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ADRIC I
read about something that has just happened… The next page says it didn’t happen at all… Over the page says it did happen, but ‘many years ago’!
THE DOCTOR Ah yeah… Well, I suppose it is a bit above your head. Mind you, they did say I had a very sophisticated prose style. – The Keeper of Traken by Johnny Byrne
This site is something that I have been developing for a long time. It contains all the reviews and articles that I've ever written on Doctor Who and Torchwood - televised stories, DVDs, audio dramas, webcasts, novels, pencil sharpeners; the lot - together with many others by fellow fans. There is even a steadily growing fan fiction section, including several stories from the co-author of Time's Champion, Chris McKeon; a handful from Shelf Life's Daniel Tessier; and even some of my own mad scribblings, for those feeling particularly brave.
Aside from being my own little forum for voicing my opinions on all things Who, The History of the Doctor also serves as a guide to the Doctor's adventures through time and space, presented from his unique chronological perspective.
In deciding what fits where, I've tried to look at the Doctor’s life with the same sort of detached perspective that a historian or a biographer might. A surprisingly large amount of the material does fit seamlessly together, but (and it's a big but) some of it is conflicting. With very few exceptions (such as The Curse of Fatal Death and Death Comes To Time, which were obviously never intended to form part of mainstream continuity) I have made no judgement calls whatsoever as to what is 'canon' and what is apocryphal. Most full-length Doctor Who stories are included here in some shape or form, and it's up to you whether you think that they 'count' or not. All The History of the Doctor does is place the stories in the order that they appear to happen in from the Doctor's unique perspective. Naturally, I did have to wield a fair bit of discretion in deciding which story fits where, and not everybody is going to agree with me.
OMEGA ...this was our universe, riddled with paradox and contradiction like weevils in a biscuit.
THE DOCTOR I know a number of seafarers who prefer their biscuits with weevils. It adds to the taste… – The Infinity Doctors by Lance Parkin
And to those of you hissing at your monitor through gritted teeth, I'd like to remind you that this is science-fiction – and time travel science-fiction, no less – and as such more or less anything goes (providing that it can be explained away by "reversing the polarity of the neutron flow" or in some similar fashion).
Now whilst I'm certainly not contending that it all makes perfect sense, it should at least be noted that over the years Doctor Who fans (and indeed writers) have put forward some compelling theories to explain away any discontinuities in the series. In the Big Finish audio drama Zagreus, for example, it is posited that there are an infinite number of quantum realities out there, each with their own unique version of the Doctor, and so anything that does not quite fit in with the established canon can be pigeon-holed as having happened to a 'parallel' Doctor. Indeed, 'nth Doctor' stories like Scream of the Shalka and the two Peter Cushing Dalek movies are almost universally considered to have taken place in alternative quantum realities. The same applies to most, if not all, of Big Finish's Unbound series of 'what if' audio dramas. Of course, this theory begs the question as to which Doctor is the 'prime Doctor', but that's another argument for another day...
Others blame any inconsistencies on the Time Wars and the Doctor’s a-linear lifestyle. Each and every one of the Doctor’s actions affects the future – the future, at least, in relation to when he is when he acts. Torchwood did not exist in the Doctor’s life until after the events of Tooth and Claw, for instance, when he inadvertently prompted its inception. And so when the sixth Doctor and Mel visited Canary Wharf in Millennial Rites, Torchwood Tower wasn't there because the tenth Doctor had not met Queen Victoria yet, sparking off the chain of events which led to the creation of Torchwood. This is probably why the Time Lords had Laws to prevent them from meddling in their own past - too many headaches! And don't even get me started on the ramifications of Faction Paradox and their doings. Trust Doctor Who to take something like discontinuity and actually forge a fascinating story arc out of it...
I hope that this guide is of interest to some of you out there. Please feel free to e-mail us with your feedback.
The following is gathered with reference to various Doctor Who novels and audio dramas as well as the television series itself. As such much of it is open to interpretation. It should also be noted that most of what we know about ancient Gallifrey and the Doctor’s past has only been hinted at, rather than explicitly stated, in an attempt to maintain a certain mystique.
If you have a question about the history of the Doctor that you would like answered, please e-mail us and we will print the answer (if we can find one!) on this page.
Who is the Doctor? Good one! Even after forty-five years’ worth of adventures, very little is actually known about the Doctor. All that we can be absolutely certain of is that he is traveller in time and space. A traveller who helps people.
“He's a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. He's 903 years old. If there's danger, he's the man who's going to save your life - and everyone on your planet. Got a problem with that?”
The Doctor’s name is purported to contain thirty-eight syllables and is ‘unpronounceable’ by most species. The Doctor is reported to have abandoned his name when he fled his homeworld towards the end of his first incarnation.
“…before he left home, he broke his name. Broke it into thirty-eight tiny pieces… He swept up all the pieces of who he was and tucked them away in an inside pocket. And over the years, as he met people who ended up sharing the road with him, travelling with him for a while, he would quietly give each of them a piece of his name… with all the jigsaw pieces of his name scattered about, they wouldn’t be able to get all of him when they came to take him away.” – Return of the Living Dad by Kate Orman
How old is the Doctor? The Doctor of the new series would have us believe that he is 900 years old or thereabouts. However, we suspect that this is a lie of sorts; his real age is considerably north of the millennium mark, something which – particularly in light of the comparatively youthful company that he keeps – he is rather self-conscious about (a theory supported by the Doctor’s testiness in The Ribos Operation). Another possibility is that the Doctor genuinely doesn't know how old his is – after all, how on earth would you keep track of your age when living your life in such an a-linear manner?
“And to be honest, I lost track of how old I really was aeons ago. I tend to round it down a bit, making a few adjustments for variations in year length across the cosmos. I could be four hundred years old, seven hundred, nine hundred; or in some parts of a particularly obscure galaxy, I’d be just… er… two.” – Orbis by Alan Barnes & Nicholas Briggs
That said, there does seem to be a fairly consistent increase in the Doctor’s age as given on screen, with or two major caveats. The second Doctor claimed that ‘in human terms’ he was about 450 years old. By the time of the fourth Doctor story The Brain of Morbius, the Doctor was a curiously specific 749 years old. Two incarnations later, in Revelation of the Daleks, the Doctor reckoned himself to be 900 years old. By the time that the seventh Doctor had been introduced, this figure had risen to 953 and would pass the millennium mark before his next regeneration, the Doctor celebrating his milestone one-thousandth birthday in Kate Orman’s novel Set Piece. By fairly early on in the eighth Doctor’s time, the Doctor was reckoning himself to be 1,012 years old, and this was before he spent 600 subjective years on the planet Orbis!
The first qualification to the above is the third Doctor’s (near) claim to being ‘several thousand years’ old. Some theorise that the third Doctor was referring to 'Gallifreyan years', or perhaps even including the years that he may have spent living as 'the Other' (see below), before he became the Doctor that we know.
The second is the Doctor’s age as given in the new series. When we first meet the ninth Doctor, he claims to be a nice round 900 years old – a figure that he robustly sticks with until Voyage of the Damned, by which time he appears to have aged in perfect unison with how long the series had been back on the air at the time!
How was Gallifrey destroyed? Gallifrey was originally destroyed in the eighth Doctor novel The Ancestor Cell by Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole. However, following Doctor Who’s return to television screens in 2005, BBC Books had to resile from this, setting up the restoration of Gallifrey in the eighth Doctor’s final novel, The Gallifrey Chronicles by Lance Parkin.
Above: The Citadel of the Time Lords on Gallifrey.
Gallifrey was ultimately destroyed in the Last Great Time War. Several veiled references made both on television and in the tie-novels suggest that the Doctor may have been directly responsible for both the destruction of the Time Lords and the Daleks. However, the closest that we have come to an explanation at the time of writing is in Lance Parkin's 2008 novel The Eyeless, which features a weapon of the type that is implied to have destroyed Gallifrey.
Why doesn't the Doctor just travel back in time and save Gallifrey from destruction? In short, because he can't.
“…it was impossible for the Time Lords to travel into their own future and they couldn’t change their own past. That was the fealty paid for their title.” – The Infinity Doctors by Lance Parkin
Access to Gallifrey’s relative past is forbidden by the Time Lords' own Laws of Time as well as "certain higher powers" (the Guardians and Gallifreyan Gods), and similarly its future could never be directly seen and thus avoided. After a certain date, TARDISes physically could not enter or scan Gallifreyan space.
“…for thirty thousand years, on a thousand planets, we [Time Lords] fought the Time Wars. The devastation would have destroyed the universe had it not been for the intervention of certain higher powers. Since that time, time has been stabilised. It is impossible to change Gallifrey’s past, or to know its future.” – The Infinity Doctors by Lance Parkin
How did the Gallifreyans become Time Lords? The Time Lords prospered around ten billion years after Event One, the creation of the universe. Gallifrey may have been one of the first – if not the first – world in our universe to spawn life, and the ancient Gallifreyans lived their lives much as we live ours today. With just one heart beating in their chests, they reproduced in the same way that humans do.
The ensuing "Intuitive Revelation" saw a triumvirate rise to power and rule over ancient Gallifrey, comprised of Rassilon; Palix (who would eventually become known as Omega); and another whose name history has forgotten.
“By Presidential decree, only the Loom-born shall inherit the legacy of Rassilon. There shall be no more children born of woman.” – Cold Fusion by Lance Parkin
A brilliant geneticist, Rassilon devised a way for the Gallifreyans to once again propagate their species following the Pythia’s curse. He constructed vast progenerative chambers ("looms") in which future generations could be genetically woven. Each House on Gallifrey was allocated one loom, and each loom was permitted to have a maximum of forty-five "cousins" in existence at any given time. Simultaneously, Rassilon introduced the concept of "regeneration" for the Time Lord elite, enabling those who became Time Lords to regenerate twelve times and live for millennia. Upon their first regeneration, a Time Lord would grow a second heart.
Meanwhile, Omega began to conduct experiments into time travel. "Chronauts" were sent into time whilst Omega created remote stellar manipulators - the Hands of Omega - which enabled him to harness the colossal energies of a black hole, creating a power source (the quasi-mythical Eye of Harmony) that would ensure the Gallifreyans' hegemony over time. Regrettably Omega was lost in his final experiment and given up for dead by his people.
Above: Gallifrey shortly after the Intuitive Revelation.
Drunk on the power afforded to him to by the success of Omega's experiments, Rassilon founded the High Council of Time Lords to rule over the ordinals with every bit as much cruelty as the Pythia did. Those who either did not wish or were not allowed to live with the Time Lords and ordinals in their Citadel were banished to live in the outer world where they lived either as "Shabogans" (savages) in the wilderness or as denizens of the Low Town.
The first Time Lords used their Eye of Harmony to anchor the continuity of the universe and ensure their hegemony. A great transduction barrier was erected around the whole planet, protecting Gallifrey from both physical and temporal incursions.
With Omega out of the way, Rassilon continued to grow more and more powerful until he eventually became absolutely corrupt. It is said that in the first Time Wars he wiped entire civilisations from time that had yet to develop (such as the Divergence) for fear that they might eventually pose a threat to Gallifrey. Those that already had developed and were classified as threats, like the misunderstood Great Vampires of E-Space, Rassilon waged more conventional war against. It is also rumoured that some of Rassilon's fellow Time Lords rebelled against his cruelty.
By this point the Other no longer wished to serve Rassilon, and so as Rassilon put the rebels that opposed him to the sword, the Other kissed his wife and his granddaughter, Susan, goodbye and then cast himself into one of Rassilon's earliest progenerative chambers to be reborn long after the tyrant had fallen from power.
Just before leaving our universe on a mission of the utmost import, Rassilon made certain that he went down in history as a legend whilst the Other was demonised. History tells us that the Other stole away one of the Hands of Omega and - in contravention of the law protecting the preteritive time of Gallifrey - took it with him into the forbidden past, jeopardising the entire history of the Time Lords and risking the wrath of the Guardians and Gods. Every year on Otherstide, Gallifrey would celebrate the day that the Other went away, taking both ancient superstition and the old ways with him.
Do the Time Lords have religion or Gods? After the fall of the Pythia, many Gallifreyans chose to worship six Godlike beings - Time, Life, Death, Fate, Pain, and Hope. Unlike the deities of many faiths, the existence of these Gods was proven fact and was not questioned even by those on Gallifrey who did not worship them.
It said that when the Last Great Time War began, the Gallifreyan Gods, together with other higher beings such as the Eternals and the Chronovores, left our universe and returned to their hallowed halls outside of space and time in Calabi-Yau space.
What do we know about the Doctor’s past? Did he have a family? The Doctor was loomed one Otherstide Eve in the House of Lungbarrow, in the Southern Mountain Ranges of Gallifrey.
In his formative "brain-buffing" years (childhood), the Doctor did not get along with his family. A lonely and depressed youth, the Doctor was bullied by many of his cousins, who would call him names like "Wormhole" and "Snail" which reflected the fact that he had been loomed with a redundant appendage - a human belly button. The Doctor’s cousins took this mean that the Doctor was born naturally prior to his looming and had later undergone genetic weaving to "infiltrate" their family for his own nefarious ends.
Above: The fourth Doctor in his Prydonian attire.
Nevertheless, the Doctor was quite close to an old hermit who would often give him counsel, as well as his "father", Quences. Quences wanted his favourite son to go into politics, and so at the age of eight the Doctor was sent to the Academy and eventually became a Time Lord in the illustrious Prydonian Chapter.
How did the Doctor and the Master first meet? At the Time Lord Academy, a young man named Koschei befriended the Doctor, who around this time went by the nickname "Theta Sigma". Both became members of an elite group of ten students - the Deca - which also included the Rani, Mortimus, and Vansell.
As part of their Academy initiation ceremony, both the Doctor and Koschei were made to look into the Untempered Schism, a gap in space and time where they could each view the time vortex directly. The experience had a profound effect on each, imbuing the Doctor with an irresistible urge to flee his homeworld and explore the universe, as well as sewing the seeds of madness within Koschei. Koschei would later claim that ever since looking in to the Untempered Schism, his every waking thought had been accompanied by the sound of drums.
Above: Several Time Lords prepare to introduce young Koschei to the Untempered Schism.
For many years, Koschei and the Doctor were inseparable. Unfortunately though, even when spending his time with Koschei, the Doctor could not escape his bullies. A young man from another house, Torvik, used to make it his business to make the Doctor’s life a living hell. One night, sick with anger, the Doctor killed Torvik in an act of self-defence. However, rather than admit to his crime, with the help of Koschei, the Doctor covered it up. That very night, the Goddess of Death visited the Doctor to claim him as her champion. The Doctor begged and pleaded with Death not to take him and, when given the choice, he told her to take Koschei instead. Eventually Koschei would become the Master.
It is unclear how much the Untempered Schism and Death each contributed to Koschei’s fall from grace, if indeed either did at all. There is evidence to suggest that Koschei was simply seduced by a lust for power and dominion, however when considering the above I would posit that Koschei’s need to control was borne out of his fear of the universe (as seen through the Untempered Schism) and also his much more primal fear of death (no doubt exacerbated by Death’s exceptional hold over him).
How did the Doctor leave Gallifrey? After Quences' murder, the Doctor stole an antiquated Type 40 Time Capsule (his TARDIS) with the intention of fleeing Gallifrey forever. Desperate to escape the clutches of his people, the Doctor took refuge in the one place that they would never find him; the one place that they couldn't ever look: the forbidden past.
“Nonsense, child. Grandfather indeed! I’ve never seen you before in my life.” – Lungbarrow by Marc Platt
Using his inimitable talents, the Doctor circumvented Gallifrey’s transduction barriers and time locks and broke the Time Lords' most cardinal law, travelling into Gallifrey's relative past. He found himself in the Old Time, just after the Intuitive Revelation. There he encountered a young woman named Susan who instantly took the Doctor to be her grandfather, the Other. The Doctor also found that, for reasons that he could not explain, the Hand of Omega bound itself to him. And so with Susan and the Hand of Omega on board his stolen TARDIS, the Doctor went on the run from his own people.
Is the Doctor ‘the Other’? Patience, Susan and even the Hand of Omega certainly believed him to be, and numerous Freudian slips made by the Doctor suggest not only that the Doctor is the in fact Other, but also that he may be aware of it (or at least suspect it). Furthermore, in The Brain of Morbius, during the mind-bending contest we are shown the Doctor’s faces going back to before he was the first Doctor. Even Morbius, himself a Time Lord of thirteen lives, seemed shocked at just how far back the Doctor’s memories go and just how long he had lived. Nevertheless, the notion that the Doctor is a reincarnation of this mysterious Other is frowned upon by many and the matter continues to be debated.
Does the Doctor have any children? Yes. The Doctor has a daughter, Jenny, who was grown in a progenerative chamber (similar to those once used by the Time Lords) on the planet Messaline in the episode The Doctor’s Daughter.
Above: Jenny, the Doctor's daughter.
However, Jenny is not the Doctor’s only child. The tenth Doctor has referred to his other children on more than one occasion, suggesting that they are all long-since dead, perhaps even casualties of the Time War. Little else is known about the identity of these children, however it is known that the Doctor / Other was married to a woman who bore them thirteen children. One of these thirteen children had a daughter, Susan, who was the last child to be naturally born on Gallifrey prior to the Pythia's curse, and who would go on to become the Doctor's first travelling companion.
Above: Susan "Foreman", the Doctor's granddaughter.
Is the Doctor half-human? The Doctor was loomed with a human bellybutton and other genetic anomalies in his DNA. It has been suggested that the Other was a human being from Victorian Times who somehow ended up stranded in the Old Time on Gallifrey. If this is indeed the case, then this could explain both the Doctor’s anomalous genetics as well as the human mother referred to in both the TV Movie and The Infinity Doctors. It would also go some way towards explaining the Doctor's fondness for Earth and humans.
When did Frobisher travel with the sixth Doctor? Click HERE to read Daniel Tessier's response.
How can the events of Time's Champion be reconciled with the events of Spiral Scratch? Surely the sixth Doctor didn't regenerate twice? Who better to answer this one than Chris McKeon, co-author of Time's Champion? Click HERE to read Chris' author's note which explicitly addresses this issue.
I'm just watching the film Dr Who and the Daleks starring Peter Cushing. In it he has his granddaughter Susan with him. I'm assuming the Doctor is human in this film. When did Doctor Who become a Time Lord from another planet? You're right - in both this movie and its sequel, Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150AD, the character 'Dr Who' does indeed appear to be a human being with a human family.
The two movies starring Peter Cushing were made in the 1960s as a spin-off from the television series, in which the Doctor has always been portrayed as an alien from another planet. As such it is not a question of when the Doctor became a Time Lord - the movies were never intended to fit in with the continuity of the television series. As such, many fans posit that these movies take place in a alternate quantum reality, where the Doctor was always a human being.
Click HERE to read more about the two Peter Cushing movies, or HERE to read more about the television stories The Daleks and The Dalek Invasion of Earth, upon which these two movies were based.
Do you have any plans to add reviews of the Time Hunter or Faction Paradox series to your site? You cover several of the other spin-off ranges. Not at present, though this is no reflection on either of them. It's simply a matter of prioritising, and we still have a large number of outstanding BBC Books' eighth Doctor novels and Big Finish Companion Chronicles to cover first.
I am currently going through the seventh Doctor stories and I use your site a lot to compare with what I have put together. I have a couple of questions about your sole story placements as I am curious as to if you have specific reasons for some of them. How did you determine Project: Lazarus before Last of the Titans? Return of the Daleks before Master? And Companion Piece before The Death Collectors? Blimey! Where to start? Well, I should start by saying that over 2010 we're going to be "showing our working" on the site a lot more, at least in relation to stories like those that you've mentioned which could feasibly be set in any number of gaps. Generally though, unless there are any continuity references in the stories that assist, I place them in production code order (if they have a production code); failing that, release order; and, just be to difficult, I often just shuffle them about on a whim. Companion Piece is where it is, for example, because I feel it flows beautifully from the seventh Doctor's loneliness explored in Valhalla and Frozen Time. Last of the Titans is earlier because it's a lot lighter, and I like to imagine Seven's adventures darkening as his regeneration looms large.
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Typset in Arial, Dalek, Deviant Strain, Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed, FuturaDisD, Tahoma & Verdana. ‘The History of the Doctor’ is Copyright © E.G. Wolverson 2006. |
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