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As might be expected of a show that’s lasted more than 60 years, been rebooted more than once, and had stories told across multiple media, Doctor Who has a fandom that can be very curious about just what counts as a canonical event or not — and the show itself occasionally likes to play around with answering that question without ever fully following through. At San Diego Comic-Con 2024, showrunner Russell T. Davies revealed that, as far as he’s concerned, that’s a good thing.

Davies was asked, specifically, about the appearance of Richard E. Grant onscreen in the episode ‘Rogue’ as a previous incarnation of the character, despite the fact that Grant’s Doctor had previously only been seen as an animated character in a story created while the “official” show was between reboots. (It happened in ‘Scream of the Shalka,’ a 2003 animated web series; the show was not officially revived until two years later.) Did Grant’s brief cameo mean that he was now canonically a Doctor, the fan asked?

The answer is… ‘if you want him to be.’

“I’d hate to say what is officially canon and what isn’t,” Davies said, in response to the fan question. “It’s whatever you want.” The decision to include Grant in the on-screen representation of past Doctor incarnations was, as much as anything, a tribute to the writer of ‘Scream of the Shalka,’ Paul Cornell — a friend of Davies’, who happened to be in the audience for the panel. Grant’s headshots for the scene were shot specifically for the show, Davies revealed, meaning that this wasn’t a throwaway decision… but he stopped short of officially confirming that Grant was now a canonical Doctor.

“I think the canon belongs to you, you get to do whatever you want with it, you can invent your own stuff,” Davies said, instead. He added that it’s important to him that fans feel that they can define what stories count and don’t count, and more importantly, feel free to make up their own stories featuring the characters, as doing so himself as a kid was what brought him into writing in the first place. If he had his way, he joked, there would be no such thing as copyright, and franchises and concepts could crossover and be used as the audience wished at any given opportunity.

“Canon belongs to you,” he repeated to the crowd. Which means I now feel comfortable pretending that we can all pretend that ‘Fear Her’ never actually happened.

Doctor Who returns to screens Christmas on BBC iPlayer in the UK and Disney+ internationally.

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