Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-24894325-20160909213807/@comment-24894325-20160912223331

This thought was completely new to me: that an appearance of another Doctor may not turn it into a multi-Doctor story. It may well be that your rationale for suggesting it is different from mine, but I can also see some reason behind it (see later).

The definition of a Multi-Doctor story as one that involves more than one incarnation of the Doctor is not directly tied to appearances (as I apparently assumed for simplicity). I would be interested to understand your definition of a multi-Doctor story. However, in the absence of a direct connection between the two, this seems to be off-topic.

Now back to appearances. Firstly, I'd like to record a seemingly new type of appearances from your example 3, a mental appearance. It is likely to be almost unique to comic books: you are not likely to see on TV or hear on audio the Doctor conversing with his previous incarnations or them providing support for the current one from the depth of his cranium. (I can think of only one example from audio: the Eleven, whose rare condition makes him (loudly) converse with his previous incarnations all the time. Even so, this example is irrelevant for counting appearances because appearances of other Time Lords are usually counted independently of the incarnation.)

So yes, I wholeheartedly agree that your Example 3 constitutes appearances of other Doctors. At the same time, mental projections clearly should not make it a multi-Doctor story. For me, involving a Doctor means involving his entirety, including the body. One mind inside a later incarnation is not enough.

Your Example 2 seems more important to me than you describe it. It answers beyond any doubt an important question: is Curator an incarnation of the Doctor? This is new information. In no way is this frame a repetition of any scene present before. I think a similar situation happened in The Name of the Doctor. There too the Doctor's timeline was attacked and we saw glimpses of other Doctors. Even though their footage was mostly reused, it was decided to count these as appearances because of the re-contextualisation in the form of their interactions with Clara. Again, for me this is an appearance of all the depicted Doctors.

Concerning your Examples 1 and 4, I have harder time considering them to be appearances. I'll write about them separately after collecting my thoughts and rereading the TV appearances discussion. I think we should really stop adapting the letter of that discussion and instead try to understand its spirit.