Smack in the middle of its (currently ongoing) 12th season, Doctor Who has introduced the biggest Time Lord twist in very recent memory, and we’ve been left with so many big questions: Has the Doctor lost the memories of her life on Gallifrey? How many? A lifetime’s worth? Several lifetime’s worth? And when we say “Doctor,” what now are we talking about?
This latest reveal, which I’ll get more specific about below, leaves us with a lot of questions. But, if you take a look back through the show (WAY back), there seems to be only one answer. And it goes all the way back to the earliest days of regeneration.
Spoilers ahead for Doctor Who, season 12, episode 5, “Fugitive of the Judoon.”
First some spoiler space.
Never be cruel.
Never be cowardly.
And never ever eat pears!
Although we also got a welcome return from Captain Jack Harkness in “Fugitive of the Judoon,” the biggest shakeup was easily the introduction of Jo Martin as a previously unknown incarnation of the Doctor—one who doesn’t remember having been Jodie Whittaker. Throughout most of the episode, we think that this character is a human named Ruth, but then, it turns out it’s really the Doctor disguised by a Chameleon Arch. (That’s a gizmo we first saw used by David Tennant in “Human Nature,” but as we’ll see, the technology certainly predates the 10th Doctor.)
Ostensibly, the question the episode poses is this: is the new Doctor in Thirteeen’s past, or her future? Unless Jo Martin’s Doctor had her memory wiped of ever having been Jodie Whittaker (not to mention the double-destruction of Gallifrey) there doesn’t seem to be a way of ensuring that she is a future Doctor. In fact, there’s evidence throughout the show’s entire 50+ year history that “Ruth” may be a Doctor that predates the First Doctor himself. Not only that, but Ruth may be one of a full set of Doctors that pre-date what we know as “the First Doctor”.
Here’s the evidence, in the chronological order of the Doctor’s life, that what we’re seeing now is possibly an origin story that’s always been there, just waiting to be told.
1. The Time Lords Are Able to Force a Regeneration (“The War Games”, 1969)
It’s plausible that at some point in the distant past, the Time Lords forced the Doctor to regenerate into William Hartnell’s First Doctor with no previous knowledge of his past lives. There’s precedent for this kind of thing in the final episode of the 1969 serial “The War Games,” where Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor regenerates into Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor.
In this story, the Time Lords put the Doctor on trial for violating their various non-interference laws. He’s found guilty of meddling and his “punishment” is death via forced regeneration, then exile to Earth. (They also deactivate his TARDIS, which is vaguely reminiscent of the TARDIS being buried in “Fugitive of the Judoon.”) The Doctor is then allowed to choose his next appearance from a set offered by the Time Lords, and his knowledge of how to fly a TARDIS is erased.
We don’t quite see this concept come up again in the show, but it does establish that the Time Lords on Gallifrey, when at the height of their powers, have control over their people that is near-total and very terrible.
2. The Fourth Doctor Admits to Several Hidden Previous Incarnations. (“The Brain of Morbius”, 1976).
In the Tom Baker Fourth Doctor serial, “The Brain of Morbius,” the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith are briefly trapped on the planet Karn, a sister planet to Gallifrey. While probing the Doctor’s mind, the titular Morbius says “Back! Back to your beginning” and the Doctor, under a lot of strain, says “You can’t… not that far… I won’t let you… Not even I.”
Nevertheless, we get a glimpse of several faces that the Doctor could previously have been, which doesn’t make a lot of sense at the time since Tom Baker is ostensibly the Fourth Doctor. The show has essentially ignored this scene as an early-days kind of mythology hiccup, but what if current Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall has found a way to use this scene to tell a story of manipulation, identity, and erasure? What if the 8 faces above did happen, unbeknownst to the Doctor? That implies that the Doctor’s memories of these incarnations have been erased, or otherwise suppressed. Who could do such a thing? And why?
3. The Eighth Doctor’s Regeneration Into the War Doctor Reveals the Ability to Create a Doctor With a Specific Personality (“The Night of the Doctor”, 2013)
In 2013’s mini-episode “The Night of the Doctor,” we learn that the Eighth Doctor becomes motivated to fight in the Time War after encountering a victim of said War. He coincidentally crash lands on Karn (the same place where Morbius trapped him and dug out information of suppressed incarnations) and asks the Sisterhood of Karn—who demonstrate advanced knowledge of Time Lord regenerations—to mold his next incarnation into a warrior.
This is notable, because the Eighth Doctor is asking the Sisterhood to not just guide his regeneration, but to specifically craft the ensuing aspects of his personality. This is manipulation of the self that the Time Lords have not yet demonstrated, but which we now know is very possible, thanks to the successful emergence of the War Doctor. Since we’ve seen the Time Lords of Gallifrey selectively edit memories before, it’s not a stretch to think that they—at some point—also know how to specifically mold the personality of another Time Lord’s regeneration.
Because we’ve also seen…
4. The 10th Doctor Uses Time Lord Technology to Suppress His Knowledge of His Entire Life (“Human Nature”, 2007)
In the Tenth Doctor season 3 episodes “Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood,” we learn that Time Lords can seemingly re-write their DNA and memory to not only appear totally human, but to suppress entire lifetimes of memories. In “Fugitive of the Judoon,” when the new secret Jo Martin Doctor is revealed, it’s fully explained that—yes—she used a Chameleon Arch to hide her identity on Earth.
The idea that Time Lords could hide among us, and even be unaware who they were to themselves is relevant to the plot of “Fugitive of the Judoon,” but the thing we tend to forget here is that the Chameleon Arch technology suppresses memories in general. If the Time Lords can hide their whole identities from themselves, surely, they can selectively erase whole incarnations from the memories of individual Gallifreyans?
This kind of big memory wipe is exactly what the Master is claiming happened in “Spyfall Part 2,” when he says “We’re not who we think.” And the Master would know! Because they’ve had their memories suppressed by a Chameleon Arch before, back in the episode “Utopia.” Where it was implied that they—possibly—were also granted a new set of regenerations, as well!
5. The Master’s Memories Are Restored and He (Possibly) Regenerates Past His Supposed “12 Regeneration Limit” (“Utopia”, 2007)
In 1976’s episode “The Deadly Assassin” we encounter the Master’s “final” regeneration and watch his quest to extend his life past the Time Lord 12-regeneration limit through more arcane means. He eventually succeeds, as we see the Master revive himself in the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie without the aid of Time Lord regeneration.
Then we lose track of him until 2007’s “Utopia”, where his memories are restored by a Chameleon Arch and he undergoes a Time Lord regeneration into his John Simm incarnation. He mentions that he was “found” on the edge of a war-torn landscape, and the implication (later confirmed) is that the Time Lords specifically resurrected the Master to fight in the Time War, they were that desperate.
But to do that, the Time Lords would need to be capable of granting a new cycle of regenerations, wouldn’t they?
6. The Time Lords Demonstrate That They Can Grant Additional Regenerations (“The Time of the Doctor”, 2013)
The aforementioned 1976 Fourth Doctor serial “The Deadly Assassin” can be blamed for the origin of the 12-regeneration limit rule in Who canon. (For context this serial aired the same year as “The Brain of Morbius,” albeit much later and is part of the original season 14, versus “Morbius” which was part of season 13.)
After this point, there was some debate if there really was a limit, but this was 100 percent confirmed to be true in the final regular Eleventh Doctor episode, “The Time of the Doctor.” The plot of that episode also results in the Doctor being granted a new cycle of regenerations by the Time Lords, however, which we’ve seen directly result in the Twelfth Doctor, and more recently, the Thirteenth Doctor. (And, it is implied, a Doctor yet to come who fancies himself a Caretaker and wears a favorite old face.)
That said, we don’t really know if the Doctor was gifted only 12 more regenerations, or if they can now cycle endlessly. In the 2015 Twelfth Doctor episode “Hell Bent,” the Time Lord ruler Rassilon taunts the Doctor with the line, “How many regenerations did we grant you?”
This kind of suggests regeneration cycles could shake out in all sorts of different ways, but the point is that the Time Lords can directly grant a new cycle to specific people, and we’ve seen them do it at least once, meaning, it could have happened before, too.
7. Missy Knew The Doctor “When he was a little girl” (“The Witch’s Familiar”, 2015)
When Clara and Missy are stuck together at the start of season 9, Missy rattles off a lot of things about the Doctor, and mentions she knew him “when he was a little girl,” then claims one of the things she said was a lie. Assuming Missy was telling the truth, this could mean that the Master has memories of the Doctor having been a girl before William Hartnell’s “First Doctor”. There’s another little hint in a line in the Thirteenth Doctor’s first episode, “The Woman Who Fell to Earth,” where she says that she hasn’t had to shop for women’s clothing in a while. That could suggest a fleeting memory of having been a woman before—though obviously that comment could mean a lot of things.
8. Finally, Time Lords Can Indeed Selectively Erase Memories, but Instincts, Fragmented Memories, Preferences, and Emotional Responses Remain (“Hell Bent”, 2015)
The Doctor has seemingly always had the power to selectively erase the memories of others and this ability is clearly not just limited to them alone. The Tenth Doctor erased part of Donna Noble’s memory in “Journey’s End,” the Twelfth Doctor erased young Danny Pink’s memory in “Listen,” and of course, Clara Oswald reverses the Doctor’s mind-erasing powers on him in “Hell Bent,” to erase all memories of herself.
And yet, in all these cases, the erased memories leave traces behind that are typically activated in high-stress situations, or triggered instinctively or emotionally. The Tenth Doctor writes about his past lives as if they were fiction in “Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood”. The Doctor is drawn back to Clara absentmindedly immediately after they separate in “Hell Bent”, Donna Noble could still feel parts of her memory in “The End of Time”, and in the case of Danny Pink, the Doctor actually created a personality trait—Pink’s desire to become a soldier—in his attempt to create a false memory.
The takeaway here is this: If the Time Lords erased the Doctor’s memory of any incarnations previous to William Hartnell’s “First Doctor” then it seems like motivations and experiences of those unknown incarnations would have definitely lingered into other versions of the Doctor. For example, Jo Martin’s mystery Doctor’s restored personality is irascible and impatient, yet ultimately kind and non-lethal. Which could easily describe the First Doctor to the letter.
It’s also implied that Jo Martin’s Doctor is a conscripted special agent or soldier, that this was her job, and that it’s “not the kind you apply for or can ever leave.” Later Doctors, particularly the Tenth and Twelfth Doctors, carry this disdain for guns, soldiers, and lethal methods as central tenets of their being, even when they are distressingly good at forming up their own special forces and storming well-defended areas (something we see the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors do repeatedly). And they are utterly shamed by their time as the War Doctor. This preference in their personalities tracks perfectly with Jo Martin’s Doctor’s urge to flee the life of a lethal Time Lord agent. And if Jo Martin’s Doctor does indeed come before William Hartnell’s “First Doctor”, then we know that the Doctor is going to be mindwiped again, and will nevertheless try again to flee their life as a special agent.
9. What About The Phone Box? Lingering Questions About a Pre-First Doctor Set of Doctors
- Why is Jo Martin’s TARDIS a phone box when William Hartnell’s TARDIS started as a featureless cylinder?
This seems like a hitch in the theory, but it’s actually easy to explain. Jo Martin’s Doctor fled to Earth, disguised her TARDIS as a phone box, really liked it, then buried it later on with the help of her companion when it came time to seal away her memories in the Chameleon Arch. When the First Doctor flees Gallifrey, he decides to settle in 1960s Earth where, conveniently, the TARDIS would have to disguise itself as a phone box.
We know that the Doctor’s preferences last even when the memories are gone. The First Doctor must have simply felt the urge to restore the phone box appearance, and that manifested in traveling to the one place and the one time where that would happen.
- Have we seen Jo Martin’s Doctor before?
Sort of! In the 2018 novelization of “Rose” (written by former showrunner Russell T. Davies) conspiracy theorist Craig’s research reveals older versions of the Doctor, including one that is obviously Jodie Whittaker but also “a tall bald black woman…with a flaming sword.”
Jo Martin’s Doctor isn’t bald and doesn’t have a flaming sword. But she is a person of color. She does have a laser rifle. And she is tall.
Ryan Britt is a longtime contributor to Tor.com and the author of the book Luke Skywalker Can’t Read and Other Geeky Truths (Plume 2015.) His other writing and criticism have been published in Inverse, SyFy Wire, Vulture, Den of Geek!, the New York Times, and StarTrek.com. He is an editor at Fatherly. Ryan lives with his wife and daughter in Portland, Maine.
Awesome article, and this hypothesis makes the most sense and also has the advantage of fitting most easily into Doctor Who lore. Additional cycles before, additional cycles after… it’s got a kind of elegance about it.
Let’s be honest. They make up what they want to do because they can and let the geeks try to make sense of it with lots of justifications.
I seem to recall a recent discussion or comment somewhere that Ohila didn’t give the 8th Doctor anything special in the potion, it was a fiction to give him permission to become what he needed to become.
@2 Yes the showrunners, and writers can do anything they want. Then leave it up to the fans to argue the justification.
I gave up in the middle of Tom Baker. Came back for the reboot. Then gave up a second time towards the end of David Tennant. The stories were getting too ponderous, pretentious and just disappointingly silly.
I once asked one of the previous writers why this state of affairs occurred. The answer was that the teams had lost their way and when they did agree on a plot, it was often complicated and confused in an attempt to please everyone.
As a non watcher I can see attempts to shoehorn in newer societal norms. Nought wrong with that.I like a lot of the changes. But does it have to be done in such obvious preaching ways? Perhaps we need to lose the show for a few years then bring it back anew.
Bob @@@@@ 4 – Well, Doctor Who is usually pretty silly (although, I’ve only seen the new Who, so I suppose I don’t have a good basis for comparison). You’re missing some truly standout Who with Smith, in my opinion (S5 is stunningly good!), but I understand your points. I honestly started to lose interest with the later seasons of Capaldi. As I always plead…just tell good stories!! It’s more fun when Who is just unabashedly silly and weird yet still has solid character dynamics and stories. Early new Who was my favourite before I felt it did seem to get a bit pretentious and too self-reverential. Same thing happened with Sherlock, funny enough. The Moffat Factor? Who knows. Still some good episodes here and there though.
@3. yeah, the day of the doctor novelization had a scene where the sister says it was lemonade or something…
Many years later, in circumstances too scandalous to relate, I asked Ohila what had been in the goblet. ‘Lemonade and dry ice,’ she admitted, as I lit her cigar. ‘Or something like that, I was in a hurry and it needed to look dramatic.’ ‘But the Doctor did become a warrior.’ ‘The Idiot Child was a warrior his entire life. The universe needed him to be a little more honest on the subject, so I provided a moment of theatre that facilitated his change of hearts.’
I like this idea that The Doctor spent lifetimes as a Gallifreyan special agent before running away as the first Doctor we know.
During that time they did terrible, truly unforgivable things; things that make the Time War look trivial and simple. They are finally pushed too far — called upon to commit one final universe altering atrocity or betrayed by a commander, something that would really break a person beyond return. And so they quit, desert, leave that life behind forever.
Every second of those lives is stripped from their mind — maybe it’s done by the Gallifreyans as SOP for departing agents, maybe they do it to themselves because they are so disgusted for being complicit for so long. But even with the strongest mind-wipe tech they can access, they can’t fully get rid of the horror and the shame of what they did, and some things poke through. They are always running, they are always helping, and they are will forever hate unthinking, unquestioning soldiers.
The TARDIS that was their service vehicle while they were an agent is now an antique, a museum piece. It’s been reset to it’s factory defaults before being put on display, but The Doctor is still drawn to it. He recognizes it, even through the erasure — or the TARDIS recognizes The Doctor. They jump in and start running, and never stop.
==
I really like the way it opens up infinite possibilities before the show we’re familiar with, without over-writing or erasing any of it. It allows them to revisit what Gallifrey was like before the Time War – the good and the bad.
The only stitch is the police box camo, but it’s not difficult to think of reasons for the TARDIS to get stuck as a police box twice. Maybe that’s what the TARDIS prefers to default to because that’s what she looks like when she’s traveling with the Doctor that she likes — and it’s a constant source of frustration to the older Agent Doctors when their ship keeps malfunctioning and uncloaking to look like this absurd blue box.
@5. Well I’m always willing to be persuaded. All on Netflix. Nothing lost by looking. Shame about Capaldi though. Loved him in Local Hero.
@7. Well thought out. But consider this appalling thought. A Doctor Who Franchise. This could be the start of The Young Doctor, or Doctor Who the Early Days.
Just like Star Trek with several series running simultaneously. Aargh!
@9/B0b – Several efforts have already been made to turn Who into a franchise: K-9 and Company, The Sarah Jane Chronicles, Torchwood, Class … and arguably the Big Finish audios turned Who into a franchise more vast and sprawling than any other sf IP a long time ago. There could be worse things, and Doctor Who would always be the flagship show (unless some kind of Darwinian selection produced one of the spin-offs as the one everyone loved and followed).
@10/writermpoteet: No prequels, though.
@11/JanaJensen – Not on TV, but the Big Finish audios have, I believe, done some audios about Susan (and maybe even the Doctor’s) life on Gallifrey before “An Unearthly Child.” There’d certainly be no inherent reason prequels couldn’t be done.
Just checked Big Finish’s website – there are some stories that look like immediate prequels to Doctor Who (one about them stealing the TARDIS, one set in London 1963 presumably just before “An Unearthly Child”), but maybe I was mis-remembering about any set any substantial time before the series. Still, though… depending on what this season establishes, no reason that time frame couldn’t be fair game!
We’ve never seen a Time Lord regenerate into a child, unless they were a child themselves (Melody into Mel). That would be extremely weird. And we have seen the Doctor as a young boy. So either Missy lied about him having been a little girl (which would be oh so shocking from someone as trustworthy as her), or when granting the Doctor what we used to consider as his original cycle of regenerations, they started it as child with no memory. It’s also possible that this little girl Missy mentions died very young and regenerated into a boy. As for the comment on shopping for women’s clothing, frankly I would be surprised if none of the male incarnations had done so!
I think there should be a point about The Other in there.
@5. sonofthunder: “I honestly started to lose interest with the later seasons of Capaldi. As I always plead…just tell good stories!”
Fans say stuff like that as if it’s objective fact instead of personal preference. It’s perfectly fine not to like any particular Doctor incarnation, without pretending that it means more than that.
Capaldi’s run wasn’t perfect, but he’s still my favorite Doctor and Missy still my favorite version of the Master. Maybe some don’t like darker stories, which is also fine, but it’s a leap to say that makes them bad. If you want an example of misguided or blind storytelling during Capaldi’s run: both Danny Pink and Bill Potts (both PoC) meet their end by being turned into Cybermen. Talk about identity erasure. Maybe that will tie into the Lone Cyberman.
On another note, if this revelation of a new (probably old) Doctor fits with the new Master’s assertion that things aren’t what they seem. Bad enough that it sends him into a genocidal rage.
If this all leads to a reckoning with all this memory and identity erasure that’s been baked into the mythology since 2’s tenure, I’m all for it. I guess I’m reminded of Maisie Williams’ Me, who is so long-lived that she has to maintain a library of journals to remind herself who she’s been. Maybe that’s the secret to all this. The “cycle of 12” is just an artificial construct (incidentally serving as an element to create story tension) and the Time Lords and Ladies are effectively immortal, with potentially infinite regeneration till the end of time.
But at the very least, hope they stop treating memory wipes so cavalierly and inconsistently.
Great article. The quote in the article used for the Doctor in Brain of Morbius didn’t happen in the televised version. I guess that was from the novelisation or script?
In the Five Doctors, Borusa offers the Master a completely new regeneration cycle to help rescue the Doctor. So, new lifecycles have been part of the canon since 1983.
As someone who has watched Doctor Who since the 70s, I’ve been waiting decades for someone to run with the Minus Doctors idea, and now it’s finally happenng. So excited!
They should go back to The Name of the Doctor and edit in some additional incarnations running around Clara at the end.
Memory-erasing as the key to this arc ties in with the cameo from Captain Jack – who had his memory wiped by the Time Agency he worked for…
@17: Yes, that was how Jack was introduced to the show, and then this aspect of the character was completely forgotten about. Typically, when Jack met Adam Smith, he asked the memory manipulating alien to restore Jack’s memories of his brother, not the two years worth of memories the Time Agency stole from him. That’s a good example of why looking for consistency in that show will rarely pay off, and here too, it’s probably better to wait and see rather than coming up with an explanation that’s more clever and works better than whatever the writers will come up with.
In the bad news department, Chris Chibnall just said in an interview with “The Mirror,” that Jack won’t be back for the rest of the season. That’s such a bad Chekov gun choice, I hope he’s lying.
@MByerly: “the Doctor lies” >>>showrunners lie
If it’s true, they may have pulled a fast one on Barrowman. Watching the show at home, waiting for the big surprise… “Wait… I’m not the big surprise?”
She’s obviously a Doctor from a parallel world
I want to know why everyone is ignoring the obvious skeleton in the closet… Doctor Ruth?!? I’ve heard that name before somewhere. It must mean something!
<spoiler>
Or not.
</spoiler>
Another theory, haven’t read all the comments so someone else may have posited this already – the previous set of regenerations may have been the Master…
8/ZAQ So, the earlier incarnations of the Doctor were previously agents of the Time Lords, and did all sorts of horrible things as an agent? This pre-Doctor then decided they’d had enough and left the Time Lords’ employ?
Okay then, if that’s the scenario we’re running with, I’d like to posit that The Prisoner is actually a depiction of the events surrounding the Doctor’s attempt to escape the Time Lords. Patrick McGoohan’s Doctor / Number Six could never answer the questions of the Time Lords / Number Two because he’d wiped his own memory before being captured. McGoohan regenerated into Jo Martin, the 7th Doctor of that particular regeneration series, after escaping the Village where the Time Lords had trapped him.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it…!
The problem with this is both the Master and the Doctor remember their childhoods.
Now she could be the actual third Doctor. When the Second was forced to regenerate we never saw him become Pertwee’s Doctor. The Time Lords could have granted a extra regeneration after forcing him to work for their Celestial Intervention Agency which he did before his exile.
@24. David: Patrick McGoohan as Doctor Number Six (1st (or whatever) cycle) sounds awesome.
@Sunspear It hangs together remarkably well, actually. The great car in the opening (shades of Pertwee!), the constantly changing Number Two (regenerations, anyone?), the weird tech that doesn’t seem to belong on Earth, the odd Village location that seems disconnected to reality, time and space. Plus, McGoohan as The Doctor? How could that not be true?
The part that bugs me is the tardis seems way more sophisticated. It can teleport. No need for a door or key.
Great ideas but the RuthDoctor doesn’t recognise the sonic screwdriver which has been a part of the Doctor’s kit since 1968’s Fury From The Deep. I’m guessing that Mr Chibnall is taking a leaf from his predecessor’s handbook and trolling his audience.
I’m happy with the idea of there being incarnations pre-Hartnell, but Ruth doesn’t feel right as one to me. It’s the same sort of reasoning as the police box, only for behaviour — she behaves like ‘the Doctor’ as a modern audience would understand the character, but that’s a characterisation which gradually developed over the first few years of the show. Extrapolating back, a pre-Hartnell incarnation ought to be even less heroic than the pipe-smoking, caveman-bashing figure of ‘An Unearthly Child’.
Search the old Patrick Troughton series. There is a scene where he is asked about a Timelords life span. He explains that through the act of regeneration, barring physical accidents, Timelords are immortal. This is stated in series long before the concept of limited regenerations is brought up.
Indeed, a very different Doctor! This one seems happy and content with herself, which to me deepens further the mystery. because the latest reincarnations appeared all damaged – to one extend or another – by the destruction of Gallifrey.
Wow!
Makes sense. Hmmm…. Doctor Who prequel? Worked for Star Trek. Enterprise and Smallville. I always thought of a prequel when the Doctor and Master were young and friends. I still think they were actually brothers. Could use it to show how they first encountered The Daleks?
@34/William – Doctor Who already showed us The Doctor’s first encounter (ostensibly, anyway) with the Daleks, way back in 1963’s “The Daleks.” Then, of course, the Fourth Doctor famously chose not to destroy the Daleks before they were created in “Genesis of the Daleks” (1975).
Then again, as we’re seeing, Doctor Who loves its retconning. And if a memory wipe is in play, then, sure, The Doctor and/or The Master could have encountered Daleks before the First Doctor found himself on Skaro. (And, of course, The Doctor being The Doctor, he may have had his reasons for not letting on to Susan, Barbara, and Ian that he knew exactly what these creatures were…)
@34/William Haney: I’d say it didn’t work for Star Trek. I found all the Star Trek prequels terrible, to varying degrees.
I’m tired of the timey-wimey ball. Can’t we be linear for a while? Just for a change?
I don’t think I like the idea of making the Doctor female in an earlier incarnation. I read 12’s transformation into 13 as a radical change of pattern because he was discontented with what he’d become. I would have preferred an older, less classically pretty Doctor, like Ruth, but given the number of small, pretty young blonds the Doctor has travelled with his subconscious choice of female body make’s a kind of sense.
Come on. I’m behind on this season and with your thumbnail and title, you are already spoiling it. Get it together, people!
Don’t forget about the Valeyard…he was first seen in The Trial of a Time Lord sequence with the Sixth Doctor. In new Who, the Great Intelligence states that the Doctor will be known as the Valeyard before the end of his life. So there’s another possible incarnation that has been seen in the past and may again be seen in the future. The Valeyard is supposed to have been an amalgamation of the dark parts of the Doctor’s personality between his twelfth and final incarnations. So possibly between Capaldi and Whittaker…or a different twelfth and final incarnation?
@21 I like the idea of a Doctor from a parallel world. When my family watched Orphan 55, we found it hard to reconcile that episode with the desolation of Earth with prior new Who episodes, for instance, Eccleston’s The End of the World. It’s been years since I watched it, and I’m sure I’m wrong, but I seem to remember it mentioned that Earth was evacuated prior to its destruction, which doesn’t fit with its desolation in Orphan 55. So we speculated that perhaps Orphan 55 was in a parallel world – and with a new Doctor who has no memory of Whittaker and vice versa, that pretty much clinched it for us.
I started watching Doctor Who in the 80’s – reruns of Tom Baker and then the rest until cancellation. For years Baker and Davison were my favorites, but I find that the Davison episodes don’t hold up for me like they used to (thanks, John Nathan Turner.) Capaldi is my favorite new Who, because I feel like he went back to the spirit of the original Who – the grouchy, but loveable Doctor who wouldn’t have dreamed of a romance with his companion. Can’t say I’m loving Whittaker – she seems very needy to me. Plus I’m really getting tired of the sonic being able to do everything and get the Doctor out of any situation. What happened to good old-fashioned brain power?
@24 I like it!
@39: At one point in Earth’s future history in the Whoniverse – 10,000 years or so in the future – massive Solar flares render the Earth uninhabitable. Humanity abandons the planet for several millennia until they settle down and return. Ark in Space and The Sontaran Experiment are from this era. I have no idea why they didn’t just put Orphan 55 in the same time period.
@30: Technically she says she doesn’t need the gizmo, not that she doesn’t know what it is.
@25: The idea seems to be that at the end of her prior incarnation, the Doctor would have regenerated into the young boy we see in Listen, maybe even into a baby, to start the second cycle. It’s weird, but we saw River do it in a Moffat episode.
@23: The Master’s incarnations already extend across two full sets of regenerations, so whilst possible it does become a bit more headache-inducing to fit them all in.
@21: Already expressly ruled out by the showrunner.
If Chibnall retcons classic Who, I feel that it is even more disrespectful to fans than he was last series by purposefully not alluding to past series or past characters and not continuing the storyline from past series in anyway what so ever. When Chibnall took over, I will never forget seeing an interview in which he so proudly proclaimed that his version of DW will not be for the fandom. I remember thinking, well that is stupidly ridiculous…who does he think watches the show loyally? This current season, at least he has acknowledged DW’s past, but he has done so by rewriting history. The Doctor returned to NY in the Tesla episode, and fans we’ll know that the Doctor can never return to NY because of the time distortions in Rory and Amy’s sign off episode. Jodie flies the tardis directly to the pocket universe where Gallifrey is positioned, even though fans know that 12 was never able to find the pocket universe–he looked and looked–but didn’t find Gallifrey until it had gotten out of the pocket universe and they trapped the Doctor in Heaven Sent. In Hell Bent, 12 even refers to this directly. I won’t even get into Chibnall’s version of the Master after Missy died without hope of regeneration–yet Chibs included not one single line to explain this and 13 didn’t even reference Missy…or even wonder out loud about where in the timeline this Master came from. RTD and Moffatt were both enormously careful to be true to the show’s mythology and history. They were both enormously careful to write in lines that made bridges to timelines to explain where or how in DW history their plots tied in. Some may prefer one of these two or the other, but regardless, both of these two show runners worked tirelessly to carefully make sure new elements they wrote fit into established DW history. Chibnall has proven again and again that not only does he not care about fans, the history of the show, but that he hasn’t even carefully watched the show! He blames his low ratings and negative feedback on sexism, when in fact most fans don’t care at all about the Doctor’s gender–they just want intelligently written, intelligently run episodes! Chibnall is more than a hack–his lack of knowledge about the show is criminal. This isn’t some stupid soap opera we are talking about–this is Doctor Who–it’s iconic. It’s fandom is intensely passionate. You can’t hire someone who has no respect for that and expect it to work out. Chibnall’s first order of business as show runner was to fire all the past writers and hire guys who had never even written sci-fi before. Maybe it’s time to admit that he is the one who needs to be fired. Retconning a new regeneration cycle (and I seriously hope that is not what this is) will absolutely infuriate the fandom, not because of gender, but because of the utter and total disrespect for the show’s history which most of us not only know…we have it memorized.
Nicely worked out. I’m rooting for a Möbius loop of Doctors that defies all alphas and omegas. Round and round we go.
Your point 9 would resolve my previously stated (in another thread) objection to a pre-First Doctor Doctor based on The Impossible Girl. Nevertheless, I am LOVIN’ this!
There is one Doctor that is hardly mentioned except once,during the Trial of the Doctor,where it was revealed that the prosecutor for the case,the Sovereign, was an incarnation of the Doctor on One of his last regenerations and if the Doctor was found guilty the Sovereign would receive all the remaining regenerations from the Doctor. A scuffle broke out and the Doctor defeated the Sovereign but we don’t know what happened to the body(No body no death) so the Sovereign could have regenerated into this incarnation of the Doctor and has worked with Gallifrey off and on
This article was great. I loved everything in this episode, especially seeing Jack! I hope we get to learn more about the newest or oldest Doctor (depends on how you look at it) I think this season is going to be so good. I can’t wait to see Jack and the Doctor together again.
To me, this is the start of the best story arc since Jodi Whittaker took over. There have been a plethora of ‘historicals’ (Rosa Parkes, Tesla and, although not strictly the same since they didn’t tell their stories, Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan – and yes, I know that ‘history’ was the original premise for the Doctor in 1963), they are getting a teensiest boring.
I loved seeing Jack again and I love a good mystery, so I’m looking forward to seeing how the Ruth Doctor fits in! Maybe the Ood could tell us…
@14. Sunspear , Thank you for saying how much you loved Capaldi. I thought he was perfect too, and although his storyline didn’t fully fit together as perfectly as 11’s and 10’s, it was still extremely satisfying and fun.
While both RTD and Moffatt certainly threw their share of curves balls, they also proved early in their tenure that they could carefully lay down the pieces of a puzzle and not forget at the end that the puzzle should fit into a larger “aha” big picture that surprised and delighted but nevertheless accounted for all of these little pieces. Moffatt’s S5 is a perfect season–actually, I would go further and say that the entirety of Matt Smith’s run is brilliant. “The Time of the Doctor” was exactly the revelation it needed to be–it answered every single question. I have heard far too many people criticize Moffatt more complicated arcs (which can admittedly span multiple seasons and which do definitely require stronger mental faculties). However, Moffatt very carefully and deliberately accounted for every bit of his particular brand of mythology-making, and he certainly did not retcon Doctor Who without forging explanations. Yes, some of these explanations might have seemed out there–but that’s the fun, creative nature of the show. His Capaldi era, unfortunately, left a few of the puzzle pieces in the box. However, I strongly, ardently believe that this is down to the fact that he was being told “simpler storylines” and being criticized for not killing off characters. I believe had everyone left the man to his own devises, we would have seen an answer for Danny Pink’s great great etc grandson, we would have known what the Doctor meant when at the end of The Zygon Invasion Part 2, he tells Clara he believed her dead for a much longer time (see, I was sure that was a set up to later explain to fans that we were watching all of series 9 out of order OR we would later find out that “Hell Bent” chronologically came prior to “The Zygon Invasion.” But this was also the series during which Moffatt was just constantly, ridiculously bashed. So I think he changed his initial plan. Moffatt is a genius and the writers he knew how to assemble served the show gloriously–the actors he hired had incredible chemistry. I love RTD too, of course, and while not nearly as complex, his carefully laid clues directed viewers perfectly to a satisfying finish.
Unlike Moffatt’s series 5, episode 1, Chibnall has never made any attempt to prove himself to fans. He gave multiple interviews, instead, stating over and over again that his version would not be for fans…would not cater to fans. He was proud that he intended to make no true allusions to past series. He said he put in “a few tidbits ” and that was it. (Yeah thanks for the fez, Chibs…but oh yeah, it wasn’t remotely funny). He fired all the past writers. He got rid of the theme music which Moffatt used so brilliantly to allude to a character or summon up the memory of a character. He hired a person who didn’t watch Doctor Who to play the doctor. Peter, Matt, and David were life long fans.
Now this season, Chibnall must have heard the screams of agony from at least some fans and realized that most of them were in fact not sexist because at least he might be trying a story arch (we’ll see) and at least now he is alluding to past series. The problem with this is that this series “tidbits” are riddled with error. The Doctor can’t fly the Tardis to NY ever again regardless of the date and time, (“The Angels Take Manhattan”)yet Chibnall didn’t remind the writers to at least write a line for Jodie to wonder upon arrival why she could land the Tardis so easily without burning NY. The Doctor doesn’t know how to get to the pocket universe where Gallifrey has been moved. Peter did find the pocket universe and in fact furiously looked for it (“Last Christmas”). He didn’t return to Gallifrey until Gallifrey had unfrozen itself and gotten itself out of the pocket (“Hell Bent”). I’m sorry to all the fans chorusing alternates dimension, but even if this is the answer, an alternate dimension, reality what have you, does not justify all these goof ups that Chibnall has made simply out of laziness. So as much as I would love to believe…to have faith as I did in past show runners…that Chibnall knows what he is doing, I can’t. And Chibnall’s creation effort/writing have done nothing to establish that trust with the viewership. It’s basic screenplay writing for college freshman…the reader/viewer has to trust the story, so your job is to lay the ties that say, I’ve got this and it’ll be okay (See Moffatt’s perfect Matt Smith power speech at the end of the “Eleventh Hour” set up to quickly establish Matt as part of the long line of doctors flashing through the screen as he tells the Altraxi, “Oh there have been so many” and launches into a whole set of quotable one liners such as “this planet is protected” which becomes one of Matt’s mantras.) Chibnall bothered with none of this. Quite the opposite he and the crew told viewers over and over again that “finally Doctor Who is for everyone.” This had two immediate effects: 1. it proved that they had never seen or understood Doctor Who which has always bee extremely inclusive and for everyone. 2. ticking off fans who felt defensive and protective of Peter and who were still in morning (not because Jodi is a woman but because we loved Peter). I’m really ranting, and I apologize for being so long winded. My point is that I have no faith in Chibnall, and I feel that he had insulted fans. Parallel Universe/alternate reality…eh, sure maybe…but that doesn’t fix these inconsistencies by which Chibnall negates DW history…unless, of course, he is going to claim that Jodie is not the doc who regenerated from Capaldi. Ha…And talk about a sexist outrage if Chibnall did that to Jodie now.
@47. Emmy: “ticking off fans who felt defensive and protective of Peter and who were still in morning (not because Jodi is a woman but because we loved Peter)”
Yes, exactly. Fans are fanatics, literally, but some went overboard in their Moffat hate and trying to diminish what Capaldi and Michelle Gomez accomplished.
I wonder too if the charge of sexism against those who didn’t like 13 was a convenient backstop for Chibnall, an easy go-to: this is why you don’t like aspects of the current storytelling. But for him to chart his own path and establish new mythology would’ve required far stronger stories than he delivered in season 1. He’s still floundering this season, with a couple bad to mediocre episodes before this one.
So this season is more a crucible than it should’ve been. If there’s a set of regenerations prior to Hartnell’s Doc, including one or more Time Lady Doctors, Whittaker’s historic first becomes retroactively undermined.
They just pulled a Star Trek on you. She is from a different timeline. She is infact the doctor from then. We’re she is the bad one and the master is the good one.
Maybe the tardis has a default, and when Hartnell took that one, it defaulted to the last image set by the chamelion circuit, maybe it got fired on
What if all the Time Lords are the Doctor…. Life is always full of gray areas. Each is regeneration is a representation of inner struggle, having to do what is right even tho people get hurt. Every decision we make changes us…
I’m glad someone else remembered the offer to the Master in The Five Doctors of additional regerations. Regarding the Master – he has frequently reappeared after certain death situations with little (or more usually no) explanation of his escape…
@47 Emmy…
I agree that Capaldi was an excellent Doctor… but think he was too often let down by the writing and, IMHO, by his show runner as well.
I think we got cheated, a bit, by not seeing more of Capaldi with a different showrunner. Whether it was just Moffat being stretched too thin (Sherlock, Doctor Who, and I think other projects), I am not sure. I think the episodes he wrote in the RTD era were often among the best but I had a lot more issues once he became showrunner. Additionally, IMHO, Moffatt was pretty burnt out early in Capaldi’s run and it showed on the screen. Capaldi’s performances carried the show for me.
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“I have heard far too many people criticize Moffat’s more complicated arcs (which can admittedly span multiple seasons and which do definitely require stronger mental faculties). However, Moffatt very carefully and deliberately accounted for every bit of his particular brand of mythology-making,… ”
I respectfully disagree with you there. Moffat began far too many plot threads he had no end-goal / plan for resolving. Many of these got forgotten (even looking at his entire tenure) or were brushed aside with a handwave and technobabble. How did Orson Pink exist, why did the Silence (?) create a TARDIS (or seemingly a TARDIS) in James Cordon’s attic in The Lodger, why was the name of the Doctor such a big, universe shattering secret. (In the end the name of the Doctor was waved off with some offhand comment about the names we choose being what is important… so why such a fuss about it? Just to open the TARDIS door on Trenzalor?) Etc, etc.
Basically, I think Moffatt has the same problem as JJ Abrams. He thinks the mystery box, by itself, is a satisfactory story formula. Moffat’s era was too full of these overblown ideas that were poorly thought out and poorly executed. (IMHO)
He also had one of the same challenges as his predecessor… not being able to let go of companions when they left the show. Every companion through RTD & Moffat’s eras was written out / killed off / trapped FOREVER in an alternate world / even erased completely from ever having existed… and then came back. This reached peak with Amy, Rory, and Clara.
There are a couple of instances where I think it worked (both Martha and Donna’s returns worked for me as did Bill’s appearance in Twice Upon a Time… because they were limited in scope by design). But Amy & Rory should have left after Matt Smith’s first season and Clara should have left once her mystery was resolved (or, better yet, that resolution… that she had repeatedly saved / intervened throughout the Doctor’s entire timeline… should never have happened IMHO) but she definitely should have been allowed to go after Danny Pink’s death rather than bringing her back again and again and again.
Time will tell if Chibnall has the same challenge.
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“Chibnall has never made any attempt to prove himself to fans. He gave multiple interviews, instead, stating over and over again that his version would not be for fans…would not cater to fans.”
I think Chibnall’s statement was something like the show wouldn’t ONLY be for fans… which is very different. I don’t see a problem with trying to make the show more accessible to new viewers. New Doctors are often a good time for new viewers to find and get into the show and more viewers usually means more longevity for a show. So, for the first season, Chibnall wanted to avoid going heavy into lore which would just confuse new viewers (and keep them from sticking with the show long enough to become fans). He may have also wanted himself, the new Doctor, etc to get into the groove and become comfortable. Now that we are in season 2, he obviously feels more comfortable with exploring that lore.
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“He hired a person who didn’t watch Doctor Who to play the doctor. Peter, Matt, and David were life long fans.”
Matt Smith grew up in the era between the classic and modern series. He has been pretty open in interviews that was culturally aware of the show… but was not a fan (it just wasn’t a big deal at that time). Neither was Eccleston as far as I know. Whether or not someone was a fan of the show growing up isn’t a big deal. How they carry out the performance is what matters and, IMHO, Jody Whitaker is nailing that (I think she did well in season 11, but in season 12 she is amazing).
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“See Moffatt’s perfect Matt Smith power speech at the end of the “Eleventh Hour”…
To be honest, I found a lot of those big bombastic Moffatt moments (end of 11th hour, the challenge he issued above the Pandorica, the one in The Rings of Akhaten, or his shouting at the Dalek’s from the bell tower after he had started to regenerate for just a few of the one’s from the Matt Smith years) as just overblown and a bit embarrassing to watch actually Don’t misunderstand this or my comments above, overall I enjoyed Matt Smith’s Doctor… and Capaldi is one of my favourites. But I can acknowledge things I didn’t like without throwing the baby out with the bath water. There were so many moments Ioved as well: Smith’s last “We all change when you think about it” speech or Capaldi’s appeal to the two Masters to help him at the end of “The Doctor Falls” are just two examples.
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“So as much as I would love to believe…to have faith as I did in past show runners…that Chibnall knows what he is doing, I can’t.”
As a fellow fan, I’m sorry to hear the show isn’t working for you right now.
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This brings up some thoughts I’ve had for awhile about the state of fandom. For the record, I’m not responding to your comments here (I don’t know if they apply to you).. but more of just fandom in general.
I think many fans, for whatever reason, decided early on… some before the first Whitaker episode even aired… that they were going to dislike this Doctor, this showrunner, this era. And I consistently see interviews or dialogue from the show taken out of context to back-up someone’s rants. For example:
Jody Whitaker gives an interview saying she brings something new and different to the show and maybe after all those men, it was time to see what a woman did with the role…and some fans scream “Jody Whitaker hates men!” (Yes, I did see that expressed.)
The show looks at racism, climate change, has a male character pregnant (played mostly for humour) … and some corners of the internet weep and wail about “This is preachy!” “Doctor Who is SJW propaganda!” .. ignoring the fact that the show has always been preachy, and more often than not progressive. The Doctor has, since the show’s early days, (usually) been anti-gun, anti-violence, inclusive, … and, yes, preachy. Whether it was pollution in The Green Death, or drugs in Nightmare in Eden, or a rejection of Thatcherism in Happiness Patrol, or any number of speeches about guns / war not being the solution, or any number of other examples… being “preachy” has long been a staple of the show.
I even seen some rants about a throwaway line in Spyfall Part 1 where Stephen Fry assumes the Doctor is a man and the Doctor replies she’s had an upgrade. Despite what some people seemed to think… no one’s masculinity was challenged, undermined, or threatened. This is people taking umbrage for the sake of taking umbrage. This line was simply the kind of line that most Doctor’s make about their predecessors (see, for example, the 2nd & 3rd Doctor’s squabbling, the 5th Doctor at then end of The Five Doctors … something to the effect of ”I’m not the man I once was. Thank goodness.”, or Tennant & Smith’s squabbling in the 50th anniversary.). But the people who complain that loudest about “they make it all about gender / identity” are the ones who actually end up making it all about gender / identify.
And it is not just Doctor Who. We see this with other fandoms (Star Wars and Star Trek for example). Fans who feel they “own” the show and if it doesn’t play out their own head-canon version they get furious. They actively seek to cut down and destroy something they say they once loved. And I find it terribly sad.
Or…..there’s an even bigger twist here. Remember what professor River Song always said? Rule #1. The doctor lies.
If in fact SHE were pretending to be The Dr., she too would lie about who she is. In traveling to the future and going backwards, she would know where the Dr. was going to need her, when, and with what (a tardis?).
Anyone remember her regeneration in Let’s kill Hitler? She was a young black woman, in the 60s, in the USA….. How or when she regenerated who knows, but if there’s anything I remember about the Dr., it’s that “the doctor lies”………be a great way to see River again too, wouldn’t it! Also explains her shock in seeing the Doctor as a woman now too……
Just sayin’…
@47: I agree that people were far too harsh on Moffat. Some of the best episodes of Who were made during his tenure, and he wrote some of those. But it’s also true that some of his story arcs were awful. The crack in time kept being replaced with a deeper mystery that didn’t bring any more clarity, and this for several seasons. The Impossible Astronaut arc made no sense whatsoever. Listen introduced a descendant of Danny Pink shortly before he died childless, and when Jenna Louise Coleman was supposedly about to leave the show too (yet nothing indicates that the timeline was changed). But it’s true he listened to the fans. It seemed that sometimes he didn’t understand the reason for the criticism, and so his acknowledging of it could feel forced, but he certainly didn’t deserve the hate he received.
David Tennant became an actor hoping to play the Doctor, and Peter Capaldi has been watching the show his entire life, but Matt Smith wasn’t like them. I believe he started watching the show after getting the job, although it’s true he became a big fan in the process.
I don’t understand why people understand it literally that the Doctor can never return to New York. It’s the eras that Amy and Rory inhabit that are banned. Otherwise, he would just go to another city in their time, send them an invitation to somewhere else, and see them again. It’s true though that Moffat was a master and explaining this kind of details to the fans with a throwaway line of dialogue, which would appease the fans and just increase the delightful weirdness of the show for others without alienating them.
There haven’t been many great episodes lately, but I’m still willing to trust Chibnall for now as I trusted Moffat. Although I agree: he hasn’t done much so far to earn that trust…
(and yes, Capaldi was one of the best actors to play the Doctor, as well as one of the most interesting Doctors)
@55, I just loved watching Capaldi chew scenery!
I didn’t know before that the Doctor Who production was so jingoistic. This is writer/director Joe Hill’s rejection letter after pitching 3 ideas for the show. He was assisted in refining the pitches by Neil Gaiman himself.
“‘We have never let an American write Doctor Who, and if we were going to, we wouldn’t start with you.”
doctor-who-joe-hill-writer-rejection/
That’s a big “UGH” for me.