User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-31010985-20180428165444/@comment-6032121-20191214111523

Actually, the conclusion regarding the Unbound stories was AFAIR that they had been marketed as "what-ifs" from the beginning, and that the later depiction of one of them as an alternate timeline only served to clarify what had been the authorial intent all along.

And let us be clear: are you walling off canons or aren't you? If we're not taking the view that alternative Doctors are a case of "the rest of the universe is the same, Jago & Litefoot and K9 and whoever are still having the same spin-off adventures, but the identity of the man in the TARDIS is different", which is the gist of my argument, but rather suggesting wholly separate fictional universes… how the heck could we then mention The Master (The Curse of Fatal Death) on the The Master page's in-universe section? What?

You write: Your interpretation, as far as I can read it, is this: You want us to act as if the Dr. Who films and the Doctor Who episodes they are relative to are separate events with different characters... But that both take place within the same universe. That's not a thing. Whoever told you it wasn't a thing? The WhichDoctor template and the business with the two Shadas are both clear precedent of us accepting cases where we know that stories happened in some fashion as far as the rest of the universe is concerned, but we're not quite sure who was in the TARDIS when they did.

Similarly, for a Doctor-less example, Birthright the audio story retells the same events in Bernice's life as Birthright the novel, except that a major character (Ace) is switched out for another entirely (Jason Kane).

The reason we don't create a separate Susan English page is that there is little doubt that the two are the same characters; Susan English still looks like Carole Ann Ford and does the same old Susan things.

Whereas Suzy looks and acts completely different, so the conclusion of an out-of-universe observer is akin to the one from Birthright — "two accounts agree that someone closely associated with Bernice and who had started space-travelling against their will when being caught in an alien transport-watchamacallit, but in one it's Jason Kane while the other one says it was Ace" —> "two accounts agree that a granddaughter of the TARDIS pilot's, called Susan or something like that, was present on Skaro at this point, but in one account it was big-haired psychic teen Susan Foreman while in the other it was an adorably precocious moppet of unclear last name".

Scream of the Shalka is actually a good point of reference, if you would have it covered by the same change in policy as Cushing — the current coverage of it doesn't seem capable of acknowledging it in full, but clearly Scream of the Shalka does take place in a universe where An Unearthly Child and everything after it up to and including The TV Movie happened. The intent at time of release was not so much that it didn't take place in the DWU as it stood then, but more that further entries in the An Unearthly Child continuity would not take place in a version of events where Scream of the Shalka had happened.