Media Essays: The Doctor's Past

Written by The Wandering Fox

Freddy: Oh? Well would you look at that everybody were back with another Doctor Who essay!

Teddy: Yeah…okay, last post got up to (looks) nineteen views!? Well that’s amazing!

Freddy: Well Ncuti rectified his viewing figures to twelve people, so I guess that’s a win.

Teddy: It must be! Well, I wonder if this will garner more viewing figures?

Well let’s see if we can, mates!

It’s me, the Wandering Fox and yes I’m here to do another essay and this time it’s all about the Doctor’s past that we know of.

No, not the Timeless Children, none of that. We’re gonna be looking at what was established throughout Classic Who and how the modern series at first respected those. Because I’ve got a few friends out there who genuinely know little of the Doctor’s past and haven’t gone that far back in the show, and they are just as confused by the Timeless Children I’m here to help get a few things straight.

Please note that I’m covering what was specifically on TV, non of the books or audio characters like the Doctor’s brother Irving Braxietal or the Doctor’s great grandson Alex will be mentioned. Well, I might make a nod to Alex. While I like that Susan had a family of her own I want to cover what was on TV, from "An Unearthly Child" to "A Good Man Goes to War".

Freddy: Well here we are then, Mr Expert.

Thank you, buddy. Let’s start all the way back to the Unearthly Child herself.

Susan Foreman

Yes, here she is, the Doctor’s granddaughter and the original companion of the series. We first meet Susan in the first episode as a student at Coal Hill School under the tutelage of Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. While a friendly and eccentric girl, Susan was incredibly strange to her teachers and students as she gave them some strange answers in regards to science and history. Ian and Barbara were concerned for her as well as the fact her home address was Totters Lane Junkyard, and knowing little of her grandfather didn’t stop those worries. They followed Susan to the Junkyard where we meet the Doctor for the very first time and after a scuffle we go in the TARDIS for the first time, discovering Susan is an alien.

Susan travelled with her grandfather and teachers, showing compassion and empathy to those around her, made the brave effort to meet the Thals and trek through Skaro on her own, became a good friend of the Sensorites. Susan’s travels would end in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" after helping to defeat the Daleks in 2164. The Doctor made his legendary first goodbye to his first companion.

Susan would return in The Five Doctors where she was nabbed out of time by the Time Lord Borusa and not only met the First Doctor again, she met the Second, Third and Fifth Doctors.

Now, this is where it gets a bit iffy. If you count Big Finish as canon then Susan met the Eighth Doctor in "An Earthly Child" set in the 23rd century and has a son called Alex (voiced by Paul McGann’s son Sonny). That’s. As far as I’ll go because you’ll be falling down a rabbit hole, but I really liked how the Eighth Doctor made a lot of time for Susan in his travels, showing that he never forgot her. I won’t go any further as it goes into the Time War and well, that’s a lot to talk of.

Susan did recently return in series fifteen of the revival but. We don’t talk about that. Thank goodness she didn’t reappear after that as it was strongly implied RTD was going to retcon her backstory to make it seem like she wasn’t born yet which is just baffling. I’ll explain my points of why that doesn’t make sense at the end of the essay.

But there you have her. Susan Foreman.

Teddy: So where do we go from here?

Freddy: Yeah, what else are you gonna talk about?

Well I did tell you this was all about the Doctor’s past. Let’s go to.

The Tomb of the Cybermen

The Second Doctor had made battle with the Cybermen a lot, and this was a legendary story as it was one of many Classic Doctor Who stories that was thought missing but was found and restored for the fans to see. But now this story is more central to talk of the Doctor’s past. This story is set after "The Evil of the Daleks", with the Doctor taking on Victoria as his companion after her father gave up his life to stop the Daleks. We get a moment between them both in episode 3 of the story in that while they sit together Victoria confesses how much she misses her father to the Doctor. He gives her comfort in the fact she still has her memory of him. Victoria mentions how with him being so ancient he’s probably forgotten his family. Then we get the moment the Doctor tells her just a bit about his family.

“Oh yes, I can when I want to... The rest of the time, they sleep in my mind."

Here’s the scene itself.

You work with what you knew at the time. The only family the Doctor had was Susan and he left her on Earth. We will come back to this but remember that by the time we first met the Doctor he was with his granddaughter. So let’s work with this that we had back then: he’s implying here his family are long gone. His wife, his children, some of his grandchildren are gone. The fact the Doctor still holds onto them even though he’s left Gallifrey and Susan just lets you know enough of the Doctor’s past. But we’ll come back to that.

Freddy: Where to now?

The Time Monster

The Third Doctor and Jo Grant find themselves trapped in Atlantis before it was sunk beneath the waves. Jo expresses her worry of whether they’ll get out or not. The Doctor reveals to her a key part of his childhood.

The Doctor talks of his childhood, of how the Hermit lived behind his home on the mountainside. This is a good bit of insight into the Doctor’s life and that he like us had gone through some trouble in his younger years and would seek out an adult for comfort. We actually meet the Hermit truly in the Third Doctor’s final story "Planet of Spiders" in which he’s been staying on Earth helping Captain Mike Yates and other men in a therapy house. The Hermit’s real name is K’anpo, and after the Third Doctor dies, K’anpo regenerated and gave the Doctor a little push to help him regenerate. There’s something nice about that, this hermit whom helped the Doctor hundreds of years ago as a youngster comes to save him and let him live again.

Might I add as well in The Three Doctors the Doctor regarded Omega as a hero he looked up to on Gallifrey? Or how he recounted the Master was his best friend once in their childhood?

Do you see where I’m going with this?

Teddy: Yes, how does the Timeless Children fit in with all this?

Yeah, I haven’t even got to the movie yet! But first we must go through.

The Tom Baker Era

We found out a bit more of the Doctor’s past when he visited Gallifrey in The Deadly Assassin, specifically his years at the academy in that we learn he was a student of the Time Lord Borusa and we meet an old school friend of his Runcible, as well as the fact the Doctor was in the Prydonian sect of the Academy. In later Fourth Doctor stories we discover as well that the Doctor had the nickname “Theta Sigma” at the academy. His times at the Academy are brought up further throughout the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Doctor eras as well as meeting the Rani who was a bothersome student the Doctor knew in the Academy and the Doctor met another old teacher of his in "The Twin Dilemma".

Now we get to the TV Movie.

As he’s recovering from his regeneration, the Eighth Doctor has suffered amnesia and starts to recall his childhood. Out on a walk with Grace he starts recall a night he laid in the grass with his father and they watched a meteor shower together and how the sky was dazzling with lights.

Some fanboy: B-But, the TV Movie said the Doctor was half human!

Yeah and guess what? Everybody hated it! Big Finish didn’t touch on it until they gave an INCREDIBLY bizarre explanation in a SIXTH DOCTOR audio. That it had something to do with Evelyn I think?

I just write the half human thing off as the TARDIS being damaged as was the Doctor’s connection to it and he hadn’t fully finished regenerating, hence there was a “blip” in the symbiotic connection between the Doctor and the TARDIS. And he did have amnesia so he wasn’t thinking straight.

But there we go, that’s where the Classic side of the Doctor’s past ends.

Teddy: Yeah, about the Timeless Children.

Wait, I’m not done.

Freddy: Wait, you’re gonna talk about Modern Who?

Yes, I did say I’d go up to "A Good Man Goes to War".

With Doctor Who back in 2005 the series did tease a bit more about the Doctor’s past. For younger viewers they all must’ve assumed what the Doctor had was lost to the Time War. But that’s not really true.

Modern Who

In both "Fear Her" and "The Doctor’s Daughter" the Doctor mentions he was a dad before. He mentioned it briefly in "Fear Her" but we have him talk a bit more of it in "The Doctor’s Daughter". In that story the Doctor, Donna and Martha end up on a planet that’s in a battle and they’ve been creating genetically engineered soldiers to fight. Who gets used to create another soldier? The Doctor, who’s hand is shoved into a machine which takes a few samples from him and out pops this girl.

(I think David Tennant was thinking something else when he saw her XD).

Because Jenny was created to fight she doesn’t share the Doctor’s own beliefs which is really hard at first for him and her to get along, but as we see the Doctor finds it hard to look at her because every time he looks at her he thinks of his family, the family he once had.

The Doctor notes here that when his family died a part of him died with them. That’s sadly the case with a lot of parents who lose their children, they feel a part of them, what they created and raised, is gone. Keep in mind he had a family before the first ever episode and with the Time War lasting for so long that he now can’t remember how old he is that he restarted at 900, it makes it all the more sad to know that he lost so much and it was just him and Susan. Then we get to the end of this episode where he thinks Jenny died and goes on, not knowing Jenny is still out and alive.

We finally wrap up the recounting with "A Good Man Goes to War" in which the Eleventh Doctor gets out the baby cot he was placed in back when he was a baby.

It’s funny to think that Hartnell’s Doctor had sneaked in the TARDIS with Susan with such a big cot XD

So. We need to talk about the Chibnall Elephant in the room...

How Does the Timeless Children Make Sense?

For those of you that don’t know, in the Thirteenth Doctor era Chris Chibnall decided to give the Doctor an origins and revealed that not only was there more Doctors before Hartnell, but the Doctor was never from Gallifrey but from another universe and the Doctor is the reason why Gallifreyeans got the power of regeneration because the Doctor’s “mum” Tecteun killed the Doctor repeatedly to get the secrets of regeneration.

Yeah…how does that make any sense with what I talked of up there?

Freddy: Didn’t they say they implanted false memories in the Doctor?

Teddy: By that are they saying everything you mentioned was just false memories?

That’s what was greatly suggested in episodes based around that. That’s honestly gutting and wrong. They had enough there to tell them of the Doctor’s past and it was simple:

He was born on Gallifrey.

He grew up on a mountainside and had a hermit as a teacher.

The Doctor watched a meteor shower with his father.

He went to the Academy.

He was called Theta Sigma there.

To the Doctor the Galifreyean Omega was a hero.

He studied under Borusa and Azmael.

He had a family, he had a wife, many children, then Susan was born as his granddaughter.

His wife died, his children died.

Just him and Susan.

They stole a TARDIS.

End of.

Freddy: That’s way simpler. I’d rather that than the sheer weirdness of what Chibnall did. Or whatever RTD was gonna do to Susan.

Teddy: Oh goodness no.

Good thing it’s out on tender.

But still thank you so much to those who have read this, I hope it simplifies a lot of the Doctor’s backstory for you. If you liked the Timeless Children then hey that’s good. To me though I prefer this for the Doctor. He was better as an ordinary Time Lord, living a mundane life by their standards after his family died, got bored of his life and went on to travel and that’s how he became a legend.

Hope this was good for you. Do leave a comment below and be respectful.