Answers To Readers's Questions [3]

 Aristide Twain

“There has been one (1) successful Doctor Who spin-off, namely, the Sarah-Jane Adventures,” Well, on television. In prose and audio and comics, there have been very good Paradise Towers comics, Faction Paradox short story anthologies, Sontaran audio plays, and so on for many decades. (And naturally a lot of very bad Gallifrey audio plays, Lethbridge-Stewart short story anthologies, etc. etc.) I do not particularly yearn for a world in which such premises were executed as TV shows on Disney+ like the Marvel and Star Wars catalogues, but it is a very easy thing to imagine.

Yes: that is a perfectly valid point. I was thinking of TV Spinoffs — K9 and Company, Australian K9, Sarah-Jane, the Dreadful Torchwood, the recent sea devils thing. But if you include an infinite range of stage plays, novels, comics, audio-stories, RPGs, and computer games, then Doctor Who has had more spin-offs than pretty much anything else. 

In 2005, the holders of the copyright to Zorro commissioned Isabel Allende to write a serious historical novel about the character, largely on the grounds that it was bout the only thing that had never been done. I look forward to Doctor Who - The Opera in due course. 

So: whoever inherits the Doctor Who logo may very well decide to create a franchise of adventurous, slightly retro sci-fi stories, linked together by a nomad who wanders through time and space. One element might be set on a planet that the Nomad once visited; one on a planet which he is going to visit at some point in the future; and one on a planet that he is never going to visit, but which he has once mentioned in passing.

It’s a not unfeasible format: Sandman does it to some extent. 

Has anyone associated John Finnemore’s name with the revamped franchise? (He collaborated with He Who Still Probably Cannot Be Named on the Good Omens sequels, so must have worked with David Tennant.) Several of his comedy shows involve interesting structural hijinks. In one of his radio sketch shows the final item involved a time machine, which proceeded to travel backwards through the previous sketches in the episode, providing the explanation for lines which otherwise made no sense. One could imagine a new version of Who doing that kind of thing.

If your target audience know and care then prequels and sequels are a perfectly valid thing to do. “How did the Kangs get on after the Doctor left Paradise Towers” is as good a jumping off point for a story as any other. And if the story is good enough, it doesn’t matter if the audience know and care. I was a big fan of a US comedy show about a psychiatrist: I later learned that he had previously appeared in a different series set in a bar.

James Blish said that if you had a good idea for a science fiction story, it was better to create your own characters than to present it as Star Trek fan-fic. But I think it is possible to have a good idea for a Star Trek story that won’t go into any other format. 

My only real beef is with the idea that a stand alone series about a group of specialists solving mysteries and space becomes magically interesting when you say “And the computer expert is Zoe!” Although even that could be fun if it were an easter egg and not a premise. 

Answers to Readers's Questions [2]

 Scurra

It will be called Doctor Who and it will be Doctor Who. Just like the 1963 version, the 1996 version and the 2005 version are all Doctor Who. I similarly think that the Target novels, the Virgin novels, the BBC novels, the Titan comics, the Big Finish audios etc etc are all Doctor Who on the same basis. Indeed, if I was going to be fair, I'd also contend that unofficial videos and fanfiction are also all Doctor Who because either there is a line (in which case, it's really hard to draw) or there isn't.

People assume that Doctor Who is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, not subjective viewpoint its more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... Cannon-y-wammony stuff.

I think it was Aristotle who said the reason elephants were large, grey and wrinkled was that if they were small, white and smooth, they would be aspirins. 

Or put another way: if you saw a small elephant, would you say “that is not an elephant” or “that is apparently a dwarf elephant.” Or if you saw a small elephant with small ears “Obviously the Indian dwarf elephant.” A small white elephant with small ears? “Obviously, an albino of the species”. How many attributes can you remove until the elephant stops being an elephant?

I suppose that we, unlike Aristotle, can say, “It is still an elephant as long as it has got elephant DNA.” 

I broadly agree with your point: the original black and white TV version of the Daleks; Russel T Davies’ absurd colourisation of the Daleks, the Doctor Who and the Daleks movie and the Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks novel all come under the Doctor Who umbrella. And so, therefore, does the TV Century 21 Dalek comic strip and the Daleks Give-a-Show projector. 

Steve Moore wrote a back-up strip for the then Doctor Who weekly called Abslam Daak Dalek Killer. Which I rather liked at the time because it had, you know, Daleks, in it. But even at the time, I could see that this was a 2000AD strip, not a Doctor Who strip, and that you could have substituted the Daleks for pretty much any other alien without it making much difference. (The British Planet of the Apes comic infamously filled some blank pages by, er, taking some issues of Kilraven and drawing apes over the Martians.)

Presumably, the lost 1963 Crackerjack skit about Doctor What and his flying post-box; and even the Private Eye cartoon about Doctor Owen who never knew which party he was going to materialise in next have something to do with Doctor Who, although they are not very good examples of the thing that Doctor Who is.

You could say that Dalek Slayer is part of Doctor Who because you can construct a flow chart that connects it to the wider Doctor Who continuity. The Virgin New Adventures arguably happened to the same man who got shot outside his police box in San Francisco on New Year’s Eve, and that man unquestionably met Absalam Dakk, so it follows…

Interestingly, it would be harder to connect the infamous 1960s comic strip to the grand narrative in quite the same way. There isn’t a point in the fictional life-story of the First Doctor where he could have been living in a junk yard with grandchildren other than Susan. But it is very easy to see what kind of thing those comic strips are trying to be — a story which is a bit like the TV show Doctor Who. Invoke parallel universes if you insist: I think that children in the 1960s had no difficulty at all with the idea that you could tell the same story in several different ways. At the age of very young indeed I could understand that Walt Disney Winnie-the-Pooh was different from book Winnie the Pooh, but that it didn’t matter very much.