Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-121.45.54.78-20130925110520/@comment-6032121-20191201214202

So I'm being pedantic here and will make this into small text to signify its irrelevance but actually the Eleventh Doctor would appear in The Impossible Astronaut even if the earlier version didn't come in after the later version "dies"; the real Doctor was inside the Teselecta all along, remember, which is the point, if the Doctor's explanation to Dorium is to be believed. "Time said I had to be on that beach, so I dressed for the occasion." It is crucial that he was still there, just… well-armored.

To answer the wider point, the problem is that if we believe later stories about earlier ones, that brings all sorts of issues like Romana II not actually appearing in Destiny of the Daleks because decades later a short story said it was someone else posing as her, all along, while she experienced a more conventional regeneration offscreen.

At any rate, as concerns the wider issue, I may be biased from the way we do things at other Wikis, but here are my two cents: "appearances" are fundamentally an out-of-universe concept. Metafictional jokes aside, "Doctor Who stories" as clearly-delineated things with a beginning and an end and things that are "onscreen" or "offscreen" don't exist in the DWU.

It follows that whether or not, for complicated in-universe reasons, what is visually an appearance of the character turns out to have been someone else… shouldn't really matter.

I agree that clip-shows that are flash-backs in-universe probably shouldn't count as appearances. But by any sane real-world standard Grace does appear in It Takes You Away; they got the actor back and everything. Within the diegesis it turns out to be a(n almost) perfect duplicate rather than the real thing, but so what?