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Media Essays: The Conundrum of the Doctor's Origins

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Written by The Wandering Fox


Hello everybody, it's me, the Wandering Fox, back from a trip to the outer galaxy and with Doctor Who back on our screens I kinda thought of how in the Chibnall era we had this big revelation of the Doctor’s origins, the Timeless Children, its impact still felt in the series today with the Doctor embracing the fact he was adopted. While I don’t like the Timeless Children, I can commend RTD for trying something with it unlike Chibnall who had the Doctor drop it like a ball.


However, if there’s many things I criticise Chibnall of in his writings of Doctor Who, it's how he borrowed lots of existing ideas or unused concepts and trying to say it was his own thing, like Mary Shelley meeting the Cybermen inspiring her to create Frankenstein, that was already done with the Eighth Doctor. Yet what if I were to tell you the Timeless Child was him kinda borrowing a idea created by Andrew Cartmel from the Seventh Doctor? It was kinda similar.


Or better yet, how about I tell you the other origins of the Doctor?


Well I am here to tell you of the Doctor’s many other planned or hinted origins which went nowhere.


Though before I go in this, I want to tell you this. I would rather the Doctor’s origins were left unknown, it’s left in our heads of where the Doctor came from. Yet still, with this out of the way, lets start from the beginning, and I mean the very beginning?


He Was The Husband Of The Fairy Godmother And Was From The 49th Century


Yes. They were going to reveal he was the Fairy Godmother’s husband back in the First Doctor era, though this was left abandoned as they felt it would be a bit too farfetched for the series.


However, him from the 49th century was something which was in the original script for An Unearthly Child, even making it to film in the pilot version of the episode, hence he and Susan would’ve been humans from the future. This however was scrapped after a disastrous first recording which saw the technical faults of the TARDIS, with the scripts being changed following this, the Doctor telling Ian and Barbara he and Susan were cut off from their people.


“We are not of this race, we are not of this Earth, we are wanderers of the fourth dimensions of space and time” - First Doctor.


However, this did not stop them in trying a go at revealing what species the Doctor was from, cos aside from him, Susan and the Meddling Monk, the Time Lord name wasn’t invented until the Second Doctor’s final story. We come to none other than the Toymaker.


The Toymaker


In the creation of the story, they were going to reveal the Doctor and the Toymaker were of the same species, and the Toymaker was going to force the Doctor to shift into another man. The latter was done for some of the series writers tried to write William Hartnell off with his poor health becoming a bit of a issue, though this was scrapped. The idea of the Doctor being a member of the Toymaker’s species did crop back up in the 60th anniversary specials with the Thirteenth Doctor regenerating into the Fourteenth theorised to have been influenced by the Toymaker, though this turned out to not be true...though I will come back to this.


From here, the Doctor’s origins began to somewhat take form, the Second Doctor revealing to Victoria he had a family long ago, but they’re gone now, yet he thinks of his family all the time if he closes his eyes. Then we learnt of his species being the Time Lords in The War Games. Exiled to Earth, the Third Doctor would reveal he grew up in a house on the mountainside and would speak with a hermit under a tree if he was depressed, he would reveal the Master was his best friend as a kid. The Fourth Doctor revealed his surname at school was Theta Sigma and was a fine student in the Time Lord Academy.


This seems simple until we come to the Seventh Doctor era, for which the series was facing the chopping block, and the writers were keen on trying to save it, therefore they had a masterplan to try and save the show: Cartmel’s Masterplan.


More Than An Ordinary Time Lord


The groundwork to the Cartmel Masterplan was laid out in Remembrance of the Daleks, with it revealed the First Doctor and Susan were joined by the Hand of Omega from Gallifrey then hid it in 1963 London. Not long after the First Doctor and Susan left with Ian and Barbara, the Seventh Doctor and Ace went to 1963 with them caught in a Dalek Civil War with Davros’s Imperial Daleks and the Renegade Daleks. The Doctor would use the Hand of Omega to seemingly destroy Skaro.


The Hand of Omega was a stellar manipulator created by Rassilon, Omega and the Other. The Other was a mysterious Galifreyan who founded Time Lord civilisation with Omega and Rassilon, first appearing in the novelisation of Remembrance of the Daleks, yet the TV version had the Doctor hint he had a hand in creating it.


The Cartmel Masterplan would’ve revealed the Doctor and the Other were the same person. The Other was the Doctor’s previous life, he was Susan’s grandfather, he married Omega’s wife, Patience, and had thirteen kids with her. He grew weary of Rassilon’s power over Galifrey and felt the need to be part of the universe on the board, not a player. The Other would tell Susan to wait for him on the planet Thersurus. He then threw himself in the Prime Generator of the Looms, the artificial progenitors of Time Lords, his body and DNA breaking down and scattering until it’d be reconstructed millions of years later. The Other was reborn as the Doctor in the Lungbarrow House, then he’d be met by the Hand of Omega which helped him take the TARDIS to Susan millions of years in the past, from there they’d go to 1963 and the series would continue.


However, it doesn’t end there. The Seventh Doctor, before he would collect the Master’s remains from Skaro, would learn Leela was pregnant. Looking into her eyes, he would say “A father of Galifrey and a mother of Earth stock. An unusual pedigree” then he would tell Leela “Just call him after me”. The TV movie would then have the Eighth Doctor reveal he was half human on his mother’s side.


Keep in mind, the Brain of Morbius features a scene of the Fourth Doctor having a mental fight against Morbius. We see the faces of the Third, Second and First Doctors, yet after the First appears, more faces appear. The Masterplan would reveal these faces were the Other’s.


The TV movie, if it was a success, would’ve had its own series in which the Doctor would learn of his heritage, him being half human and he would become the ruler of Galifrey.


With the cancellation of the series in 1989 and the Doctor saying he was half human was met with anger from the fandom in 1996, these were forgotten of, though the Twelfth Doctor did wonder if he was half human. The Cartmel Masterplan survives through Lungbarrow though its thought to be non canon. Well, it stayed this way until the Timeless Children did its own take, with the Morbius Doctors flat out confirmed to be the Doctor the entire time, and the Doctor being from a different universe and helped found Galifrey and regeneration.


The Timeless Child is something I think Chibnall shouldn’t have done, yet I will give RTD credit for trying something with it. But now we come back to the Toymaker.


Then What Will We Learn In The Future?


Earlier I mentioned the idea of which the Doctor and the Toymaker were from the same species. Here's the thing, the Timeless Child was introduced in the series in which the immortal god Zelin captures the Thirteenth Doctor, comparing himself to the Toymaker. The Doctor unlocks a hidden memory of her life as the Timeless Child. 


Though she tried letting go of the reveal of what she was, the Timeless Child still haunted the Doctor even up to her next incarnations. The No Things taunted the Fourteenth Doctor of how he doesn’t know what he is anymore or where he comes from. This episode allowed the Toymaker to reach our universe thanks to the Doctor casting a superstition at the edge of the universe. The Fifteenth Doctor has come to accept he was adopted, yet his and Ruby’s stories are incredibly similar, her abandoned with no knowledge of where she came from, raised by her adopted mum. Like the Doctor. As a little girl, the Doctor was abandoned by a portal in which Tecteun found her, took her in, though obviously the Doctor had it much more traumatically than Ruby’s, yet you see?


This is in which I come to my theory. I think the Doctor is part of the Pantheon, an entity outside of our reality who was found and taken in our universe.


Of course, I’d rather the Doctor wasn’t, yet hey, I can’t stop RTD.


Conclusion


The Doctor’s origins are like a whirlwind.


Well, after this, I need a lay down, don’t you? I will see you later.

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