8 Most Overused Words In Doctor Who Fandom

8. Canon

OK, let€™s get the elephant in the room out of the way first. In an entirely different world the esteemed New Testament scholar Marcus Borg sadly passed away earlier this year. When Borg was ordained as a canon in his church, he was well and truly put in his place when his wife informed him that the word €œcanon€ means €œbig shot". It is a word that has travelled into Doctor Who fandom to become the cause of many heated debates. It is tempting to argue that fans sometimes use it to claim superior knowledge and to big up their status of €œtrue fan". When it comes to a body of work, traditionally, establishing a canon does three things. It condemns certain works to a lesser position or even heretical status. It controls the reader/viewer as to what they can regard as gospel. And it closes the book so to speak, stopping any further work from being added to the mythology it seeks to contain. When you look at it like this, applying it to Doctor Who is immediately problematical. Doctor Who is a continuing narrative. The BBC have not closed the book. In the TV series, anything previously considered to be non canonical, can with one line become part of the official narrative. Time Heist is a great example. As soon as his face appears on that screen, Abslom Daak from the world of the comics is suddenly reassessed by those who had contested the canonical status of the Dalek killer. Similarly, some of the Big Finish companions of the Eighth Doctor are mentioned in The Night of the Doctor. In The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang, the Chelonians from the New Adventures novel by Gareth Roberts get a thumbs up. That means that anything is possible and nothing can be dismissed as heretical, not even unofficial fan made material and theories. The problems don€™t stop there. Many of the authors of Doctor Who are still alive and will sometimes add interpretation to their works. Is the mysterious woman in The End of Time supposed to be the Doctor€™s mother? It doesn€™t say anything of the sort in the episodes, but should it be regarded as canon because Russell T Davies said as much in his book The Writer's Tale? And take the nature of the beast, all that timey-wimey (yes, that's probably the ninth most overused word/saying!) stuff. Doctor Who is uniquely placed to be able to allow discontinuity to exist because of alternative universes and time travel. Every time something is added to an artificial canon in Doctor Who, it is in effect being made a fixed point in time. Should the discerning fan regard that choice as canon? It€™s time to get shot of the big shot word.