Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-4028641-20151008023030/@comment-6032121-20191104203646

I don't like this proposed at all, because again, it's blatant EDA erasure. Per Legacy of the Daleks, it is equally true that the Crispy Master is a deformed Delgado (12th Master) as a deformed Beevers (13th Master). As discussed at Talk:I Am The Master (audio story), Ainley is also explicitly called a "regeneration", and nor does it make much sense to treat the Tzun Master as the same guy as Beevers.

As for disambiguating Jacobi and Simm, part of me wants to answer "Shalka should be valid and that way Jacobi is The Master (Scream of the Shalka)". But more seriously, Jacobi is given the title of "War Master" by Big Finish to match the War Doctor, so why not use War Master for him, thereby leaving The Master (Utopia) for Simm and The Master (The Sound of Drums) for Hughes.

As for "is Dreyfus the First Master?", I wanna say no, but the reason is the elephant in the room when it comes to early Master incarnations: we have yet to reconsider the The War Chief/The Master link in light of the "novelisations are valid" thing. Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon is quite clear that they're the same guy, in addition to all the hints; thus far Divided Loyalties’s treatment of the Master and War Chief as distinct trumped this, but now that novelisations are fully valid in their own right… That's a mess that deserves its own thread, unless we want to rename this one and make it more generally about straightening out our coverage of the Master's incarnations. Which doesn't sound too bad, actually.