitive account of what "did" or "didn't" "happen" in that imaginary construct called the Doctor Who universe. If you don't want to believe, in the version of the DWU that exists in your head, that the Doctor once compared Dalek bumps to breasts, you are free not to believe it. I sure don't believe everything on this site. The Eleventh Doctor in my head never kissed a married lesbian against her will. I know some people's mental Twelfth Doctor didn't turn into a woman. Quite plainly, Chris Chibnall's mental First Doctor wasn't the reincarnation of the Other.

Before you go saying Tardis Wik is off its rocker with this closure, banish this type of thinking from your mind and look at the facts.

"Should" we validate TCoFD? (Hint: yes.)

The facts are this:

• Steven Moffat wrote Curse with the intent that it took place in the DWU.
• Curse had a commercial license from the BBC to use the Doctor, the Master and so on, so we're going to have pages about it no matter what.
• Several later, already-valid stories reference Curse.

The latter fact, of course, doesn't matter diddly-squat for T:VS, but it does matter to common sense. If AUDIO: The Bekdel Test contains what is plainly a continuity reference to TV: The Curse of Fatal Death, we should be able to say so in the "Continuity" section of our page on Bekdel Test. But we can't do that unless Curse is a valid source.

We can't make invalid stories valid just because they're referenced by valid stories — but it should make us want really badly to be able to cover them as valid.

Again, there is no sanctity of canon to be preserved, here, no One True Story of the DWU. Our pages about the Eighth Doctor and Ninth Doctor are already a mess of conflicting accounts: one humble note that maybe the Ninth Doctor looked like Atkinson and was planning to retire early isn't going to make it any more "impure" than it already is.

What matters how well we're able to cover the various works of fiction which we have pages about. And quite plainly, recognising the obvious fact that that line in The Taking of Planet 5 is a prequel to the Tersurus bits of Curse of Fatal Death allows us to cover both Taking of Planet 5 and Curse of Fatal Death better than if we insist that these are two stories about two completely different universes that happen to have trademarks in common.

Of course, those arguments also hold for Scream of the Shalka. It's very silly that we're not "allowed" to say who Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows) is supposed to be. But after lengthy debate, it was found that there was no wiggle room for Scream of the Shalka to pass muster. Ditto for Death Comes to Time. Both these webcasts are rightly invalid, but this is unfortunate. It's an acceptable, but annoying, side-effect of the policies we use to make sure we don't find ourselves covering The Final Script — not intended performance.

With Curse of Fatal Death, User:Borisashton has shown us that we have that wiggle room. We can bring Curse back into the fold fully, without forcing ourselves to write about how afraid the Sixth Doctor was of Roberta Tovey. We should be leaping with joy.

Unless, that is, some of us still think in terms of "canon" and "the real DWU", as opposed to "valid sources for the writing of in-universe articles on our specific Wiki".

Part 3: Practical concerns

Ninth Doctor?

User:Borisashton spends some of the OP arguing that the Atkinson Doctor may not really be "the Ninth Doctor", and pointing out that, for that matter, the Christopher Eccleston Doctor took forever to be confirmed in-universe as the same. (And after he was, things became complicated again anyway.)

He fails to make the clear connection between those two facts that follows: we don't necessarily need it spelled out in so many words what a Doctor's name is. "This is his ninth body" in a TV story coming off the heels of the TV Movie means we're dealing with a Ninth Doctor unless otherwise specified, for the same reason that the woman introduced at the end of Twice Upon a Time was the Thirteenth Doctor by default.

This is just a lot of sound and fury trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. A bit louder for the people in the back: canon doesn't exist, at least as far as we're concerned. We don't need elaborate theories of how the Doctor can have several regenerations labelled "his ninth body". We can just report the fact that one source said X and another said Y.

(Oh, and as near as I can tell it has never been codified why we can call Whittakr the Thirteenth Doctor even without a valid source for the phrase — but: while Thread:238917 isn't quite about this at all, it's probably exemplar of the same philosophy that says T:NO RW prevents us from nicking Marco Polo's birth date from Wikipedia, but does not prevent us from, I dunno. From saying that a Third Doctor story which mentions "a man with a goatee called the Master" is probably talking about Delgado, not James Dreyfus.)

Why Eccleston's still King

And even all that is seeing a problem where there is none. The Doctor's ninth incarnation handily demonstrates something we've known for years: valid sources tell us that there's something screwy about the Eighth Doctor's regeneration. They tell us so, in exactly so many words.

The very same account also confirms the "man with big ears" as the "final", "primary" Ninth Doctor, even though all the other ones are real too, somehow, someplace. So we don't even need to break T:NPOV to still give primacy to the Ninth Doctor introduced in TV: Rose and consider him the primary topic: in-universe sources guide our hand.

Again, pages like Ninth Doctor 2 (The Tomorrow Windows) are going to exist anyway. Within our ability, least we could do is help them make a bit of sense compared to the obvious intent of the writers. Making sense of Eighth Doctor#Regeneration has been a lost cause since the TV Movie failed to spark a series, and there's the truth.

Conclusion

Well, there you have it. I've thought about this a long time, and given all possible weight to what arguments were raised against the validity (not canonicity!) of TV: The Curse of Fatal Death, and I say: Boris is right. We can deem it a valid source, and still look T:VS in the eye.

And, for the reasons outlined above, we really, really, really should. There's just no good reason save "canon" why you wouldn't want to consider Curse of Fatal Death a valid source on a Wiki which calls Genesis of Evil and Doctor Who and the Time War valid sources. There are plausible reasons why you'd be unable to. But there's no scenario where you should be happy about it.

So this is it. It's valid. There.

What remains is implementation. The Master (The Curse of Fatal Death) will need to be made a redirect to The Master, which will have to be updated accordingly. Invalid tags must be removed, appearances list corrected. Maybe we can make the page Tersuron look a little less… absolutely dysfunctional… than it does at the moment with one line's valid info and a BTS section full of the actual data.

That's up to you, the editors.