Or Prof. Chronotis (probably spelt wrong) from 'Shada' if you prefer.

I'm convinced, or fooling myself even, that the Doctor is not the only Time Lord left, and maybe this chap is still around, as I'm fairly sure that at the end of both versions of the story, he returns to Cambridge.

I may be wrong, I don't know, but I'd be interested to see what everyone else thinks.

Do you think they could adapt Shada to the new series, would love to see it in all its absurb Douglas Adams glory...

It's not canon as it never made it properly to screen so he can be completely ignored.

G

Umm, no, I disagree, it is Canon, its a properly written for television, half produced Doctor Who story...why would it not be included???

It was NEVER broadcast so that makes it non-canon. Otherwise you might as well include books, audio and webcasts like "Scream of the Shalka" and then where would we be?

Besides there's also the "Dirk Gently" complication ...

G

It was produced by the Doctor Who production team to be shown on TV as the last story of that season of Doctor Who, made by the BBC, of course its should be regarded as canon...

God I hate that phrase as much as I hate the use of the term "franchise" for Doctor Who or Stark Trek or any other creative media, it has implications of stuff being made to simply generate cash....argghhh!!

Dear God!

Who could ever conceive of such a thing?

To think that in this enlightened age of ours a programme could be made not for the raptuous joy of the creative storytelling process itself but for dirty profit.

Why if such a thing were to come about there would be such odious sights as pages and pages of Doctor Who merchandise in the Argos catalogue.

I, for one, am glad that I don't live in such a world.

Does he return to Cambridge as a Time Lord? If so then I would suspect the would have died in the Time War. It seems the Time War wiped all Time lords out of existence from time and space as if they had never existed. The Master had to be human to survive, and exactly how the Doctor survivedd is yet unexplained.

I like the way people can make sweeping blanket generalisations like this based on absolutely nothing.

Who says it's not canon? Nobody, not the BBC, not any production team of Doctor Who, has ever sat down and officially decided what should be part of any 'canon' and what shouldn't. It's up to each individual fan to decide for themselves. Shada might not be part of your canon, but it's certainly part of mine.

Look at me, I'm running around brazenly including Shada as part of my canon, what are you going to do to stop me?

...in a situation where we have an even richer and more diverse range of Doctor Who stories to enjoy?

And Shada was a webcast too, with Paul McGann, so it was 'broadcast' in a sense. As well as bits of the original version being used on TV in 'The Five Doctors'.
Just ignore those books then if you so choose, it's not really a problem.

There's an interesting article about canon in Wikipedia, which even includes a sentence about Doctor Who.

Your opinion is certainly represented, as are the others we've seen here. Maybe the key paragraph is
My emphasis.

I think the most sensible way to look at it is this:
[LIST][*]The TV series/movie/specials are canon, whether or not they are inconsistent - except for obvious spoofs of course (no the TVM doesn't fit into this category )[*]Anything else that you as an individual want to consider canon, you're free to choose ... however ...[*]If something outside the TV series contradicts something in the series, the TV series is 'correct' - regardless of which is published first.[/LIST]

Why does everyone and their wooden Aunt Sally remember them then?

If they had never existed then no one would remember them yet the Doctors always meeting people who do.

Yeah that's how I look at it too, with the TV series being the 'primary' canon which other media must fit around. I tend to accept everything else as being canon unless there's an explicit contradiction.

Although if someone wants to believe that nothing is canon, not even the TV series, except for the Jim'll Fix It sketch 'A Fix With Sontarans' then... well, they'd be a loony, but they'd be perfectly entitled to hold that view.

Umm...because the Doctor wasn't removed from all existance.

So people can remember him and what everyone remembers him as is "the last of the Time Lords". So they cab remember that there once others...but they can'r actually remember anything about them.

There's actually nothing in the TV series to suggest that Gallifrey and the Time Lords have been erased from history. It's entirely a fan-made idea.

Eccleston in 'The End Of The World' talks about Gallifrey burning up like the Earth has, and says it's become "dust and rocks", which kind of suggests it's been physically destroyed rather than wiped from time. In the same story, Jabe's DNA scanner identifies the Doctor as a Time Lord, so there must be detailed records of them.

Mr. Finch in 'School Reunion' also seems to know an awful lot about the "dusty, ancient Senators" and the Time War, as well as Captain Jack having heard of the legends of Gallifrey. So there seems to be more than just hazy memories floating about.

This is of course true, but if a viewer gives it any thought to it at all it would appear to be the only explanation to the fact that if all the time lords died in a big fight on Thursday morning the Doctor could always pop back to Tuesday to see them all (condensing 100 trillion years of history into one week for each of explanation of course).

Although he could also pop forward to Saturday and meet them if back on Tuesday afternoon some Time Lords had taken a trip to Saturday to watch the match before heading back to Tuesday, spending Wednesday in Monday afternoon, popping back to Wednesday evening and then being killed in the big war the next morning.



The fact that is hasn't been talked about on screen has the slight wiff of writers who really don't want to get involved in the whole timey-wimey-ness of it all.

<applauds> Nicely put.

Except for Blinovitch's Limitation Effect which prevents this - mentioned a few times in the classic series. Timelords were not supposed to cross their own timelines - only in exceptional circumstances. Hence the Doctor could never have existed at the same time as his current incarnation and was only allowed to cross his own timeline in exceptional circumstances. In the Three Doctors it was allowed by the Timelords, in the Five Doctors it was done by a Timelord and in the Two Doctors it was a result of the Time Experiments being undertaken on the Space Station)

In Mawdryn Undead because the Brigadier met himself and that resulted in him destroying Mawdryn and his followers.

In Fathers Day the Timelords were no longer around to stop it happening and The Doctor took Rose to the day her father died and of course that caused the problem with the time parasites.

However the full effect of Blinovitch's Limitation Effect has never been explained by either Terence Dicks who conceived the idea and subsequent writers.

Not necessarily. It could be perfectly possible to go back and see them, but to do so would be a really *really* bad idea, which would risk altering the timeline.

My take on it is that the Time War caused such massive disruptions to history, with time being flipped back and forth between numerous alternate realities, that when the Doctor finally ended it the version of history that won out (in which he's the only surviving Time Lord and the Daleks are mostly gone) is so fragile that he daren't go back and interact with any Time Lords for fear of making things worse. He could accidentally change history again and end up with a Universe in which the Daleks won. So the TLs are effectively dead and unreachable to him.
Oh, abolutely. Blinovitch Limitation Effect? That'll do. Move along, nothing to see here.

Not the only explanation

A Time Lords Timeline is/was synchronised with Gallifrey so that whenever a Time Lord left Gallifrey he always returned there at a later time (ie it was impossible to travel into the past on Gallifrey).

It may well be the same for Time Lords meeting Time Lords in general. The Doctor always met the Master at a point that was later in their personal Time Lines for both of them. The same was true for every other Time Lord he met (where a previous meeting had took place or was mentioned).

So in the new series with Gallifrey destroyed at a particular point in Time it's impossible for the Doctor to travel back into it's past and also impossible to meet any Time Lords who were destroyed with it.

They may still be traveling back and forth in Time from their PoV (as for them Gallifrey still exists) but from the Doctors PoV they are dead and in his past. Only Time Lords that survived the Time War and the destruction of Gallifrey can interact with the Doctor.

I have recently read Shada and I was wondering what happened to Salyavin/Professor Chronotis in the end. I assumed that he must of died of old age in Cambridge - I take Shada to be canonical but I know that some fans argue about whether all of the books are part of the Doctor Who canon.