User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-197.86.143.126-20200606192351/@comment-6032121-20200606222406

Hm, I see. Well, I'm certainly not saying these comments are binding. They are interesting, because they show that we're not just seeing things when we interpret the actual hard quotes the way we do, but they wouldn't drive us to anything on their own.

There is an important precedent for looking at these sorts of quotes: The Doctor (The Cabinet of Light), whose description had just as many seemingly-decisive clues to his identity as we might use to identify the Doctor in, say, a Short Trip, as e.g. the Sixth Doctor. Yet when quotes came to light confirming that no, he was not in fact intended to be the Shalka Doctor despite the apparent similarities, this changed the Wiki's mind, and rightly so.

So it's useful, after we bring up a bunch of quotes from Hulke's valid stories, to take a step back and check that this is indeed what he meant by those quotes.

But I don't think the case needs rest on those quotes. And as I have said, neither do I think that the quotes prove the Monk is the Master to the same extent as they prove the War Chief to be the Master. Again, in terms of the Monk, a perfectly reasonable interpretation of all the "only two Time Lords ever…" quotes is "kindly forget The Time Meddler happened for a sec", as opposed to "please assume the Master appeared in The Time Meddler".

(Before anyone becomes worried about Rule 4 and the like, stories rely on older stories not having happened all the time. Let's not forget that Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon also ostensibly posits that Terror of the Autons as seen on TV didn't happen either.)

Which simply isn't possible for The War Games for all the reasons stated above.

But this is sort of what I meant about how I wouldn't have structured the opening post the way our anonymous friend did. The "only two Time Lords" quotes per se are given a lot more weight than other, perhaps more decisive ones, such as the "I was not so lucky" one.