Doctor Who fans have been debating the chronology of the Doctor’s regenerations for years. In modern times, The Timeless Child storyline that has come in the era of Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor has got fans in a tizzy as it suggests there were incarnations of the Doctor before William Hartnell’s First Doctor. How could the BBC mess up the narrative and the numbering of the Doctors so that the first isn’t actually the first and therefore none of the other Doctors are correctly numbered either?
Well for long time Doctor Who fans this is nothing new. In fact, the BBC have been potentially messing with the history of the Doctor for literally decades.
The important thing for fans who are upset that their favourite Doctor is no longer referred to with the correct number, is to keep in mind is that The Doctor is pretty much always just known as ‘The Doctor’.
Jon Pertwee didn’t say ‘Hello, I’m the Third Doctor’, and Christopher Eccleston never uttered ‘Nice to meet you, I’m the Ninth Doctor.’ Certainly there are a few issues here and there as the Eleventh Doctor does point at himself and say ‘Eleventh’ in one episode, and a few episodes show flashbacks of previous lives or mention ‘All thirteen’ when there were only meant to be thirteen incarnations. But for the most part when watching any episode or era of the series, the Doctor is just ‘The Doctor.’
In this article, we will break down all the incarnations of the Doctor, and in particular let’s add in all the ‘Disputed Doctors’ to see if we can reconcile the entire chronology.
As a side note, we’ll be focussing primarily on the events of the TV show as the TV show is the original and main source of the story from which other media such as audio, comic and novelisation versions of the Doctor are derived from. We may occasionally look to another source for a clue, but for the most part we won’t as the TV show has regularly ignored and contradicted these sources. Grab your sonic screwdrivers, because it’s going to be a bumpy ride!
Doctors Numbers 1-7: The Timeless Children
Well, we have no choice but to start with the what are currently the most controversial additions to the Doctor’s history, The Timeless Children. Established during the era of the Thirteenth Doctor as being the earliest incarnations of the Doctor, the Timeless Children completely upended everything fans thought they knew about the Doctor’s origin.
It’s been established that the earliest incarnation of the Doctor wasn’t from the planet Gallifrey, but instead was discovered as a female child by a pre-Time Lord Gallifreyan called Tecteun. This child was found on an unspecified planet next to a portal to another dimension.
Tecteun ‘rescued’ the child and raised her until the child died from an accident. It was at this point it was discovered that the child could regenerate, and Tecteun experimented on the child until she could learn the secrets of regeneration.
Having learned how to regenerate, Tecteun gave this ability to her own species, the indigenous people of Gallifrey, the Shobogans, who would go on to learn both time and space travel and rename themselves The Time Lords.
During a short sequence of the episode titled The Timeless Child, and narrated by The Master, we see the earliest incarnations of The Doctor in seven different forms, establishing that there were at least seven forms of The Timeless Child. These were played by both female and male actors from various ethnic backgrounds. We never hear any of them speak, and other than their physical appearance we don’t learn anything about them.
This storyline has been met with great controversy amongst fans for a multitude of reasons. Part of this is because The Doctor, who up until Jodie Whittaker had always been a male character is now shown to have been originally female, and had several female regenerations before William Hartnell’s First Doctor. This also takes something away from Jodie Whittaker, who was famously publicised as the first female Doctor as well, and does so within her second season as the character.
Whilst adding a richer history of diversity to the character with more female regenerations and various ethnicities is a positive, it has a much less positive side for the fact that the Timeless Children are shown to have been the subject of experimentation by Tecteun, and almost certainly murder victims who were killed over and over again so Tecteun can steal their ability to regenerate.
There is something very unsettling as a fan to know that The Doctor’s origin was that of a tortured child who was repeatedly murdered so that The Time Lords could steal their immortality.
Many fans dislike that this is now the origin for the Doctor, and that as well as this very bleak and tortured backstory, it’s also that The Doctor wasn’t originally a Time Lord or from Gallifrey, and especially that it removes William Hartnell as the original incarnation of the character. Although this wasn’t the first time the showrunners would do this as we will discuss later…
Doctor Number 8: The Fugitive Doctor
Also, during the era of the Thirteenth Doctor, and as part of the Timeless Child storyline, we learned that there was another Doctor, who based on all available information would pre-date William Hartnell as well.
The Thirteenth Doctor met a version of themselves who is known as The Fugitive Doctor. This is because they had been hiding on Earth in human form as some kind of fugitive from the law. The Fugitive Doctor changed into a human using the same chameleon arch technology to change their DNA that we first saw used by the Tenth Doctor. Upon meeting each other they were both shocked to learn that neither knew who each other was which created the mystery of which one was from the past and which one was from the future, as one should remember being the other.
The Doctor Who Flux event series more firmly established that the fugitive Doctor was pre-Hartnell and that this incarnation of the Doctor had worked for the evil organisation, Division, and fled from them and hid as a human known as Ruth Clayton on Earth.
It is not currently clear how this Doctor fits into the timeline following the seventh Timeless Child, or if the Fugitive Doctor directly becomes William Hartnell’s First Doctor. There is evidence to suggest they do not however, but we’ll get to that soon.
The Fugitive Doctor again establishes that the Thirteenth Doctor wasn’t the Doctor’s first female incarnation. Jo Martin, who plays the Fugitive Doctor also became the first person of colour to play The Doctor on screen, although the earliest incarnation shown in the Timeless Child storyline was also a black female.
