User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-121.45.54.78-20130925110520/@comment-5442547-20130929234113

CzechOut wrote: Yeah, i think my question wasn't really, "What's current practice?" so much as, "Is what we do now a good thing?" I personally don't think that a character appears in an episode unless the actor that plays them gets paid. I mean, if all you do is show a flashback and reuse a person's appearance non-interactively, I'm not sure why that would be any more important to recognise than verbally recounting a story. Does Liz Shaw appear in Death of the Doctor? No, but we're reminded of her through dialogue. I'm not sure that the Tenth Doctor's later appearance in that story through flashback is more important or notable than the Liz callback. Basically flashbacks that reuse old footage are weird cases where the character appears in-vision, but the actor does not in any sense make a legal "appearance".

Now of course, there's the Trials and Tribble-ations or The Name of the Doctor exception, In those cases you're reusing footage, not paying the original actors an appearance fee, but I think they do count because other actors actually interact with that footage. It's not at all a flashback, but rather the modern characters are experiencing the older events.

Or for a non Doctor example, the Beatles do appear in Fanfare for the Common Men. Nyssa and the Doctor see them. They just aren't heard.