User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-197.86.143.126-20200606192351/@comment-6032121-20200710215558

User:Najawin asks that "the War Chief or the Master [be] brought up in the same context, to show some textual connection, and thus an intentional allusion". Well, the War Chief by name is not quite referenced in The Three Doctors, but the events of The War Games are, since The Three Doctors ends with Pandad IV revoking the exile he originally decreed in The War Games.

The ways in which Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon namechecks the War Chief/The War Games are now well-documented and I shan't waste everyone's time by going over them again. But the point is: this (quite valid) criterion has already been met.

And there are no such things as "Continuity errors" or "Discontinuity" in the view of this Wiki, only alternative accounts. Stories where the Doctor is human or called Dr. Who are not "mistaken", they are valid alternative accounts, exactly as correct as the televised version. If a story says, with no unreliable narrator in sight, that the Master was the only Renegade Time Lord the Doctor ever fought, we must recognise that this is an "according to one account" which has exactly as much weight as The Time Meddler or A Brief History of Time Lords. There only remains to puzzle out exactly what is being said.

And as I tried to explain earlier, the argument goes thusly: when a story simply says the Master is the only Renegade the Doctor had fought by the end of the Pertwee era, and does not reference the Monk stories in any way, Occam's Razor suggests that what's going on is that the author is kindly asking the readers to forget that The Time Meddler and The Daleks' Master Plan happened. It is unsurprising that Terrance Dicks would do this — in 1975, with no home videos and the novelisation of The Time Meddler still over a decade away, readers couldn't be expected to remember the Monk, and as Dicks had had no part in the creation fo the Monk, he must have felt no great need to enshrine this forgotten 60's character's existence.

Whereas Dicks goes out of his way to reference the events of The War Games in the same breath that he establishes the Master as the only other TARDIS-thief, and (in The Three Doctors) in the same book which resolves a story arc begun in War Games. This is very different.

On the subject of the Monk, the simplest explanation si that PROSE: The Three Doctors says "According to another account, the Doctor had never fought another Time Lord, suggesting the events of TV: The Time Meddler never happened". Whereas as far as the War Chief is concerned, it says most specifically, "According to one account, the Doctor had never fought another Time Lord than the Master, even though The War Games did take place".