User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-197.86.143.126-20200606192351/@comment-6032121-20200620215000

My word, are things getting heated around here!

My two cents: what Divided Loyalties says is not actually that relevant. If true, it would be interesting for the solitary explicit source for "War Chief ≠ Master" to actually be an unreliable dream sequence.

But that is not necessary to the proposal of this thread. It can, and, in my opinion, is, a simple matter of conflicting accounts. Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon and Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons can say one thing while Divided Loyalties stands in a corner saying another. As it happens, whatever we make of the dream sequences, the Third Epilogue is pretty explicit on who Koschei and Magnus become, even directly referencing The Dark Path despite the problems this involves.

"Koschei who, after leaving Gallifrey to seek his fortune, came upon the DarkHeart, a malevolent force that was to imbue him with a new sense of direction. He was obsessed with universal domination and the Doctor became his ultimate nemesis. The two fought many times, across many times, places and dimensions, Koschei always trying to be the Doctor‘s Master… (…)

Unlike Magnus, the only one of the Deca to leave Gallifrey and face a rather ignoble end. Obsessed with the Aliens and their war games, he fled his homeworld and joined them, offering his services to build TARDISes for them. He claimed that he deliberately built in defects so that the Alien War Lord would always need his services. The War Lord, however, was not as foolish as he seemed, although he was prone to bouts of extreme paranoia. And it was in one of these moods that he had Magnus executed when the final war game scheme fell apart and the Time Lords finally carried out their threat of erasure…"

- Divided Loyalties

But again, this doesn't matter. Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon still disagrees, in that it says "War Games happened, but only the Doctor and the Master ever left". And there still isn't any certainty that Magnus (Flashback) was either of those people. Magnus is a pretty common name, after all.

The War Games is, notably, the theatre of another, very similar matter of conflicting accounts. The Legacy of Gallifrey says that Bernard Horsfall's character in War Games was Goth, whereas several other stories say he was Pandad IV. The Wiki acknowledges this through clever use of "According to another accounts…", and what's amazing about this is, the Wiki has yet to explode.

We can easily add content to the in-universe sections of the the relevant pages (The Master, Magnus (Flashback), The War Chief) in a similar way, taking care not to place one account more highly than another.