User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Tales from the Tardis/@comment-188432-20130325173913/@comment-188432-20130408131229

Yeah, sorry, this is like the 57th thing on my list. I kinda forgot about it. Sorry :)

Here's the question I asked, in its entirety: Hey, Paul:

On the final Christmas 2012 podcast, David Richardson introduced the Vienna audio series. He twice stated that it was "not a Doctor Who spin-off" and then said, "It's not set in the Doctor Who world at all." Yet the website says that it's a spin-off of the particular Doctor Who story, The Shadow Heart. We've taken the position at the wiki that it is therefore not a part of the broader Doctor Who universe, but a completely independent production. It matters deeply to us what David meant by "not set in the Doctor Who world at all". See, if it's a spin-off that is actually set in "the DWU"—like the Benny audios or Torchwood--we cover it. If it simply involves the same character but in a different universe unrelated to the DWU—like Faction Paradox or The Minister of Chance—then we don't. That probably seems like a silly fan demarcation, but it affects policy at our wiki. If we didn't set up a boundary over the issue of where the authors meant to set their stories, it'd be possible for all those "pseudo-Doctor Who" things from BBV, like The Stranger, to make it in. So generally when a key creative goes on the record and says, "this thing is not a part of the Doctor Who mythos/world/universe", we don't touch it.

I guess what we're struggling to understand is how is Vienna different from the Benny series? Or maybe more to the point, how is it different from Graceless? Are we right to have discerned that David seemed to be going out of his way to distance Vienna from Doctor Who, in a way that hasn't happened with Benny or Graceless?

Any help you could give would be appreciated. :) And Paul responded: Hi there

It's a bit of a tricky one, this. From the basis of promotion and licensing, this isn't a Doctor Who spin-off. It's not licensed through AudioGo or subject to compliance rules because Vienna is our character and thus can exist in her own series as long as the Doctor doesn't turn up. Also, it's useful to distance the series in the hope it will appeal to non-Who fans and have appeal to, say, the Deep Space Nine fans who follow Chase but have no interest in Who. But there's no denying that this is the same Vienna who is in The Shadow Heart. So all the tropes of that story are present, that setting is present (and events of the story referenced in The Memory Box), but to all intents and purposes it's a locked off little side-universe that the Doctor has once appeared in.

I suspect that probably doesn't help you, but that's basically it: David wanted Vienna to stand on its own so it helped to separate it from Doctor Who. We didn't want to call it a spin-off and have it saddled with the need to know Who, listen to The Shadow Heart and all the other stuff that comes with that.

Paul Spragg Big Finish Now, I see the phrase, "it's a locked off little side-universe that the Doctor has once appeared in" to be key. This puts Vienna in the same situation as Death's Head. We could say that because the Doctor definitely visited the Marvel Universe, landing his TARDIS on top of the Baxter Building, that we can therefore include the Fantastic Four on this wiki. Or we could at least include every single issue of Death's Head (1988) on this wiki, because the Seventh Doctor happened to appear in issue #8.

But of course we don't do that, because Simon Furman and company obviously were trying to create a series independent of Doctor Who (and The Transformers, where Death's Head originated), and so we at Tardis only cover Death's Head's direct interaction with the Doctor.

Essentially, if we cover the Vienna series, logic demands that we open up the wiki to cover the Marvel Universe—and that's simply unreasonable.