Talk:Sil

Placement of Mission to Magnus

Is it possible that, in Sil's own timeline, Mission to Magnus happened before the events of Mindwarp? I only ask this because his line in Mindwarp "Age has not improved you since Varos" seems to imply that this is his first time meeting the Doctor and Peri since then. –Nahald ☎ 06:19, June 24, 2020 (UTC)

I doubt it. The denizens of Theory:Timey-wimey detector, or some other one of the many places on the Internet where people choose to think that Doctor Who timelines can be linear, are free to make up their own answer, of course. But the line in Mindwarp seems simply to be a function of the fact that as far as was known at the time, the Doctor and Sil hadn't met before. Mission to Magnus the TV story wasn't "canonical" because it literally didn't exist, not because they had some other timeline placement in mind.

Now, you could argue that Mission to Magnus the novel, and/or Mission to Magnus the audio story, may have been intended to occupy a difference place in the Doctor's timeline than the TV story was supposed to. But I doubt it. Both adaptions were marketed as the faithful translation of "the lost episode"; therefore it seems clear one is meant to mentally slot it into Season 23, just like magic.

There are, as I said, many stories which dispute the idea that trying to solve these kinds of minor contradictions by moving stories wholesale up and down the timeline is a good idea. Bafflement and Devotion, which establishes that in a complicated metatemporal way, new adventures are perpetually being retroactively added to the Doctor's past (in a direct mirror to retcons & "Past Doctor Adventures" in the real world), seems the most relevant.

As was reaffirmed earlier this year for the placement of Sacha Dhawan's Spy Master on The Master, the Wiki's stance that timeline theories belongs in Theory:Timey-wimey detector means that unless clear in-universe evidence and authorial intent are present, we should assume that a character's appearances in an ongoing stories happen in the right order for them and for the Doctor. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 09:47, June 24, 2020 (UTC)