And not entirely unrealistic. The main reason I've never grown a beard is because it'd make me look way too much like my father.
Frobisher is Canon!
- Thread starter StCoop
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And not entirely unrealistic. The main reason I've never grown a beard is because it'd make me look way too much like my father.
Remember also that pic of Sean Pertwee cosplaying the Third Doctor from a year or two ago?
I think their vocal resemblance is even more uncanny than their facial resemblance.
Anyway, I guess we now have five actors who have played both the Doctor and another character (or two), not counting impostor/duplicate Doctors or implied future incarnations of the Doctor -- Hartnell (Abbot of Amboise), Troughton (Salamander), Colin Baker (Maxil), Capaldi (Caecilius/Frobisher), and David Bradley (Solomon). Also Tennant if you count Big Finish audio roles.
Also, both Romanas had doubles, come to think of it -- and both of them were princesses whose names mean "star," Princess Strella and Princess Astra. Although one was a coincidental doubling and the other was a conscious regenerative choice.
I guess technically you could say that Anthony Ainley played Tremas before he played the Master, but that one's kind of cheating, since the Master possessed Tremas's body (and what a coincidence that his name was already an anagram of "Master"!). By the same logic, Eric Roberts also played a different character before playing the Master.
The fact that it has no officially defined canon? There's no Gene Roddenberry, George Lucas, J. Michael Straczynski, or Joss Whedon proclaiming what counts and what doesn't. But yeah, the Time War can help with people who insist on applying canon rules from other shows on this one.
There usually doesn't have to be. "Canon" is just a nickname for the original body of work, as distinguished from derivative works like tie-ins and fan fiction. The only thing that ever really needs to be defined is how the tie-ins relate to it. Usually they are separate from the canon by default, but there are occasional exceptions (increasingly often these days), and that's when you need things defined.
Roddenberry never actually needed to define what was canon. It just bruised his ego when people called Diane Duane "the creator of the Rihannsu," so he felt the need to make a statement claiming ownership. And while he was at it, he decided to say the animated series didn't count, partly because its ownership was up in the air at the time, but (I suspect) partly because he'd fallen out with D.C. Fontana and wanted to devalue her contributions to the franchise. But that had nothing to do with what the makers of actual canon were doing, since Roddenberry's involvement with TNG by that point was strictly honorary. The actual producers were just making the show, which was canon by definition, and they had no problem referencing TAS when it suited them, or ignoring Diane Duane's books when it suited them, or whatever. Creators define canon by what they do, not by some official declaration.
Similarly, the "proclamations" of Lucasfilm only applied to the status of the tie-ins relative to the films and to each other. That was subject to change, but the status of the films themselves was a given. Although it gets iffy in the case of Star Wars because you've got TV movies and shows whose relationship to the canon has been defined differently at different times (e.g. the Ewok movies, the Ewoks and Droids cartoons, and the first Clone Wars cartoon).
In the case of JMS and Whedon, I don't think they ever needed to "declare" anything canon. Canon in its simplest sense means what the creator of the property creates. So when the creators make their own tie-ins, or at least closely supervise them, those tie-ins can be canonical in a way that other people's tie-ins usually can't, because the creators are too busy making the main show to ride close enough herd on the work of the people doing the tie-ins. JMS wanted all the B5 novels to be canonical, but he wasn't able to supervise the first run of books closely enough because he was still making the show, so inconsistencies got through. It wasn't until the show was over that he was able to devote enough attention to the later line of tie-ins to make them canonical. So it wasn't a matter of declaration so much as just the way things worked out. Same with Whedon -- he couldn't supervise the Buffy and Angel tie-ins that came out during the shows as closely as he could the ones that came after the shows. Or at least, the ones that came out after the shows didn't run the risk of being contradicted by new episodes.
You know, they could do a cgi, or puppet Frobisher penguin. I mean they made K-9 work. Even for the 10th doctor's run.
That's all it's supposed to mean, yes. But fans use it as a bludgeon. Canon as used by fans sometimes matches your basic, old-fashioned, common sense definition, but what it really means in most conversations is: canon is what I think counts. And every canon thrash tends to involve a lot of goalpost shifting on the part of the canonistas.
Have you read Paul Cornell on canon in Doctor Who?
Which doesn't mean I have to play along with that misapprehension, or that creators are affected by it in any way. Labels aside, creators can tell whatever stories they want to tell, and they're free to borrow or contradict ideas from other stories set in the same copyrighted franchise, depending on what serves the needs of the current story. And sometimes an Easter egg is just a wink at the audience, not a history thesis.
Two or three times, yes, and it's well-said.
Honestly, I've never understood how anyone who's watched a lot of Doctor Who could imagine for a moment that it was possible to construct a genuinely consistent continuity out of it. It's always contradicted the hell out of itself, because it was originally made at a time when television was expected to be ephemeral and not long remembered, and it was assumed that its young target audience would age out and be replaced every few years. So continuity was never something the classic series really bothered with, and it could never really be taken as a consistent reality so much as a series of tall tales. And for all that the modern series has been fannishly obsessed with past continuity (sometimes in very satisfying ways like revisiting the Mondasian Cybermen, sometimes in lame and self-indulgent ways like having the Twelfth Doctor's pre-regeneration speech be mostly just quotes of earlier Doctors), it's also freely reinvented the rules and the timeline at a whim, and even codified the mutability of history into its storytelling.
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