User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-43908-20150311013943/@comment-6032121-20190206103424

The difference with other Time Lords in the Matrix is as I've sketched out earlier that the Matrix usually acts as the afterlife of Time Lords; they're uploaded post-mortem. So a Matrix Time Lord isn't any more a different person than the various Testimony humans. Ergo if "Trey" is the result of the Landau Romana III dying and her mind being uploaded, there's continuity of consciousness and we treat her as a single character, like we do Bill Potts and her Glass Avatar self.

On the other hand, if the Landau Romana III is meant to have lived past the point at which her mind was scanned and copied into the Matrix, we end up with two divergent individuals who past this point are free to form new memories separate from each other. Like Bill Potts (Shadow World), who has all of Bill Potts's memories up until the events of Extremis, but at this point diverges by living (and eventually dying) through the whole "our world is secretly a simulation run by the Monks" while the original flesh-and-blood Bill Potts up there is having a completely different adventure with the Doctor. Hence, a separate page.

(As concerns Rassilon and particular… he's complicated, okay? As documented in that crazy article in the Doctor Who Essential book on Time Lords, not everyone involved with The Five Doctors agrees quite what was up with Rassilon, and Moffat and Davies have yet again different ideas. One of the opinions is that Rassilon died, having decided not to use the cursed immortality he had discovered; that his mind was uploaded to the Matrix, and projected the big mustachioed head from The Five Doctors; and that he got resurrected for the Time War into Timothy Dalton. If so there's continuity of consciousness and so we cover Rassilon on the one page. On the other hand, there's others who opine, and Moffat agrees with them, that Rassilon was never dead, merely sleeping à la Sleeping Beauty; the floating head was his spirit, ascended to a higher plane of existence while his body slept, temporarily manifesting itself back in his tomb to deal with the intruders; and for the Time War he only had to be awakened (Moffat claims the "Rassilon the Resurrected" line in Hell Bent refers to a different death that happened during the Time War). In this second scheme, and only then, the Rassilon in the Matrix would be a copy deserving of his own page. But we don't know for sure which of the two things happened, so we're not getting involved. Ergo, just the one Rassilon page.)