I like that, too. Much better than simply wishing away what you don't like.
What's in your "head canon"?
- Thread starter Mr. Laser Beam
- Start date
How about this one?I don't really see that one... but Matt Smith is definitely playing the eleventh Doctor in Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.
Oh. And Lis Sladen is playing Sarah Jane Smith in the Gerry and the Pacemakers film, Ferry Cross the Mersey. (It's early Sladen work, she's an extra.) Sarah Jane loved the Mersey sound!
I think there's just some resistance to "forget everything you know" stories. When they change tbe rules on a whim. DC Comics, for example, likes to do that every few years with their constant reality-shattering crises.
Kind of like the thing about "bi-generation". I read about that, and I'm like, what the hell? Is this how ALL regeneration is supposed to work now? Or was it just that one time? And what happens to the 14th Doctor now? Does he just age and die like anyone else?
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(Almost) all of the original series (1963 - 1989) as seen on screen is canon.
The War Chief and the Master are the same guy.
The Monk is not the Master nor is he the War Chief. He's a different renegade Time Lord entirely.
The First Doctor is really the first incarnation of the Doctor and he really only gets 12 regenerations unless there is some kind of jiggery-pokery that the (nearly) All-Powerful Time Lords can concoct to extend that limit in certain cases.
Roger Delgado is the 13th incarnation of the Master.
The Deadly Assassin Master and the Keeper of Traken Master are the decayed forms of the Delgado Master.
The Ainley Master is the Delgado / Pratt / Beevers Master in a stolen Trakenite body and unable to regenerate. Any personality changes are due to the normal "character growth" that someone would experience over a long life and after experiencing a ton of trauma.
Elements of the TV Movie are canon.
Exceptions:
- The Master wasn't "put on trial by the Daleks and exterminated". There are other reasons why the Master is a blobby snake at the beginning and how he crosses paths with the Doctor on Earth.
- The Doctor is not half-human. The TARDIS has systems that are biometrically locked to the Doctor personally, not to "human eyes" in general.
- The Eye of Harmony is not "in" the TARDIS, but there is a link to the EoH.
2005+ is fan fiction written by humans who have heard of but never met the Doctor.
- No Timeless Child, no Flux, no "Last Great Time War" with the Daleks, no War Doctor.
- Gallifrey still exists where it always has and the Time Lords are the same smug do-nothings as always.
There's probably more but I can't remember now.
The War Chief and the Master are the same guy.
The Monk is not the Master nor is he the War Chief. He's a different renegade Time Lord entirely.
The First Doctor is really the first incarnation of the Doctor and he really only gets 12 regenerations unless there is some kind of jiggery-pokery that the (nearly) All-Powerful Time Lords can concoct to extend that limit in certain cases.
Roger Delgado is the 13th incarnation of the Master.
The Deadly Assassin Master and the Keeper of Traken Master are the decayed forms of the Delgado Master.
The Ainley Master is the Delgado / Pratt / Beevers Master in a stolen Trakenite body and unable to regenerate. Any personality changes are due to the normal "character growth" that someone would experience over a long life and after experiencing a ton of trauma.
Elements of the TV Movie are canon.
Exceptions:
- The Master wasn't "put on trial by the Daleks and exterminated". There are other reasons why the Master is a blobby snake at the beginning and how he crosses paths with the Doctor on Earth.
- The Doctor is not half-human. The TARDIS has systems that are biometrically locked to the Doctor personally, not to "human eyes" in general.
- The Eye of Harmony is not "in" the TARDIS, but there is a link to the EoH.
2005+ is fan fiction written by humans who have heard of but never met the Doctor.
- No Timeless Child, no Flux, no "Last Great Time War" with the Daleks, no War Doctor.
- Gallifrey still exists where it always has and the Time Lords are the same smug do-nothings as always.
There's probably more but I can't remember now.
That's similar to what Lungbarrow established, with the First Doctor being a reincarnation of the Other, rather than a regeneration.
Why insist on the same Master appearing throughout the entirety of OldWho myth? Why can't the Delgado Master and the Decayed/Ainley Master be different entities? This is not supported on-screen anyways, so why insist.
BF explained this away as Evelyn Smythe's human DNA sealed the Eye of Harmony away from the Daleks in The Apocalypse Element.
Theoretically, the TARDIS interior is not in the TARDIS, if you catch my meaning, but anyway.
NuWho, and now DisneyWho, are valid continuances of OldWho, as valid as any other.
I presume BF and other extended universe material the same way?
Personally, I think its like the splinter in season 6B series, its a strand of the Doctor that seperated but is bound to reunite with his Doctor self when his time is come. Maybe even look like the Watcher from Logopolis?
That's what I appreciate about The Giggle versus what The Timeless Children imposed. The latter feels like a strict marking-this-territory-as-mine retcon, not inviting much imagination or actual euphoria in its world-building, whereas the Giggle retcons bring a new dimension to the show without away what we know about it. Bigeneration is an interesting concept that, while dilluting somewhat in how the Doctor's regeneration seems less dramatic but at the same time, it is an intriguing concept that gives birth to the above quote. It invites imagination and fun.
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Didn't really go for the Lungbarrow similarity, but I guess its unavoidable. At least Cartmel himself also realized you can't take away the Doctor's journey away from by handwaving it as a drop in an ocean of forgotten memories of countless regenerations past.
Because I prefer it that way. It's my head-canon, not yours.
Your comment reminded me of the ‘cosmic angst’ scene in the Five Doctors. Another thing that makes no or less sense post TC.
‘A man is the sum of his memories, a Time Lord even more so.’
‘Great chunks of my past, breaking off like ice bergs…’
‘I’m being whittled away. Piece by piece.’
‘I must find, I must find…’ ‘My other selves.’
I'm down with that.
Doesn't matter how many times you say it or how intensely you feel it, that is simply not true.
Well, maybe in your head canon. But not in reality.
Ooh, I like that. Into the headcanon it goes.
How do you square this with Season 6B?
My very condensed take: The Second Doctor is splintered from just before the Third Doctor regenerates and continues on going about partly or mostly as a CIA agent in parallel to the Third Doctor's existence, no?Ooh, I like that. Into the headcanon it goes.
How do you square this with Season 6B?
Well, my headfanon: the Second Doctor thinks he's gonna return and accept to regenerate into the Third Doctor, as he does in The Five Doctors, but as he returns he finds out he's intended to keep working as a CIA agent, while the Third Doctor will eventually die, unable of regenerating (because of the season 6B split, Pertwee's unable to regenerate). He refuses this and escapes, but is cought and naturally regenerates (naturally, as a splinter's lifetime is seemingly limited) and regenerates to Jo Martin, who continues on being a CIA agent, always mindful of escaping...until she finds out the complete truth about the Division, which turns out is also the organization that splintered the Second Doctor and sent him in the season 6B adventures (including the BF ones, The Two Doctors and The Five Doctors) for their own, mysterious purposes. However it happened, and we may never find out, Martin's time was up, and my next headcanon comes forward:
The Watcher is the Jo Martin, midway regeneration. Basically, she's the "side" of the Doctor who could regenerate, and without it, the Doctor could never naturally regenerate (he only regenerates in Planet of the Spiders because of the Hermit's "little push"). Also, being a Division agent, she's probably aware of the circumnstances of her own regeneration into Five, maybe even specific info. But, she;s aware that if she does "unite" with the Doctor, she will forget everything about her life as the Fugitive Doctor. Indeed, everything about season 6B. And it makes sense. The Sixth Doctor did not remember the events of The Two Doctors from the Second's perspective. The Second Doctor clearly remembers meeting the Third Doctor before in The Five Doctors. It seems plausible to look at the CIA/Division Doctor as immune/enhanced towards multi-Doctor encounters. So, with that knowledge, she guides the Fourth Doctor towards the events of Logopolis and, together with Tom Baker, Jo Martin regenerates into Peter Davison.
Its a bit different, but also fundamentally the same. My best surprise from the above theory is, it almost logically explains why Peter Davison was a visible super-mess during Castrovalva. He's the Doctor who has the re-adjust with his missing half for a long, long time and also cope with his insane memory loss.
Anyway. Sorry for the really long post.
Meh, I prefer to think that, in Season 6B, the Second Doc began to undertake more dangerous missions and so his handlers decided to regenerate him into a stronger form.
Some of these missions were SO dangerous - and therefore extremely classified - that when the Fugitive Doctor regenerated into the Third, all memories of that incarnation were wiped.
Some of these missions were SO dangerous - and therefore extremely classified - that when the Fugitive Doctor regenerated into the Third, all memories of that incarnation were wiped.
Ooh, I like that. Into the headcanon it goes.
How do you square this with Season 6B?
It fits quite easily.
Two works for the CIA, hoping to get at least some of his sentence commuted (which is in part a success, hence Jamie’s presence in the Two Doctors) but following the cock-up with Dastari and the Androgum gene manipulation over the whole Rassilon Imprimature thing is forced to regenerate, having led to believe it is the only way by what turns out to be The Agency. She does her whole Rainbow ops thing with George, Zippy and Bungle, but things go awry.
The events of Fugitive of the Judoon happen.
After she returns to Gallifrey, she hands herself over to the CIA who had a departmental rivalry/conflict with the other lot — a splinter group perhaps — who she was working for, and they give a little top up of the artron / regen energy to cover the extra incarnation (or better yet, just time-loop everything post-Dastari, so the events basically did and didn’t happen all at once — theres enough of a mess caused by two and six meeting and events unfolding that it would need a bit of finessing by the Time Lords anyway) and bump the Doctor into the witness protection program that was their original sentence.
The events with the Fugitive Doctor are either then covered up, or basically didn’t happen due to being Time Looped, with that incarnation existing within the Matrix (and what amounts to the Tardis’s own USB stick version of the matrix, as seen with the holo-doctors in Power of the Doctor) having been time-looped. It’s no different to the Valeyard in some ways.
The Timeless Child stuff was just the Master lying and messing with the Doctor, using the control of the Matrix they’ve been shown to take in The Deadly Assassin and The Trial of a Timelord. Why?
Because the TC was actually the Master, but he’s still running scared from Tecteun who he knows is out there doing shit. Tecteun only thought the Doctor was the TC, because they’re absentee much of the time, and the Master fiddles with the Biodata records on Gallifrey. (As was also shown to be a thing in Deadly Assassin.)
There’s other ways to neaten the edges, but that would cover it. The Master being the TC makes perfect sense, because he is not only having a traumatic reaction to Death on the regular, but keeps coming back. Rassilon knows this, and that’s why he used the young Master to be the lifeline out of the Time War rather than The Doctor. Because he can’t die.
(Edit: Division not The Agency.)
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^ ... That works too.
Clara isn’t a problem tbh. The GI went in and messed with things, Clara went in to unmess them, then Eleven pulled her out. It never retconned anything, as the end result was no-change.
You can put all the events of flux into a pocket of broken time by having Thirteen accidentally end up there during fugitive, and tie the whole thing to Omegas actions in The Three Doctors, whilst also having it explain Unit dating, by having the timeline accidentally scrunched from the seventies to the eighties. All topped off by the Arc of Infinity and the Brigs Blinovitch Limitation snafu in Mawdryn Undead. Basically, 1973 to 1983 are a big old shoal reef of temporal ocean, especially in the English Home Counties, all because of Omega and Gallifrey, into which The Doctor is regularly pulled. Can even stretch to 85 because of The Two Doctors and Attack of the Cybermen, though I’d think of that as just the calmer edge of it, with the messiness of 1986 and Mondas, and 87 and the Nemesis Comet, almost occurring because of it.
Almost like a little Time War all of its own, starting with say… Day of the Daleks. WW1 to the Time War’s WW2. We know the Time War basically started with Genesis as the Time Lords incitement, and Resurrection showing the Daleks own opening shots. (The often forgotten ‘Android duplicates off to assassinate the High Council of Gallifrey’ sub-plot) All of the strands converge in that neat little 1983-87 zone at the edge of the shoal (including the Five Doctors) with the far side in the past being around the period for Inferno, Day, and The Three Doctors.
So the seeds of what the modern show has as it’s Time War are all sown in the sort of Cold Time War of the Classic Series.
(You can fit all sorts in the middle, courtesy of the books, including The War In Heaven, etc etc, and it all neatly fits into this idea of some time/space locations basically being utter wrecks of causality. Particularly Earth, as that gets dragged off to be Ravolox in its own future, which may even have originally occurred in that end of of millennium period before it was fixed apologetically by the Time Lords, and was of course was messed with again when The Master opened the portal to the Eye of Harmony there in 1999. No wonder there’s a rift in Cardiff.)
(Edit to add: The problem really is the way RTD always ties things *hard* to our real world in a way the show never bothered with. They had a better space program in the Whoniverse, and even had BBC 3 a couple of decades earlier than us. Why they needed to have Davina McCall repeatedly foisted into their timeline is anybody’s guess. Poor sods had enough to contend with, surely.)
Almost like a little Time War all of its own, starting with say… Day of the Daleks. WW1 to the Time War’s WW2. We know the Time War basically started with Genesis as the Time Lords incitement, and Resurrection showing the Daleks own opening shots. (The often forgotten ‘Android duplicates off to assassinate the High Council of Gallifrey’ sub-plot) All of the strands converge in that neat little 1983-87 zone at the edge of the shoal (including the Five Doctors) with the far side in the past being around the period for Inferno, Day, and The Three Doctors.
So the seeds of what the modern show has as it’s Time War are all sown in the sort of Cold Time War of the Classic Series.
(You can fit all sorts in the middle, courtesy of the books, including The War In Heaven, etc etc, and it all neatly fits into this idea of some time/space locations basically being utter wrecks of causality. Particularly Earth, as that gets dragged off to be Ravolox in its own future, which may even have originally occurred in that end of of millennium period before it was fixed apologetically by the Time Lords, and was of course was messed with again when The Master opened the portal to the Eye of Harmony there in 1999. No wonder there’s a rift in Cardiff.)
(Edit to add: The problem really is the way RTD always ties things *hard* to our real world in a way the show never bothered with. They had a better space program in the Whoniverse, and even had BBC 3 a couple of decades earlier than us. Why they needed to have Davina McCall repeatedly foisted into their timeline is anybody’s guess. Poor sods had enough to contend with, surely.)
Pfft. You don't think Three can do anything Two can't?
I'm riffing on Two's "you don't think there's anything you two can handle that I couldn't" bit from Five Doctors. But on a wider scale, I don't see any incarnation of the Doctor as stronger or weaker than another. The Master thinks like that "if the Doctor can be young and strong...." but even Missy admits in her retelling of the Doctor vs the Invisible Superstrong Android Assassins that it could be ANY version of the Doctor because they're all the same.
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