User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-188432-20130514042227/@comment-188432-20130522170911

So you're suggesting that Strax somehow knows how to a) use the TARDIS communication systems and b) knows them well enough to send a message to the Sontaran Empire at a time — relative to the events on Trenzalore — when they would even know who Strax was? And if Strax is on good enough terms with the Empire to send field reports back to them, why is he essentially allowing himself to be on Victorian Era Earth in more-or-less permanent exile?

Obviously all that invites speculation, so I just bring it up sort of rhetorically. I think it is an extraordinarily common feature of modern-day marketing that production houses cut ads that appear to be narrative. The new Star Trek movie, for instance, has three ads "told" from Cumberbatch's perspective that I'm quite certain Memory Alpha wouldn't even consider for a second to be a valid narrative. And it seems to me that's what we've got here. We'd be foolish to confuse long-form advertisements told in a narrative style with genuine narrative.

So I would say with conviction what you said with sarcasm, DCT. Because Name did not feature anything that remotely looked like the setting of SS, HS, or even contained any elements later picked up by Name, it's now super clear that this was in no way a genuine prequel. I mean, you don't get the White House, you don't get Nixon, you don't get Clara's mum, you don't get Victorian London, you don't get anything like the elements seen in previous prequels. In fact, it's not even a prequel using BBC Wales' definition.

SS, HS definitely fails rule 1. It's just a teaser. If we elect to view it as an actual story, we will be fundamentally changing the definition of the word on this wiki. We will then have to include Tom Baker's trip to the cinema prior to Terror of the Zygons or the Miracle Day pieces or Eccleston's "Do you wanna come with me?" or Rose's reply to that, or — and this is what this damned thing really is — the Donna spots just prior to the broadcast of series 4.