User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-45314928-20200525010944/@comment-45692830-20200525041535

This just isn't a response though. To the Doctor in universe traveling for a few weeks and then leaving is no different than agreeing to come, then changing your mind when you see how dangerous it is. So we can't really apply any line of reasoning here. And since we can't, there's no real reason to try and force a major change.

But if I'm going to really try and defend the multi story/adventure distinction, let's have a go. Sarah Jane Smith was not the Tenth Doctor's companion for all of the second story she appeared on screen for in S4, if we're even calling her a companion, which is generous, as she doesn't really fill that role. She's a guest star, ensemble casting. She's a companion for one segment of that story, one adventure. Hence multi adventure. The same is true for Jackie Tyler, she was never consistently a companion throughout two separate stories. She would pop in and out for specific adventures within the stories but was not actually a companion for the entire story. Jack should probably be reclassified though off of Boom Town and Utopia.

River Song did get solid comments in non valid sources that were later retconned. It's a mess, since iirc the part was written while Tennant was still thinking about coming back for one more season, but the non valid comments show clear authorial intent on how to interpret her statements in Silence in the Library. I don't think "narratively ambiguous" is the right category for her, because there's nothing in the narrative that's ambiguous. It's just that the category that would exist for her would probably just include her and only her in relation to Ten, and it would be something like "had adventures at some point, but we're not sure if that still happened or time travel erased them, because we've never seen them on screen and behind the scenes stuff sort of made this complicated".

We can't even use the "according to one account" language, because the one account we have of this is invalid even though there's clear intent that there were adventures that were just never mentioned. (If I want to get really wacky, I could argue that because she has pictures of all his faces in order during Husbands, she knows that Eleven is after Ten, but she asks Ten about the Byzantium, which means that there is an alternate timeline where Ten and River did the Byzantium rather than Eleven and River. But that's like actual speculation, not just authorial intent.)

Suffice it to say that these things can be argued in many different ways, if I'd make a change, I'd say Jack should be moved.