User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-1506468-20180414104725/@comment-28349479-20180417141252

I don't see it that way at all. This isn't some scenario where a random unlicensed spin-off series has a story about Daleks-with-the-names-filed-off: The Eyeless bears the Doctor Who logo. Like all New Series Adventures, it was run past Cardiff for approval – approval by the Doctor Who production office itself, people directly answerable to the showrunner. Unless you can find me legal material that suggests the copyright for the Moment specifically lies with some showrunner rather than with the BBC itself, I posit that our uninformed speculations about copyright just aren't a concern here, kind of like how it isn't a concern when it comes to the BBC's uses of Grace, Oa, or the Daleks.

Even with that in mind, there's absolutely nothing stopping Lance Parkin from inventing a concept that would later be used in or by the television show. Just look at Beautiful Chaos, another Tenth Doctor novel released on the same day as The Eyeless, which introduced the character Henrietta Goodheart who got a namedrop in The End of Time. Of course, I'm not saying RTD was deliberately referencing The Eyeless when he named the Moment in The End of Time. That would be speculatory, since there's no evidence either way. But if there's no evidence either way, then saying "He had no idea about the weapon in The Eyeless" is speculatory as well.

And as it happens, that isn't even a concern, because Lance Parkin didn't invent the idea! In issue five of The Forgotten, we see the Eighth Doctor in the Last Great Time War, stealing the Great Key to – as our article for The Forgotten puts it – "recreate the De-mat Gun and possibly even modify the original to increase its lethality to remove millions from time and space at once." The Tenth Doctor then explained that he used this weapon to end the Time War and "doom everyone". This issue was also released before The Eyeless was. Call it simultaneous inspiration if you wish, but The Forgotten got there first. So there's your foreshadowing of a single weapon as the instrument of the end of the Time War. In fact, it's a lot more than foreshadowing; the Tenth Doctor straight-up says it!

(Do you think RTD checked in with Tony Lee to secure the rights to that idea, before he added that line in The End of Time?)

And in fact, it doesn't stop there: while The Forgotten just says the Doctor activated the weapon by turning the Great Key and time locking the Time War, 2010's Don't Step on the Grass specifies that the weapon – the same weapon, which the Doctor activated with the Great Key and used to time lock the war – was called the Moment.

I think if we were having this discussion in 2012, it would be happening very differently. I would say, "Look at the facts: The End of Time and Don't Step on the Grass agree that the Moment is the name of weapon the Doctor used to end the Time War. The Forgotten described the weapon, and The Eyeless features a weapon that was used to end the Time War and which matches the description of the Moment's powers from The Forgotten." I imagine that conversation would be going very differently. After all, the de-mat gun from The Forgotten was mentioned on the Moment page before Don't Step on the Grass even confirmed the connection! (I figure that the absence of The Eyeless back then was simply due to a lack of editors familiar with it.) No, the reason we're having this debate now is because The Day of the Doctor gave a contradictory description of the Moment. And I'm of the opinion that, rather than trying to hide contradiction by splitting it into separate pages, we should embrace the differences, embrace the juxtaposition, and embrace the full, messy history of the Doctor Who universe in all its forms.

CzechOut wrote:

Basically, though, it's very simple. If Agatha Christie describes a ruggedly handsome, no-nonsense British secret agent in Murder on the Orient Express, she's not talking about James Bond because Casino Royale hadn't been written yet.

And yet, if she had described a ruggedly handsome, no-nonsense British secret agent with a sha cut into his hand, who was said to have fallen in love after trying to bankrupt a Soviet counterintelligence agency on a gambling trip to Royale-les-Eaux, and also the main character of Murder on the Orient Express was a CIA agent named Felix Leiter … well, I think you would’ve picked a different example :)