Canon is a very loaded word, and that's the only time I will use that pun, I swear. When it comes to something like Doctor Who, which is half a century old and very prolifically contributed to pretty much every possible artistic medium, establishing what is canon and what is not can be a sore point among more-literal minded fans. How can THIS happen if THAT happened?
Over the past several years, various showrunners and creative minds have tried very hard to bring as much of the Who universe into sync as possible through retroactive continuity, which when you think about it is the only way to fix something involving a time-traveling alien that can't stay out of trouble. Today we're going to look at some of the best of these fixes.
Time Crash The Children in Need special from 2007 was a very significant event in the revived series. It marked the first appearance of a classic Doctor on the show, bridging the gap between the two and helping to unite the show's history. It also passingly explained away two practical aspects of the show that had never really been explored.
The first was the changing appearance of the console room. Obviously various artists wanted to put their spin on the place The Doctor would spend the most time on his travels, but it didn't really explain why a room could alter as dramatically as it did during part of Tom Baker's run (He said it was a secondary control room) or in the 1996 film. In "Time Crash," the Fifth Doctor questioned the Tenth's taste in desktop themes, naming the then-current console room Coral. This established that the Tardis could reconfigure itself easily to fit The Doctor's current mood, like a computer desktop. The Eleventh Doctor would revisit this idea when he began burning off rooms in the Tardis to gain enough power to leave the universe in "The Doctor's Wife."
The mini-episode also explained why previous incarnations of The Doctor always appear older than the latest one no matter what their normal appearance is. In real life it's because, well, actors age. Even the David Tennant seen in "Day of The Doctor" is a noticeably older man than the David Tennant who left in "The End of Time" only a few years previously. The Tenth Doctor explains the Fifth's older appearance as shorting out the time differential between them. Previous incarnations will therefore always appear older because of this, and that makes it a little easier to suspend belief for future multi-Doctor stories.
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