TOOBWORLD VERSUS OTHER FICTIONAL UNIVERSES

My aversion to bringing in outside media to expand the canon of ‘Doctor Who’ in the TV Universe was illustrated with the first of the three 60th anniversary specials written and produced by Russell T. Davies.  “The Star Beast” featured a character called “The Meep” who tangled with the Fourteenth Incarnation of the Doctor and with Donna Noble and her daughter Rose.

But in the universe based on comic strips, the Meep – then known as “Beep the Meep” – appeared on that Earth early in 1980 and wound up as an antagonist to the Fourth Incarnation.

This situation has cropped up in the past, with the TV series adapting stories from other sources – “Family of Blood” & “Human Nature” from the novel and e-book “Human Nature”, as well as “Blink,” which originated as “What I Did On My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow,” a short story which, like the TV episode, was written by Steven Moffat.

In both cases, the “televersions” cannot be reconciled with their source material.  One Meep battled the Fourteenth Incarnation while the original fought the Fourth.  The Incarnation who believed he was a teacher at a prep academy just before the first World War broke out was the Seventh Incarnation in Bookworld, but in Earth Prime-Time, John Smith was actually the Tenth Incarnation.  That tenth version of the Doctor briefly met Sally Sparrow in Toobworld, but it was the Ninth Incarnation in that short story.  Aside from that, Sally Sparrow was only about 12 years old in the short story and not some young woman played by a future Academy Award nominee!

So all those versions of those stories are incompatible with each other and the truly fanatical Whovians should quit trying to crowbar any of the stories from other media into Earth Prime-Time.  I think they’d be better off accepting and enjoying the differences within their respective fictional universes.  P.O.M.G. as Bill Savitt used to promise.  (Connecticut reference.  Look it up.)

I will accede, however, that the possibility exists that anything found only in the novels, short stories, comic books, comic strips, and audio dramas could eventually find their way into the TV Universe (including Skitlandia and the Tooniverse.)  BUT!  They would have to be adapted to the strictures of whichever TV dimension in which they appeared.