From: ira2p@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU (Iain Robert Asplin)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.drwho
Subject: Trivia War:  Steve versus Dave
Date: 22 Aug 92 14:13:50 GMT
Organization: University of Virginia

>-
>- Jean-Marc Lofficier's Programme Guides are just as non-canon as are
>- the novels, and I still say the "master" was the old man, the person.
>- There is not one occasion in episode 5 where Zoe, the Doctor, or anyone
>- call the computer "the Master of the Land."  What they do call it is
>- "the Master Brain" which is a completely different name from what you
>- asked in your quiz question.


	

>-
>  1) Define canon for us.
>  2) The Master of the land contained 2 components: 1) A human who needed
>     to be replaced, 2) A computer that brought the fictional characters into
>     existence.  I was looking for the 2 components.


First 1).    Canon is anything said or done in the television show itself.
	Novels or programme guides can each try to explain to us what 
	happened in the shows themselves, but in both cases are subject
	to an author's intrepretation, which by definition is open to 
	debate.  However, there are times when something done in the
	book clearly and flatly contradicts or changes something said
	or done in the show, and in these cases, it is possible for
	a clear and logical intrepretation to be gained from the show
	where you can say "Aha, the book's got this wrong!"
	Such a case is the introduction to "The Doomsday Weapon"
	aka "Colony in Space" where Jo meets the Doctor for the first
	time.  In the shows, it is extremely clear that this is NOT
	what happened, since Jo met the Doctor there in "Terror of
	the Autons" which preceded CIS.
Leading neatly into 2) I think I can safely say that this Mind Robber
question is another such case, based on this dialog which I now
quote from the show itself:

Jamie:  Zoe, what can we do?  We can't fight those brutes!
Zoe:  No, Jamie, but the computer.  It must control everything here,
	the robots included.  And the Master said, "it must be
	protected against overloading."
	
Clearly, this dialog establishes the Master as the old man wired into
the computer, and other dialog in the story establishes the computer
as being called "the Master-Brain."
"The Master of the Land" never once appears in the show itself, but
is rather a name I first saw turn up in the Doctor Who Technical Manual,
solely to distinguish this Master from the Time Lord Master.

So when you ask who the Master of the Land is, you ask an ambigiuous
question with no real answer.  It is either the old man or the computer.
(It can't be the both of them together for although they were connected
together, they were still seperate individual entities.  If they 
were part of one entity, then the old man would most likely have perished
along with the computer when it was destroyed.  Certainlu, however,
the computer was dependent on the man, but they were not quite one
single creature)  One could argue both ways for which one of these
two, the man and the machine, are the Master of the Land that the
Technical Manual and the Programme Guide make reference to.  The point is
that there is no definitive clear-cut canon answer to that question,
so it shouldn't have been asked in the first place.
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