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)

I have actually rethought this one. I tried to start a discussion about it on the Panopticon, but someone relentlessly trolled it, and then it was shut down before any actual discussion took place. First thing, the War Chief is the Master, and the Master is the War Chief. That is beyond any reasonable doubt. As Terrance Dicks wrote both this novelisation, as well as Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, and Malcolm Hulke novelised Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, Doctor Who and the Sea Devils and Doctor Who and the War Games. Any ONE of those makes it beyond obvious that Edward Brayshaw and Roger Delgado were playing the same Time Lord. Period.

But what of Peter Butterworth? if we go by what this novelisation says, does that make him the Master too? That is certainly what FASA, the officially licensed board game, and other sources would say. And then, we get the kneejerk response, and stuff like No future and the recent "Missy/Monk meetup" from Big Finish. So, we now have two totally contradictory viewpoints, and it's wrong to state that one ir "right", and the other is "wrong". Because, they could both be wrong.

The first character ever identified as a Time Lord is the War Chief/Master. In The War Games. And then the Doctor is called one too. And then, it's repeatedly stated that the Doctor and the Master/War Chief were the only two renegade Time Lords of the Era, and that, prior to Omega, the Doctor had only ever had one other Time Lord adversary, the Master(who is the same character as the War Chief).

But, and this is extremely important, as recently as The Wheel in Space, the Doctor still was written as a human being from the far future. he had one heart, repeatedly referred to himself as a "human being", and even the so-called "regeneration" in The Tenth Planet was said to be entirely thanks to the TARDIS, and NOT the Doctor's own biology. He was "a human being like you and me"(The Savages, which aired AFTER both The Time Meddler and The Daleks Master Plan). Originally, the Doctor and Susan were human beings from the far future, Susan came up with the name TARDIS, and the Doctor may have invented it himself. Then, we found out that there was at least one other TARDIS. There is nothing at all in either The Time Meddler or The DAleks Master Plan to make one think that the Time Meddler is anything other than a human from the future. All his time meddling, all his references to historical events, all his schemes, all the treasures that are in his TARDIS...they all come from the same planet...Earth. And his knowledge of Earth history is actually much better than most human beings today, it should be added. Yes, the Doctor states that they're "from the same place", but that may be the same future Earth, or may possibly be the same human scientific institute that developed TARDISes. and, as noted, even by The Wheel in Space there is NOTHING AT ALL suspicious about the Doctor's physiology, when he gets a medical examination.

Then came The War Games and everything changed. The Doctor was now a Time Lord. The Doctor and the War Chief/Master speak of "the humans" as "they", and the Time Lords as a totally different species. This then becomes the norm, and the Doctor was retroactively always a Time Lord. Yet, nowhere in any actual Season 1-3 episodes is that applicable to either the Time Meddler or Susan Foreman. And, if the Time Meddler becomes a Time Lord, then, as the Doctor had only faced one other Time Lord, prior to Omega, the Time Meddler appears to become a pre-Edward Brayshaw Master.

Modern viewpoints take it for granted that everything from An Unearthly Child on has the Doctor as "a Time Lord from Gallifrey", and everyone he meets from his own point of origin is automatically a Time Lord too. Thus, Carole Ann Ford and Peter Butterworth were both playing "fellow Gallifreyans". Which resulted in some absolutely terrible writing about "how Susan wasn't really the Doctor's granddaughter" or "the Monk(?) was working for the Celestial Intervention Agency".

The simplest solution however may be this...The Hulke/Holmes/Dicks people era were only concerned with their own era. They wrote a group of television serials, and then novelised those same stories. They made it clear that the Master is the War Chief. But, they never directly indicated anything about anything from any other era. (Actually, why Doctor Who is so poor right now may be because the writers are trying to "explain" continuity points from different eras, when the very idea of what Doctor Who even is were wildly different at those different points in time.)

Had nobody ever tried to "explain" how Peter Butterworth's character fits in, it wouldn't really have been anything other than a very minor thing only fanboys ever even thought about. The first character identified as a Time Lord is the 'War Chief'. The Target novels make it explicitly clear that the 'War Chief' is the Master. And the Doctor and the Master were the only two Time Lords to steal TARDISes and leave Gallifrey. And the only two renegade Time Lords of the era. And the Master was the only Time Lord the Doctor came up against before Omega. That's it. But then fanboys weighed in. One group stated "that means the Time Meddler is ALSO the Master/War Chief". That is on a par with the comic The World Shapers. But, even worse, another group then pushed the idea of the Doctor encountering a Time Lord BEFORE the Master/War Chief, who is NOT the Master/War Chief, and even giving him an "origin story", and then repeatedly bringing back the "Meddling Monk"(?) in more and more embarrassing stories.

In fact, if we look at the stories as they were written, then Peter Butterworth isn't the Master/War Chief. But he's also certainly not the character who Paul Cornell wrote for in No Future, and he's definitely not the character(s) portrayed by Graeme Garden and Rufus Hound in Big Finish Audios.

So, this book is evidence, if any were ever actually needed, that Terrance Dicks knew that the War Chief and the Master are the same character. However, it can't be taken for rganted that he's saying that Peter Butterworth's character is also the same character, as Peter Butterworth never actually played a Time Lord on television.