Canon: fired

[adders]

Paul Cornell, writer of much Dr Who (book, audio and TV), explains why canonicity doesn't matter in the show.

I can hear fanboys' heads gently imploding all over the world.

Comments

[point5b]

Ehn, I watched various eras of Who broadcast by PBS back in the 80s, but I never knew enough of the history to react to any inconsistencies that such a long-running show would pick up. And the guy ranting about "continuity" versus "canon" had a point - did Peter Parker get his powers from a spider totem or from a genetically engineered spider that was either red and blue or involved in research to recreate Captain America? The answer to that is "depends on the continuity".

I only object to weird contradictions in the current stuff. In one case, it strikes the Doctor as perfectly sensible to help aliens colonize the dead of 1800s England, despite Rose's alarm at the prospect of changing Earth history in such a huge way. History is always in flux, little girl! But when Rose prevents the death of her father a few episodes later, it's a cosmic catastrophe. You've thrown a spanner in the works of the great machine of inevitable destiny! That's the sort of thing that irritates me (despite my liking that episode), not that it doesn't jibe with something that happened among decades of episodes. Especially since, while watching the first season of the new series, I strongly got the impression that the writers simply didn't agree on whether to present history as mutable or not.

I will say that I'm taken with the idea that "retro-future" depictions of the late 20th and early 21st century from the past of the show could be explained away as entirely different histories that time travelers have actually undone, intentionally or not. (I think someone said this came up in the second season, but my TV's on the fritz and I haven't been able to watch those DVDs, yet.) Heck, I very vaguely recall (and will look up at some point) that during the B&W period, one of the Companions actually was a girl from the very late 1990s or early 2000s. (There was an episode involving a villain who could conjure up beings from fiction, and one such being was a comic book character from her time period armed with a ray gun. She identifies it by name and what the gun will do, and the Doctor dismisses it as a scientific absurdity, causing the gun to vanish. But the character's superhuman strength wasn't so readily dismissed...)