What If the Story Is the Canon?

Notes on RTD's Doctor Who

Let’s just start with this: I don’t think RTD is telling a story in the Doctor Who universe. I think he’s telling a story about Doctor Who, about what it means to tell stories in a universe that has outlived any attempt to canonize it.

That’s not just a cute meta-theory. It’s also the only lens that makes sense of what we’re watching. Every episode of this era has treated story as both content and subject. It’s not just that characters remember things differently, it’s that the show treats memory as the final battleground. Who gets to remember? What survives the retelling? What’s worth passing down?

Canon and the Barber

Take “The Story and the Engine.” On the surface, it's a whimsical adventure about gods and barbershops, but structurally, it's the season’s thesis made literal. The barbershop isn't just a metaphor. It's a spaceship. A literal vehicle powered by stories. The chairs, the clippers, the windows: they’re all conduits for narrative energy. The Nexus it flies through? A web built from gods' essence and mythological logic. Story isn’t just meaning here, it’s architecture. Infrastructure. The only thing keeping this fragile world in motion.

The Barber doesn’t just tell stories. He harvests them. He powers a time-space engine with narrative energy. Stories aren’t just meaning, they’re infrastructure. They build, fuel, and control the universe.

The Barber declares: “I begin all things. I am the lie that tells the truth.” He calls himself Anansi, Dionysus, Loki, the architect behind every myth. He isn’t just a storyteller; he’s the story engine incarnate. But he’s also a cautionary tale. His flaw isn’t cruelty, it’s control. He wants to cut the gods from the narrative web, severing stories from memory and tradition, because they rejected him. His ambition is to remake the narrative in his own image.

This matters. Because what saves the day isn’t just another story. It’s the right kind of story. Belinda’s story, about nursing, about listening, about a quiet act of compassion, produces more power than the Doctor’s grand adventures. And Abby’s story, about enslaved women braiding maps into their daughters’ hair, becomes a literal escape route. Memory, context, sacrifice: these are the truths that feed the engine without corrupting it.

When the Doctor finally uses his past regenerations to overwhelm the engine, it’s not to win, it’s to disrupt. To unseat the myth of the omnipotent narrator.

The episode doesn’t just argue that stories are powerful. It argues that they’re sacred. And dangerous. And real.

Lucky Day and the Consequences of Disconnected Stories

“Lucky Day” might be the most chilling story in RTD’s new era. Not because of the Shreek, but because it dramatizes what happens when a story breaks free from reality entirely. Conrad doesn’t erase memories. He doesn’t need to. He constructs a false narrative so effectively broadcast, so emotionally satisfying, that the world simply accepts it. There is no forgetting, just replacing.

What makes this terrifying isn’t that people are confused. It’s that they’re persuaded. The story is wrong, but it’s told with such confidence and reach that it overwhelms the truth. UNIT remembers. Ruby remembers. But it doesn’t matter, because the spectacle is louder. Memory alone isn’t enough if no one’s listening. The story Conrad tells is easier. It gives people something to believe in, even if it’s false, and that belief, not amnesia, is what threatens to overwrite the truth. They’ve accepted the lie.

This is the necessary shadow to the thesis in “The Story and the Engine.” If that episode says stories can create worlds, “Lucky Day” warns that stories, when wielded irresponsibly, can unmake them. When stories become unmoored from truth, from memory, from cost, they stop being meaning-making and start being dangerous.

RTD isn’t saying stories are more important than reality. He’s saying the right stories, the ones grounded in lived experience, emotional truth, and accountability, matter more than mere coherence. “Lucky Day” completes the argument by showing the consequences of getting that equation wrong.

The synthesis is this: stories do shape the world, but only when they connect to something real. Memory. Cost. Consent. That’s where story earns its power.

Lux and the Fight to Be Real

If "The Story and the Engine" is the argument for the sacred power of storytelling, and "Lucky Day" is the warning against spectacle without truth, then "Lux" is where the myth bites back. Lux, Mr Ring-a-Ding, is a god of light, a cartoon come to life, a trickster force that turns people into projected images and traps them on film. His power isn’t physical. It’s symbolic. He imprisons people not with chains, but with story logic.

And how is he defeated? Not with a laser screwdriver or a TARDIS trick. He’s undone by two things: memory, and limitation. The Doctor and Belinda return to themselves by remembering who they are, not just narratively, but emotionally. They reclaim depth. They break the frame. And the one thing Lux never does, go outside, becomes his undoing.

But the episode’s most powerful moment belongs to Lizzie, Hassan, and Robyn: audience avatars, story-aware constructs who help the real characters escape. They know they’re not real. They know they’ll disappear. And they choose to help anyway.

What they ask in return is simple: remember us. It’s a direct plea, not just to the Doctor, but to the viewer. They know that memory is the only form of survival available to them. Their request transforms a metafictional twist into something deeply emotional and moral. To forget them is to validate Lux. To remember them is to resist him.

It’s no accident that they’re given surnames in the credits (though never spoken aloud onscreen). The show names them. RTD canonizes their sacrifice, not with lore, but with acknowledgment. It’s a quiet, devastating act of narrative justice, and a challenge to us: whose stories will we carry?

The Rani and the Fight for Story

We don’t know her full plan yet. But RTD seems to be casting the Rani as something more than a villain. Maybe a narrative editor. Not someone who wants to destroy the story, but to refine it. Curate it. Decide what belongs.

In a show about memory and multiplicity, she becomes the perfect antagonist. Because RTD’s Doctor Who is not just about telling stories, it’s about preserving them. About saying: messy is sacred. Complicated is valid. Your version counts.

If that’s where she’s headed, the Rani becomes a stand-in for a certain kind of fan logic: the belief that canon should be clean, consistent, correct. She could represent the urge to collapse contradictions, to decide what’s “real.”

But RTD is saying: you don’t get to decide that. Stories don’t become real because someone in authority declares them canonical. They become real because we remember them. Because we care.

As for the Timeless Child: it’s the perfect stress test for this era’s thesis. A story that fractured canon, split the fandom, and refuses to settle. But RTD isn’t trying to fix it or erase it. He’s folding it in. It lingers in the background, not as a dominant plot thread, but as part of the story’s ecosystem. And that’s the point. He’s showing that you don’t need to reconcile every contradiction. You just need to hold them. Let them breathe. Let them matter, even if they clash. That’s the new shape of canon. Not a tidy timeline, but a memory palace, cluttered and alive.

The Bigeneration and the Multiverse of Meaning

Bigeneration isn’t just a fun twist. It’s a structural thesis. Two Doctors. Two stories. Both real. Both true. “The Giggle” doesn’t explain it. It just lets it be. And in doing so, it models the new narrative logic of this era:

You don’t have to reconcile everything. You just have to let it matter.

That’s more radical than it sounds. Bigeneration lets two contradictory truths coexist not just narratively, but visually, performatively, canonically. It’s the show saying: there’s no need to collapse these halves into one unified whole. The contradiction is the point. We’re living in a story where contradiction is structural, and the Doctor, the most mythologized, recast, and revised figure in sci-fi, finally contains it.

In that light, bigeneration becomes more than a regeneration gimmick. It’s a commitment to ambiguity. It’s what canon looks like when it grows up. Not an answer, but a holding of difference. A Doctor who doesn’t choose which version is more “real”, because both are. And always were.

Ordinary People and the Power of Story

Throughout this era, RTD returns again and again to a consistent truth: the most powerful stories are not the most epic, but the most human. It’s Belinda's quiet act of care that powers the Story Engine. It’s Gary, a hologram technician, and Mike, a nurse, who save 100,000 lives in a revival booth cobbled together from fandom and first aid. It’s Reginald Pye, in “Lux,” who refuses to let go of a moment with his late wife, even when the rest of the cinema is lost in dream logic. He doesn’t fight. He doesn’t resist. He just remembers. And that memory becomes a kind of anchor.

And it’s Lizzie, Hassan, and Robyn in “Lux.” Three seemingly minor characters who turn out to be constructs, audience avatars aware of their own fictional status, who still choose to help. They sacrifice their own existence to free the Doctor and Belinda. In doing so, they make the story better. They complete it. And while they claim they’re “not important,” the credits disagree: for the first time, the show gives them surnames.

RTD gives these characters the dignity of memory. The Doctor and Belinda don’t defeat Lux with brilliance or force. They do it because someone else held the story open for them. And that someone else was the kind of character who normally vanishes between episodes.

This isn’t just a subversion of old tropes. It’s a reframing of narrative authority. Doctor Who has always danced with the mythic, but RTD’s version elevates the minor key. The background character. The mundane heroism of someone who remembers something painful and doesn’t look away.

Final Thought

The best evidence for all of this isn’t just in the episodes, it’s in RTD’s own words. When asked about canon, he said: “The canon belongs to you.” Not to him. Not to the showrunners. To us.

He’s also said he’d happily reuse a plot and just wave it away with a “glitch in time.” He isn’t being flippant. He’s showing that coherence is less important than connection. That the true role of a showrunner is not to impose order, but to make space for meaning to emerge.

And that leads to what might be the real synthesis of this era: memory links story and reality. The right kind of story, the ones we remember, carry, and share, don’t overwrite the world. They anchor us in it. Memory becomes the bridge between myth and truth, legend and life. In a world full of dangerous stories, remembering wisely may be the closest thing to salvation.

So maybe that’s the story he’s telling now. A story about stories. A story where the question isn’t “What happened?” but “What will we choose to remember?”

And maybe that’s the real canon: not a timeline, but a memory.

Bring on the finale.