Talk:Doctor (Doctor Who)/Archive 4
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Title change
Why isn't this article called "The Doctor (Doctor Who)"? That is, after all, the character's name, and the way in which he is currently listed in the credits. --Mister Six (talk) 10:42, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
- Per Wikipedia naming conventions, "the" isn't used at the start of article titles, unless it would be capitalized in running text. Since you'd write, "I met the Doctor," and not, "I met The Doctor", we don't capitalize. --Brian Olsen (talk) 17:08, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
- I'd write "The Doctor". It's part of his title; he has no name like "Doctor Ian Smith" he is "The Doctor". However my primitive logic is irrelevant - what do reliable sources call him? --kingboyk (talk) 18:01, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
- If the "the" was really part of his name, it would be used in direct address: "Save Me, The Doctor!" as opposed to "Save me, Doctor!". The nearest source I had on hand was one of the BBC novels (The Feast of the Drowned), and it doesn't capitalize the "the". --Brian Olsen (talk) 23:01, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
- I'd write "The Doctor". It's part of his title; he has no name like "Doctor Ian Smith" he is "The Doctor". However my primitive logic is irrelevant - what do reliable sources call him? --kingboyk (talk) 18:01, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
Opening with quote
Hi, folks. An anonymous user recently edited the article so that it began with this quote:
"The man who makes people better. How sanctimonious is that?"
—The Master to the Doctor
I reverted the addition, because although I like the sentiment I think that in general starting an article with a quotation isn't very encyclopedic in style. The article needs to be able to serve as an introduction to the character for someone who's never seen or heard of Doctor Who. And such a person wouldn't necessarily know who the Master is, or understand the proper context for the quotation. (They might think that the Doctor actually is sanctimonious, rather than thinking that his arch-enemy considers him sanctimonious — a very different thing.)
Second, it's possible that opening the article with a quotation from one of the most recent episodes of a series with a 44-year history might give undue weight to the current incarnation of Doctor Who. A neutral point of view would present the character first in a context which is applicable to all of Doctor Who, and only subsequently go into aspects which may depend on the point in the series' history. Or, to put it a different way, why begin with this quote from the Master, instead of starting with this:
"A cosmos without the Doctor scarcely bears thinking about."
—The Master to the High Council of Gallifrey
In short, although it's a great line to open a fan article about the character of the Doctor, I don't think we can use it here in that context. We can talk it out though, if you disagree. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 05:41, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
You could do that for each Doctor in their own article. Put a quote said by the doctor at the start of the page. For example in the First Doctor article you could put a quote of what he said in the episode "The Massacre" - "Perhaps I sould go back. Back to my own people, but I can't" or in the Second Doctor you could put "I do tend to get a bit involed" - The War Games. It could be a quote that reveals something about himself in each incarnation. (Speaker180 (talk)) 23:01, 15 February 2008
∂³∑x²
LuGiADude (talk · contribs) has recently been adding the following sentence to the "Doctor who?" section:
- In The War Games, the name of The Doctor is said to be ∂³∑x². This has not been confirmed by any of the writers or producers of Doctor Who.
Leaving aside the inadvisability of participating in an edit war, I don't believe that this is correct. I don't recall seeing or hearing that formula given as the Doctor's name in The War Games. (It certainly wasn't in dialogue — how would you say it?) It was, however, given as the Doctor's name in one of Terrance Dicks' behind-the-scenes books in the 1970s — I don't recall which one offhand. It's shown up a couple of times since then — the formula (or something very like it) can be seen on the obelisk in Rassilon's Tomb in "The Five Doctors", and I believe that it also showed up on the Doctor's calling card in Remembrance of the Daleks (along with a prominent question mark).
I'll need to do some research to find exactly where it first appears, and to confirm those later appearances, but I think that it's basically an idea of Terrance Dicks', which has generally been ignored by subsequent production teams. (Did he perhaps put it into the novelisation of The War Games?) If we can confirm the provenance of the information, we can put it into the article, but we need to get the info right. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 00:04, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
- I think it may have been in this book The Making of Doctor Who (1972, Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke) .I have some memory of seeing symbols as his name and I do have a copy of this book.Garda40 00:29, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
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- That sounds right to me. If you can find your copy of the book, perhaps you could whip up a citation from it? We could say something like this:
- In the 1972 behind-the-scenes book The Making of Doctor Who, Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke wrote that the Doctor's name is ∂³∑x². This claim has not been reproduced in any other source; however, the same Greek letters and mathematical symbols appear on an obelisk in the Tomb of Rassilon in The Five Doctors, and in the 1988 serial Remembrance of the Daleks, the Doctor produced a calling card with similar symbols and a question mark on it.
- How's that, assuming we can cite it appropriately? (I noticed that we've got a frame of the card already in the article — it would justify its inclusion better if we talk specifically about the lettering on it. It's not, in fact,the same as the formula from The Making of Doctor Who, but it's similar enough.) —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 02:23, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
- That sounds right to me. If you can find your copy of the book, perhaps you could whip up a citation from it? We could say something like this:
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- Sorry about this, I may have understood things wrong. Well, misunderstood. Yeah, I read that book and it said something about the war games, so sorry about that, I thought it was in the actual episode. I thought there was something dodgy about it lol
- But again I apologize for what's happened LuGiADude 12:10, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
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- No problem, LuGi — but I hope this shows you why it's a bad idea to edit war. If you had come to the talk page and discussed the matter when you were first reverted, we probably could have figured it out sooner.
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- That said, I do think that it might be a good idea to add the paragraph I suggested above to the article, if we can get a proper citation. LuGi and Garda40 both have a copy of the book — could one of you get the info we need for the citation? (We'd probably use {{cite book}}, so you can look at that template to see what information is needed.) Thanks! —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 00:11, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
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Interesting to Note
That the Orgins of the Alias "John Smith" can be found in the episode "An Unearthly Child". By all accounts the Doctor seems to have picked up the name from Susan, who was a fan of "John Smith & The Common men."
Perhaps further analysis and an entry should be made somewhere.
—Preceding unsigned comment added by JamesRandom (talk • contribs)
- That was just a coincidence. By all other accounts--the various books, DWM, etc.--he first got the name from Jamie. DonQuixote 02:03, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
"Brothers" speculation - or is it?
I've been watching the edits going back and forth about the question of the Doctor being the Master's brother for, what, about 24 hours now. The fact that there is a textual basis for raising the issue - the Grimwade/Saward line, the novel and the ridicule-without-explicit-denial in "The Sound of Drums" - takes it out of the realm of idle fan speculation and makes it notable and encyclopedic, IMO, not to mention interesting. I think Someguy has the right idea here: report what has been said in the show and spinoff material, but go easy on the fan theory angle, to the extent that it has to be mentioned at all. --Karen | Talk | contribs 05:53, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
- Interesting, yes, but it's all speculation at this point. Here's the text in question:
"Fans have occasionally seized upon the two Time Lords' rivalry to speculate that the Master and the Doctor are, in fact, brothers. Such speculation was fueled by the Master's last line in Planet of Fire, which was originally scripted by Peter Grimwade (with permission from script editor Eric Saward) to allude to this as "Doctor, could you do this to your own..." However, this line was excised in post-production, and the Master's last words in the story are somewhat obscured. On the other hand, Lance Parkin's novel The Gallifrey Chronicles implies that the Doctor and the Master had different fathers. In "The Sound of Drums", Martha Jones asks if they are brothers, and the Doctor does not answer directly, merely saying that she "has been watching too much television"."
- There are no citations for the "fan speculation", the notes about the script (and who gave permission), or the reason for that line being cut. If the last line is "obscured", is that intentional, a technical issue, a problem with a particular copy of the show, or a subjective interpretation? With regards to the novel, it is described as "implied" - which means it is again subjective interpretation. The same goes for "The Sound of Drums". Basically, we've got nothing concrete. Thoughts? --Ckatzchatspy 08:51, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
Speculation over meetings of different Doctors
In the same vein as the above discussion I've noted the addition of quite a bit of speculative material since I started this section. Most of this needs to be removed because it isn't referenced in the series. I also removed the claim that RTD "misdirected" fans by his comments regarding multi-Doctor stories. Aside from being unsourced and therefore in violation of WP:BLP, it's also meaningless. RTD made his comments in the early days of the series and a producer has the right to change his mind. Plus, no one has really firmly indicated that Time Crash is canonical anyway, though Moffatt left it a possibility. 23skidoo 07:07, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
merger proposal
Age
The BBC Trailer for Voyage of the Damned (Doctor Who) has the Doctor stating his age at 903. Should this be added to the article now, or should we wait till VotD on Christmas Day? - Weebiloobil (talk) 18:15, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
- It's already been mentioned. The Doctor says that he's 900 years old in Aliens of London, hence he's 903 now. We don't need to keep updating this every year. DonQuixote (talk) 18:39, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
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- The bigger problem is that said age is flat-out wrong, unless he's refering specifically to his tenth incarnation, since he was 953 as of "Time and the Rani", and is mentioned as being over a thousand during the course of the Eighth Doctor Adventures. MartinMcCann (talk) 23:37, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
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- Yep...darn those continuity errors. If it weren't for the fact that the Master also mentions this, we could've chalked this up to the Doctor's vanity. Oh well. DonQuixote (talk) 06:35, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
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- It's even more irritating since it implies the Doctor was being literal when he claimed to be 900 in "Aliens of London" - hasn't the script writer ever heard of rounding? The only explanation that makes sense is that the Tenth Doctor is 903, with the gaps being filled at the end of "Doomsday" (between the Doctor leaving Torchwood and contacting Rose), and between "The Runaway Bride" and "Smith and Jones". MartinMcCann (talk) 13:33, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
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- Worth noting another factoid often dragged out with this issue - in "The Empty Child" the Doctor mentions that he's had "900 years of travel in a phone box," making it impossible that he's only 900 himself unless he's somehow been flying his TARDIS around since birth, which we know he hasn't. Rob T Firefly (talk) 20:14, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
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