User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-31010985-20170128173417/@comment-188432-20170129030723

Yes, "The Feast of Steven" is a valid source on this wiki.

Episodes are indivisible from serials, insofar as inclusion debates are concerned. "Steven" is, in any case, not a story on its own. Recent Christmas-themed blogs like this one, which may at some (unknown?) level be influencing a revisitation of the episode, do not carefully read the text of the episode when they say, "The Feast of Steven couldn't be more far removed from the larger story it's a part of."

In fact, at this point in the larger story, the TARDIS team are on an uncontrolled race from the Daleks, having procured the taranium in earlier episodes. "Steven" depicts one of the stop-offs in that chase -- and one that's not particularly "sillier" than them showing up in Ancient Egypt in "Golden Death", or, for that matter, the ridiculous places depicted in The Chase, a story that has basically the same plot of the back half of DMP.

Moreover, the first two scenes of the episode directly tie into the last scene of the previous episode, "Coronas of the Sun". The cliffhanger from "Coronas" is somewhat similar to the one from "The Firemaker" -- the last ep. of An Unearthly Child -- in which TARDIS instruments are showing a problem with the atmosphere outside the Ship. The top of that next episode, "The Dead Planet", reveals what the Ship's instruments were indicating, much as the top of "Feast" does.

First the viewer (through the brief opener with the policemen), and then the main characters (through the initial TARDIS INT. scene) discover it's just ordinary, modern, Earth pollution that the TARDIS is reading as a threat.

And while the bulk of the episode is a bit of a narrative cul de sac, there's definitely a mid-ep TARDIS scene where the three principals remind us about the Time Destructor, the Daleks, and the taranium that are key parts of the serial's plot.

Finally, the top of "Volcano", the next episode, has an initial TARDIS INT. scene that reminds us the Doctor and friends are being chased through time and space by the Daleks for the taranium they've got on board the Ship. So when you take episodes 6, 7 ("Steven"), and 8 together, it couldn't be more clear that they really are part of the same story.