Inclusion debates/The Case for Death Comes to Time's Validity
Death Comes to Time remains currently invalid on the Tardis Data Core.This was done by CzechOut and had ramifications stretching out to the way the general populace of Doctor Who fans views this story. I wish to discuss why this eight-year-old debate has changed since the implementation of validity over canon.
Why it harms the Wiki to cover this story as invalid[[edit] | [edit source]]
Last time there was an (admittedly-ill-argued) attempt to change the Wiki’s coverage of the story to valid, the closing admin (now-former administrator User:Amorkuz) claimed that the debate was pointless either way, because it would not meaningfully impact the Wiki’s coverage of the story if the {{Invalid}} tag were removed from the page.
This was yet another pointless debate. It was held for no other reason than to have this debate. The story is already covered by the wiki. Its page is more extensive than those of many valid stories. Even if there were some reasons to change the status of this story from "covered invalid" to "covered valid," what would have been achieved by that? Beyond a successful inclusion debate, that is? Is it desired that the Seventh Doctor page necessarily states, "According to another account, the Seventh Doctor died there and then"? And each future consequent Doctor's page states at the end, "According to another account, this Doctor never existed"?
We’ll cover, in another section, the matter of whether it’s relevant that the Doctor seemingly dies. But as a matter of fact, whether Death Comes to Time is considered valid on the Wiki does change rather a lot about what we can and can’t cover of the story on the Wiki. Of course it does. That’s, unless I’m very confused about some very important things, what having invalid sources means.
Case in point, the mess that is The_Brigadier_(Death_Comes_to_Time). The invalidity of the story forced us to create separate pages for its versions of characters (because if we can’t have the Doctor’s Death Comes to Time actions in the biography section of Seventh Doctor, then that was the only way to give them the in-depth coverage they deserved)), but the situation turns into a Catch-22 with the poor Brig: since he is little more than an extended cameo in the story, we somehow have to act as though this mysterious man who introduces himself as “the Brigadier” is appearing for the very first time, as though we have no idea what his real name even is. Which is obviously nonsense.
Death Comes to Time may not seem to fit particularly well with the TV Movie, although wait a tick. But it is overwhelmingly obvious that it at the very least takes place in the same universe as the Classic Series of ‘’Doctor Who’’. Trying to cover ‘’Death Comes to Time’’ as if it existed in a vacuum, rather than as a continuation of the adventures of the same Time Lord whom we saw tried by powerful, mystical Time Lords for his interference in ‘’The War Games’’, and form a strong bond with Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart throughout the Pertwee era, turns it into a garbled and frequently confusing non-story where elderly men in unfamiliar military outfits show up for no reason and refuse to introduce themselves.
Further, the failed thread linked earlier may have been mistaken in its assumption that the reference to Death Comes to Time in Zagreus was blatant enough to revalidate the story on its own merits, but the fact remains that varyingly-subtle references to Death Comes to Time in later, unambiguously valid stories are dime-a-dozen. There’s Zagreus; there’s a recent and blatant reference in the high-profile novel At Childhood's End; the Minister of Chance makes a cameo in The Tomorrow Windows; and Tannis is referenced in The Gallifrey Chronicles. This latter cameo, incidentally, means that our Tannis page must currently consist of a minuscule sentence about what we know about the guy from valid story, and an unworkably huge behind-the-scenes section to cover any and everything that people actually want to know about the man — so there’s yet another example of the way in which covering this story as invalid very much impacts its coverage on the Wiki, negatively so.
Plus, notice anything about two of those four references, perchance? That’s right: half of these references to Death Comes to Time are in Eighth Doctor stories. The admin, in his closure of the earlier thread, might have said the story remained invalid…
…until a quote from Dan Freedman is found, where he explains how his killing of the Seventh Doctor and disparaging of the Eighth was meant to integrate his story into DWU at the time.
but obviously, authors of valid stories featuring the Eighth Doctor didn’t wait for such a quote to integrate this supposedly anti-Eighth-Doctor story into the ongoing adventures of the Eighth Doctor.
Why this story passes Rule 4[[edit] | [edit source]]
I found the fact that this story’s invalidity was decided back when the Wiki used the concept of “canon” willy-nilly —- when the fact that a story was or was not referenced by later stories could be as, or more, important than authorial intent — and that it was not reevaluated upon the adoption of a new system, very counterintuitive indeed. Reading through the original debate, it becomes clear that it’s actually where much of the validity policies we now know were ironed out, and given that closing admin CzechOut had to point out “Anyway, guys, this thread is about Death Comes to Time” in his succinct closing statement, it’s easy to see how in the effervescent atmosphere of those early days of the Wiki, the actual facts of the case might have been analysed a bit too lightly by the time people even agreed what the relevant facts were.
In this section, we’ll look through the Four Little Rules and how they are met without question.
Rule 1 - It is a story. This passes with flying colors.
Rule 2 - As this was produced by the BBC itself and no evidence has been found to show they didn’t attain the proper licensing, I would say this passes as well.
Rule 3 - Released as both a webcast and an audio. This passes.
Rule 4 - This, as always, is where doubt starts to come into play. For all that the original 2012 (!) debate followed an archaic form of our validity system, it did, to its credit, feature a couple of quotes whose use in the discussion was along the lines of how we would, these days, examine a Rule 4 quote. However, this does not mean that they are convincing Rule 4 quotes, at least in my opinion. No offence to people who participated in the discussion then; it was a different time with different policies. But it’s time for us to give them another look.
A quote from Nev Fountain illustrates the following position:
[I]f you want to accept it as canon, you can. or not. Whatever you prefer.
As we do not use canon any longer, this hardly matters on the surface. It does tell you, however, that their stance on “the DWU” is, in effect, very similar to our stance. We do not dictate what people can and cannot deem personally canon, but as stated above, creators having their stories explicitly set in the DWU have on countless times referenced it. The script editor merety states that personal opinion is exactly what it says on the tin.
Nothing has been said to imply that this story is in a wholly-separate continuity outside the confines of the DWU. Fountain merely joined Paul Cornell and Steven Moffat in arguing that in a fictional world as big and complicated ridiculous as the Doctor Who Universe, it’s a fool’s errand to want to make everything fit, and that fans are free to pick and choose what is true in their personal imaginary DWU.
In that old Forums debate, CzechOut also picks apart some quotes from Dan Freedman himself:
"No regeneration scene, no continuity references, no nothing. You've got to get to know this character and his companions again."
Freedman also says he already had someone cast "theoretically" as the "next Doctor" for his proposal of a new series. This means, as far as I can make out, that the death in DCTT simply wouldn't have been narratively respected.
Had his proposal, instead of RTD's, been the one that carried the day, he wouldn't have even used DCTT as a part of the backstory.
Again we see this assumption that the Doctor’s death is really supposed to be final, which is frankly a bit odd when the Doctor calmly replies “I’ve been dead before” when someone points out what he’s doing might kill him. But besides that, is it just me who reads this Freedman quote as the exact opposite of what CzechOut is saying it means? Consider: once you’ve created a non-TV story where the Doctor “dies” in a way where he disappears, ready to pop up again in the future through unknown means, then is skipping a regeneration and just reintroducing a new Doctor with no set number not the only way you could keep your TV continuation in continuity with the non-TV spinoff? It’d certainly have been more respectful of Freedman’s to his own EU work than Steven Moffat was to his first take on Sally Sparrow, or Paul Cornell to the prose version of Human Nature.
Similarly, when it comes to “ignoring McGann”, reintroducing a new Doctor with no regeneration scene, few continuity references, and no clear in-universe evidence of which number their incarnation is… that’s, er, precisely what Russell T Davies ended up doing in ‘’Rose’’, isn’t it? To the point that Moffat was later able to retcon a whole new incarnation in-between McGann and Eccleston when it suited him. It’s just the common-sense way of reviving a ten-year-cancelled sci-fi show and not having it bomb.
CzechOut, after the aforementioned passage, also speculates on whether Freedman’s Doctor Who revival might have been a straight continuity reboot in the vein of the Leekley Bible, with a new First Doctor. Perhaps so, though again that is by no means clear. But if that’s what the quote means, then again, the potential TV revival ignoring DCtT would also have ignored the whole of the Classic Series with it. Because DCtT is in the same universe as the Classic Series, and ignoring one goes together with ignoring the other.
A reminder that validity isn’t canonicity[[edit] | [edit source]]
The closing statements we have already quoted twice seem agog at the prospect that…
…the Seventh Doctor page necessarily states, "According to another account, the Seventh Doctor died there and then"? And each future consequent Doctor's page states at the end, "According to another account, this Doctor never existed"?
There is an obvious answer. It goes something like this: “sorry to break it to you, but the Third Doctor page already has two different irreconcilable accounts of how that Doctor died, the one from television and the one from Interference.” One story saying the Doctor died one way, and another saying the Doctor died some other way, is just a thing that happens in the DWU sometimes. Nor does Death Comes to Time annul post-Seventh Doctors, necessarily; no body is found after the “death scene”, and the Seventh Doctor says that he “has died before”, so I rather doubt that Dan Freedman intended to close off future regenerations.
Later on in the same closing post, the admin argued that…
(…) completely rewriting the very basics of the universe, like making the Doctor a human inventor or making Time Lords homeless time gods, unambiguously places the story outside the wide but not infinite bounds of what can count as Doctor Who.
Well, the quip about the Doctor being a human inventor is I think clearly a fun dig at the Peter Cushing movies, which are their own conundrum, but here’s the thing: as casual perusing of The Doctor's early life and The Doctor's species will show, there exist unquestionably valid accounts from the sixties, some of them televised, of the Doctor being a human inventor called Dr Who.
As for the Time Lords being “homeless time gods”, I would also advise that Amorkuz (were he here) or anyone else of similar opinion have a look at the page Fraction: there is significant evidence in Death Comes to Time itself, and already acknowledged by our coverage of it, that the Time Lords of the Fraction are a special case, and that the less epic bureaucrats of The Deadly Assassin still exist in the background somewhere, or used to exist. But more to the point: Time Lords having all kinds of godlike powers over Time and reality is something already present to various extents in The War Games, The Five Doctors, The Test of Time, Silver Nemesis, The End of Time and more. The Time Lords can hardly be considered “the very basics of the [Doctor Who] Universe” when there exists, as we have demonstrated, a bunch of stories where the Doctor is explicitly a human, plus, lest we forget, fosixur years’ worth of stories (from 1963 to 1969) where the concept of Time Lords didn’t even exist yet. Any argument that Freedman is knowingly setting himself completely outside Doctor Who, besides, again falls flat against the fact that this is a story which expects us to know who the Brigadier is and to care about him and his relationship to the Doctor. Is it possible for every Doctor Who story yet released to have happened within the backstory of Death Comes to Time? Perhaps not, but neither can you say that about The Klepton Parasites, or indeed The Five Doctors. The point is that it is, like any other DWU story, a story predicated upon the fact that its Doctor, Ace and Brigadier are the same people that viewers have already been following for years; it is part and parcel of the gleefully contradictory palimpsest of Doctor Who.
The Timeless Children, to pick a very recent example, could easily be discounted from continuity by a close-minded Wiki for whom intentional messing about with “the lore of the Universe” would be a capital sin. With its total lack of mention of Rassilon or Omega, redefinition of the word Shobogan, and intentionally blasphemous ideas about where the Doctor came from, it would take days to list all the stories which Chris Chibnall knowingly contradicted. Yet it would be lunacy to suggest that because it doesn’t adhere to one conception of who the Time Lords are, it is not part of the DWU. ”Canon” is not the same thing as “DWU”.
Also drawing from recent and televised examples, let’s back up a bit: how is the Seventh Doctor’s seemingly-definitive death, though given an asterisk in the formof “I’ve been dead before”, any different from Steven Moffat giving Missy a “final death” in The Doctor Falls in the full knowledge that Chibnall, or some further showrunner, would someday bring back the Master, likely without even addressing how Missy escaped? Moffat recently published a quote stating that he saw no need for an official explanation of how we go from The Doctor Falls to Spyfall and fans are free to make up their own minds. Does that phrasing perhaps look familiar?
Conclusion[[edit] | [edit source]]
I hope to have demonstrated that it does the Wiki tangible harm as a resource on the Doctor Who universe to cover Death Comes to Time as invalid, especially (though not only) when even more references to it in valid sources than existed at the time of the previous debates keep piling up.
Being that covering DCtT on the Wiki as valid is desirable, the question became: is it feasible by the Wiki’s policies? Again, I honestly think the answer is yes. The quotes from Nev Fountain and Dan Freedman were overinterpreted — understandably so, but overinterpreted. They are in fact wholly consistent with what this Wiki considers “Rule-4-passing”.
And as for the fact that the Doctor seemingly dies and that the Time Lords don’t act like what we’re used to… then by those standards, logic dictates that Interference and The Doctor Falls and The Timeless Children should be made invalid too. No one wants that, and that’s not what the Wiki’s policies are all about.
Thank you for your attention in reading through this monster of a post, but this is a thorn in the Wiki’s side that had to be plucked eventually.
