Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-1272640-20161223201024/@comment-188432-20161228090007

"Authorial intent" is being used differently here than it's meant to be under T:VS. What we mean by it is the intent of the copyright holder, which is a tricky concept in Doctor Who. Generally, for televised Doctor Who, and Shalka counts as "televised", we mean the BBC. So the question is not "what did Cornell intend", but what did the (then-controlling part of the) BBC.

This is key to understanding Shalka because yes, during much of production, one part of the BBC -- namely the commissioning BBCi -- definitely believed that this was straight-up, proper Doctor Who, and that they were telling the adventures of the Ninth Doctor.

However, simultaneously, Lorraine Heggessey was furiously putting a team together to take back Doctor Who for BBC One. She'd been working tirelessly to figure out the strange, complicated, tangled legal picture with Doctor Who, and she finally got it all figured out in September 2003. And from that announcement, Shalka was immediately an also-ran. It hadn't been broadcast yet, and by the time of its November 2003 broadcast, the momentum was with the BBC One team, not BBCi.

That's why you end up with DWM being pretty hands off with Shalka. It's only significantly in DWM 336 -- and even that has Richard E Grant on the cover with this orange bubble that touches his hair and announces "Doctor Who set for BBC TV comeback!"

The very next issue of DWM, 337 makes, as far as I can tell, one oblique reference to Shalka, deep in a 40th anniversary piece, but never mentions it by name. It's already old news, consigned to the scrap heap of Doctor Who. The end of 2003 is really all about what the Heggessey-Tranter-RTD team are gonna do.

So Shalka never made it to broadcast as "real" Doctor Who that had a serious chance of continuation. Heck DWM never even give a traditional "Richard E Grant is the Doctor" headline, so you know he's not really the Doctor.

That's why it's wrongheaded, in my view, to speak of it being "in the DWU as it existed in 2003". It's clear that the primary copyright holder at the time it was actually released -- the straight-up, as-seen-on-TV BBC -- never had any intention of considering Shalka a part of their world. To Lorraine Heggessey, Shalka was a contractual obligation of another department impeding progress on the television show. She had no problem allowing an announcement in September 2003 about her show that would obviously and completely kneecap Shalka with fans and, more importantly, the general public.

By DWM 342, DWM are going with a big interior headline that says, "Stop Press: The BBC Unveils the Ninth Doctor at Long Last"; in 343, the number nine is twice on the front cover. Any thought that you might have had that Richard E Grant was actually the Ninth Doctor had disappeared as if DWM 336 had never been printed.