Doctor Who canon can be confusing, even for some of us lifelong fans of the show. Just ask any Whovian what was the definite way that the ancient continent of Atlantis was destroyed on the show and there are a couple of different answers you could get. To be fair, the show’s time-travel conceit does allow for the possibility of events being changed so that maybe an alien race like the Daleks can have two different origins or the original series’s stories involving UNIT were simultaneously set in both the 1970s AND the 1980s. And that’s a good way to hand wave away contradictions that a production team was unaware of or just ignored in order to tell a different story.
But current Doctor Who producer Russell T. Davies has a different approach – Canon is up to you, the viewer.
Speaking at the Doctor Who panel at this past weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con, a fan asked about the inclusion of Richard E. Grant in a visual of a number of past Doctors during the episode “Rogue” and whether that canonized the animated story, Scream of the Shalka.
Davies stated that he included Grant in that scene as Scream Of The Shalka writer Paul Cornell is an old friend and that “he was kind of excluded when Chris Eccleston became the Doctor, so it was a nice thing to do to a friend to reach out and sort of canonize it.” Cornell also write a number of Doctor Who tie-in novels that were published in the years between the original series’s ending in 1989 and its relaunch sixteen years later before contributing scripts to the new series.
But Davies also went on to expound about the nature of canon as it relates to Doctor Who in a rather egalitarian manner –
I would hate to say what is official canon and what isn’t… I’m going to say it is what ever you want… I think the canon belongs to you. You can invent it, you can invent new stuff, that’s how I started as a kid. I just used to invent stories in my head and now I do it for a living. It’s yours! No official answer, which is the best way to be!
Now to be sure, Davies is not saying that everything in Doctor Who is up for grabs. The show will always have some things that are the bedrock of the it’s storytelling – the Doctor as an alien time traveler who journeys through the universe to experience its wonders and to fight its injustices while bringing along a number of traveling companions to share in the adventure. Beyond that, there is a lot of flexibility to allow the telling of all sorts of stories. And if that means maybe contradicting something that happened previously in the show’s six decade history that is not necessarily a bad thing. There’s enough Doctor Who where you can like what you like and ignore the rest. It’s the ultimate nerd buffet.
And that is not to say that this attitude towards canon is one that should be embraced by all franchises. That is a decision best left to the people who run their respective television and cinematic universes. If maintaining a strict continuity is what your show demands, then so be it. If your movie series can afford to be a bit loose with its continuity, go for it if that helps tell better individual stories.
But the next time you’re hanging with your Doctor Who fan friends and someone asks “So, was Atlantis destroyed by a mad Atlantian scientist or a time-eating chronovore?” you can answer “Yes.”
