User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-1272640-20161223201024/@comment-4028641-20170126085538

What's important about this is that, despite the "Grant-cover" DWM being released after the announcement, it's pretty clear that most of it was made before. If it hadn't been, Grant likely would not have been on the cover at all.

So all of these are what people had to say about Shalka before the announcement: "The Ninth Doctor in a story that sets its sights on the future and provides a starting point for ongoing adventures without reformatting the show. Traditional but original, new monsters that behave like Doctor Who monsters should, and a new Doctor with a new way of doing things who's still very much the Doctor we know and love" - Paul Cornell

Maybe even broadcast on television - just like like how proper Doctor Who used to be. Actually, according to BBCi, 'this is proper Doctor Who''. '''

"It's a new medium, a new start for Doctor Who. No one knows what the next step is going to be." - James Goss And this is what people had to say about it after, and thus technically before it was even released:
 * After Eight

He came back to life before your eyes. But now he's regenerated - and no one thought to tell him. Benjamin Cook caught up with Paul Mcgann to mourn the passing of the Eight Doctor and pass judgement on his usurper [Richard E Grant]. Usurper means "less important," btw.

So it's pretty clear that everyone jumped ship on Shalka being anything that "counted" before it was even released. I even recall my father showing it to me as a child and constantly saying "Don't get attached to any of this." If anything, by releasing this statement just before the story came out, it was almost as if the BBC wanted to purposefully sabotage the story just so people wouldn't get confused. If you look at this from the point of view of the BBC being the "authors," then this certainly wasn't something that they expected to be "part of our world," as it were.

On the topic of if a story is an alternate universe or timeline, I must again say that we simply can not guess something like that without very specific guidelines. I would need Cornell saying "We were going to do a second one where Shalka fell from his universe into RTD's and met Chris Ecclesiastes" before we would have enough info to do to this what we did to Infinity Doctors. You can't just call every full narrative that wasn't meant to be the DWU an "alternate timeline" with absolutely no evidence at all.

So my next big question would be how the official DVD release of Shalka discusses the story?