User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-31010985-20180428165444/@comment-6032121-20191214003737

Again, please don't make too much of the Discord remark; if it came across as if I meant for it to have any authority I apologise, but this wasn't my intent.

As for the rest… fine, I'll stop blathering about the Obverse books, though we obviously have a sort of philosophical difference on the theoretical importance of them. (I espouse the view that due to the sheer mass of Doctor Who fanfic Tardis is very sadly forced to take some draconian measures regarding licensing, but that in the abstract, novels written by professionals about Dr Who aren't made any more "important" for having a nice slip of paper signed by a movie producer's estate.)

And you have my intent down pat with: I'm guessing that you want Susan Foreman to say something like "A few greatly different accounts claimed that Susan actually was a human born to her grandfather Dr. Who," and vise-versa. And you say it's a small thing, but I say it isn't, in spirit at least.

To my mind it's very different to wholly split canons as you have been proposing — whether through a separate class of pages on this Wiki, or through a potential Dalek Movies Wiki —, compared to acknowledging the Cushing version as a different, valid take on the DWU, albeit one whose differences and complicated BTS circumstances would mean we would rarely link to on the main page. In one case one is essentially creating a new subsection within the "Invalid" framework, while in the other one is bringing the stories from invalidity into a form of validity.

There would be larger practical differences, as well — I feel like if we created an, I dunno, tag/category, and go full-on with treating as a separate fictional construct, then we'd be led to have pages for Dalek (Dr. Who and the Daleks), Skaro (Dr. Who and the Daleks), etc.

Whereas if we take the view that the Dalek Movies present another account of who these time-travellers who interloped were exactly compared to The Daleks, but that it is nevertheless an alternative to it, occupying the same spot in a wider Whoniverse, there would be no need for any such pages. Skaro is still Skaro, the question is just of which madman with a box landed on it and why.

A good point of reference here might be The Dalek Chronicles, which are simultaneously prequels to the Daleks on TV Doctor Who in general, and, if certain wholly official, well-researched Doctor Who publications are to be believed, to Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (an idea which the presence of Cushing-design Daleks in the later Chronicles stories would seem to support). In other words, the same stories lead into both versions alternatively, rather than the two 'universes' being walled off.

OttselSpy25 wrote: Your claim that the Dr. Who films weren't a reboot (they were)

For the I think third time: what proof do you have of this? That seems to be quite an extraordinary claim. In 1965, it seems to me that ideas of "reboots" and "canons" simply wouldn't have been in David Whitaker's Overton window at all, and that he wouldn't have thought of the task "I'm rewriting The Daleks to work as a novel for new readers; what should I change?" differently from "I'm rewriting The Daleks to work as a movie for new viewers; what should I change?".

I struggle to imagine what mindset could have led him to have clear-cut ideas, there and then in 1965, about whether the one or the other was still in the same fictional universe as the TV series. Most likely, had he been asked, he would have just answered, "all three are basically the same story, you can pick whichever version you like best; and yes, inasmuch as that means anything, they're all in the same 'universe', a mad little place with vanishing blue boxes and Skaro and Daleks".

Per T:VS, failure to pass Rule 4 is defined by authorial intent at time of release. I don't see how, if Whitaker (or someone else involved heavily in the production/writing of the Dalek Movies) didn't have any such opinions in 1965, we can meaningfully declare them to take place in a different universe.