Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-4028641-20170306172600/@comment-6032121-20200510184914

More nails for our Varga-plant coffin: Peter Harness just revealed as part of Doctor Who: Lockdown! that The Zygon Invasion very, very nearly had a direct and unambiguous continuity reference to Dimensions in Time (TV story). ([1], [2]).

The line was cut in the end, but we could very well have gotten the Twelfth Doctor reminiscing about "that thing with Big Ron" on BBC One in 2015, right alongside references to other multi-Doctor stories such as The Three Doctors. I hardly think we would have called The Zygon Invasion invalid if that had come to pass. So why should short stories be invalidated for exactly the same "crime" of setting themselves in a timeline where Dimensions in Time happened?

Note also that Harness's wording provides direct evidence of what I said earlier about what goes on in the mind of a writer who references a famously invalid or "non-canonical" story in their new licensed DW work: namely, that they're trying to "bring the earlier story into canon", not make the new story equally non-canonical. Of course, the Wiki doesn't acknowledge the "bringing the earlier story into canon" part of the equation, as well it shouldn't lest we find ourselves covering Time Rift and the whole of the AudioVisuals as valid sources, which I don't think anyone really wants. But the point is, the intent is that the new story is set in the DWU, very much so. "Around about here, there used to be a scene in which I went continuity mad and tried to make sure that “Dimensions In Time” was put into the Doctor Who canon."

- Peter Harness, 2020

Of course, Harness is talking about "canon" here, which we never do. But I think it's fair to say that while something can be "non-canonical" but still be valid, the creator of a story saying it's "Doctor Who canon" implies that it's also, by definition, set in the DWU.