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Feb. 12th, 2007 07:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethhttp://paulcornell.blogspot.com/2007/02/canonicity-in-doctor-who.html#links
Doctor Who has no canon, contradicts itself every which way, has an excellent set of excuses, and is generally a game anyone can play.
Okays.
But when I'm wondering if something is canon I'm wondering how to write a particular character. I mean the Doctor changes personality on a semi regular basis, so it isn't like there's only one answer to that. But there's stuff like him being a father and a grandfather, or who he's travelled with, or how he died all those other times, that seem sort of significant.
I quite like the idea that characters can be living in different versions of history. Like, history worked one way for the Doctor, who travelled around in it and kept making changes. But the people who stay still are living in another version, which is subject to change that retcons them along with everything else. And other time travellers are each living in their personal timelines and so remember things that didn't happen that way from the point of view of other people.
It would all get utterly insane to live in and you'd have to kind of give up on the whole concept of history and/or consensus reality.
It would also be possible to meet the love of your life and find out they never met you before.
Actually now I'm thinking Time Cop, where he comes back to base and there's a different president and stuff.
But any time traveller that gets split up from the people they care about would *know* that it's possible everything changes for them while they've been apart.
Nasty.
Add to that memory alteration technology and... I think I'd end up really really insecure and possibly using those stretchy don't run away thingies just to make really sure of people.
Or, to look at it another way, it's difficult to figure the emotional arc of a character who might have had their entire history rewritten since last time we saw them.
Doctor Who has no canon, contradicts itself every which way, has an excellent set of excuses, and is generally a game anyone can play.
Okays.
But when I'm wondering if something is canon I'm wondering how to write a particular character. I mean the Doctor changes personality on a semi regular basis, so it isn't like there's only one answer to that. But there's stuff like him being a father and a grandfather, or who he's travelled with, or how he died all those other times, that seem sort of significant.
I quite like the idea that characters can be living in different versions of history. Like, history worked one way for the Doctor, who travelled around in it and kept making changes. But the people who stay still are living in another version, which is subject to change that retcons them along with everything else. And other time travellers are each living in their personal timelines and so remember things that didn't happen that way from the point of view of other people.
It would all get utterly insane to live in and you'd have to kind of give up on the whole concept of history and/or consensus reality.
It would also be possible to meet the love of your life and find out they never met you before.
Actually now I'm thinking Time Cop, where he comes back to base and there's a different president and stuff.
But any time traveller that gets split up from the people they care about would *know* that it's possible everything changes for them while they've been apart.
Nasty.
Add to that memory alteration technology and... I think I'd end up really really insecure and possibly using those stretchy don't run away thingies just to make really sure of people.
Or, to look at it another way, it's difficult to figure the emotional arc of a character who might have had their entire history rewritten since last time we saw them.
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Date: 2007-02-13 12:56 am (UTC)Honestly, canon is what you make of it, I suppose. And there are so many divergent timelines that ANYTHING could simultaneously be canon and NOT canon. Like... okay, perfect example, look at the Eighth Doctor! There's both the audio dramas with Charley and now with Lucie (I think?), then there's the Eighth Doctor Adventures with Sam, Fitz, Anji, Trix, Compassion and a partridge in a pear tree, and I think a few of them actually note that there's all these different time lines!
Like there's a line in The Gallifrey Chronicles where Marnal comments that the Doctor's timeline is utterly insane and that it looks like he has THREE Ninth incarnations - clearly, Eccleston's 'canon' Nine, the Shalka Nine and, uh, the Curse Of Fatal Death Nine (which means, in some alternate reality, Doctor/Master is canon!).
And I just reread The Blue Angel, which includes the perfect analogy - the alternate, human Doctor explains to Fitz that the passionflower is plagued by particularly virulent catepillars, so to protect itself, the plant produces sham eggs to discourage the butterflies - and when human!Doctor feels 'less than authentic', he considers himself to be one of those sham eggs to protect the real passionflower - the 'real' Doctor. But at the same time, perhaps what others knew as the 'real' Doctor was, in fact, a sham egg, and that human!Doctor WAS the real passionflower, placed there to protect himself. (As far as we know, this alternate is entirely human, so it's most likely he's a sham egg, but the analogy still stands.)
But yes. Canon is utterly, utterly insane in the Whoniverse.
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Date: 2007-02-13 08:01 am (UTC)which this fandom has had rather a lot of
add time travel and... yup.
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Date: 2007-02-13 09:38 am (UTC)And where the fuck to the Cushing films fit in? Dimensions In Time? Curse Of Fatal Death? Are they just group hallucinations? Or did they happen in some time line? *grin*