Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-1272640-20161223201024/@comment-4028641-20170102132904

RingoRoadagain wrote: It's not like invalid stories are inferior to a valid one anyway.

Oh-ho-ho Czech will fight you to the trenches over that one.

The way I see it, Shalka is one of those "on-the-edge" stories where it's only being considered invalid because there's been no confirmation on what it even is. As far as the BBC is concerned, it isn't "an alternate universe storyline" or an "alternate timeline caused by the time war." It's "a story that we made and then we ignored it to make something better."

The reason that Infinity Doctors is loosely valid is that we have confirmation that the plan from the beginning was to make a sequel that explained how it was an alternate timeline. But Shalka was, by almost all accounts, meant to be a legitimate continuation -- no one on the first day secretly planned a story that would explain the discrepancies between this version and the 2005 series, it wasn't given much thought.

If there had been a sequel story to even lightly touch upon the idea that this story was set in an alternate dimension/timeline/reality, then we'd probably slap it into that category and move on. But the most that we currently have to support this is a tongue-in-cheek statement from someone who had worked on it. It's the equivalent of trying to claim that Mace Windu is alive just because Samuel L. Jackson joked about it once or twice in interviews.