Doctor WHO? The Ever Changing Origins of The Doctor 

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Amen other

You could say... it's a fantastic day

Amen to that.

A great day indeed!

Many forget about Susan because well to a large extent the show has. She was left in the 22nd century and yet the doctor always claims to be "the last time lord" after the time war.

@@gaylordcomic Susan isn't necessarily a time lady, even though she is Gallifreyan

Great point. You should check out the first Unbound audio, it kinda deals with that and is a really sweet story

@@owenmonahan5821 I've heard it! I really enjoyed a lot of its concepts but overall it wasn't really for me? I really like the two David Warner stories though.

@@kurukurushuffle fair enough. I love all the Unbounds personally. The Warner ones were great too. Have you heard Deadline with Darke Jacobi? That one is an absolute masterpiece

And, frankly, none of the changes ever made (except for the "Other" idea that was never implemented) changed that basic fact.

@@MaryAnnNytowl I guess that's true, even if they do come from another universe.

One of the most annoying things about the Moffat era is how the Doctor is made into something more God-like and special with all the grandiose speeches.

‘He’.

@@daffy8995 this is a misinterpretation. The whole arc is him getting too big and arrogant for his boots, following up on Ten being arrogant and egotistical, and having to calm it down. None of his big moments actually lead him to succeed. In Eleventh Hour, he'd already won and what he did to the Atraxi changed nothing. In Pandorica Opens, he didn't scare them off, they were playing him the whole time and his speech had no impact beyond feeding his growing ego. In Good Man Goes to War, the whole idea is brought to its climax as he fails big time and it's from there that he tries to step back. Then finally in Rings of Akhaten his speech didn't beat the god, it was Clara who came in last minute. People like to put this on the Eleventh Doctor, but his speeches never really did anything and it was all about his growing ego.

I always liked the idea of it being a half broken Chamaeleon arc. The Doctor in the TV movie is obsessed with his pocket watch. That’s also the explanation expanded media gives.

What makes the Doctor a fascinating and inspirational character is that we see him _become_ a hero, he doesn't start as one. In _An Unearthly Child_ the Doctor is not a good person, he kidnaps Ian and Barbara in a fit of pique and seems intent on bashing a man's head in with a rock. But over the course of the 1960s he changes and shifts in his personality and attitude, and he takes us along for the ride.

Agree completely.

I think being the Timeless Child only makes the Doctor special on a superficial level. They *thought* they were like any other Time Lord and the vast majority of the other Time Lords also had no idea they were the Timeless Child, so the Doctor still became special through their own courage and morality. Chibnall just didn't highlight that because he's a shallow writer. The Timeless Child "reveal" could lead to great "nature vs nurture vs personal choices" conversations, and I wonder if future writers will grasp that opportunity.

@@Mark-pl3bv This 100%. What most of the fandom doesn't realise is that the Doctor and the Child/Other aren't the same. They're the same person, sure, but they're completely different identities. It doesn't matter how special the Child is, it doesn't make the Doctor any more special.

@@Mark-pl3bv If they are wise they will retcon the timeless child out permanently and unambiguously. it was to Doctor who was as stupid and destructive a retcon as if Agatha Christie had revealed in the 13th Poirot Novel that Poirot was from Alpha Centauri, not Belgium, and Captain Hastings was an android SHE built in her greenhouse.

@@gazda69 They don't "realise" it because that just is not true. its the same character, Chibnal added a backstory most of the fans hated.

I really enjoy how well his videos are out together, they have such a professional feel to them.

@@AnotherScifiGuy absolutely mate, that’s the word, professional. World class presentation skills. Cheers.

Chose to speak facts 💯💯

In multiple situations. If they were both bored, and the Doctor didn't want Susan to have the opportunity to get into as much trouble as him. If he were concerned that Susan would be married to someone too young (we don't know their customs). If he were scared of one of the Timelords having a chance to hurt his granddaughter. If he had been frightened by the very things he was later obsessed with (the Hybrid prophesy, another prophesy, or even fear, itself), even - like in _Listen,_ or _Hell Bent._ And that's just off the top of my head, with only 4½ hours of sleep. 😄 I'm sure there are a ton more possibilities!

Except Tecteun was shown to be real, and she confirmed the portal story, and there's a watch full of memories.

@@Jansenbaker who did she tell that to, and under what circumstances? AND remember that Timelords lie, all the time. And... that watch... the Doctor did NOT open it, did she? She gave it to the TARDIS, to hide it from herself, because she didn't want to know.

@@MaryAnnNytowl Yeah to me that means that its up to interpretation, they came close but never fully confirmed that what the master said was fully true

My headcanon is that the story told by the Master isn't entirely the truth

I'm not super fond of the story, but your right there's enough that's unclear about the whole thing for me to be able to craft a headcanon that agrees with my tastes. For one I follow with the version told in the 2021 annual (I could be wrong on the year) that says the Timeless Child didn't have infinite regeneration and that twelve is just a natural limit to it, so I then choose to belive that the Doctor has had their regenerations renewed more than once. And the other big thing I belive that is that the world the Timeless child originally came from was a future or parallel Gallifrey, I find it fitting that the Time Lords would come about as a result of a time loop.

It's also done excellently in Dave Rudden's Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir.

Also, Lungbarrow ends by strongly implying that the Other was half-human anyway. Now, the one that's *really* wild that nobody ever talks about or acknowledges is Sometime Never, where the only sane conclusion of the madness is that The Doctor is a large shiny crystal duplicate of himself created by a jealous magic dog called Jamais, and Gallifrey has never existed.

@@LightLMN Wait, what??? My knowledge of the novels is pretty basic; is the crystal duplicate you're talking about named Soul?

@@blackphoenix77 It is! It's so wacky that the wikia barely talks about it, but if memory serves, Jamais gets jealous of his owner's doll so he bites its head off, causing eight crystals trapped inside to fall into the Time Vortex. These crystals become the Council of Eight, including Soul. Sadly, I haven't read much of it myself either, haha. If you want to know more there is a tumblr that I learned a lot from that talks about it a bit, called doctornomore, under the tag "Sometime Never." (They're a writer for the Faction Paradox spinoff, and know so much about the Whoniverse it's scary.)

@@LightLMN Wow that's so weird.... even weirder than the Looms! P.S. do you mean doctornolonger? I follow him already but I never saw that tag. (I searched for "doctor no more" on Tumblr and he's the only one who popped up)

Real ones know that the doctor is both half-human, and was loomed - The Other is the biological child of Leela and Andred, and was then reincarnated via the looms as Dr. Who

Couldn’t have said it better, props

Hinchcliffe admitted he didn't know much about Doctor Who before he got the job.

It's the Doctor's old friend Winston Churchill's quote, 'a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,' there!

It isn’t a retcon to anything, though.

Simple fix: the TARDIS the Doctor stole is an old model. So old that it was being used by the Timeless Child while working for Division. During that period, the time ship got stuck in the Police Box form. When the Timeless Child was captured and changed into Hartnell, the TARDIS was impounded and repaired. The Chameleon Circuit was fixed. The TARDIS even says in The Doctor's Wife that she chose him on the day he stole her. She wanted to re-unite with her old pilot. For a while, her Chameleon Circuit functions. But then, it breaks down in Unearthly Child, again. With the exception of Attack of the Cybermen, it stays that way. The Doctor is using the same TARDIS he used as the Timeless Child. There's an inherent problem with its camouflage technique that causes it to keep getting stuck as a Police Box.

Except now we don’t know what the doctor’s original species is. So isn’t it more of a mystery? Like how it was back in the 60s?

@Michael Rather be a “jodie bot” than a C-U-N-T

@Michael Nice try, bigot. We know all too well why you need so many alts.

@@MichaelO2000 no because it makes the doctor a god

@DrWhoFanJ how is he a bigot for not liking a story line, is it just because the story was in the first female doctors run. Oh wait even the timeless child made it so jodie wasn't the first female doctor

He clearly said in the video it was because they couldn't have kids by having sex, not that writers thought sex was icky. 🙄😒 I've no clue how you misunderstood it. The "Virgin" being the publisher of the stories, including Lungbarrow, was used as a joke line, is all. 🤨

100%. Thanks for putting it into words like this

@@MaryAnnNytowl True, but I have heard repeated criticism of the VNAs that they were written by a bunch of sexually repressed virgins who invented the Looms because they didn't want to think of the Doctor having had sex. I assumed Josh was riffing on that familiar line of criticism, but I might have been wrong.

Gallifrey wasn’t introduced until the second doctor era. In 1963 the character was a human with one heart.

Yikes. If anything, this video reminds me of the time when the showrunners went as far as to reshoot scenes to ensure vagueness to the Doctor's origin & leaving it to the audience to come up with their own conclusions.

Nah.

Nah, I've got to disagree with you. You're forgetting Verity Lambert, David Whitaker, and a bit later, Innes Lloyd, who all had a huge hand in shaping the shows lore.

@@MaryAnnNytowl You can disagree all you want. I would say that Robert Holmes and Terrence Dicks shaped a great deal of the lore, as well. The problem is that only Sydney Newman was present at the creation, and able to hand off a coherent idea for the rest of them to shape. On down to what RTD is planning later this year.

It is true to say that DW has been the product of a number of influences, starting from SN handing off to Lambert and Whittaker. But you can say that for any number of shows that have had multiple production teams.

@@ExoplanetaryMedia2516 how many others that worked on the show in its infancy have ever been incorporated into the lore of the show? First with #10, as a human in Human Nature, when he says his mother's name is Verity. Then she _and_ Sidney were incorporated into the show with Verity Newman, the great granddaughter of the woman the 'human' Doctor fell in love with in that episode, who - in the episode End of Time - wrote _Journal of Impossible Things,_ the love story of her great grandmother and "the man from the stars." You have to admit that - even if you want to dismiss Whitaker's and Lloyd's importance to the show - if Sidney Newman was Doctor Who's father, then Verity Lambert was the show's mother.

@@MaryAnnNytowl I don't understand the question.

And yet literally none of that is true and you know it.

jealous much…

I mostly agree with you. I did like '42' though.

​@@tokublwhovian Jealous? Of whom, Chibnall? Nah. Of you and your content-based grammar and eloquent remarks ... well, maybe.

@@Xenomurphy you’re jealous because he was in charge and wrote what he wanted to, instead of you

Chibnall didn't say "yes," nor did that storyline ruin a.n.y.t.h.i.n.g. The Doctor is still an alien with two hearts that grew up on and ran away from Gallifrey, stealing a magic blue box in the process, and who wants to help whenever they can, but usually finds too much trouble in the process. I mean, this e.n.t.i.r.e. video is about ALL of the changes that have been made to the Doctor's backstory, from literally the 1960s onward. And yet, none of those changes have changed anything about the basic character, _except for the _*_very first_*_ one,_ the one that means they can regenerate instead of dying. Not a single one! The only other ones, the Other, and the "more than just a Timelord" bits from Cartmell, never got used. If they had, THEY would've wrecked who the Doctor is, but they weren't. The Timeless Child had to do with someone way, way, way in the past from the Doctor we know. Is Tennant's Doctor the same person as Colin Baker's Doctor? Is Patrick Troughton's Doctor the same person as Peter Effing Capaldi's Doctor? Certainly not in personality! Certainly not in the number of life lessons they've learned. And definitely not in the number of losses they have endured! That means the concept is simply ancient history to the Doctor, and is truly meaninglessness when it comes to who they are NOW. The storyline that affects the character more is the Fugitive Doctor, the one Jo Martin played. And even that has a direct tie-in with historical Doctor Who lore, from the Brain of Morbius. Which leads us to the clear conclusion that none of what Chibnall did hurt the mystery of the Doctor's origin at all.

@@MaryAnnNytowl look if u like it, go ahead I have nothing against you but to others also, it takes away who the doctor is plus I find it disrespectful to Hartnell

Exactly, precisely, and prezactly! Couldn't have said it better, myself!

It’s not a retcon at all, though. Literally nothing of your description of it is even remotely true.

@@DrWhoFanJ I whole heartedly disagree.

@@TheRandomGuyTheFarNoGameCat You can disagree all you want; what I said is still objectively true nonetheless.

@@DrWhoFanJ this is hilarious. You are both being subjective and yet here you are being all high and mighty. I'm guessing you're a white man late thirties to early fifties who has issues with people who identify as anything other than binary. 😅

@@ActionB2Z Not at all. TRG’s comments are objectively incorrect, and I have told them so. I have a problem with precisely the kind of person you have clearly falsely assumed I am for that very same reason.

I thought I was fairly knowledgeable of trivia relating to DW, but that detail came as a genuine surprise!

@@Redfern42 Me too!

You know men can be nurses right?

@@IsaacWhittakerDakin oh yes. But this was a deliberate attack on the franchise as per Chairman Mao's doctrine. To rebuild society, one MUST first destroy the old. Starting with ALL the movies that people love, Destroying families with gender nonsence etc It goes on but its ALL part of the plan ,

And that’s why even if I’m not the biggest fan of the Doctor being a “found child”, it still retains the heart of the story and hey that is what matters.

@@TheRunningLeopard exactly, precisely, and prezactly - I couldn't agree more!

But... 'Doctor' is a name chosen, carefully and with much consideration, by the person themselves. They didn't just one day accidentally discover they were being called the Doctor and decided to keep the name.

Well... confirmed to not be a "pure-blood" human being from Earth, at least. 🤣