In this inaugural episode of the podcast, we will look at the issue of “canon” in Doctor Who. No, that does not mean The Highlanders. Canon is the list of stories that are to be recognized as authoritative. Does it exist? If so, what is it, exactly?

 

Transcript

Roar of the Canons

Back in the early 1990s, when The New Adventures of Doctor Who, that is, the books that attempted to continue the series after its cancellation, initially appeared in print, fans of the show began having their first in-depth discussions of which Doctor Who stories were to be accepted as “canon,” and which were not. Today you can hear the word on the lips of just about every Doctor Who fan in some conversation or other. Have you ever been asked, “Is this canon?” or been told “That’s isn’t canon”? The thing is, not everyone is using the word in the same way, and this is one of the reasons controversy about canon continues.

I’d like to address the subject and some of its subtleties, after which I hope to demonstrate first, that everyone who claims there is a canon is wrong, and second, that everyone who claims there is no canon is also wrong. Let me explain.

The term “canon” was borrowed from the Star Trek fan world, who had for some years been reading stories of their favorite show that had never been televised and wondered which ones were to be taken as truly part of Star Trek mythology. They, in turn, had borrowed the term from Sherlock Holmes fans, who had done something similar, and they had borrowed the term from the Christian church: yeah, the word “canon” had been employed by theologians to refer to the list of authoritative books that belonged in the Bible, a formally-approved collection of Scripture. In other words, fans wanted to construct their own “Bibles” for their favorite fiction franchises. Is there such a Bible for Doctor Who?

First we need to nail down the meaning of the word “canon,” because not everyone has the same concept in mind when they speak of it.

In 1992, Geoffrey Cotterill wrote an article for Doctor Who Magazine in which he tackles the issue of canon in the Doctor Who universe, and he offers the following definition: “Canonical Doctor Who,” he writes, “is those stories which are authoritative in providing the ‘facts’ on which other ideas about the show can be based…. Most other stories which are not regarded as canonical should be treated as imaginary.”[1] This concept of canon is alive and well today. On the Doctor Who TV website, Chris McIntyre offers a similar definition: “Canon could loosely be described as the stories that make up the ‘true’ Doctor Who story. On the other hand, non-canon is essentially stories that, while including the Doctor, his companions, monsters or other characters from the franchise, do not actually fit into the Doctor who story and therefore shouldn’t be considered to be ‘true’.”[2]

There is an inherent problem with this definition of canon in Doctor Who. It implies that there is, for everyone, a “true” or “real” Doctor Who and a “fake” or “imaginary” Doctor Who. Cotterill explicitly says that any adventure that contradicts information established in the televised stories is “untrue.” First of all, there are televised stories that contradict information in earlier televised stories, so his framework falls apart right there. But let’s be honest. From a real world point of view, all of the Doctor Who stories are imaginary, so the concept of a canon based on factual vs imaginary tales is ridiculous in itself.

Nevertheless, if you are the type of fan who prefers to believe that there are Doctor Who stories that are true, why not just accept all of them as true? After all, the show itself says that there are an infinite number of parallel universes, right? Therefore all of the stories conceivably could be true, whether they contradict or not.