Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-43908-20150311013943

There's an interesting merge debate going on in the talk pages of Romana III and Trey which leads to a larger issue about Romana incarnations.

Basically, we have the Romana III character from the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures. She was created by Paul Cornell, modelled in prose descriptions on actress Louise Brooks, and she was an antagonist to the then-current TARDIS crew. She appeared in The Shadows of Avalon, The Ancestor Cell, and The Gallifrey Chronicles.

Much later, we were given the character of "Trey." Played by Juliet Landau and first appearing as an illusory Matrix-projected future self of Romana II (Renaissance, Ascension) who named herself "Trey" (which happens to mean "three" and is a standard nickname for anyone whose name bears a III suffix), Landau's portrayal of Romana later appeared as a genuine future incarnation reminiscing about her former two (Ward and Tamm) incarnations in Luna Romana. The Landau Romana then took the lead in the Gallifrey story Intervention Earth.

James Goss (writer of Renaissance, creator of the Trey incarnation) said on page 17 of Vortex #56:

Big Finish has let me have the most fun. Every time, it’s something amazing. Would you like to write for Servalan? Fancy giving Liz Shaw a mother? Sticking Celia Imrie in a nuclear bunker? And now, ‘Would you like to create a future Romana’?

Well, yes, durr. Of course, there have been other future Romanadvoratrelundars (remember Paul Cornell’s brilliantly glacial flapper?), but still. Creating someone who can stand up to Lalla Ward took a lot of thinking about. And the answer in the end was obvious. When I worked at the BBC it was full of a certain kind of manager – very friendly, very powerful, very deadly.

Lady Trey (as she becomes known, for simplicity’s sake) had a lot to deal with, many tough choices to make, and a universe to save – and yet she’s done it all with a big smile, and one eye out for her next meeting. And it’ll be a tough one – because it never stops being tough for Lady Trey.

So, according to Goss Trey is definitely not the same incarnation as the Brooks version. But on the other hand, we have Scott Handcock (writer/director of Intervention Earth) and Gary Russell (director of Reneaissance and Ascension) expressing their own intent that Trey is the third incarnation of Romana, on the Big Finish Forum Handcock writes "In our minds, she was always intended to be the third..." and "I seem to recall I got the 'Trey' gag and Gary didn't... so who knows what we intended collectively! :P"  Russell follows that with "I always thought she was the one who replaced the Lalla Ward version..."

So, we need to figure out how to set this all up in this wiki. Fandom has long called the Brooks incarnation "Romana III," and that's who is in the article by that name on this wiki, but her III-ness is now being brought into question by the presence of the Landau incarnation.

So, how do we figure all this? I don't think we should merge Trey with Romana III because, as above, they are definitely different characters, but should we do something about calling one or the other of them the third Romana? T:ROMANA would seem to favor us calling at least one of these Romanas "Romana III" if we can solidly cite either of their III-ness; have either of them been specifically referred to in-universe as the third Romana in any of their media? If not should we sidestep the number three instead, perhaps by renaming the pages to "Romana (Shadows of Avalon)" and "Romana (Luna Romana)"?  