Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-3999524-20141211184047/@comment-188432-20141212065720

Well, Cousin Zagreus, I really don't want to squash your desire to contribute to the debate of the wiki. But I've also got a need to honour the discussions of the past — discussions that lasted literally for years. And I feel bound to say that in those discussions, no one advanced your interpretation of Legacy before. Indeed, outside the wiki, the general interpretation of the book is that "it's the one where we see how the Master changed from Delgado to Pratt".

And since the passage where Delgado turns into Pratt does not include a regeneration scene, we can't reasonably assume that it happened "off screen". I mean, when in Doctor Who history do writers ever deprive us of at least a discussion of regeneration? It's probably not logical to imagine that any Doctor Who writer would just throw away a regeneration. Your argument is not that a regeneration positively occurred, but rather that it wasn't definitively denied. Sorry, but that just doesn't fly in this franchise. Regenerations are Big Damn Deals. They're the bread and butter of Doctor Who. If you have to say that it's possible the regeneration happened, it just didn't. That's not the way Doctor Who works, except in the very most experimental of stories. And Legacy is amongst the most prosaic of novels out there.

Hey, I get that it's confusing that regeneration has two distinct meanings in Doctor Who. But it just does. And you have to be able to pick out the meaning contextually. We can't just go around saying that if a word has two meanings, it's impossible to make definitive statements about text. Given the number of English words that have radically different alternate meanings, that would obviously invite madness 'round here.

In this case, it's absolutely possible to figure out which definition of regeneration applies, because the author has helpfully disqualified one of the two.