Future Imperfect (short story)

was a Brief Encounter short story published in the Doctor Who Yearbook 1992. Though it tried to explain how the Second Doctor ended up meeting the Third Doctor in the television The Three Doctors, it overlooked events that would allow it to fit within the continuity of the TV series.
== Summary ==
The Second Doctor is unable to find his recorder and mentally re-enters the Land of Fiction to search for it, where he meets Lemuel Gulliver once again. However, when "Gulliver" suddenly quotes dialogue from Gulliver's Travels that Dean Swift never wrote, the Doctor realises that this is in fact the Time Lord Goth. The Doctor finds himself unable to wake up and is told by Goth that the Time Lords require his assistance urgently, showing an image of vital cosmic energy being drained away into a black hole. Next thing he knows, the Doctor finds himself in the TARDIS once again, face to face with both his next incarnation and future companion.
== Characters ==
* Second Doctor
* Jamie McCrimmon
* Zoe Heriot
* Lemuel Gulliver/Goth
* Third Doctor
* Jo Grant
== Worldbuilding ==
* Dean Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels, with Goth misquoting the book tipping the Doctor off to his true identity.
== Notes ==
* This story served as a prequel to The Three Doctors, explaining that the Second Doctor got recruited by the Time Lord into the fight against the anti-matter universe immediately after The Mind Robber. In an oversight, however, The Three Doctors makes explicate reference to The Invasion, despite the Doctor using his recorder to spy on Tobias Vaughn's base in that serial, which aired right after The Mind Robber, without explaining how the Doctor recovered his recorder after it was destroyed in Omega's anti-matter universe during The Three Doctors.
== Continuity ==
* The Doctor returns to the Land of Fiction while his TARDIS is rebuilding itself, and remembers meeting Gulliver there. (TV: The Mind Robber)
* The Doctor explains away his defeat of Master of the Land as a "literary disagreement". (TV: The Mind Robber)
* The Doctor recognises Goth from his work with the Celestial Intervention Agency. (TV: The Deadly Assassin)
* The Doctor reacts with intense fear when he thinks the Time Lords have found him. Goth even taunts cryptically about his eventually capture by the Time Lords. (TV: The War Games)
* The Doctor loses his recorder, which he sees has been transported to his future self's TARDIS. (TV: The Three Doctors)
== External links ==
Category:BE stories
Category:Brief Encounter stories
Category:Second Doctor short stories
Category:1991 short stories
Category:Multi-Doctor short stories
Category:Third Doctor short stories
Category:Stories set in the Land of Fiction
Category:Stories set in England
Category:Stories set in the 1970s