User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-27280472-20160606210324/@comment-4028641-20161130032049

Here's how I see it.

The reasoning we use for making 'Infinity Doctors' a sort of loose-valid is that we have information on what a potential sequel to the story was meant to be like. That is, there was supposed to be a second book where we figured out what made the "infinity timeline," and everything would have been reset to the regular 8th Doctor adventures.

One could argue that this shouldn't set a precedent for many stories as it's oddly specific, but I want to try and explain what we would really need to apply it to Death Comes to Time.

The context for what the authors meant for the story is very important. We get a hint that 7 dies at the end, but was this actually meant to be final? Is there any quote out there that says "Oh, if we had done another one he would have unexploded" or what-not?

According to what I had read, the lead writer had considered that story a rebuttal to the TV movie, and that they didn't consider the TV movie to be part of that story's "true universe." If anything that only seems to explain the supposed death at the end -- what better way is there to clearly say that the TV movie doesn't count then to KILL the Doctor long before that story would take place?

It's one thing for stories to contradict each other -- Lungbarrow is still very much valid on this site, for example, and it contradicts almost every other Who story ever made -- but to go as far as to say that an entire incarnation of the Doctor doesn't count is a whole other ball park. The show, comics, books, and audios have consistently made it clear that the TV movie did happen. If the Doctor does die in that story, and it was intended to always be that way and was never meant to be un-done, then it's set in a different "idea" of the Doctor Who universe than most everything since then.

Some would put forwards that we should count them anyways and simply put scrutiny to pages about them -- this however, is simply a discussion about weather DCTT should be valid under the same precedent of TID, and without quotes to suggest that the authors DIDN'T want the story to end where it did, I don't think that there's a very strong case for this idea.