User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-2.26.183.189-20170416191252/@comment-188432-20170809015723

The BBC website, as DWM 500 tells us, billed it as "an exclusive scene from a future episode". This was a bit of a sham, but it's still how it was publicly announced. The determination of just how much of it was used is therefore relevant to validity

So it's important to examine what Moffat actually said in episode 1 of The Aftershow. He does not say it fits. He says quite clearly at around the 4'05" mark, that he "wasn't sure at all" whether he was going to reuse Friend from the Future. He then says he tried to fit it in. And when he did, he put the whole thing in, and "it didn't work". It had to be edited to make sense. That means the production team made editorial decisions about what to keep and what to throw away. .

We honor those kind of choices around here. The full Friend from the Future is best considered a deleted scene. And this wiki has long held that deleted scenes don't count.

So Friend from the Future, in its entirety, is invalid on that basis alone.

However, I take on board Amorkuz' points about production intent at the time of shooting "Friend". DWMSE 45 does indeed establish this as a promo in the minds of key produciton personnel. DWM 511 tells us definitively that it was Pearl's audition scene that got filmed. It was thus never meant to be a true story, just a scene. And DWM 500 tells us that the BBC explicitly commissioned it as an "announcement" of the new companion, which Moffat then described as "a funny little moment". So even if you think that it doesn't matter at all how it was treated by the makers of The Pilot, it's still not a story and therefore invalid.