Talk:Baker's End (audio series)

"Overstatement"

Is this not all a little overstated? Surely "Baker's End" merely parodies the setup of the Hornets Nest series, the characters are not the same people. The fourth Doctor is not Tom Baker, whom BE establishes as an actor (not in 'Doctor Who') and the fourth Doctor definitely didn't regenerate into Colin Baker. Mrs Frimbly's first name is not the same as Mrs Wibbsey's, except in one short story in which Magrs rewrote a HN story into a BE story.86.162.8.70^{talk to me} 18:49, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

With no personal offence meant — man, you've got to love an argument on the level of "these characters are different, except for, er, that time the author explicitly equated them".

More broadly, I think you need to familiarise yourself better with how Paul Magrs rolls. He is a writer ideologically aligned with contradictions, which he does not see as contrary to continuity at all, within a work of fiction. Important recurring characters in Magrs's DWU stories routinely change names or backstories in-between installments for no clear in-universe reason, despite clearly being intended to remain the same from one story to another. The way he spells out his philosophy for writing Doctor Who stories is that…

…I wanted my stories to feel like half-remembering an amazing dream you once had after seeing something bizarre on TV.Paul Magrs

Additionally, Magrs blurs lines between reality and fiction, Dr Who and Doctor Who, quite often and completely on purpose. Iris Wildthyme herself often acts as metafiction made flesh and does things like interact with her narrator. When she met the Eighth Doctor in The Scarlet Empress, the central tension of their relationship was that the Doctor is somehow aware, in-universe, that Iris is a parody of him, and keeps saying, in essence, "come on your parody versions of my adventures can't be as real as my own, straightforward adventures in those same places! they conflict!". And this is clearly treated as the Doctor not Getting It™.

And who is to say that the Doctor didn't regenerate into Colin Baker? The Eighth Doctor regenerated into a bunch of different people at once. Also, remember that Magrs has stated that in his mind, the Tom Baker Doctor of Hornets' Nest is not really the Fourth Doctor before died in Logopolis, but rather, "what happened to the Fourth Doctor after he died at the Pharos Project and Peter took over". (He has even given an escape route for those who want a less meta headcanon, which is that the Nest Cottage Doctor is a young Curator.) Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 19:22, 25 May 2021 (UTC)