User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-24894325-20170121220436/@comment-24894325-20170124184301

Still deferring to the experts, but one aspect was not mentioned, I believe.

The Eighth Doctor, Fitz Kreiner and Compassion are the current TARDIS crew (at the very least a current TARDIS crew) at the time of Toy Story's release. The Eighth Doctor is most definitely the current Doctor in 1999. The first appearance of Compassion (based on info on the Wiki) is almost contemporaneous with Toy Story and written by the same writer. Fitz's first appearance is also almost contemporaneous.

So this is similar to Strax Field Reports. Strax would never call the Doctor the Eleventh Doctor and would rarely give a description of him, if memory serves. But the default reasoning dictates that he's talking about the current Doctor, unless stated otherwise and/or has no resemblance to the current TARDIS situation.

Here we have a writer more or less simultaneously writing two stories about the same TARDIS crew, which is also the current one, giving names in one story and matching descriptions from Lolita's perspective in the other.

I think it's important to remember that we only need to prove things beyond reasonable doubt, not beyond all doubt. Otherwise, we would never be able to interpret United States as United States of America rather than United States of Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela or a number of other countries: