Talk:Blood Harvest (novel)

"In what appears to be a redundancy, Borusa is freed from his prison in this story although Borusa's redemption had already been depicted in EDA: The Eight Doctors."

I changed this to:

"In what appears to be a redundancy, Borusa is freed from his prison in this story, but his redemption is later depicted differently in EDA: The Eight Doctors."

In the real world, in 1994, The Eight Doctors hadn't been written yet; the EDA line hadn't even been conceived of yet.

For The Seventh Doctor at the time of Blood Harvest, The Eight Doctors obviously hadn't happened to him as the Eighth Doctor until after his regeneration, nor had it happened to him as the Seventh Doctor. (It's right before The Room With No Doors in his timeline.)

For non-time-travelling Time Lords, The Eight Doctors seems to be later than Blood Harvest, although possibly before Goth Opera (since Romana is back but Flavia is still President).

Of course the reality is that Terrance Dicks reused some of the same ideas that he and Paul Cornell had used for Blood Harvest and Goth Opera in The Eight Doctors, and didn't do it consistently. At the time, the BBC novels weren't supposed to treat the VNA/VMA novels as canon, but Dicks, being who he is, couldn't resist throwing in references anyway, so the continuity is a mess.

In-universe, you could blame that on The Master messing with things, or one of those crazy effects from having copies of the same Time Lord from 9 different parts of his time stream all around each other, or just wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. At some point in The Doctor's personal history, Blood Harvest and Goth Opera were part of overall universal history, but later, some or all of that history has ceased to exist (except maybe in The Doctor's memory) and instead The Eight Doctors is what happened.

But however you explain it, I can't think of any way it makes sense to refer to The Eight Doctors having already happened at the time of Blood Harvest.

Meanwhile, it might be worth mentioning that this novel and Goth Opera are actually chock full of inconsistencies with the later novel The Eighth Doctor, but since the latter article already says that, maybe it's not worth mentioning here. --32.139.58.88 06:15, March 16, 2010 (UTC)