User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-6032121-20181104204754

( A word of warning: I have not listened to “Zagreus” myself; I'm acting on good faith that the information on the Wiki is accurate. )

As we all know, Death Comes to Time is not considered a valid source because, much like Scream of the Shalka, it was determined that by the time of its release its creators weren't so sure at all that it was "canonical" to the wider Whoniverse, even if it may originally have been conceived in that spirit. The relevant debate is here.

Only, after listening to Death Comes to Time for myself, I checked out our page about it, and I found a rather arresting statement there, whose information had not been brought up in the original debate:

This reality was one of the realities seen by the Eighth Doctor during the Anti-Time infestation of the TARDIS. (AUDIO: Zagreus)

If true, and again, maybe that statement is incorrect or misleading (I don't know — I don't own a copy of Zagreus), but if true, isn't this major evidence towards classifying Death Comes to Time as an alternate timeline, rather than a null-and-void pastiche/elseworld?

Remember, a character traveling to the non-valid story's universe (treated as an alternate timeline to the main Whoniverse timeline) is what made Sympathy for the Devil valid retroactively, and, by association, the other alternate-timeline Unbounds. And in the debate about the possible validity of Scream of the Shalka and Curse of Fatal Death based on a possible reference to them as alternate timelines in a novel, the debate was carried out with the assumption that if the reference was decisive then Shalka and Curse would have been reevaluated as valid — it just turned out that the references weren't precise enough to definitely say "this is the Richard E. Grant Doctor" and "this is the Rowan Atkinson Doctor".

So by the same standard, if the statement above is verified, and the reference is precise enough… shouldn't Death Come to Time fall into the same basket?