Talk:Seventh Doctor (Death Comes to Time)

Why do we have this page?

I know Death Comes to Time is considered to be invalid, but this just seems to be the Seventh Doctor appearing in an invalid source, rather than a seperate character. For example, we don't have Seventh Doctor (Dimensions in Time) or Seventh Doctor (Search Out Space). NightmareofEden ☎ 21:49, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Proposed merge

I see someone added a merge tag. Given his ambiguous status, I'm of a mind that this version of the Seventh Doctor is best covered on his own page still, even if we also mention him at Seventh Doctor as potentially just an event in the mainstream Doctor's life. What do other people think? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 16:02, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

That could work. I'd be of the mind to put info about "this" Seventh Doctor into the "main" one's biography, in a new section with {{main}}, as opposed to just in an "Other realities" section, however.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

16:23, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

He should be mentioned in both. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 16:40, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Sure, there's a tiny bit of odd ambiguity regarding this Doctor's reality, but there's just as much ambiguity regarding the Virgin reality or 2-D universe et al., and we're not making pages for Seventh Doctor (Timewyrm: Genesys) or Seventh Doctor (The Sirens of Time). I think the pages should be merged. – n8 (☎) 19:42, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

I'd agree with you in an ideal world, but the difference is that the authorial intent of DWUness of Timewyrm: Genesys and The Sirens of Time is not in question. So long as it's covered in a Rule 4 By Proxy paradigm, we cannot start from the same default of it being intended as prime-DWU: in a very real sense we should cover this material as though it were contained "within" the relevant references in e.g. Zagreus. Particularly with the degree to which we can Wikify the Same Face connection apparently being in question, this leaves us with only the very vague Canisian-invasion allusion for hard evidence that the events of DCtT properly happened as far as the Eight Doctor onwards' universe is concerned. And that doesn't count for nothing, of course, but it does mean that we should give somewhat more prominence to the "alternate timeline of some kind" way of looking at DCtT than we would if it were an inherently-valid story that had only later been intimated to be some kind of alternate continuity.

And all, of course, is without going into the question of whether the story itself contains in-universe clues that its events constitute a forking/aborted timeline, as discussed in the BTS of The Doctor's reality (Death Comes to Time) itself… Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:52, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

We have much more than just a "very vague Canisian-invasion allusion" to go off of.

1. In the Eighth Doctor novel The Gallifrey Chronicles, Tannis is listed in a prophecy as an enemy that the Doctor would one day defeat. At The Doctor's reality (Death Comes to Time), you portrayed this as a contradiction with the Seventh Doctor's presence in Death Comes to Time, but I corrected that: the prophecy is from the time of the Doctor's birth. The Doctor's defeat of Tannis is the story of DCtT, mentioned in the same breath and with equal weight as The Invasion of Time and The Ancestor Cell.
2. Relative Dementias and The Tomorrow Windows mention Anima Persis, which debuted in and played a major role in DCtT.
3. The Three Paths mentions "Mount Plutarch" as a valid name for Mount Lung, and Celestial Intervention mentions the Lune Forest: both locations and names first used in DCtT.
4. The Same Face doesn't even have to enter into it: the only thing it told us was that the Minister existed in the "main" Doctor's universe. But that was already established by his cameo in The Gallifrey Chronicles and, to a lesser extent, The Tomorrow Windows!
5. On top of all this, yes, as you mentioned, Trading Futures establishes that the Canisian invasion – an invasion depicted in DCtT, by a race established by and exclusively featured in the same story – happened to the Earth of the Eighth Doctor's timeline. This and the mention of the Doctor's defeat of Tannis particularly are abundantly clear and specific, particularly in comparison with the vague allusion in Zagreus to "a universe where the Time Lords have terrible mind powers", which could be anything frankly.

It's very clear which of these perspectives deserve more weight in our coverage. – n8 (☎) 23:23, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Objection, y'honour! All that these points, and indeed Same Face if we acknowledge the Minister connection, demonstrate is that the events of DCtT are a possible timeline of the DWU up until the Eighth Doctor's era, as it were; that as of Doctors 1-6, it is a pregnant possibility that DCtT will happen, and that the setting of DCtT is physically the same as the DWU. At best they preclude DCtT being some completely different, coincidentally-similar parallel universe floating somewhere out there (contra the Zagreus take), but I don't see that they establish anything about whether the DCtT!Seven is aborted/alternative/divergent compared to the conventional Eight. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 23:46, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Au contraire! I anticipated that point and explicitly addressed it in points 1 and 5 😛 – n8 (☎) 00:12, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Nay, I'm not convinced by Point 1. All it proves is that from the point of view of the Doctor's birth, DCtT and Invasion of Time and TAC are all equally in his future; it is particularly powerless against the Striptease Interpretation of DCtT as an aborted, indeed self-explaining and self-aborting, divergent timeline — after all, TAC itself has comparable circumstances. This leaves your Point 5, which, Tannis-in-TGC aside, is just that Trading Futures mention again. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 00:41, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm confused. Why are you giving Capital Letters Authority to "the Striptease Interpretation of DCtT", which is explicitly unofficial and – frankly – very poorly thought out? At most Striptease might be weighted similarly to "the AHistory Interpretation", namely, that Death Comes to Time is a completely normal part of the Seventh Doctor's timeline; in fact, AHistory deserves infinitely more weight, since its author was responsible for both of these so-called ambiguous references! Let's set aside the extreme inside baseball legalism for a moment. Are you seriously arguing that by referencing events as specific as "the Doctor's defeat of Tannis" and "the Canisian invasion of Earth", Parkin wasn't referencing DCtT – whereas Gary Russell with "a universe where the Time Lords have terrible mind powers" definitely was? – n8 (☎) 04:06, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

The capital letters were meant to be tongue-in-cheek, as though "the Striptease Interpretation" were a serious physics theory or the like. I would totally agree with giving similar weight, and comical capitals, to "the AHistory Interpretation". Though in my opinion, an article that was contemporary with, and hosted in the same place as, DCtT itself deserves a fair bit of weight; not superior to later reinterpretations, certainly, especially not ones that tied in with actual valid sources, but not infinitely less so, I wouldn't say.

I am certainly not arguing that he was not referencing DCtT; I don't think the references are "ambiguous" in that sense. I meant merely that the prophecy of the defeat of Tannis does not take a side about whether the specific events of DCtT constitute an abnormal state of history. This means something quite different from the Zagreusian Heresy (of placing it in some wholly sequestered parallel universe); a good comparison for how I think of the Striptease Interpretation might be the Cracks in Time as resolved by the events of The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang. That is, the "reality" where the Time Lords are all dead and the Seventh Doctor blows himself up on Salisbury Plain to destroy Tannis while Ace becomes a Time Lord may be likened to the "starless world" where all the stars were destroyed, and the Eleventh Doctor flies the Pandorica into a time-supernova to close the Cracks while Rory becomes an Auton. And all of this has the benefit of being rooted in actual dialogue in DCtT ("you'll disrupt the course of time!") and actually accounting for what's on-screen within it — e.g. "the Seventh Doctor is in some meaningful sense dead, and this is a state of history where there are but a few Time Lords remaining" — in a way that the maximally gremlinnish Parkin take of placing it somewhere around Sirens of Time simply fails to.

For all that, of course, we don't actually have Eleventh Doctor (The Pandorica Opens) (heck, we don't even have Grandfather Paradox (The Ancestor Cell), so I dunno that this is in any way decisive about whether or not to merge this page. Just musing out loud, as it were. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 15:34, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

(heck, we don't even have Grandfather Paradox (The Ancestor Cell) [...])

Don't threaten me with a good time. Najawin ☎

(True, true, we probably should, if only due to the post-hoc treatment of him as some weird projection rather than a "real" future. Someday someone's going to have to do a thorough Wikification job of TAC in general… Though my heart sort of rebels against it because in my heart he is just the Eighth Doctor at some point after Gallifrey Chronicles but before regenerating into Eccleston.) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 16:32, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

You've gotten right to the heart of it. If we adopt the Starless interpretation, we shouldn't have Seventh Doctor (Death Comes to Time), because we don't have Eleventh Doctor (The Big Bang); if we adopt the Zagreus interpretation, we shouldn't have Seventh Doctor (Death Comes to Time), because we don't have Eighth Doctor (The Eight Doctors); and if we adopt the AHistory interpretation, we shouldn't have Seventh Doctor (Death Comes to Time) because, well, it's just another story, and we don't have Romana II (Neverland). Maybe this system is worth rethinking in the future, but with the precedents as they stand, it seems pretty clear. – n8 (☎) 17:57, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

I do intend to get to summarizing/wikifying all of the VNAs/EDAs/PDAs eventually, but given my current rate + the fact that I consume media other than Doctor Who (if you think I've been putting off Newtons Sleep, I've been like 3 chapters into The First Binding for 4 months or so while reading other books from the library), this will be years from now. So, uh, if y'all don't do it it'll eventually^tm get done. Probably. On a geological time frame. Najawin ☎ 18:25, 1 February 2023 (UTC)