User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-31010985-20180428165444/@comment-6032121-20191213234809

Well, as I said, those are two completely different, and, I daresay, opposite ideas of mine. But they coexist basically based on Tardis's rules about Rule 4 being based on authorial intent at time of release. I think it's obvious that later efforts like Daleks Versus the Martians or the Obverse books were written with the intent of being set in a continuity of their own, which sprang from the original two Dalek Movies. That continuity is different enough that it would deserve coverage completely separate from regular Doctor Who.

But I also think it quite likely that back in 1965, David Whitaker didn't think he was creating a whole new universe when he wrote Dr. Who and the Daleks, just a new take on a familiar Doctor Who story. The Doctor looked a bit different, but again, neither can we speak about him being "intended to be the same incarnation" as William Hartnell because the concept of regeneration hadn't been introduced yet. There was no such thing as a Dr Who who wasn't the same character as William Hartnell; Cushing is a recast, whose costume was given a touch-up to look more cinematic and kid-friendly, but it's unfeasible for him to have been intended to be "a different Doctor" from Hartnell in the same way that Troughton is.

I don't know at what point you got the impression that I thought Dr. Who (Dr. Who and the Daleks) should be merged with First Doctor, though, since I said precisely the opposite in my last post. The fact is that this version of the Doctor is different enough, and his circumstances murky enough, that he warrants a page of his own IMO, just one that mentions that the accounts of his life concur in many ways with accounts of a longer-haired fellow to whom various other sources also ascribe a granddaughter called Susan and the name of Dr Who.

Again, the thing is that the Wiki's policy (and I think it is sound, even if it leads to a perhaps surprising result here) is that we care about what the intent-regarding-DWU-ness was at time of release, not what later writers thought, let alone what later fans thought. As far as validity goes, it matters not if we like to think of Susan Who as being a different character from Susan Foreman, what matters is whether David Whitaker thought the Skaro yarn in his script was a reboot, or just a retelling of the ones already featured on TV.

Oh, and— OttselSpy25 wrote: I'll ask you to stick to on-site precedent, debates on some far-off Discord do not interest me. Twas no debate, let alone anything I meant to establish as precedent. I just mentioned it as an anecdotal detail of how I came to realise how flimsy the evidence we have of its having been intended especially as a "reboot" really was.