In the Tom Baker story, The Brain of Morbius we saw that the Fourth Doctor was scanned and we saw images of his past lives. Thes went in reverse chronological order and showed us the third,
second and first Doctors, before showing us several more faces.
Fans debated these for years even from when they were first shown, but within time these were ignored and by the time you got to Matt Smith he actually would acknowledge that he was the 11th incarnation of the Doctor.
So who were these faces? Well, they were clearly meant to be the Doctor, but there was a lack of clarification so fans could speculate that these were in some way previous incarnations of Morbius instead.
That is until we got to the era of Jodie Whitaker as the Thirteenth Doctor and they were shown again from the same clip when showing the Doctor’s past lives.
Arguably, this could have just been them showing an event from the Fourth Doctor’s time,
and it meaning to be him still, but pretty clearly the intention was to say that the show had previously established that there were more Doctor’s before the First.
And the reason they did this is because the showrunner Chris Chibnall decided to make what was already murky water even more confused and chaotic.
The Timeless child storyline during the era of the thirteenth Doctor established that the Doctor had a second forgotten incarnation similar to the War Doctor…well actually not similar to the War Doctor as that was a version the Doctor chose to ignore and wanted to forget,
but the Fugitive Doctor as she was known was someone even the Doctor didn’t know they once were.
But even though they’ve not made things crystal clear on where the Fugitive Doctor fits into the chronology,
it does appear that the Fugitive Doctor preceded the First Doctor played by William Hartnall.
However…they also decided to establish that the Doctor wasn’t a true Timelord like any of the other Timelords and was an unknown alien form another dimension who we saw appear as a little girl.
She then died and regenerated, but we have no way of knowing if the little girl was the first iteration or not.
But we do know that the timeless child as this version of the Doctor has become known as was tortured and killed a bunch of times so a character called Tecteun who was a Timelord before they became known as Timelords as the people from Gallifrey were now also suddenly Shabogans,
studied and tortured the child until she learned how to regenerate.
At this stage, I can’t believe how confused all of this has become.
And we’re still not done.
The Master, who it was previously established had run out of regenerations but at times was granted new regeneration cycles by the Time Lords, or stole bodies to possess, was then upset that the Doctor was more important than him and killed them all.
The next part of the Master’s plan was to become the Doctor himself which then involved her regenerating into him where they were combined, but where the Doctor later degenerated and so whether or not those regenerations count is anyone’s guess.
The Thirteenth Doctor then became the Fourteenth Doctor who was once again played by David Tennant, after it had already been announced that the eventual Fifteenth Doctor Ncuti Gatwa was cast as the Fourteenth Doctor.
Fine,
they decided to bring David back for the 60th anniversary specials and so made him both the 10th and 14th Doctors officially, although you could argue that David Tennant has been in one way or another, the 10th, 11th, 12th, 14th, and 16th Doctors if we remember that David regenerated twice and there was also the War Doctor.
With each point of new information bumping his true number to a different point.
However, now it was established that there was the Fugitive Doctor and the seven…seven iterations of the Timeless Child, you can also argue with the shifting numbers that David Tennant was actually the 18th Doctor when he first played the 10th.
This would have meant the second David Tennant was therefore the 19th, and with the inclusion of the War Doctor he was in fact the 20th.
If you make the argument that the Timeless Children don’t count as they’re not named the Doctor,
even though it’s meant to be the same being, you can say that David was actually the original 17th Doctor.
But we’re still not done.
