User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-39450671-20200330222925/@comment-6032121-20200606133037

No one is arguing for lumping the various stolen bodies together. The exact opposite, in fact. I've been arguing that every single "stolen body" Master should have his own page, from Ainley's Master to the Preacher to "Don Maestro". The difficulty of constructing a non-speculative timeline is as pungent when trying to write the Biography section of the unified "The Master" page as it would be trying to write "The Master (body-surfing)" or whatever we'd call it. But it goes away if all the Masters have separate pages and we don't try especially hard to give a "correct chronological order" for all of them.

For the record, The Eight Doctors outright says that the Master played by Gordon Tipple in the film was in fact Anthony Ainley's Master immediately post-Survival. However, The Novel of the Film says otherwise, not to mention the TV Movie itself, where the brief glimpse of Tipple and his eyes don't really look like Ainley at all, and (by implication) First Frontier and all other stories about Ainley losing his Tremas body somehow. It is no harder to cover "maybe X Master got tried by the Daleks, or maybe Y Master did" than to cover "maybe the Eighth Doctor ended the Time War, maybe it was the War Doctor".

Incidentally, the many good reasons we split the pages about incarnations of the Eleven are to be found at Thread:199315.