Board Thread:Tales from the Tardis/@comment-188432-20130325173913/@comment-1046-20130413032248

I don't have a dog in this fight, as I haven't even listened to The Shadow Heart yet, much less any of the Vienna stories. But reading over this thread, I have to agree with... well, pretty much everybody except CzechOut... that the situation is a lot less clear than CzechOut seems to think it is. Specifically, the phrase "locked off little side-universe that the Doctor has once appeared in" does not, to me, seem equivalent to "a distinct universe that the Doctor has visited once". The former means that from the point of view of the Vienna audios, the Doctor showed up once and had an adventure with Vienna. The latter means that from the point of view of the Doctor, he left his "usual universe" and had an adventure with Vienna. That seems to me to be contrary to the stated purpose of the trilogy which starts with The Burning Prince: that The Burning Prince, The Acheron Pulse and The Shadow Heart are all set in the same part of space, over the course of many centuries.

Now, if Big Finish were to lose the rights to make Doctor Who audios, they would still be able to make Vienna audios. I suspect that's what "locked off little side-universe that the Doctor has once appeared in" means. It seems to me to be closer to the situation with Iris Wildthyme, or the K9 TV series, than Faction Paradox. Unless there's some narrative reason to believe that the Vienna audios take place in some separate universe, I think that the comment from Paul Spragg actually gives us the choice to treat Vienna however we wish. If we want to say that her further adventures are not part of the DWU, we can do so, using the comment from the podcast as justification. However, if we want to say that they are part of the DWU, we can do so, using "this is the same Vienna who is in The Shadow Heart" as justification.

When Paul says it's not a Doctor Who spin-off, that's clearly a marketing decision, not a narrative one. Faction Paradox was separated by both marketing and narrative decisions — despite the presence of Sontarans and Sutekh, the Great Houses aren't quite the Time Lords of Doctor Who. But it looks to me as if Vienna is still taking place in the DWU as we define the term here.