Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-31010985-20180428165444/@comment-6032121-20200319194828

I don't think it would imply that, any more than the Doctor in The War Games is made a different person from the Doctor in The Evil of the Daleks because he is now a Time Lord rather than a human altered by the experience of time-travel.

No, the second movie does not preclude the Doctor still being a 20th century inventor, but neither would you deduce that fact from the movie itself, and I see this as no different from the fact that you can take a given BBC Wales non-Time-Lord-reliant episode — say, Into the Dalek — and imagine it still takes place in the direct continuity of The Klepton Parasites and The Equations of Dr Who, with a Doctor who used to be a genius engineer and mathematician, invented the TARDIS, and then left Earth.

What I mean is that the second movie obviously does feature the same characters as the first one, but only in the same way that any two valid stories featuring a single Doctor will take in the same universe. This doesn't mean they're not "canonical" to each other, any more than The Chase and Plague of the Black Scorpi are non-canonical to each other; but it does tell us something very interesting, which is that the status-quo/bible to which both Cushing movies revert by default is the status-quo of the televised Hartnell era, not each other.

This is all a very esoteric further demonstration of something we'd already largely established — but I think it's an interesting insight into the thought processes of David Whitaker and Milton Subotsky, which is certainly a useful intellectual pursuit when trying to establish Rule-4-compliance.