User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-31010985-20180428165444/@comment-6032121-20200319194828

I don't think it would imply that, any more than the Doctor in The War Games is made a different person from the Doctor in The Evil of the Daleks because he is now a Time Lord rather than a human altered by the experience of time-travel.

No, the second movie does not preclude the Doctor still being a 20th century inventor, but neither would you deduce that fact from the movie itself, and I see this as no different from the fact that you can take a given BBC Wales non-Time-Lord-reliant episode — say, Into the Dalek — and imagine it still takes place in the direct continuity of The Klepton Parasites and The Equations of Dr Who, with a Doctor who used to be a genius engineer and mathematician, invented the TARDIS, and then left Earth.

What I mean is that the second movie obviously does feature the same characters as the first one, but only in the same way that any two valid stories featuring a single Doctor will take place in the same universe. This doesn't mean they're not "canonical" to each other, any more than The Chase and Plague of the Black Scorpi are non-canonical to each other; but it does tell us something very interesting, which is that the status-quo/bible to which both Cushing movies revert by default is the status-quo of the televised Hartnell era, not each other.

This is all a very esoteric further demonstration of something we'd already largely established — but I think it's an interesting insight into the thought processes of David Whitaker and Milton Subotsky, which is certainly a useful intellectual pursuit when trying to establish Rule-4-compliance.