Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-26845762-20151212000440/@comment-25117610-20160630171133

Actually, there IS an explanation for the Expert characters in-game. When you first open the "expert levels" tab. it displays the following text: "The ongoing battle with the Doctors enemies has opened a massive rip in space and time. bringing through characters from a parallel dimension!"

As for the "Trickster Event", during the final-boss level against the Trickster, the team's characters can be seen being put under his control (also being later summoned by him on gameplay to help him)

For the SA characters, during the first level of the storyline, the first Doctor states "Then the team is assembled. Let us start our adventure!" meaning that these versions of the characters are simply a mini-team that was put together to recover devices (only being different characters in a gameplay sense)

Finally, the fan area/signature are not part of any storyline of the game, so it wouldn't really affect anything