Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-188432-20130514042227/@comment-188432-20130515152134

SmallerOnTheOutside wrote:

I believe that, because of its title and its marketing as a so-called "prequel," SS, HS is meant to be narrative, although it might not achieve this in everyone's eyes.

If it's not narrative, then explain to me why they gave it a unique title (not even the lazy The Bells of Saint John: A Prequel), and why they called it a "new prequel." Again demonstrated incompetence with a word means that you don't get to use it with credulity. Just because they say it's a prequel doesn't mean it is. They've said that the Adventure Games were "new episodes of the television series", or very similar, but our dab term for City of the Daleks is not (TV story). Another point of mine is that, unlike your Ninth Doctor example (which is just a montage of clips with a bit of narration at the beginning), SS HS not only features a unique setting, but gives us insight into the character's thoughts and feelings. Clara calls the day she met the Doctor "the best day of her life," expresses for the first time that the Doctor needs her, and says that "the trick is, don't fall in love." The Doctor calls Clara "perfect in every way for me." Well, I would again refer you to the Phantom Menace tone poems, or, perhaps more relevantly, the Torchwood: Miracle Day character pieces. In fact, the Torchwood pieces are established to be the characters talking into a camera that's recording them. But we've never for a moment considered these as a part of the actual narrative of Miracle Day. How could we? Although they have the sort of "trappings" of narrative, it would impossible to speculate when and where they could have possibly occurred within the Miracle Day narrative.

Same thing here. So far, we have absolutely no narrative indication where these are set, who the characters are talking to, why the sets structurally look the same but have different props, and why one character is wholly immobile while the other is talking. Your "it's all in the mind" theory is a pretty good one, but it doesn't explain why the two characters have fundamentally the same room, but filled with different stuff. The metaphorical implication there would be that they have the same brain, or at least the same type of brain, and she's been scanned enough for us to know she can't be a Time Lord.

Anyway, the "in the mind" thing is just a theory and obviously inadmissible.