People assume that canon is a strict progression from episode to episode, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly... timey wimey... stuff.
Capaldi Leaving Doctor Who
- Thread starter Allyn Gibson
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Started well, that sentence.
This is one of the laziest pieces of crap writing I have ever seen in the nuWho series. It's baby-talk.People assume that canon is a strict progression from episode to episode, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly... timey wimey... stuff.
Honestly, it's always sounded to me like something Tom Baker's Doctor might say. I'm sure I remember him once referring to a technical problem on the TARDIS as "The 'whiz-bang' goes 'boom'."
I've seen the Tom Baker episodes many times, and am very sure that this is not a line that is spoken in any of them.
"Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" is a line of technobabble that has been used by more than one Doctor, though.
There's a difference between the stuff that's on screen and the stuff that someone running the show has decided can't be contradicted. The latter is canon.
On TV, Atlantis has had three mutually incompatible fates. Where canon would come in is if the God Emperor of the BBC said, the version of the Atlantis story from The Time Monster (or The Underwater Menace or The Daemons) is the one you all have to be consistent with. But no one has ever done that.
And yet it is one of the most popular and quoted lines from Doctor Who. Even a Star Trek novel used it in one of the quotes on the opening pages.
It's funny, although that's considered his catchphrase, Pertwee only said that twice, and even then only once during his actual run, The Sea Devils. The other time being in The Five Doctors. It's mostly in the Target novelizations that the line got used the most.
Yes, I'm aware of the Atlantis issue. Unless they're officially disowned, all three are canon and can be used as fodder for some other Atlantis story. It would make as much sense as any of the nuWho stuff, particularly the post-Tennant seasons. Hardly any of the stories in those seasons make any sense.
Yes, it's a popular catchphrase. I've used it myself in some of my Doctor Who lolpics.
Really? Which one? Aside from most of the post-Nemesis, non-Voyager books, I've largely stopped keeping up with all of the books.
Officially disowned by whom? New producers have often overwritten what previous producers have done. Writers have even contradicted their own stories, as Terry Nation did with The Daleks and Genesis of the Daleks. Does canon reset every time a new producer comes in? Does it reset at the moment one story overwrites another? Evidently not, if all three versions of Atlantis are canonical. Meanwhile, we're talking about a show in which changing the flow of history is built into the concept. Maybe canon's just not a very useful concept here.
Oh, and the other thing I meant to say... Doctor Who is a wide-ranging show that includes a variety of styles, genres, settings, and so on. It's not a closed off kind of world. So it feels right for me that it should include comics, audios, books, as well as spinoffs like K9, Bernice Summerfield, Faction Paradox, Time Hunter, Erimem, etc.
I was thinking of how at various times the Animated Series has been declared non-canonical, and the Voyager episode "Threshold" has been disowned. It was so bad in enough ways, that as far as canon goes, it officially no longer exists. But that's Star Trek.
As far as Doctor Who goes, what you're describing is sheer chaos. I guess the fanfic I've read must be canon, then, and the Fourth Doctor was really Jesus. Personally, I'd have thought that getting stabbed in the heart and crucified would have triggered a regeneration, but oh well. It was otherwise an excellent story.
It's Doctor Who. There have been time wars. The universe has been recreated. Atlantis had three different fates, the Daleks had two different origins, and you can't create a clear and logical timeline of Lethbridge-Stewart's life.
'Doctor Who is a chaos of a series' - Steven Moffat
'Doctor Who is a chaos of a series' - Steven Moffat
Well, you can, but only up until UNIT is formed!
I had a feeling it was going to be one of those.
And more recent accounts suggest that Troughton left less because he was afraid of being typecast and more because he asked the BBC for more money and they wouldn't give it to him. Also, he was exhausted from the 40-episodes-per-season production grind. (Shame then that he didn't stick around for Season 7 when they dropped the number of episodes down to 25.)
So the "Troughton rule" was always something of a myth to begin with.
Star Trek has a different take on canon & on the legitimacy of non-TV/movie sources. For most of its history, the novels have been regarded as completely non-canon, as was the Animated Series. It wasn't until the last season or 2 of Enterprise that they started to integrate more extra-canonical ideas into the main TV series. (Meanwhile, I'm not aware of "Threshold" ever being decanonized. I know that Roddenberry tried to decanonize Star Trek V: The Final Frontier but I don't think Paramount ever went along with that.)
Other franchises have been more eager to embrace non-TV/movie sources, like Doctor Who & Star Wars. In Star Wars, naming the capitol planet Coruscant was established in the novels long before it was mentioned on screen in The Phantom Menace. The word "Sith" also comes from the novels as well. And now, even after The Force Awakens has totally tossed out most of the expanded universe, they're still using Thrawn on Rebels. (And, personally, I'm still of the belief that Pink Five and Phineas & Ferb Star Wars are both canon in the Star Wars universe!
)Doctor Who, thanks to all the time travel, has even more flexibility when it comes to canon anyway. IIRC, at the end of the Paul McGann novels that the BBC published from 1997-2005, there was some bit of time travel hand waving that they used to shift all of the stories into an alternate timeline so as to accommodate any contradictions in the new TV series (of which there were at least a couple) without totally decanonizing the entire range.
Meanwhile, the Big Finish audios have always had a hand in all of the different sources. Right from the beginning, they adapted a bunch of the Virgin New Adventures novels featuring Bernice Summerfield, including rewriting some of her Doctor Who novels to omit the Doctor entirely because Big Finish didn't have the rights to him yet. They also did at least 1 audio adventure featuring Fitz Kreiner, one of the 8th Doctor companions from the BBC novels. And then there were Colin Baker audios that brought in Frobisher, his shapeshifting talking penguin companion from some of the comics in the 1980s.
I have never heard that. What is your source?
One of the DVD docs, I think? Wasn't there a documentary on "The Krotons" that covered the entirety of the Patrick Troughton years?
I don't know about Troughton, but Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker both cited 'I asked for a raise the BBC wasn't willing to give' as the final straw in their decision to leave.
I'd heard that with Pertwee (which Barry Letts disputed ever happened) but not with Tom Baker. I got the sense that Tom Baker's departure was a combination of him being tired of doing it and the new production team getting tired of dealing with him.
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