B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (346 page)

The eighth Doctor is 1012 in
Vampire Science
, in which it’s also said that his current body is “three” years old, meaning that the seventh Doctor regenerated at age 1009. In
The Dying Days
, the eighth Doctor is 1200. We also know that this incarnation resided on Earth for one hundred and thirteen years, from 1888-2001 (beginning with
The Ancestor Cell
and ending with
Escape Velocity
) and that he spent six hundred years on the planet Orbis (
Orbis
). Cumulatively, and however one structures the eighth Doctor’s adventures, he must be at least 1725 (probably more).

The new series reset the Doctor’s age, but has been consistent in its progression since then. The ninth Doctor says he’s 900 in
Aliens of London
and
The Doctor Dances
. In response to Rose’s question about the problems introducing himself without a real name in
The Empty Child
, he says, “Nine centuries in, I’m coping”.

The tenth Doctor says he’s 903 in
Voyage of the Damned, “
The Whispering Gallery” and
The Nemonite Invasion
. He’s 906 in
The End of Time
(TV). Taken at face value, this means that the Doctor’s tenth body only survived for six years.

The eleventh Doctor is 907 in
Flesh and Stone
and
Amy’s Choice
. He mentions spending “nine hundred years in time and space” in
A Christmas Carol
. In
The Impossible Planet
, we see him at two different points in his life - at age 909 and 1,103. He ends Series 6 as the latter. It’s unclear if the intervening hundred and ninety-five years occur (for him) during the mid-season hiatus between
A Good Man Goes to War
and
Let’s Kill Hitler
or between
The God Complex
and
Closing Time
(after he drops Amy and Rory on Earth). The Doctor telling young George in
Night Terrors
, “I was your age oh, about a thousand years ago”, might suggest that about a century elapses between each break.

The tenth Doctor evidently doesn’t add the ten years of life he yields to restart a TARDIS energy cell in
The Rise of the Cybermen
to the overall tally of his age, perhaps suggesting that the eleventh Doctor doesn’t count the twenty-five years he donates to settle Amy’s temporal credit card bill (
Borrowed Time
) either.

From this, we can infer some other dates:

• The Doctor has been operating his TARDIS for five hundred and twenty-three years by
The Pirate Planet
, and was 759 in the previous story,
The Ribos Operation
. This would mean that the Doctor left Gallifrey when he was 236. However,
The Doctor’s Wife
claims that the Doctor has been travelling in the TARDIS for “seven hundred years”; as he was cited as being 909 in
The Impossible Astronaut
, this would alternatively suggest that he left Gallifrey when he was 209-ish.

• The Doctor attended his Tech Course with Drax “four hundred fifty years” before
The Armageddon Factor
. This would mean he was 309 at the time (implying it was after he left Gallifrey, or that he left and then returned before leaving for the last time).

• Romana is equally inconsistent with her age, and the age difference between her and the Doctor can variously be calculated as 617 or 620 (
The Ribos Operation
), 625 (
City of Death, Creature from the Pit
) or 600 (
The Leisure Hive
).

Past Lives

The orthodox view accepted wholesale by most fans is that the Doctor is a Time Lord who can regenerate his body twelve times when it is seriously injured. It’s also held that William Hartnell played “the first Doctor” and that by the end of
The End of Time
(TV), the Doctor has regenerated ten times, so that Matt Smith is the eleventh incarnation of the Time Lord. This version of events is actually established very late in the show’s history (the term “regeneration”, for example, is not even used until
Planet of the Spiders
at the end of Season 11, the word “incarnation” is only used on rare occasions - such as in
The Twin Dilemma
and
The Trial of a Time Lord
- and so on).

Only a half a dozen stories in the classic series refer to the orthodox view: In
The Three Doctors
, the Time Lords claim that the Hartnell Doctor is the “earliest”. We learn that the Time Lords are limited to twelve regenerations in
The Deadly Assassin
, a view that is reinforced by
The Keeper of Traken
,
The Five Doctors
and
The Twin Dilemma
. (Although in
The Deadly Assassin
,
The Keeper of Traken
and
The Five Doctors
, we learn that it is possible for a Time Lord to regenerate more than twelve times, and in
The Twin Dilemma
, Azmael initiates a thirteenth regeneration, the strain of which kills him.)

It is
Mawdryn Undead
(Season 20) before the Doctor explicitly states that he has regenerated four times and has eight regenerations remaining. In
The Five Doctors
, the first Doctor sees the Davison Doctor and concludes “so there are five of me now” and refers to himself as “the original, you might say”. In
Time and the Rani
, the Doctor talks of his “seventh persona”. The voiceover at the start of
Doctor Who - The Movie
says that the Doctor is “nearing the end of my seventh life”.

The new series displays the established eleven Doctors in order (starting with William Hartnell and finishing with David Tennant, then Matt Smith) in
The Next Doctor
and
The Eleventh Hour
. In
The Lodger
, the earliest Doctors appear in a mental flash, and the Matt Smith version points at himself and says, “eleventh”.
SJA: Death of the Doctor
upsets some orthodoxy when the Doctor says he can regenerate “five hundred and seven times” (see the “Regeneration... A Complete New Life Cycle” sidebar).

Despite all this, the commonly used terms such as “first Doctor”, “second Doctor” and so on are never used on screen (and should never be capitalised).

More often, the evidence about the Doctor’s past is ambiguous or inconclusive: he seems vague about his age throughout his life, the details varying wildly from story to story, likewise his name, his doctorate and the reasons why he left Gallifrey. In
The Deadly Assassin
, Runcible remarks that the Doctor has had a facelift and the Doctor replies that he has had “several so far” (the original script more specifically said he had done so “three times”). In
The Ultimate Foe
, the Valeyard comes from somewhere between the Doctor’s “twelfth and final incarnation” (not the “twelfth and thirteenth”). No unfamiliar Doctors come to light in
The Three Doctors
or
The Five Doctors
, but on two occasions (
Day of the Daleks
and
Resurrection of the Daleks
), an attempt to probe the Doctor’s mind is abruptly halted just as the William Hartnell incarnation appears on the monitor. In
The Creature from the Pit,
he claims Time Lords have ninety lives, and he’s had a hundred and twenty.

There have been a number of hints that incarnation of the Doctor played by William Hartnell was not the first. In the script for
The Destiny of Doctor Who
, the new Doctor confides to his astonished companions that he has “renewed himself” before. In the transmitted version of the story,
The Power of the Daleks
, the line does not appear, but neither is it contradicted. In
The Brain of Morbius
, Morbius mentally regresses the Doctor back from his Tom Baker incarnation, through Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell, but this time no-one interrupts and we go on to see a further eight incarnations of the Doctor prior to Hartnell. Morbius shouts - as the sequence of mysterious faces appears on the scanner - “How far Doctor? How long have you lived? Your puny mind is powerless against the strength of Morbius! Back! Back to your beginning!” These are certainly not Morbius’ faces (as has occasionally been suggested) or the Doctor’s ancestors or his family. Morbius is not deluding himself. The Doctor fails to win the fight and almost dies, only surviving because of the Elixir... it just happens that Morbius’ brain casing can’t withstand the pressures either.

The production team at the time (who bear a remarkable resemblance to the earlier Doctors, probably because eight of them - Christopher Barry, George Gallacio, Robert Banks Stewart, Phillip Hinchcliffe, Douglas Camfield, Graeme Harper, Robert Holmes and Chris Baker - posed for the photographs used in the sequence), definitely intended the faces to be those of earlier Doctors. Producer Philip Hinchcliffe said: “We tried to get famous actors for the faces of the Doctor. But because no-one would volunteer, we had to use backroom boys. And it is true to say that I attempted to imply that William Hartnell was not the first Doctor”.

However we might want to fit this scene into the series’ other continuity, or to rationalise it away, taking
The Brain of Morbius
on its own, there’s no serious room for doubt that these are pre-Hartnell incarnations of the Doctor. This hasn’t stopped fans doubting, of course. Two stories later, in
The Masque of Mandragora
, the Doctor and Sarah Jane discover “the old control room” that the Doctor claims to have used, although it had never been seen in the TV series before.

Cold Fusion
features a sequence where the Doctor remembers his past on Gallifrey (p172-173), where he has recently regenerated to resemble the “Camfield Doctor” seen in
The Brain of Morbius
. However, there is a degree of ambiguity as to whether these are the Doctor’s own memories.
Lungbarrow
states that the Hartnell Doctor was the first and hints, but never explicitly states, that the faces seen in
The Brain of Morbius
are incarnations of the Other, not the Doctor.

“Regeneration... a Complete New Life Cycle”

In
The Five Doctors
, the High Council offers the Master the carrot that - should he enter the Death Zone and help the Doctor as they wish - he will be rewarded with both a full pardon and “regeneration, a complete new life cycle”. This has become a perennial source of confusion, as it would seem to be a change from the twelve-regeneration limit as first established in
The Deadly Assassin
. And yet, both on screen and in the tie-in media, nearly every classic
Doctor Who
story has ignored the development and continued to regard the twelve-regeneration rule as sacrosanct.

Even within
The Five Doctors
itself, the deal looks a bit suspect. The story entails Borusa wanting to be President of Gallifrey for eternity by obtaining the immortality promised by Rassilon, but we know that Borusa can remain President even if he regenerates (he’s done so at least once while in office; compare with
Arc of Infinity
), so the issue isn’t that he’s desperate to hold onto his current body. He wants to be
truly
immortal, which
The Five Doctors
cites as being beyond any Time Lord save Rassilon and anyone he bestows it upon.

In which case, the question must be asked: If Gallifrey has, somehow, developed the ability to grant Time Lords a new set of regenerations, why would this invaluable life-extender be an option for one of the Time Lords’ most infamous and evil renegades, but
not
their own Lord President? One theory, fronted by Neil Gaiman, holds that the limitation on regenerations is as much a legal limit as a naturally occurring one. The idea would seem to be that Time Lords are born with twelve regenerations “in the bank” (as it were), because they evolved that way due to exposure to the Untempered Schism (
A Good Man Goes to War
). But, given enough of an energy top-up, like recharging a battery, Time Lords can acquire even more lives - the Master attempts just that in
The Deadly Assassin
, albeit while going to the drastic lengths of trying to open the main Eye of Harmony (and threatening the destruction of Gallifrey) to achieve the energy required.