Talk:The Three Doctors (novelisation)

Meeting Time Lords before Omega

Well, the novelisation of The Three Doctors explicitly states that, prior to his encounter with Omega, the Doctor had only ever come up against one other Time Lord...the Master.

Someone said that this was a deviation from the television series, pointing out that the Doctor had also previously faced both 'the Monk' and 'the War Chief', clearly failing to comprehend what Terrance Dicks meant by that comment.

This was then edited, withe the resulting consensus seeming to be stating that Dicks had meant(as other Target novelisations had) that the 'Monk', 'War Chief' and 'Master' were implied to be one and the same. And that, prior to the Virgin New Adventures, this was the default position.

And then some over-eager ip editor came and radically rewrote this, making sweeping comments, adding her own point of view, and speaking of 'this era', which is both ambiguous and likely to date very quickly. Should a wiki article even make comments like "this era"? What if the article doesn't get edited for years? Will 'this era' still mean the same thing then?

I have reverted it to the consensus version. But I am keen for others' input.

"This era" doesn’t mean the current one you illustrate anteater! 86.183.123.28^{talk to me} 17:07, May 13, 2020 (UTC)

The thing is, unless I've got my wires crossed, "Deviations from the TV story" doesn't necessarily mean contradictions with the TV story; just anything in the novelisation that isn't onscreen. If there were, say, an explicit mention of Borusa in the novelisation somehow, when no such comment was made on TV, that would constitute a "deviation from the TV story" whether or not this contradicted other pieces of lore.

As to the specific issue of whether we can take that comment to mean the Monk and the War Chief were both the Master: eh. There are other in-universe, valid-source grounds to argue for the War Chief and the Master possibly being the same individual, and I plan to create a thread on this subject once the thread intended to split off The Master page into all the different Masters is concluded. But in the absence of any valid source telling us the Master and the Monk, or the Master and the War Chief, are the same person — well — while Dicks's authorial intent is fairly clear, you could just as well suppose that The Three Doctors is saying that The Time Meddler didn't happen at all. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 18:31, May 13, 2020 (UTC)