Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1293767-20151029072618/@comment-5918438-20160108020107

Apparently it's been three hours since I started writing this. Whoops.

The point of this thread should be to standardise what it means to be a two-parter. You cannot deny that cases like Utopia, etc, if not quite clearly not two-parters on any official level, are certainly disputed cases. But that's a dispute to be had within the Doctor Who fandom. On a Doctor Who forum, you can debate what you think might be a two-parter, or what's really Doctor-lite, what should and shouldn't count as a multi-Doctor story.

But we are an online encyclopaedia. We can't have this debate for each and every story. Believe me, if we didn't have specific rules set at T:VS, etc, we would be having a "is this valid?" argument for every story which any fan questions. Thankfully, we have a clear system, and we can say either, "yes it passes" or "no it fails this rule".

Above, I devised a series of three qualifications which must be ticked off in order for two or more episodes to be considered a multi-parter. It's a lot clearer now that I've specified this, and Utopia definitely is not part of a multi-part story. I'm sorry, but that's just how it is. You can't win all of 'em, I'm afraid. Not only will you not be able to find official statements labelling it as such (as it was not RTD's intent), but it was also not given the same director as the subsequent two-parter, nor was it produced as part of the same production block. Those two qualifications are unanimously true across all valid two-parters, certainly those from the RTD era. We're talking Aliens of London/World War Three here, not "I'd really like for this to be considered the first part in a three-episode story."

It is part of a continuing narrative, yes. It ends on a cliffhanger, yes. But as I have brought up, RTD does this a lot with his penultimate stories, and we see the very same thing this past series with Face the Raven. Actually, Closing Time leads directly into The Wedding of River Song as well, and actually anticipates its eventuality throughout. Turn Left is yet another penultimate episode which sets the scene up for the finale. But these examples are all standalone stories, at least from a production perspective.

You can argue that any number of stories are narratively linked, and you might say it's notable than one story ends on a cliffhanger that leads to the next one, as with The Almost People. But we cannot have the mess of "I think this should be considered a two-parter", because then the precedent of Utopia would necessarily lead to the inclusion of all stories mentioned above in this post as also part of the story to follow. And then suddenly The Rebel Flesh/Human Nature/A Good Man Goes to War/Let's Kill Hitler is a thing.

We cannot allow that. We simply cannot make rules which allow for these things to happen, which users are ultimately allowed to exploit to link together any two stories. And the battle will go on forever. Now before the entirety of BBC Wales Doctor Who is one massive 133-part story, I would really suggest that we adopt a simple, straight-forward and all-encompassing policy on what does in fact count as a multi-part story. What we can and should do is make use of the three qualifications which I put forward, so that this isn't a debate in the future, weird new oddities like HS/HB aside.