Howling:Joan Refern solution

The Situation:
There are two stories called "Human Nature". The first is a VNA with the Seventh Doctor and Bernice Summerfield, the second is a TV story with the Tenth Doctor and Martha Smith. The two are obviosly two versions of the same story but they contain enough differences that they might both qualify for cannon within the parameters of a time traveler's adventures. The many differnces lend themselves to keeping both while the similarities and parallels makes this act difficult to assimilate.

The Biggest Thorn
Thankfully the two stories are set in two different years, albeit in the same small location, and this allows us room to make an attempt at including both within cannon. Most of the obsticals involved can either be smoothed over or given a sufficient explanation; however, there remains the difficulty of trying to have two "Joan Redferns" (or one who knows how to keep her mouth shut and play along).

Potential Solution
a) Neither woman was actually named "Joan Redfern", rather the Tardis translation circuit interpreted the women's names as one The Doctor associates with amourous adventures.

b)The first time (Seventh Doctor) it really was Joan Redfern but the second time (Tenth Doctor) the circuit acted as above and translatied the name of, say, "Clara Hobson" into one the Doctor would subconsciously recognize.

If anybody has a better solution I'd love to read it. I'm one of the people who really, really want to include the stories side by side and not one over the other. --Stillnotginger 19:48, February 28, 2010 (UTC)

Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey. There, solved! It is technically in the same timeline(the Doctor's own personal one), but because time is not a strict progression from cause to effect it hasn't always necessarily happened to the Doctor all at once... Feumas 19:39, March 2, 2010 (UTC)

Honestly, I think any "solution" is going to be a bunch of untenabe fanwank. I'm pretty sure that in the minds of Paul Cornell and RTD, the solution is that the novel didn't happen--in fact, none of the NAs and maybe none of the EDAs happened, or at least were part of an alternate possible reality like the "Unbound" series--and therefore nothing needs to be resolved.

If you really want to come up with an answer, yours really doesn't fit the bill. It explains why both women were called Joan Redfern, but it doesn't explain why he ended up teaching at similar schools (or, for that matter, why there were two such similar schools in the same small town) with various other similar people, why the students at both schools ended up having to fight off aliens, etc. All of this is incredibly unlikely, unless one event somehow (timey-wimey) influenced or reflected the other. You could come up with a theory about how that worked, with morphic resonances and fixed points and wibbly-wobbly and so on, but why bother? --99.20.129.165 08:03, March 3, 2010 (UTC)