Pointless Headcanons #1: Dax's Original Job

The other night, a friend and I were talking about plot holes and unresolved threads in Star Trek and something occurred to me about Jadzia Dax. The thing about Dax, you see, is that she is the only dedicated science officer we meet in the 24^th century shows. Voyager doesn't have a science officer, unsurprising given she's not an exploration vessel, and on the Enterprise-D the job is effectively split between Geordi and Data.

The question that occurs is that Dax was assigned to DS9 before Starfleet knew about the wormhole and the strange new worlds on the other side of it. So why does a random Deep Space station in the middle of nowhere need a science officer when the flagship of the fleet doesn't?

So here's my utterly pointless headcanon reason: she's there to supervise the Starfleet relief efforts on Bajor. It isn't something that gets much play after the pilot episode but the main purpose of the Starfleet presence on DS9 is to do everything “short of violating the Prime Directive” to get Bajor up and running again after the Occupation.

Jadzia is there to help with the scientific side of that process like supervising agricultural projects or setting up genetic databases so families separated during the Occupation can reunite. Given that the chief engineering officer is a CPO (O'Brien) and never seems to work on anything not related to the station or its vehicles (runabouts, Defiant, so on) she's probably involved in the logistics side of things: what tech to send where, what Starfleet's industrial replicators should be churning out for the reconstruction effort and so on. 

Across The Darkened City and competing canons

(MAJOR SPOILERS for Across The Darkened City by David Bartlett, the second story in Doctor Who: The Companion Chronicles: The First Doctor volume 2 and I do mean MAJOR, this is basically all about the big reveal of the story).

Doctor Who canon is really weird. On the one hand you have a series that has a profound love affair with its own past which produces sequels all the time. I'm posting this between the transmission of two episodes featuring a version of the Cybermen not used on television since 1966 for really no better reason than as a thank you to a lead actor who loves the design. On the other hand, there are few people who can claim Doctor Who canon has any consistency.

According to televised Doctor Who, not bringing in any later expanded universe material, the Doctor both built from scratch and stole the TARDIS; the Brigadier retired from UNIT half a decade before meeting Sarah Jane Smith at UNIT; the same author wrote the story that established the Doctor has only thirteen lives, co-wrote one that established that Tom Baker was the Twelfth Doctor and then wrote Davison's (therefore Thirteenth) Doctor's regeneration.

When you start subbing in EU material it only gets stranger: Peri has three or four different fates (two of them even produced by the same author for the same company); Ace has at least five; Sarah Jane dies in 1997, a decade before her own TV show begins where she is neither a corpse nor a zombie; Gallifrey is destroyed twice; the Eighth Doctor leads several contradictory lives.

So sometimes you just have to shrug and pick the explanation you prefer. You don't have to choose. I've nothing against The Sarah Jane Adventures but I also loved Bullet Time, the novel that kills off Sarah Jane. Sometimes, though, you end up with a clash where you pick a side almost on reflex.

Across The Darkened City is a two-hander in which Steven and a semi-functional Dalek are the only survivors of a spaceship crash. There's an abandoned Dalek transmat on the other side of a ruined, monster-infested city and if Steven drags the Dalek there on a cart the Dalek will chip off back to Skaro and give Stephen the co-ordinates for the planet he was abducted from (and where the TARDIS currently is). Its a pretty standard such shipwreck story where the Dalek elicits some sympathy and the two start working together in a way that suggests both are suffering some element of Stockholm Syndrome. Its a decent story and Nick Briggs does his usual excellent job with the Dalek vocals.

An element that comes up every now and again is that the Dalek is a special, superior form of Dalek that “needs” to survive and return to Skaro. Across the story its suggested that this Dalek has empathy and is preserving Steven's life for more reasons than sheer pragmatism.

The bit I like about the twist I'm about to describe is that the way this Dalek acts, with a degree of emotional intelligence enough to manipulate Steven into not just helping it but sympathising with it, is an interesting way to link the Hartnell era Daleks with the Troughton era version. This Dalek has been engineered to display the emotional intelligence the Daleks display in David Whitaker's two Dalek stories which makes it superior to the Daleks as imagined by Terry Nation (it helps that I am absolutely on the side of Whitaker in this particular debate).

Then it turns out this isn't just some random genetically re-engineered Dalek because in the final scene it gets put in a new casing, gets a deeper voice and turns out to be the Emperor.

Now, as unfashionable as it is to disbelieve that John Peel (not the sainted DJ) contributed anything of worth to the Dalek mythos, one idea I always loved (from his Evil of the Daleks novelisation) was that the Emperor was the very first Dalek, the one who shot Davros in Genesis. It made a beautiful sense to me that in a society of total conformity with no names and barely any form of rank (nothing seems to exist between mission commanders and drones) the only true distinction that could nominate an ultimate authority figure was killing the creator of your entire species.

He's the Emperor because he killed “god” and in my own personal headcanon I'm sticking with that. It just seems a bit more fitting than having the Emperor being another random Dalek experiment.

That's just my humble, of course. Its Doctor Who canon, do as thou wilt is the whole of the law.

Big Finish/Time War headcanon fusion

Ah, the glory of headcanon, or “continuity wrangling” as we used to call it in the old days, a game that has only been made more fun by the existence of various expanded universe versions of Doctor Who. You got the TV series itself, the novels, the comic and the audios to play with.

So, the Big Finish canon and the Time War.

As far as I'm concerned (I know the point is considered debatable by some) the Rassilon in The End Of Time is the Rassilon. The Time Lords dragged him out of the Divergent Universe by means unknown and somewhere in the deep shadows of those council scenes in The End Of Time is lurking that “complete fraud and malicious piece of excrement” the Kro'Ka.

As to the Divergents themselves (who would have been resurrected in the new cycle started in The Next Life) I suppose that Rassilon probably used them as cannon fodder against the Daleks. Not in any particularly tactical way, just opened a portal from their universe in front of the biggest Dalek army he could find and watched the two slaughter each other, probably whilst eating popcorn (Big Finish Rassilon? Not a nice guy. Kind of a genocidal maniac, actually).

I think Romana's dead. I don't believe bringing Rassilon back from the Divergent Universe is something she'd have signed off on, I think the High Council did it after she died. If she died then Leela died too, probably protecting Romana.

Part of me wants to speculate on what Braxiatel did during the Time War but that would mean making some kind of sense out of Braxiatel's Big Finish timeline and that way madness lies. I think the version of Braxiatel from the Gallifrey series is the same Braxiatel from the Legion-era Bernice Summerfield box sets and the Braxiatel from the Collection-era is an alternate version originating in the New Adventures timeline. I am almost completely certain they're meant to be separate people and not the same guy at different points in his timeline. Maybe. Who knows? Not even Brax, as far as I can tell, so I've got no hope.

Contrary to what is going round the internet right now I don't think Big Finish will be doing the Time War ever. Its a very definite ending to their side of the continuity and endings aren't really something Big Finish are in to.

Oh, and the Visionary is the Pythia resurrected from the ancient Gallifrey of The New Adventures.