4Q2 - The Face of Evil 2

Terrance Dicks has a theory about when The Fourth Doctor's first visit to the homeworld of the Sevateem took place. According to Dicks, this apparently occurred sometime during the Season 12 story Robot. I find this notion fairly limiting, actually. Do we assume that everything that happens in The Doctor's life happen before our eyes? Does grass grow only when we're watching it?

We assume that The Doctor was traveling solo during this first visit, but he needn't have done. Sarah could have easily been with him at the time. And perhaps the reason The Doctor doesn't immediately remember the details of that first visit doesn't necessarily mean that it happened decades ago in The Doctor's personal timeline, either. Perhaps his memory of the event could have been wiped? Possibly even by Xoanon? Or perhaps, even, this adventure actually happened in The Doctor's future, which is why he doesn't remember it at first, but, mysteriously, does later? Or, in other words, wibbly wobbly, timey wimey? (Thanks, Steven Moffat, for writing one of the great escape lines ever. Never again will you have to describe the complexities of time travel on screen).

In keeping with the memory loss hypothesis, I'd almost put this story as happening directly before The Doctor materializes on the planet, a la The Ark, where two consecutive TARDIS trips are to the same planet, separated by hundreds of years. If Tom Baker actually did Big Finish audio dramas, you know that the prequel to The Face of Evil would be one of the first stories they'd write for him...