User:Gai-jin

Warning! The following was written under the influence of Lawrence Miles!
As you will quickly discover if you browse through the articles below, I have been putting jokes in my contributions to this wiki for nearly as long as I've been contributing. This will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me. What is a bit surprising, and gratifying, is that hardly any of them have been taken out.

I put them in for a few reasons. Partly because they made potentially quite dull and dry articles more interesting to write (and, I hope, read). Partly because there's a danger with this sort of project of the dead hand of pompous self-importance settling on our collective shoulder...


 * Side-rant here: if I could ban one phrase from this wiki, it would be Humanian Era. It's ugly, it's a hangover from a deeply compromised and unsatisfactory piece of Doctor Who, and it adds nothing to an article that we didn't know already. It's not as if there are multiple forms of calendar in common use here that we need to distinguish between. Why bother?!?!

...but most importantly, and this sort of includes the previous two things anyway, it seems more Doctor Whoish to have articles with jokes in. Or, to put it another way, the series takes itself a lot less seriously than many fans do. If this wiki is going to accurately communicate what makes the series so unique, as opposed to just being another collection of cast lists and monster descriptions, then that's the sort of thing that we should be thinking about.

However this is a dangerous path to start down, because I've been thinking along those lines, and... well, there are out-of-universe articles here, and they're fine. Some of them very fine. My personal interest has always been the mythology, though, the fictional universe and how it coheres and interacts with itself, which is why most of my articles are in-universe ones.

But here I'm increasingly finding a conflict between the nature of a project like this one and the (oh dear) spirit of Doctor Who as mentioned above. The series has always thrived on the fact that it hasn't needed to develop a single coherent setting for every story to occur in (unlike Trek or Babylon 5 for example) and the resultant masses of loose ends are part of what I love about the series, the idea that there are vast areas of the unknown just over the (event) horizon. Was the Doctor Merlin? Do Vampires and Time Lords share a common ancestry? Is the Miniscope actually a Gallifreyan product? Maybe. Perhaps. All interesting and potentially exciting ideas, but suggesting most of them in more than the vaguest possible terms would rapidly result in the offending text rapidly being deleted (if anyone bothered to read it).

I'm starting to think that the best way to communicate the best things about the series is through this kind of speculation and expansion of the mythology, rather than by a dogged attempt to categorise every last existing detail. This does run rather contrary to a recent trend which I will rather rudely call the Russellisation of the Mythos (rude because it's not just Gary Russell that does it, so do Craig Hinton, John Peel, David A McIntee, etc) where rather than expand it with new and interesting ideas they hobble what's already there. Is part of this pure ego? 'I will go down in history as the man who named the Master.' It's not for me to say.

But look at it this way: on their first appearance the Eternals were said to live outside of Time. Wow. That's an interesting concept, especially as presented in the show ('How can there be Lords of something so small?' etc) - it's mysterious and evocative. Now, thanks to Russellisation, the Eternals live somewhere called Calab-Yau Space, which sounds like something from a Star Trek spin-off and is about as mysterious and evocative - but, and here's the rub, it lends itself to wikification a lot more easily than 'outside of Time'. You can't really have mysteries on a wiki.

(We also get this desperate tendency to retcon away every inconsistency in the continuity - for example, the comic strip Flashback, which was written to explain the origins of the Doctor-Master feud (not something I was particularly fussed about learning, by the way), names its Master-character Magnus - and when, a few years later, someone actually names the Master something else, an emergency retcon was made - that's the War Chief, not the Master, in the story. Continuity is preserved, and the only casualty is the creators' original intention, not to mention the whole point of the story.)

Normally my response to this sort of thing is to ignore it, which is why I haven't regularly bought novels in nearly a decade, partook of the strip only sparingly recently, and have barely listened to any Big Finish since the TV show came back. But you can't really do that here, which is why I've felt obliged to include information in some of my articles that I personally wouldn't consider canon.

I find my appetite for that is dwindling, however, and am beginning to suspect I am not the right kind of Who fan to write the in-universe wiki. Or maybe that Who itself is not a suitable show for an in-universe wiki - taming it and compartmentalising it that way kills something essential and irreplacable.

Thanks for reading. Your response to the above is of interest to me, by the way. (As long as it's not Gary Russell didn't invent Calab-Yau Space!, anyway.)

List of Stuff I've Originated or Heavily Rewritten

 * Aliases of the Master - If, after all this memory-intensive work, I still go senile I shall be highly annoyed. Well, as annoyed as a senile person can be. By the way, how long do you reckon it'll be before someone sticks a big spoiler in here? :)
 * Andrew Hunt - our families lived in the same house you know, not at the same time of course
 * Argolis - just written so I could re-use the Xxbrmm gag
 * Armageddon Convention - dunno why I bothered as I haven't even read the book, I just thought it was a one-line thing in Revenge of the Cybermen - I don't know, is there any casual reference from the 70s that hasn't had a 200-page novel written about it by Andy Lane, Gary Russell, or (God help us) Craig Hinton? So much for subtlety and a sense of mystery in the mythos. I knew we were on the slippery slope when they started 'revealing' the names of characters like the Monk and the Master - fine, why not tell us the Doctor's name while you're at it? Peasants. I should drink less coffee.
 * Blake's 7 - now here's a show crying out for its own small but perfectly formed wiki!
 * Bowship
 * Celestial Toymaker - quite surprised no-one else got there first
 * Daleks of Human Origin - No, I couldn't think of a snappier title, and believe me I tried.
 * Dalek Prime
 * Dalek weaponry - giving full reign to my inner geek
 * Death's Head - the TARDIS version anyway
 * E-Space
 * Everybody dies!
 * Goodge - just written for the boiled egg gag
 * Gunstick - originally part of Dalek weaponry, but, you know...
 * Humanised Dalek - you start just by adding a bit on the power sources of Dalek casings, and the next thing you know...
 * Inconsistencies and Retcons in the Doctor Who Universe - brace yourself for a prolonged spat over the definition of 'retcon'...
 * Jubilee Pizza - enjoyed writing this inordinately. They've probably taken all the jokes out by now...
 * Miniscope
 * N-Space - am I allowed to say that I think that some of the amendments other people have made to this and E-Space aren't necessarily improvements? Hey ho - live by the wiki, die by the wiki...
 * Non-interference policy - another one that grew in the writing
 * Psychic - a low-quality job but its absence was annoying me.
 * Randomiser - hurrah! Found out what happened to Compassion's randomiser!
 * Real world interface - tongue drifting ever-so-slightly into my cheek in some parts of this article
 * Runcible
 * Riverfruit - possibly the most important fruit in Dr Who's 18th season
 * Robert Holmes - the Main Man
 * Sandminer robot - if you know what SASV-1's name actually meant then please amend this accordingly
 * Sato Katsura - obscure and Japanese, so right up my dori
 * Sevateem
 * Spiridon - largely written for the invisibility gags
 * Staser
 * TARDIS scanner
 * Time Lord-Vampire War
 * Tissue Compression Eliminator - oh dear, these last two make me look like a Time Lord gun nut
 * WOTAN