Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-26845762-20160928013021/@comment-27280472-20160928152839

What I mean about the "Barbarella" Iris isn't just that the numbers don't match up. The Iris in From Wildthyme with Love is definitely from the future, while the one in Iris Wildthyme of Mars is definitely from before the Big Finish series.

I haven't read Wildthyme on Top. You're saying that even though it has Katy Manning on the cover, it doesn't have her incarnation?

Trying to number them seems ridiculous to me. The one in Gimme Shelter could be rationalized as a future Iris who is travelling with Panda again, but that's not really how it's written. It's written as "What if default-Iris (i.e. Katy Manning+Panda) regenerated into a minor?"

The problem is that nothing about Iris is ever going to be consistent or linear. Even more than Doctor Who stuff always is, she's more like a set of reinterpreted themes than a chronology. I think there are two stories in The Panda Book of Horror that end with Iris and Panda dying/being trapped in a horrible way, so that logically all their future adventures should be annulled.

I don't think the details of whether there's one attractive blonde Iris or two is really that important, but the fact that there are multiple positions kind of demonstrates my point: it's too complicated to pin down into individual incarnation pages. She's not like the Doctor, with separated eras for incarnations and lots of incarnation-specific characteristics. Stories that explicitly feature a pre-Panda Iris have Panda in them, and chalk it up to sarcastic halfhearted technobabble about timelines.