Never considered that but I love it!
And I mean, it kinda makes sense when we stop to think about it. Back in the day, before Eccleston was announced as the 9th Doctor for the revival, Shalka was the further official point we had.
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Absolutely! I don’t want to sound like someone who gets mad when things go haywire or something like that. Totally the opposite tbh. I make these connections more as a creativity exercise than anything else, simply for fun.
At the end of the day I enjoy a good story and that’s it 
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My feeling is that once the war got started, the timeline got altered several times.
First, you’ve got a timeline that appears to be a second UNIT era, The Curse of Fatal Death, with Rowan Atkinson’s 9.
Given the Scream of the Shalka aired after that, I’d pin that as the next timeline in the series, and then Revival (Christopher Eccleston) as where things eventually stabilized to.
It’s hard to pin down when the time war actually started. I’ve actually got a tendency to go for Remembrance of the Daleks, and the timeline just didn’t actually start shifting until post-Survival…
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It started after the First Doctor had first encountered the Daleks on Skaro 
Try to make that make sense…
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So not during the first serial. Good to know…
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I do as Delta and see all stories in isolation. I love good stories and a strict canon would just get in the way of that.
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For me, every story is canon unless explicitly stated.
If there are contradictions, I can easily work with that.
After all, that’s the nature of time Travel!
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I don’t mind the contradictions or need an explanation. There’s 60+ years of the show, plus all the EU. A strict canon was very unlikely to ever happen, especially with how much lost media there is from the early eras of the show and the lack of a story bible (and what a nightmare story bible I’m sure it’d be if it existed…)
The show has always contradicted itself, let alone contradicted BF and other EU things. Would I love more BF stuff to be done in the TV show? Yeah of course! But for me I just pick and choose what I want to be canon when given contradictions, or don’t think about it too hard lol. To me part of the charm of DW is how flexible it is even with its own canon
Totally understand other perspectives though
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Well, every conflict starts somewhere… We can’t say you are wrong 
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When things contradict, the story that I like better wins 
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That’s a great way… the problem is when they contradict but both stories are great
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Then I blame the Time War! It even happened twice so gotta be it!
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Let’s blame the Time War agaaaaaaaaaain
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I am a firm believer in Schrodinger’s canon. Everything is canon and it isn’t. It’s a show about time travel for goodness sake. You may not be able to rewrite history but you definitely can modify it. And we sure see that in the Time War. My personal belief is that the Time War is responsible for random canon changes and retcons. Add the Toymaker, Faction Paradox, and whatever else you please.
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Yes I consider the Other and Tecteun the same character.
Often i think the doctor is just changing the timeline a lot. And that both fuftristic and present dayish houses, clothing, and names coexist in the future centuries. AND the future colonies, space ships, and space station s are ingabited by a variety of species living together.
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My approach to canon in Doctor Who is that everything is canon! Also nothing is canon!
You can pull your hair out all day trying to fit everything onto a timeline but it won’t work and trying to decide the “true timeline” isn’t much better.
I personally think the absolute best way to experience the show is just take the version of events you like the most and treat that as you own, personal canon.
For instance, I do not like The Timeless Child so I do not consume consume other bits of Doctor Who media with it in mind. However, somebody who loves the Timeless Child will do exactly what you’ve described and place it into older stories so it fits into their personal series of events.
Neither is wrong and at the end of the day just try to enjoy the silly little sci-fi TV show.
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I wouldn’t say “worry”, because thinking about this sort of thing and putting everything together is fun to many of us.
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Very well said!
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I like the ‘every story happened, but time travel shenanigans changed it’ approach. Specially because, in my view, that means the Doctor and the other Time Lords have all these different versions of events co-existing in their heads in some fashion. Like, they know what is the ‘current’ Correct Event, but they can also see the alternative, the has-been versions of it. As in, it all happened for real to the Doctor, whether it was later changed or not, and they remember it even it was rewritten or something. Or they should remember, since, you know, their memory has been wiped and maliciously changed so many times…
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So there is a distinction between continuity and canon. Canon is the set of works that is officially recognized as the stuff that “counts.” Doctor Who doesn’t have this. The show can “count” as much as Big Finish, or the novels, the comics, etc. This is generally a good thing, it opens it up for creativity and more stories to be told across all media. Continuity is the series of events that occur within the universe of a thing, and Doctor Who’s is very messy.
My approach to Doctor Who continuity is that the TV show takes the main priority. It is the original form of Doctor Who, the one that started it all, so it’s only fair that it is the primary Doctor Who. Whatever the show says at the current moment goes, and any “contradiction” is merely the way the timeline has changed, what the current paradigm is, because it’s a time travel show, and timelines inherently change in such a thing. It does not mean any other media is less valid, or doesn’t “count.” Again, that refers to canon, something Doctor Who doesn’t have. It just means that at the end of the day, I consider the show to control the rules of continuity at any given time.
This applies to any contradiction: the show with the show, or the show with other media. The two sides of a “contradiction” are just two versions of the timeline. Shelley can be both a companion of the 8th Doctor and someone who just appeared in a 13th Doctor story, to use the example common in this thread. It’s just different versions of the timeline, clearly Villa Diodati isn’t a fixed point in time. The Doctor wasn’t an alien, then they were, then they were a Time Lord, then they might not have started with Hartnell, then they were limited to 12 regenerations, then they were half-human, then they were a Time Lord again, then they were the Timeless Child. It’s all in flux, its just the nature of Doctor Who.
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