Yet another side blog for fandom bullshit. My main is emasperusual. My rarely used Star Trek blog is emstrekblogfun. My more commonly used Cats/Weird Musicals blog is sevenkittensinatrenchcoat
getting into the doctor who eu and especially big finish is like “oh you love this obscure and somewhat hated companion character? that’ll be $10 to see him get tortured, please.”
Mel says she was the first redhead. This means either:
A) RTD forgot about Turlough.
B) When the Toymaker said "I made a jigsaw out of your history", that included deleting Turlough.
I can explain why Turlough was made a schoolboy out-of-universe.
The idea for a "companion who's really working for the Black Guardian" arc was thought up before Mawdryn Undead. The original plan was that in a different story, call Song of the Space Whale, Turlough would be introduced as a colonist on the planet the story took place. No specific age, just a colonist. But, the story fell through. Mawdryn Undead had been thought up as a story for later in the season, with Turlough already around, but they moved Mawdryn Undead forward in the line-up and merged Turlough with a one-off schoolboy character to give him a reason to be there. No thought was given to why he was at the school instead of literally anywhere else he could've been sent. Being exiled to some random human colony makes a bit more sense. But the combination of "literally everything else about Turlough" and "Turlough posing as a schoolboy at Brendon" happened last minute without much thought involved. Most Doctor Who from this era was like this.
So, Production Issues and Lazy Writing. We can all make up our own explanations, I guess.
It's nice to have confirmation that he was older but I still don't get why he was posing as a schoolboy in the first place, Mark.
If Nyssa had two hearts, I think it would've come up at some point, especially since she worked in medicine and having to adapt her knowledge for single-hearted people would've been a challenge. I think the Master was sort of in denial about having a Trakenite body.
In the real world, I think the writers just forgot the Master was in a non-Time Lord body when the line was written.
(i am aware that fasa has it that the numismaton gas on sarn restored him to a fully time lord body to explain this line. we're ignoring that/explicitly talking about his trakenite/pre-tzun/non-time lord body here, okay?)
Reblog and put your rare pair in the tags/comments! I want to see the depths people will go to create, for the most random two characters in the most obscure media.