Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-3999524-20141211184047/@comment-188432-20141212012151

According to longstanding practice here at Tardis, novelisations are essentially second-class citizens. Material within is considered only valid if there are no other sources that contradict it. This is because novelisations, particularly ones within the Hartnell and Troughton eras, are liberal adaptations. The Romans and Doctor Who and the Romans are told in entirely different ways, with the latter using essentially unreliable narrators. The Daleks and Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks are almost wholly different stories, particularly when it comes to character development. The Enemy of the World is factually wrong in several places, but that wouldn't have bothered Ian Marter in writing the novelisation, since he never saw the original (as far as we know) and he certainly never expected the original to become widely available to the public.

The fact that the Deadly Assassin novelisation speaks of burning up regenerations is thus a fact contradicted by Legacy of the Daleks — and therefore discounted.

Note that novelisations are the only source we treat in this manner, and it's entirely due to the fact that they are retellings of stories.

So novels > novelisations.

An on page 153 of Legacy, the text describes what Susan does to him thus: "There was no respite for him now, no way to regenerate from such a death." Then season dumps the Master out of his Tardis on the planet Terserus, leaving him to die. And finally in the epilogue, it's revealed he's not dead but described as he was in the Pratt version. At this point, Goth finds him and we're more or less where we are at the start of Deadly Assassin.

So it's not vague at all. He's Delgado at the start of the novel. Susan uses his Tissue Compression Eliminator, fed through the transmuter on the TARDIS console to zap him. She believes he's dead, and dumps him out on Terserus. Goth finds him and you see the point at which the crispy Master casts his spell on Goth, all ready to start Deadly Assassin.

Based on the level of certainty in these primary sources — "no way to regenerate" — it's hard to imagine how else to write the article. However, the wrinkle from the novelisation of Assassin is an interesting one, which — because it's a secondary source – should go into the behind the scenes section, if it's not there already.