The Doctor Who Canon Debate
Matt_1979
Posts: 226 Forum Member
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I have been reading recently about the debate surrounding Doctor Who canon, which I have found very interesting. I know of course that many of the members on here are much bigger Doctor Who fans than myself (I would call myself a fan but not a serious Whovian), and I have seen online that there were one or two unlicenced books featuring Colin Baker's Doctor that aren't considered Canon just because they weren't licenced by the BBC.
I have recently read the Doctor Who book 11 Doctors 11 Stories and I noticed something odd - in the First Doctor story it mentions that The Doctor doesn't like Blake's 7, but I have read about a Fourth Doctor novel from some years ago that features a Blake's 7 character! Do some books and stories contradict others? If so, this could be a problem in the canon debate.
I have recently read the Doctor Who book 11 Doctors 11 Stories and I noticed something odd - in the First Doctor story it mentions that The Doctor doesn't like Blake's 7, but I have read about a Fourth Doctor novel from some years ago that features a Blake's 7 character! Do some books and stories contradict others? If so, this could be a problem in the canon debate.
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A can of worms best left unopened.
Even then though, the televised stories often contradict themselves. When exactly the UNIT stories took place is one example, as is the Doctor's age. The whole half human thing is also dismissed by a lot of fans as a delusion/lie/joke/misunderstanding or simply as something which never happened.
At the end of the day, Doctor Who is a bit of fun which has never really taken itself too seriously.
But seriously Op, as others have said, there is no real official continuity as their is so much stuff out there which people view differently. I understand your interest but any attempts to actually pin down what is official cannon and what isn't are never fruitful and just lead to arguments. That's the problem with a show with a 50 years history and multitude's of spin off stuff unfortunately.
If you see a story about the doctor in any form, and seriously believe for you, that it realistically happened in the doctors world, then to you it's cannon.
Not quite as simple as that
One of the companions mentioned by Eight, Charley Pollard also travelled with Six, and on one occassion Four. If her travels with Eight are canon then that must mean so are her travels with Six and Four. Subsequently that would mean that all the Big Finish stories featuring those two Doctors are canon.
Two of Six's other audio companions Thomas Brewster and Evelyn Smythe also met other Doctors (Five and Seven respectively). Therefore any BF audios featuring those two Doctors would be canon as well
Blimey, I just wrote 'Whoniverse'. Whatever. :kitty:
If you just want to consider official tv programmes canon you can, if you want to consider the books that's also fine.
As there really is no official canon, your own personal canon is fine and up to you.
For me, it really is just official TV, but hey maybe thats just me.
Completely agree! Have always been a bit bewildered by the debate.
The K9 series is made through Bob Baker and not the BBC, therefore I don't count it as Canon, which is just as well as I hear it's bloody awful!
I think some people are reluctant to consider things as canon because they have this idea in their head that everything is still like TV Comic and continuity isn't as accurate in the spin-offs. The truth is that the stories are either produced by people entrenched in Who folklore who know what they're doing (Big Finish) or produced under the watchful eye of the Doctor Who Brand manager, who makes sure that contradictions are kept to a minimum. The writers of the comic strip often talk to the TV people to make sure they don't contradict each other as well. Of course, this is before we even mention the fact that the TV series contradicts itself.
In fact, far from being a separate thing from the TV series, most of the stories outside of the show make special efforts to integrate themselves into the show. For example, the short story 'Storm in a Tikka' follows on directly from 'Dimensions in Time' and leads directly into 'Search Out Space', allowing both to be Canon if you wish!
Have fun everyone.
To be fair I think everyones includes K9 and Company
And indeed our old friend tingramretro took essentially that position.
Nor is it right for a TV show to start a story in our living rooms then say "OK, to hear the rest of this story, head down into town to your local comic book store and buy Doctor Who issue 4 subsection 12. That'll be 4.99 please!"
No, TV is Doctor Who canon. Books/comics/audio/anything else can be part of your own personal canon if you wish, but its is a bonus extra to the main show, not a continuation of it.
Even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff.
I assume you're not being entirely serious, because one of the fantastic things about English is its flexibility. There always has and always will be an exchange between word classes and our language is all the richer for it. Dictionary definitions are shaped by, and lag behind the everyday use of language in the high street, newspaper and internet forum. How stale and dull English would be if it were the other way round.
The 8th doctor WAS half human. No other doctor was, but he was......
I'm not! Obviously the correct adjective has classically been 'canonical' and it still grates internally when Americans particularly ignore the concept of an adverb ("I'm feeling real good") but what am I going to do? Kick off because we don't all still use English as per [Beowulf/Shakespeare/Dickens/etc] (delete as applicable)?
I still felt it was worth commenting on though as deviations from the 'rules' are often temporary rather than permanent — I've no idea how much slang gets discarded in an average decade but I'd imagine more than we recognise.
That's an interesting point, but there's a degree of interpretation to it. To some people, unless they catch one of the recent repeats on the Horror channel, Classic Who itself is a branch of canon that has to be 'tracked down and paid for' because it's sold on DVDs. How are Big Finish Audios different in this aspect? In my eyes, they aren't, except for the size of the cases they come in.
I didn't even realise we were talking about people feeling superior over each other. I thought that giving equal weight to both TV stories and radio dramas had a kind of equalizing effect. If it came to a 'tiebreaker' situation, the TV series would obviously take precedent, but otherwise both are considered 'real' Doctor Who.
That's funny, I've read a few Spider-Man comics like that. You turn the page and it turns out that in between scenes he had an adventure with Iron-Man in Marvel Team-up 48 or something! That can be annoying, but again it's one of those things that exists in the TV series in itself. Many people have criticised Steven Moffat's Doctor Who for being too self-referential, but not that that self-referral makes it any less Canonical.
It's sort of the flipside to the point I was making about some people perceiving non-TV stories to be not accurate as the main episodes, but you consider these stories to be too continuity-heavy to be linked to the TV episodes. I'm not sure that's a viable method of defining Canon for the reason I gave in the above paragraph.
Ah whatever happemded to him or Granny come to that. As far as what is or is not canon each to their own. Personaly, canon to me is what I have seen on the screen and nothing else, thats mainly because I have never heard any of the audio dramas or read many of the books.
I've often wondered if his half-humanity was almost a 'curse' inflicted by the High Council, who meddled with his regeneration .... designed to make his life more difficult, along the lines of 'Well, if he likes these humans so much, let's see how he gets on this time ...' (ducks and takes cover ...)
The BBC seems to:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/season6b.shtml
I hope this was a joke, because its exactly my sense of humour and I laughed out loud for real
Your comments about using the correct adjective are interesting and for some reason I didn't think about 'canonical' rather than 'canon'.
I have often wondered about the 'half human' debate and how it could possibly fit in with the rest of the series.