Doing It Again...

So here’s a question: can the Doctor have the same adventure twice? Obviously, I’m going to say yes – my standard answer being that in a quantum universe, anything is possible. However, there are some fans for whom it’s a real problem: the sort of fans who insist on defining and zealously policing a rigid canon. I’ll talk about the politics of canon debates some other time, but the sad thing is, it seems to me that some people want a canon solely for the opportunity to exclude things from it. I’ve had arguments with people who want to dismiss the audio adventures as non-canonical on the basis of Jubilee being the inspiration for the tv episode Dalek. It’s not like they’re the same story in anything but basic ideas. (And if repetition of ideas was enough to disqualify stories, we ought to throw out Planet of the Daleks for revisiting The Dead Planet – or for that matter, The Caves of Androzani as a rehash of The Power of Kroll.) As if the Jubilee/Dalek thing wasn’t bad enough, I’ve even encountered someone who wanted to invalidate Spare Parts for being the same story as Rise of the Cybermen – well, it was pretty apparent that person hadn’t actually heard Spare Parts and was just going on what he’d heard third-hand from posts on Outpost Gallifrey – but he wanted a justification for his exclusion of the audio adventures and thought he’d found it. Never let the facts get in the way of a good canon debate…

The 2007 series gave the canon-exclusionists their most powerful ammunition yet, in the form of two literary adaptations. Whereas it was apparent quite early on that Human Nature would be adapted from the novel of the same name, we knew very little in advance about Blink, other than that it would be a “Doctor-lite” episode and really scary! Nearer to the time of broadcast, a few facts had started to emerge – most notably that the main protagonist was called Sally Sparrow. Those of us who’d read Steven Moffat’s story in the 2006 Annual would already be familiar with that name, of course – and so it began to look as if Blink would be an adaptation of it. At least they were honest about it, mentioning it on Confidential and popping the original story up on the website. What I found interesting was the relative lack of consternation about this adaptation – in complete contrast to the pages of argument on Outpost Gallifrey over the previous fortnight regarding the canonical status of Human Nature. It may be that an Annual story just doesn’t register on most people’s radar in the way the New Adventures did…

Nevertheless, there were a handful of comments that Blink had effectively removed the Annual story from canon. Once again, I marvel at the willingness of Who fans to discard stories on the flimsiest of evidence, but in this case, I really don’t see the need. Admittedly, the basic idea is the same, but most of the details are different. The two Sally Sparrows live in different time periods, are different in age and appearance. The settings are completely different. There are no Weeping Angels in the Annual story. It’s just the notion of the Doctor, separated from the Tardis, sending messages via a recording medium that links the two tales. It’s no more a rehash than Dalek was of Jubilee, and we survived that. I think the question only arose because Moffat named his heroine Sally Sparrow, perhaps in homage to the Annual story, perhaps because he just liked the sound of the name. If only he’d called her Mandy Magpie, I don’t think there would have been an issue.

Human Nature is another matter entirely – as probably the single most popular Who novel ever written, the adaptation was always going to cause ructions on all sides of the canon debate – arguments that are still rumbling on to this day. It seems obvious that Paul Cornell himself anticipated this, and tried to head them off with a blog entry on the subject of canon. I’m not sure if he really thought it would still the debate, but it seems unlikely. (Many, but not all, of his points I would agree with, incidentally…)

But inevitably it happened – even before broadcast, people were declaring the novels as non-canonical, again based on that spurious argument that the Doctor couldn’t have the same adventure twice, and that the tv version had to trump the novel. Even despite the fact that the novel existed first! (It’s a mind-set that’s difficult to shake off. Even for someone like me, who spends so much of his time fitting all forms of Doctor Who together, there’s still some subconscious impulse to regard the tv series as the taproot, as somehow more real than any of the other media. Certainly, I know that I can recite the dialogue from entire episodes, whereas I can’t remember more than basic details even of books I read quite recently.)

Of course, the argument soon brought NA supporters out into the open, to offer any number of reasons why Human Nature could have happened twice, without “de-canonizing” the novels. Many of these invoked the Time War, as having in some way undone the previous sequence of events. (Indeed, Cornell suggested this in his blog entry.) This is quite an easy get-out clause, though, and in fact it comes up more and more frequently these days as a catch-all explanation for continuity discrepancies. And frankly, that’s just lazy…

I suppose I haven’t been as bothered by all this as some people – it’s not as if the notion of adventures happening twice is particularly new. The Ultimate Adventure stage play happened to three different Doctors. Shada happened twice as well (and in that case, the repetition was explained in the story). Then there are a number of comic strip adventures for the fourth Doctor, that previously happened to the second or third Doctors. And all this happened long before the Time War came along to start buggering about with the timeline. In The Complete Adventures, I’ve suggested explanations for all these occurrences. One idea I’m particularly taken with is that the Doctor, on some subconscious level, is drawn towards such areas of quantum instability, as if feeling the need to restore missing sections of his timeline. (Or maybe the Tardis deliberately seeks out these space-time discontinuities…)

My quantum universe model allows for all versions of the same story to have occurred in the same continuity. There’s no need to imagine they’ve somehow un-happened. They just haven’t occurred in the current quantum iteration of the continuum. There’s an important point about Human Nature, that the canon debate has largely ignored – the tv story is not just a straight adaptation of the novel. It seems superficially very similar, certainly the closest of the adaptations so far, but it’s not identical by any means. Some of the characters are similar, but have different names. Some have the same name, but are different characters. Some are missing altogether. Most importantly, the Doctor’s reasons for becoming human are completely different – and the villains of the piece aren’t the same either. (And where were the scarecrows in the novel?) So my fundamental question is: if the events of the novel didn’t happen, who defeated the Aubertides? (As with Blink, I have to wonder if fandom would be quite so bothered by all this if Cornell had changed the names of his characters and called the story something else. Who am I kidding...?)

Here’s a theory, then: everything in the novel happened back in a different branch of the quantum universe – the seventh Doctor decided to try being human, the Aubertides came for his biodata, and were eventually defeated. So far so good. Centuries later, the tenth Doctor is in a different quantum permutation of the continuum. (It could have been the effects of the Time War, it could have been anything – but those past memories just aren’t accessible to him any more. However, we can imagine that the Tardis memory banks retain that knowledge at some quantum level.) When the Doctor activates the chameleon arch, he leaves all the details to the Tardis. The John Smith schoolmaster persona would be automatically drawn upon to create the Doctor’s new human form; and the Tardis would then locate a setting in which to place him, homing in on an area of quantum instability to try and protect the integrity of the Doctor’s timeline.

Or it could just be a massive coincidence…