User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-3999524-20141211184047/@comment-3999524-20141212021254

She doesn't dump him out on Tersrus, they're already there. And it's not "no way to regenerate", it's that she thinks that regeneration can't save him. Additionally, Susan only sees the explosion of energy second-hand, through TARDIS scanners, and assumes he's dead. He's not. We can thus assume that her thoughts re:regeneration not saving him are also less than accurate. We see him as Delgado before the blast occurs, and when we next return to him in the text, he's as he is in Deadly Assassin. It's very ambiguous, and hardly "definitive".

Interesting note about the novelizations though. I shall endeavor to find further evidence within the text of Legacy itself. On page 141, the Doctor tells someone that he's meeting the Master out of order (and the description of the Master makes clear that this is the Delgado version we're encountering), and that he's met him in "two and a half bodies since he since this one", referring to Pratt/Beevers, Ainley, and Roberts, since the MacQueen incarnation wasn't yet a thing at this point and the EDAs were still distancing themselves from the continuity of the Virgin NAs and MAs. He also muses elsewhere in the book (page 235) on how he knows the Master was on Tersurus when his final regeneration occurred, telling us that the events some ten pages prior did indeed include a regeneration.

I'd suggest that article could be rewritten to treat them as separate incarnations, as the BBC does, and make a note down in the bottom under trivia or something about the fan concept that Delgado and Pratt/Beevers could be the same incarnation. It wouldn't even require a whole lot of cleaning up. Just comment out the "It's all about Delgado" box, and give from Deadly Assassin through Keeper of Traken its own section header.

Cousin Zagreus ☎ 02:13, December 12, 2014 (UTC)