Talk:Penelope Creighton-Ward

Duplicate

Is this page technically a duplicate of Penelope Creighton-Ward? Penelope Creighton-Ward/Appearances does list The Dying Days so this wiki seems to consider them the same character - although this article's BTS section indicates it is plausible that this is one of Penelope's ancestors. guyus24 (talk) 02:15, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, the appearances lists are sometimes a bit weird in what they merge. These should be different pages though, as they're not explicitly stated to be the same. Najawin ☎ 02:27, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

Oops — I'd entirely forgotten that this page existed.

Look, it's not as though we are talking about an unnamed, implicit cameo, here. She is called "Lady Creighton-Ward" in-text! And furthermore, the author's notes for The Dying Days give us this, from Lance Parkin himself (emphasis mine):

The Party. Oh boy. Allan Bednar, the illustrator of the BBCi version of this book, has hidden in a cupboard and won’t come out until I assure him he doesn’t have to draw the party. This, of course, is a theme party, and the theme is ‘lame in-jokes’. Where to start? Well... the guest list includes Emma Peel from The Avengers and Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds. Lalla Ward makes the first of two appearances in the book. The rest... well, I’ll let you work them out. Once you spot the Old Woman from the Saturday Night Armistice, then you’ll be heading for a high score.Lance Parkin

The idea that this could be some other Lady Creighton-Ward is wholly speculative; it runs against stated, black-and-white authorial intent, and she's referred to by name in-text, just not by her firs name. What more does anybody want? If we heard of a "Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart" at a party, and the author's notes told us that yep, this was the Brig, no one would dream of saying "well, it could be a relative of his who's also a Brigadier, or maybe…". I'm merging.

But even if we didn't have the Parkin quote, this seems a lot like worrying about whether "Bernard of the British Rocket Group" as namedropped in Remembrance of the Daleks is really Bernard Quatermass. When we're given such conspicuous details, the null hypothesis should really be that it is the character who's obviously being referenced, not some implausibly similar analogue. Granted the "it's meant to be an ancestor of Lady P." view was somewhat plausible from the POV of "yes, but isn't Thunderbirds meant to be set in the late 21st century?" — except User:Borisashton's more recent Wikification efforts have made me realise the degree to which the dating of the Gerry Anderson 'verse was always highly up-in-the-air, with the "2060s" setting coexisting happily with sources treating it as taking place in the 1960s despite the advanced technology on display. (And we think we have it bad…) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 14:52, 10 June 2023 (UTC)