So, I'm sure you've all seen by now this article where Matt Martin, a Story Group Creative Executive at Lucasfilm, states:
“So to summarize: there is a reason that we need to internally know what is and isn’t canon so we can keep our line of official storytelling as aligned as possible but that doesn’t mean fans can’t individually pick and choose what they want to accept as true,” Martin wrote. “It’s all fake anyway so you can choose to accept whatever you want as part of the story.”
You can imagine why this is a bit of a problem from one of the people in charge of continuity over a major franchise. Particularly from one of the people in charge of continuity over a major franchise that has fallen into such a big mess since 2017 because the line of official storytelling very clearly was not aligned, but that's not what I'm here to talk about.
Let's start with this: what is canon? Wikipedia defines it as "the material accepted as officially part of the story in the fictional universe of that story." So, let's stick with that and talk about why it is one of the empirically important facets of a creator's responsibilities when tackling a long-running franchise.
You take something like Star Wars that has existed since 1977 and has seen films, books, comics, audio dramas, video games, television series, and more developed out of the original film as written and directed by George Lucas. Before the Disney takeover, Star Wars actually had a very elaborate system for determining levels of canon, with the films superseding everything else and going down the list from there. If you're really that interested in the particulars, Wookieepedia is your friend.
This, however, got thrown out the window when Disney took over, leading us the throwing out of the entire Expanded Universe and it's re-branding as Legends as well as the Sequel Trilogy...and we all know how I feel about the Sequel Trilogy by this point. Thus "Disney Canon" was established, so a new status quo was created.
However, rather than make this an hour-long tirade on The Last Jedi and why Rian Johnson should be locked up in a gulag and allowed to do nothing but harvest turnips and getting tasered in the groin by Ewoks until the heat death of the universe, I'm actually not going to harp too much on Star Wars in particular. Instead, I'm going to bring up two other examples in pop culture. One where canon is more fluid and one where canon is more rigid (or at least was until a few years ago).
Namely Doctor Who and Star Trek.
Doctor Who is the current longest-running sci-fi television series in the world. Having started in 1963, running continuously (with one small interruption in 1985) until 1989 before being revived in 2005 and continuing on until the time of this writing. If you've been reading my reviews of the earliest years of the Revived Series, then you ought to have some grounding in it if you haven't seen the show. Needless to say, a show that runs for 26 years and then another 15 is going to have more than a few continuity errors, snafus, and gaffs. This is normal and expected.
...and that's before you include the Doctor Who expanded universe. The Doctor Who EU includes audio dramas, novels, comics, video games, and so on. It greatly expands on the television show in a lot of ways while also introducing a myriad of things that contradict each other - both within the show and within the context of their own works. Thanks to a throwaway line that Steven Moffat put into Night of the Doctor, it's basically impossible to not see just about everything connected to the show as canon, regardless of how much it conflicts and contradicts. Such is the nature of Doctor Who.
As I've said in many of my Doctor Who reviews, understanding just makes it hurt worse.
Star Trek, on the other hand, is a little more rigid. While it does have novels, audio dramas, video games, and so on...pretty much all of that isn't canon. Television shows and movies are the only actual canon products. That isn't to say some elements don't make their way into canon (Kirk's middle name of Tiberius apparently originally came from a novel before being made canon in Star Trek VI) but, by and large, only the movies and TV series are treated as having happened.
Why? Because in that case, it provides consistency. Between 1987 and 2001, Star Trek tended to be pretty alright with this. Yes, you're always going to have the occasional hiccup (and there have been more than a few - especially considering Voyager), but overall you have people who are dedicated to keeping things straight so that what came before doesn't get ignored for the sake of the story that a writer wants to tell.
That internal consistency helps the audience get and stay invested. It shows that things that happened matter.
Also, please keep in mind I did say overall (I'm looking at you, Voyager).
Now, I know what you're thinking. 'MadCap, how do you justify this line of thinking with something like Doctor Who?' It's true, Doctor Who and consistency are a bit like an ironing board and potato salad. Even within the original show, there were a few problems that popped up here and there such as the UNIT dating controversy and Season 6B, and that is again before adding in all the spin-off material.
The reason for this is simple - Doctor Who is a long-running show that has gone through a bunch of writers, directors, and producers. What was supposed to only be a simple children's television show that would only run for a few weeks became a nationwide and later a worldwide phenomenon that endures to this day, regardless of Chibnall's efforts to atomize it. Doctor Who is in a unique spot where it's continuity is a bit more fluid - i.e., it's built pretty much entirely on retcons.
The Doctor's nature as a Time Lord, and indeed even the Time Lords themselves, are a retcon.
Regenerations being limited to thirteen total incarnations? Retcon.
Even regeneration itself, one of the core concepts of the entire show, is a retcon.
So, naturally, the question becomes why would I bring that up? Those are clearly changes to canon and affect the story overall. So that's bad, right? No. In this case, all of those changes to what had come allowed new stories to be told from them. For example, the introduction of the Time Lords in 1969 gave great storytelling potential all the way through to the Revived Series. It is because of their introduction that Gallifrey, their home planet (which wasn't named until 1973 - a good four years after the Time Lords themselves were introduced) that we have one of my favorite stories from the Tom Baker era, The Deadly Assassin.
This approach to things is why I wasn't too bothered by Jodie Whitaker being cast as the first female Doctor (besides sighing at the backlash that was sure to pop up from it - as there are some contentious fans who will be so for it's own sake), it's just another step on the path of regeneration set up in The Tenth Planet back in 1966, particularly since cross-sex regeneration had already been established (again, another retcon).
It's also the reason why the big reveal in The Timeless Children does NOT work. It does nothing to enhance the story or give an opportunity to tell new ones. In fact, it closes several avenues while also bringing up an entire universe worth of continuity problems. In order to elaborate, I'm going to have to spoil a bit here, so here's your final warning for that.
In The Timeless Children, it's revealed that the Doctor is way older than anyone ever thought (making the whole "900 years old" arguments from 2005 seem remarkably quaint now) having lived a myriad of lives before the William Hartnell incarnation while working for the Time Lords for some dark, nefarious purposes and then having his/her/their mind wiped. Thus, the Doctor has been led to believe that Hartnell was the first incarnation for reasons that will never be explained.
It is a retcon that actually ruins entire episodes, in particular the regeneration episodes for Peter Davison and Matt Smith. In both of those, it seemed that the Doctor was either surely going to die or at a very heavy risk. It created tension and drama and gave us two of the best episodes of the series in my opinion (Caves of Androzani is miles better than Time and the Doctor, before someone tries to take my head off). From a meta perspective, yes, we know the Doctor isn't going to permanently die. In-universe, though, it makes it compelling and makes us want to see the Doctor overcome and escape death once again.
Now, thanks to Timeless Children, the Doctor is some immortal god thing that is basically unkillable. So all of that drama, all of that struggle is completely pointless now. We know that the Doctor is going to escape and live another day.
It's also a retcon that makes no sense, given that Ruth had a police box shaped TARDIS and unless she were an incarnation after Hartnell, it wouldn't have been stuck in police box form. This isn't some obscure bit of trivia about some throwaway line in an obscure episode, it happened in the second part of the first ever episode in 1963.
The point of all of this is, while Doctor Who canon is more fluid, there are some things about it that are constants. Even Russell T. Davies at the height of his madness as the showrunner, was not stupid enough to break everything about canon for the sake of a story he wanted to tell. That's the real issue, here. Chibnall is just one example in the menagerie, but this is a recurring problem of late across many different forms of fiction.
I think @GyakutennoMeg, one of my mutuals on Twitter, put it best.
Because, in the end, that's what this is. Matt Martin saying that canon doesn't matter is a very lazy, pathetic attempt to shoo off naysayers to the stories that he and his group want to tell. They want to be praised and rewarded for all the hard work they haven't done and don't want to be criticized or ridiculed in any way. Movie studios, television production companies, and comic book publishers are allowing people like this to flourish rather than violently fending them off.
This is what allows people like Chris Chibnall, Alex Kurtzman, and yes even Rian Johnson to run amuck in entertainment rather than being relegated to being 500 yards away from so much as the craft services table to anything creative ever. All the while, almost nothing they do appeals to the people that they're supposed to be appealing to.
Also, Rian Johnson defenders, please stop trying to tell me to go watch Brick as though it will make up for what he did. It will not.
Canon is an important part of an audience's investment in any form of entertainment, be it a movie, a TV show, book, etc. To go back to my earlier example of Doctor Who, I give it a little more leeway given just how long running it is and how many people have worked on it with different ideas and approaches. Not so Star Wars, which has been reduced to just the nine films and whatever material that Disney approves of on a whim (or, in this case, doesn't). It all comes down, however, to the major problem with this and with Matt Martin's statement in general.
The internal consistency of even the tiniest amount that that provides helps the audience to care, and shows that you as creators care. If we see that you care, then we as the audience are more likely to care. More likely to get invested. That, of course, means more money for you.
No, by the way, it is not something that was invented by nerds to herd superiority over others. It's one of the basics of any fiction series ever created.
When you're working with a long-running franchise in particular, the trope of "entitled fanboys" come up. That's not it, though. That's a poor tactic to deflect criticism, rather like insisting that canon doesn't matter. It's Entitled Creators at work, although as much as I've tried to push that hashtag I realize now that the name is a bit of a misnomer. The people who do things like this - ignore canon, attack fans, dismiss all concerns for the sake of their glorious vision - they aren't Creators. They're parasites, trying to work off of someone else's legacy.
This is ironic in many cases, not the least of which is Star Trek, where most of what the franchise produces these days is something Gene Roddenberry wouldn't feel comfortable wiping his ass with, much less putting into production. People like Gene or Rod Serling knew that the first job of an entertainer was to entertain. They also knew if they weren't doing that, that they were the problem rather than their fans.
Yes, it's daunting and even hard to put your voice into the next piece of a long-running franchise. What I have said isn't to say that there are no members of a fanbase that act in the way of the stereotypical basement dweller does, but the belief that this is in any way a majority is completely insane and a poor attempt to distract from the actual problem that the creators are creating.
These people don't care about what they're doing, and that is not an option when you're adding on to a long-running series. Yes, new ideas are hard. Yes, doing things that show respect for what came before is hard. Y'know what that isn't? An excuse for you to just throw it all out and do whatever you want to do. It's long since time we as consumers started pushing back against these people. It is time that we fight to see our franchises put into the hands of people who put the respect for the franchise and its fans before their own egos.
It's time for people like Rian Johnson to be unemployed in Hollywood.
It's time for people like Alex Kurtzman to go back to writing for no-budget New Zealand produced television.
It's time for people like Joe Quesada, Dan Slott, and Nick Spencer to be scratching out pathetic blog entries on Tumblr instead of writing and drawing characters they very clearly hate.
It's time for people like Chris Chibnall to-you get the picture.
See that? My sentiment on this is strong enough that I had to use a gif.
Canon does matter. Internal consistency does matter. Having respect for the franchise you're working on and its fans that have made it possible for it to exist does matter. If you're going to undertake something like that, then you have a responsibility to do it right. If you don't care enough to do that, don't care enough to even attempt to try, and don't do anything other than a pat 'oh, you just pick whatever you want', then you're just showing yourself off as a lazy, entitled asshole who has no business being in the position you're in.
Your message or the stories you want to tell do not matter when you are adding on to a long-running franchise. I'm sure some of you might think that's coming off as though I'm an entitled fanboy, and maybe I am, but it's also the truth. If a creator cannot bother to set aside their own ego in order to show that baseline level of respect for the fans and competence
I'm not saying to try and match the passion of the fans (trust me, you won't), but they care about things like canon and eschewing it completely is not only lazy but incredibly harmful to your brand. Creators need to put aside the desire to tell the stories they want to tell and instead focus on what is good for the franchise as a whole.
I'll give you a hint, having people in the 24th century complaining about conditions on modern Earth (and in particular modern America) is not the way to do it.
Listen to fans. Learn from criticism. Learn from the mistakes you make, because you will inevitably make mistakes (see above on the continuity problems in Doctor Who and Star Trek) and grow as a content creator.
Your first job is to entertain. If you want to push your message first or complain about the current state of politics first, then you have no place in entertainment, whether you're working in a long-running franchise or not. If I wanted to be preached to, I'd go to a church. If I wanted to get blunt force trauma about politics, I'd watch the news. I don't want either of those things when I watch something that is supposed to entertaining. Like I said before, Roddenberry, Serling, and Lucas all understood that the entertainment value had to come first before anything else.
That isn't to say you can't do either of those things, but there is such a thing as subtlety and - more to the point - the story must always come first!
Otherwise, what you produce will be dated and will have no substance after a few years. No one will have any reason to think back on it or want to watch it again. It's the one small comfort I have about entertainment from about 2016 through to the present and why I hope we can just shuffle this away into a "We shall never speak of this again" memory hole.
Saying that it's all fake is true from a real-life perspective, sure, but you have to make us suspend our disbelief. That's the goal. You have to make us believe that humanity will reach a point of peace and enlightenment and go live out among the stars. You have to make us believe that a man or woman from another world can travel around time and space in a blue box that's bigger inside than out. You have to make us believe that people can wield a mystical energy that binds the galaxy together for good or ill.
So do that.
Because by taking that job, you've given yourself the responsibility to do nothing less than that. Canon is one of the facets that's crucial for reasons I've already gone over. If you don't like that, then get out of the way and make room for someone who actually cares enough to do a good job.
For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter @MadCapMunchkin.
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