Speculation on Doctor Who

[fbhjr]

Whenever there are stories with long plot threads that span multiple shows/movies/books I try and figure out what’s going on and where the story will be going.
I do not have a great success rate. Often what I come up with is more convoluted than how things turn out. But, I still speculate.

Last night I got into a long discussion on facebook with a friend of mine, Tom, about the Doctor Who 50th event this November and what we each thought was going to go on.

Tom had read that the new Doctor shown at the end of the episode was a “missing” regeneration that occurred between the 8th and 9th Doctor and was involved in the Time War and something that happened in the Time War is the great secret the Doctor has had all these years.

My speculation is different.
In the episode they make a point of saying there is a difference between The Doctor, and the person he was before he took that name.
Very little is known about him before he took that name and left Gallifrey with his granddaughter to roam around the universe having adventures and fighting evil.
My speculation is that this new version of him comes from the time before he actually became The Doctor.

Back in 76 in the episode Brain of Morbius, the Doctor gets into a mindbending contest with Morbius. As Morbius overpowers the Doctor in the contest you see his previous incarnations go past. After the first Doctor, 8 more faces are shown.
This has been the source of an argument for the intervening 3 ½ decades about who those faces were.
The producers of the show at the time admit they were actively trying to suggest that the Doctor was older than we know and had incarnations before we ever saw him in TV.
Others have suggested they were previous versions of Morbius, but the dialog doesn’t really support that. Or, that they are younger versions of the First Doctor, but they are clearly different people. (The production team of the episode…)

The very next season was an episode that said Time Lords can only regenerate 12 times. And there have been many other episodes that have counted out how many Doctors there are and how many regenerations he has left. The numbers always matched the First Doctor being the start.

But, in the 20th anniversary show, the Time Lords offer the Master a complete new set of regeneration cycles. The Master does not express any surprise or disbelief at this offer, so it seems clear that a new cycle of 12 can be given under the right circumstance.

Back to The Brain of Morbius. In that episode it is revealed that Morbius had been the president of the high council of Time Lords. He had tried to take the Time Lords on a warlike path using their power to conquer time and space. When they rejected him, he raised a mercenary army and began the war anyhow.
The Time Lords finally captured him, disintegrated him, but his brain was saved in a jar by one of his followers.

When the Doctor gets near Morbius, he recognizes the telepathic contact as being Morbius.
This strongly implies they had met before.
But, Morbius doesn’t seem to know the Doctor. This would imply that the Doctor might not have been a big figure in what went on with Morbius.

What if the Doctor’s children were?
What if they were some of the followers of Morbius?
What if they were with him as his army began a war against time and space?

The unknown incarnation of the person who is now the Doctor says he did what he did “in the name of peace and sanity” as he looks over what appears to be a battlefield. A battlefield that could be Karn where Morbius was stopped.

What if he had to betray his children to stop a war?
And, maybe the Time Lords gave him a new regeneration cycle as payment.
And, sick of the Time Lords he leaves with his only remaining family member and goes off to fight evil to atone for what he has done?

The Doctor has talked about the Time War with different folks. He told Amy about destroying his home planet and people off screen as she already knows about it in “The Doctor’s Wife”.
So, that hardly seems to be “his greatest secret”, which is how this other incarnation is described.
And, the Doctor having a “great secret” goes back at least to episodes in the 80’s with the 7th doctor. That was clearly before the Time War.

But, his family and what went on before he left Gallifrey? That is never discussed. It was never even shown on TV until this episode where it shows him leaving with Susan.
They’ve hinted his family is all dead. The Second Doctor said “they’re sleeping in my mind”. He is also indicated that at one time he had a brother as well.
He almost never talks about them, and always changes the subject when it comes up.
They are much more of a secret than the Time War.
(I won’t even get into the Minyans and the war the Time Lords started there by acting like gods. They had Time Lord tech and were blowing up planets too back before the Doctor left Gallifrey…)

Also, in the same episode where they said 12 was the limit of regenerations, the Doctor puts his name in as a candidate for president of the Time Lords. There is much debate about him doing it to get out of being tried for murder, but no one says anything along the lines of “he’s not qualified” or anything similar.
That would indicate some sort of background in Time Lord politics predating when he went on the run.
A leadership role in the war against Morbius could explain that.

Don’t know. It’s all just speculation.
But, I would prefer a story line along those lines to a secret regeneration between 8 & 9 and another Time War story.

Comments

[ravena-kade.livejournal.com]

You have me wanting to watch Brain of Morbius...because I forgot about those faces.

I also prefer you speculation as a missing regeneration between 8 and 9 doesn't sound right...it would still be The Doctor. They extra should be before he started using the name Doctor, or when he was finished with it (like the Valyard).

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

I could loan you the VHS...

[zosh.livejournal.com]

Ok if JH's doctor was the doctor before he became the doctor how could he have broken the promise to what it meant to be the doctor? The Doctor and all that implies would have already have been established.

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

In the episode with the Master a couple of seasons ago, the Master says that the Doctor's name means "the one that makes people better".
He could still have promised to make things better, especially for his children, before taking that name.

[evrgreen.livejournal.com]

I have had a couple of similar speculations on where they are headed with this now. But, there were also large blocks of time in which I didn't watch or have access to Dr Who, so many of the seasons are still unknown to me, and I don't have the breadth of knowledge across the seasons which you have, my friend!

Still it can be fun to think about it.

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

Ah well, it looks like I was wrong about all this.
I'd still love to see a story about my speculation.
Hopefully it will be a good episode even if not the premise I liked...