Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-26469787-20150726050336/@comment-188432-20150731154036

Ahhh, but there's the rub. It's not in-universe information. You're using out-of-universe information — what you've read about the intent-during-production for broadcast order — to undergird your belief about the in-universe "facts". And you really can't do that.

Believe me, we've talked about this very thing before, and then I was making your arguments. But if you sit and think about applying this sort of logic to Doctor Who as a whole, you rather quickly run into problems.

In the first place, JNT signed off on broadcast order, so production intent goes out the window. Maybe at one point a certain order was intended, but ultimately the Doctor Who production office shuffled the deck. So you can't establish the order you'd like as what was intended by the producers, even though there appear to be very solid clues supporting your view.

But in the second, we're talking about a show that's riddled with production errors. And the problem becomes how do you establish any sort of intent in any situation that seems suspect? Fine, we can say with certainty that boom shadows shouldn't have existed (when they did), and Tardis doors should have opened smoothly (when they didn't), but that's about as far as you can take it.

Did, for example, William Hartnell intend to fluff as many lines as he did, or was he, at least some of the time, deliberately getting the lines wrong so as to create a character trait? We don't really know, so we deem the script-as-written — which presumably would be devoid of at least some of the fluffs — a lesser source than the show-as-aired. In other words, we believe the Doctor said things as Hartnell said them, not some other way that might make better sense.

Equally, we don't ignore Tom Baker's well-known penchant for ad-libbing in favour of the script.

And should we say that The Greatest Show in the Galaxy really didn't take place largely in tents because we know that it was filmed in tents because of an asbestos scare at Television Centre? No, the proper interpretation of the story is that the planet on which it takes place simply has a lot of tents. Neither do we note the myriad CSO errors in Underworld on an article about one of the characters from that story, because we are meant to believe that the CSO is working to wholly suspend our disbelief.

And we certainly don't say that Troughton's TARDIS walls in Tomb of the Cybermen were made of paper — even though they most evidently were. Did the production team intend those walls be made of paper? Yes. That's what the budget ran to. But they certainly didn't intend us to believe the walls were made of paper. And now that we can see The Aztecs in much better resolution, we can see that the background is actually just a cyclorama. It's screamingly obvious that it's just a bit of canvas. But we still suspend our disbelief to say that the story took place in Ancient Mexico, and not on a soundstage at Lime Grove.

Same thing applies here. The production team signed off on broadcast order, and that's the order that we're meant to believe the stories happened in. Clues to the contrary are production errors arising from that decision, and thus should only be placed in behind-the-scenes sections.