[DenValdron @replies]

@scaryb   I suppose then that you’re not a big fan of ‘Human Nature’ or ‘Family of Blood’ or ‘Journey’s End’ all of which produce ‘Human’ Doctors?

[DenValdron @replies]

@scaryb

Yet, there was quite a tradition back then of ‘disposeable’ television serials, which were made into relatively faithful movies.   The entire Quatermass series – the Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II and Five Million Miles to Earth were originally television serials reproduced and refilmed as movies.   Adaptations are always a risky proposition.  I can’t really blame Amicus for trying hard and not quite hitting the mark.

Please keep in mind that the vast imaginative universe of Doctor Who largely did not exist in 1965 or 1966.   This was still the Hartnell area, and there simply wasn’t much established.  The Time Lords as a race did not exist and had not been named, the details of their society, their meddling with the Doctor, Gallifrey itself was all far in the future.   The Cybermen hadn’t come on the scene yet, the Master was still a decade away.  The Ice Warriors, the Silurians, the Great Intelligence, none of it had shown up yet.    None of it was even being imagined by the series creators, who were simply busy trying to get a show up and throwing whatever they could at the wall.

You had the Daleks who were the only running thread in the series apart from the Doctor and Tardis itself.  You had some journey’s into  history, an unclassifiable adventure like the Planet of Giants, and a handful of unconnected adventures set on different planets.  Apart from the Daleks, whose situation and whose abilities changed from one serial to the next, there wasn’t any kind of continuity or mythos.

I don’t know that the Doctor was even established as an alien or non-human until the encounter with the Meddling Monk,  which told us just about nothing about what the Doctor was, except that there were other time travellers out there.  Nor could the Meddling Monk be a landmark, there was also the Celestial Toymaker.  The series could have gone off strongly in either direction, but for the most part, both initiatives died on the vine.

Even the Doctor’s personality during the Hartnell area was not fixed.  He’s aloof and ruthless up to Marco Polo, where he gets friendlier and more approachable.

We can talk in hindsight about the great big massive imaginative universe structure of Doctor Who, but it took time for that to evolve, and most of it was not established or available for the Cushing Doctor.

I don’t see the Cushing Doctor as emasculating that universe, and certainly, that universe did not exist in that form in Cushing’s time.  Rather, I see that great big massive imaginative universe as having finally grown big enough and clever enough to absorb and incorporate the Cushing Doctor.   I’m good with that.

[DenValdron @replies]

@scaryb

Well, in respect of the Cushing Doctor, I can pretty easily admit that it has not aged well.  But that’s par for the course.  Even the most diehard who fan has to admit the flaws and foibles of what we have of the Hartnell and Troughton productions.  Even John Pertwee, Tom Baker and Colin Baker seem appallingly tosh when compared to the production values and overall standards of the modern series.  It’s as much nostalgia that preserves these Doctors for us as much as anything else.

If you look at the Cushing Doctor in context, he holds up better.  The Cushing Doctor’s adventures appeared in 1965 and 1966.   They were in full colour with that gorgeous 60’s saturated colour that the British were using at that time, the movies actually had a cinematic production budget (admittedly at that time – cinematic productions were not that huge, particularly for British movies) which shows in terms of the scope and dressing of sets, large numbers of extras, and quite effective special effects for the time, and widescreen.   And a film release, even a general audience release suitable for children, was a bit more liberal in showing violence and action than television was allowed to be.   The second movie, for instance – Invasion Earth 2150,  features a desperate car chase across a road filled with Daleks.  That simply wasn’t in the budget or production capacity of a setbound TV series.  In the first movie, there are a number of sets of the ruined planet that are genuinely eerie.

And unlike the TV series, where there was so little care for the episodes that many of them would end up getting erased, the Cushing movies were considered valuable properties, available for release and re-release theatrically.  During the first five to ten years of the series, they would have held up extremely well, would have shown up in the theatres from time to time, and would have been probably the best Doctor Who viewing experience available.  Hell, during the days of VHS and Beta, they were among the first Doctor Who released.

Ironically,  somewhere along the way, Doctor Who became a package where we can get access to it repeatedly. Ironically, that wasn’t an original advantage, but one that evolved, and it was an evolution that left the Cushing Doctor in the lurch. PBS would run its BBC Doctor Who Catalogue for years and years and years on end, but for Amicus, Doctor Who were only two modestly successful movies in a larger and diverse catalologue, Amicus would go out of business and that catalogue would float.   The Cushing Doctor was orphaned by the same circumstance that would inflate the BBC Doctors.

The Cushing Doctor falls down  in a couple of ways.  One is the reliance or over-reliance on Daleks, which overshadows the Cushing Doctor.  At times, particularly in the second movie, he’s almost a supporting character in his own movie.  But Dalekmania is a historical fact, and we have to note that the film makers went with that.  They picked the two most seminal and cinematic Dalek stories.

The Cushing Doctor, it can be argued, is relatively colourless as Doctor’s go.  Nowadays we associate the Doctor with ‘go big or go home eccentricity.’ –  Matt Smith, David Tenant, Tom Baker, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy – all of them over the top eccentrics.  But in contrast, the McGann and Davison Doctors were relatively restrained.  The Hartnell Doctor was less eccentric, and more ambiguous.  The Cushing Doctor comes in an era where he couldn’t look back on a handful of Doctor’s and backstory to flesh out his own character.  He was working with Hartnell as a model and trying to put his own cinema friendly spin on the character, and I suppose dealing with the reality of Cushing as a ‘star’ – ie, an identifiable cinematic personality that carried through different movies.  I can give the Cushing Doctor low marks, but then again, I can’t really hold it against him.

Finally, there’s storytelling.  One of the things that really worked for me for the old series was its willingness to invest in complicated and unpredictable plots and depth of characterizations.  This in turn was a product of a serial format where literally, you had to have a series of interlocking plot arches for individual episodes, groups of episodes and the serial as a whole, an open format where budget and the need to fill time meant that people had to act up a storm.  This strength of Doctor Who, and it was a huge strength to those who would discover the series in later years, was so compelling that the episodic hour long modern series would try to ape the format in various ways.  But it was an inadvertent strength, one that came out of the production process.

In contrast, the Cushing Doctor was designed as a movie, and followed conventional movie narrative structures.  So it just doesn’t have that quality of complexity and depth, except to the extent it borrows some of it from the original stories it adapts.  But you know what?   This exact criticism is available to the McGann movie.

I think that the huge problem of the Cushing Doctor for most Who fans is simply this:   He’s not “our” Doctor!  We all have our favourite Doctors, usually the one who introduced us to the series – for me it was Tom Baker, although I came to be fond of many others (Pertwee, Davison, Tenant, Smith, Eccleston, sometimes Colin Baker).   For others it can be Hartnell, or Troughton or McCoy.    Well, I suspect that the potential fandom of the Cushing Doctor is restricted to those who saw he theatrical movies in the theatre in England when they were at the right age, which implies there’s not many of them in comparison

Nevertheless, he’s a Doctor, or a version of the Doctor, and while he may be no one’s favourite, its worth a bit of effort to try and integrate him into the fold.

[DenValdron @replies]

@scaryb

No worries.  The part of my brain which detects snark was lost in a tragic typewriter accident.  So everything is cool.

[DenValdron @replies]

@whohar

Don’t worry, my dog-torching days are long over.

I’m glad to hear that.

[DenValdron @replies]

@whohar

I dunno.  I’m kind of an Uber-nerd.  I have no social skills, and not a lot of interest, so it works out nicely.  I’m interested in ideas.  Show me a fiendishly clever Doctor Who fan theory, I’m totally there. If I come up with a fiendishly clever Doctor Who fan theory, I want to share it.   Conversation?  I dunno.  If I really wanted all that touchy feely sharing stuff, I think I’d just get a dog or something…  or maybe a cat…  or a goldfish…  or a cactus…  or maybe a pleasant looking rock, something with the right level of engagement or interactivity.  I appreciate the sentiment and the whole  ‘welcome to our community’ thing, that’s very nice, but mostly I would just end up standing uncomfortably near a cyber wall, suffering quietly, while deep in my head dissecting design discontinuities in Sonic Screwdrivers or something like that which would make normal peoples eyeballs bleed.  I’m really dull, and I have no interesting thoughts per se.

[DenValdron @replies]

@whohar

Re – Canadian.  I don’t really stand on nationalism per se.  Life is too short to get worked up about stuff like that.  Basically, people who walk around with a chip on their shoulder can always find things to be offended by.  Me, the weight throws off my balance, I’ll do without the chip.  No apologies necessary.

Unless you did something like setting fire to my dog.  That would probably require an apology.  That sort of category of thing.

[DenValdron @replies]

@whohar

Ahh, I see what you mean.

[DenValdron @replies]

Nah, it was Tom Baker, particularly ‘Nightmare on Eden’ the one with the Lalla Ward Romana, the two spaceships warped together, wandering monsters, extinct species and drugs.  It was a potent cocktail of weirdness.  I ran across it in Fredericton, at the Student Union Building while I was going to University, sat down and was hooked.   I think Tom was gone by that time, but the stories were still running on the Public Broadcasting Service.

[DenValdron @replies]

Unless someone has Steven Moffat’s or Paul Cornell’s phone number, or something equivalent, I wouldn’t hold much hope out for working the theory into the show.   And even so, television production simply doesn’t work like that.  I was peripherally involved with the LEXX television series, at one point I was selected or approved to write the book about it.  The book never came to anything, but I got a pretty good look into the whole production process.  I can analogize from that experience into some insight into the Doctor Who production.

I have no expectation at all that the production crew sits around thinking ‘Hmm, how do we integrate the Rowan Atkinson Doctor into continuity.’   That seems silly to me, they have ten thousand other things to do.  The reality is that a lot of fan theory is about trying to  explain or reconcile gaps in the story which are products of the production process, from those ten thousand real world decisions involved in getting the show done and on the air…. for an episode, a season, or thirty seasons.  Fan theory is a game, a bit of verbal or intellectual cleverness exploiting the original text.  I’m good with that.

As for writing it up as  a full story.  Well if you google my name, you’ll find that I have quite a sparkling sub-mediocre career as a writer.  Enough to show that I’ve got the chops, and at one point had aspirations of breaking through to the professional realm.  But writing fiction is a lot of work.   Frankly, if I was chasing a book deal or audio deal with one of the publishers… sure, it would be cool.  But I don’t think anyone’s going to knock on my door, and I don’t feel like putting the time and energy into a work of Doctor Who fiction for the simple fun of it.

Nah, ultimately, I think it’s a cool theory.  It fits neatly within all the available evidence, doesn’t leave too many holes.  It requires a few leaps and assumptions, but not really big ones.   And I think it’s significantly better and more satisfying than any of the current theories.  So all I want is for it to circulate and get some discussion.

And hey, if it leads people to dig out and take a second look at the Cushing Doctor adventures, that’s a good thing. If it gets people taking a second look at episodes, that’s a good thing.  If it changes the way we look at a few things, or adds to our perspective and appreciation…. well, that’s a good thing.

Maybe sometime I’ll work on a theory to integrate the two versions of the Richard E. Grant Doctor (Shalka and Curse of Fatal Death), with Richard E. Grant’s performance and role as the Great Intelligence.  That might be a fun project.  I think I might wait a couple more episodes before I try that though, just to see what comes about.

PS:   I’m Canadian.

[DenValdron @replies]

Well, you’ll excuse my casual use of idiom.  I’m a small town back country boy, so I don’t even know if these idioms actually have any currency outside my immediate neighborhood.

I don’t actually expect that anyone connected with the series would make any use of the theory whatsoever.  I can imagine they have a trillion better things to do than wrestle with peculiar bits of deep trivia.

This is a fan theory, first, last and always, and the best I can hope is for people to go  “Hmmm… that does make sense.. and its kind of fun!.”  And to take a modest place in the pantheon of fan theories that float around in fandom.

 

[DenValdron @replies]

Hi, my name is DenValdron.  Longtime Doctor Who fan.  Anyway, it’s a bit of a cheat, my being here, and I apologize to anyone who might be offended.  Basically, I came up with what I thought was an interesting little theory to integrate the Peter Cushing Doctor from the movies into the overall series Canon/Continuity, and having spent a bit of time working on it, I wanted to share it with someone.

So I figured, hey, fellow fans!  Why not?  I don’t know how this will go over, or if it will offend people.  Sometimes people get their backs up.   There are a handful of semi-canonical or pseudo-canonical explanations, mostly stressing that the moview were some kind of illusion or hallucination or retelling – ie, manipulation by the Celestial Toymaker forcing the Hartnell doctor to relive his adventures in distorted form and distorted identity,  or someone making an actual movie of the Hartnell Doctor’s adventures, getting details wrong and hiring actors.  I don’t feel that any of those are really satisfactory or particularly respectful.

All right, for what it’s worth, here’s my Nerd Theory to incorporate the Peter Cushing Doctor into the Doctor Who continuity.  All I ask is patience, respectful discussion, and please feel free to circulate it around to any fan that might be interested….

The first thing we have to do is understand and accept the limitations of the Cushing Doctor’s backstory.

– We are told very explicitly that this Doctor is human, and an earthman. His Surname is ‘Who.’ He is definitely not a timelord.

– That he has two granddaughters Barbara and Susan. Between the two movies, Barbara is lost or abandoned, but the Doctor suddenly acquires a niece, Louise. The Timelord Doctor, of course has a single grandaughter, Susan, no nieces, but travelled with a schoolteacher named Barbara.

– And most importantly, that he claims he has invented the TARDIS himself, a device which not only travels through time and space but which plays with dimensional space.

– The Doctor’s adventures closely parallel, but do not exactly match, two adventures of the original Doctor. There’s a third, unchronicled adventure, hinted at the end of the first movie when, upon leaving Skaro, the Tardis materializes on a roman era battlefield.

All right, this whole thing poses questions for the dedicated Nerd. The rest of the Doctor is, has always been, and always will be a time lord. We can’t reconcile a human doctor with the Time Lord continuity of the series. It’s just not the same guy. Not only is the Cushing Doctor an Earth guy, but he’s got way more family than the Hartnell Doctor, or any other. The whole Cushing Doctor being human is a major deal breaker!

Yet, there’s a lot of evidence which points to the fact that it is the same guy – the fact that he’s got a Tardis, the fact that its in the shape of a police box, bigger on the inside than the outside, that it can go to different planets and times. His enemies, the Daleks, are the Daleks. So it’s the same guy, but it can’t be the same guy.

The Tardis itself in these movies is a conundrum. There’s no indication that this is a period piece, so this Doctor, working with apparently nothing more substantial than 1960’s technology, little or nothing in the way of outside help, and no more resources than would be available to a moderately wealthy englishman… has built a Freaking Time and Space machine.

 

But this Doctor is not a 60’s version of Tony Stark, except for his claim to have built the thing, he doesn’t show any spectactular technological aptitude or intelligence. Put it simply, the notion that some old guy built a super-machine is a pretty big pill to swallow. Of course, in Three Stooges Meet Hercules, another old guy builds a time machine, and in George Pal’s ‘Time Machine’ it’s done again. So… 50/50 on that one. It’s kind of a ludicrous proposition, but its one that we were frequently asked to accept.

 

Although it’s pretty identical on the outside, and bigger on the inside, in the first movie, the Tardis interior is different. No familiar control room, but rather, the place looks like a junkyard with wires and cables hanging off everywhere. Between the two movies, he’s obviously been making improvements since the interior is now considerably more polished, but still not quite resembling the Time Lord version.

 
Finally, there’s the paralleling of the Cushing Doctor’s adventures with a couple of the Hartnell adventures. Are the Cushing Doctor’s adventures a parallel universe sequence? Or are the Cushing Doctor’s adventures a distorted retelling or replaying of the Hartnell adventures? Who knows.

Okay, now let’s take a look at a few bits of information from the current series which come into play.

1) Is that Time Lords don’t always have to be Time Lords. They can downgrade, using the “Chameleon Arch” to devolve to mere human and being stripped of most or all of their memories, and their time lord essence, which is concealed or contained in a handy receptacle. Handily, it also provides a set of false memories. The The Tenant Doctor does this to escape or hide from his enemies in the Tenant two-parter “Human Nature” and “Family of Blood”

 

It’s discovered that the Master used the same Chameleon Arch shtick in “Utopia.” The Master may have used a similar trick in the “End of Time” to resurrect himself.

 

There’s a second occasion where the Tenant Doctor goes human. In Journey’s End, a wounded Tenant Doctor forces himself into a partial regeneration to heal. This works unexpectedly well, when the combination of regeneration energy and Donna Noble cause the severed hand of the Doctor to regenerate into a brand new, but human, Tenant Doctor.

 

Well, gee whiz! There you go! The biggest obstacle to the Cushing Doctor being in the continuity is out the window. It is entirely possible that the Cushing Doctor has been written down to mere human, had his Time Lord knowledge and heritage removed, and has been implanted with a set of false memories…

Well, all right. But voluntarily or involuntarily? Who would do such a thing and when and where? Did the Doctor do it to himself? If so, why? If someone else did it to the Doctor, then whom, and why, and all the rest…

2) Time War – The Time War is the big barrier between the original series up to Doctor 8, and the current series, chronicling 9 through 11. The Time War happened, Gallifrey went tits up, the Daleks were almost wiped out, whole races and civilizations vanished into the void, lots of weird bad shit went down. The major combatants seem to have been the Time Lords and the Daleks.

However, there’s some indication that the Tremors of the Time War were being felt, in hindsight, even during the original series. Consider the Tom Baker Doctor serial “Genesis of the Daleks” where the Time Lords send the Doctor back to Skaro to try and abort the emergence of the Dalek race.

 

The Pertwee Doctor gets sent up against the Daleks early in their history in Planet of the Daleks. This is very similar to both the Hartnell and Baker’s journeys to the early history of the Daleks. Hartnell’s Doctor seems to have stumbled upon them, Pertwee and Baker are deliberately sent.

On the other side of the coin, the Dalek side…. There’s the Hartnell Doctor episode, ‘The Chase’ which features the Dalek’s as time travellers, hunting the Doctor through time and space, capabilities that they didn’t show in most of the original series events. The Pertwee Doctor also goes up against time travelling Daleks in ‘Day of the Daleks.’ Now that’s interesting, in most of the Dalek episodes, they don’t seem to be time travellers. The Doctor shows up through the Dalek’s history, going as far back as when they required electrified ramps or broadcast power to travel. There’s a lot of variability in the Dalek mojo, in different adventures. Which makes sense if we assume that the Daleks are building up over thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of years as they evolve. Early Daleks are quite tosh, end-time Daleks are tough mofo.

 

Time Travelling Daleks are almost certain to be from around the particular era of the Time War… or at least leading up to it. Therefore the fact that Time Travelling Daleks reach as far back as the first Doctor to chase him across time may be very significant.

 

In the new series, there’s a very telling bit of information that proves that the Time War reaches into the Doctor’s entire Timeline and beyond…to the Master’s. In the Tenant Doctor episode ‘The End of Time’ part II, Rassilon from the very depths of the Time War reaches across time to place the sound of Drums in the Master’s ear when he’s eight years old, a force which then warps the boy’s life into the villain we know. The Master and the Doctor were both children and youths on Gallifrey at about the same time. So this tells us that skirmishes or sorties from the heart of the Time War, deep deep maneuvers precede and can take place through the Doctor’s entire history.

 
How does this relate? Well, very simple, on to the next point —-

3) Time Lords are dicks. The Time Lords don’t make an appearance at all in the Hartnell Doctor’s adventures, though I think it’s clear he’s on the run. They only show up at the end of the Troughton adventures, when he finally gives up and calls them in.

However, once they do get their hands on the Doctor, they show a decided penchant for manipulating or attempting to manipulate him. Canonically, they trap the Pirtwee Doctor on Earth, in Spearhead From Space, and keep him under thumbs until the Three Doctors. He’s specifically sent on a mission to retrieve a Doomsday Weapon in Colony in Space, jerked around by them in the Mutants, sent up against early Daleks in Planet of the Daleks. The Time Lords specifically jerk around the Baker Doctor in Genesis of the Daleks and Brain of Morbius.

 

I could go on, but it’s pretty clear that the Time Lords are frequently manipulating several of the Doctors. For instance the Shalka Doctor complains very loudly that the Time Lords (or someone) are jerking him about. The Davison Doctor’s TARDIS appears to be hijacked in Frontios, sending him to confront the Resurrection of the Daleks. The Colin Baker Doctor has to face a Trial of the Time Lord. I can go over all the canonical stuff, but it’s pretty clear that the Time Lords are squeezing the Doctor under their collective thumb every chance they get.

It appears that the Time Lords are very interested in the Doctor, in crippling his ability to travel during the Pertwee era and in controlling where he goes. Significantly, on at least three occasions, the Time Lords send different versions of the Doctor head on against the Daleks, and on two of these, its trips to the early Dalek history. So not only are they jerks, but there’s a pattern of using or attempting to use the Doctor as a foil for actions which seem to connect back to the time war.

4) Fixed Points in Time – the new series shows us definitely that there are fixed and unchangeable points in time. Well, pretty tough to change. In the Waters of Mars, the Tenant Doctor confronts a fixed point in time and says ‘screw it all, I’m not a Time Lord, I’m ‘THE TIME LORD’. The Ecclestone Doctor confronts what may be a fixed point, or simply a paradox in ‘Father’s Day.’ The consequences of randomly screwing with a fixed point in time are shown with the Smith Doctor in ‘The Wedding of River Song’ in which a temporary parallel earth is created where time is floopy, and the whole universe is in danger of going vorp!

All of this goes towards explaining or clarifying what’s going on in the background.

So, here’s my theory:

At the end of War Games, the Troughton Doctor blows the whistle on the renegade Time Lord called the War Leader, resulting in his own capture and confinement. In the hands of the Time Lords, he is put on trial – the long and the short of it, is that they strip him of his companions, strip him of the knowledge or ability to use the Tardis and exile him to earth, and force him to regenerate…

Spearhead from Space, the next season, opens up with a regenerated Doctor stumbling onto earth.

Now, there’s a few glitches here. The Pertwee Doctor in his first appearance has gadgets and stuff that the Troughton Doctor didn’t, and vice versa. The clothes don’t quite match up from Troughton’s disappearance to Pertwee’s appearance. And the Troughton Doctor, when he shows up in the Five Doctors, seems to have knowledge and experiences from after the War Games.

This has lead fans to speculate a season 6B – ie, that the War Games did not lead directly into Spearhead from Space, but that there was an intervening period of unknown duration, prior to the apparent regeneration and appearance of the Pertwee Doctor.

This is where the Cushing Doctor comes in. I think that instead of just booting him to Pertwee, the Time Lords were much more insidious. They devolved him to human with the Chameleon Arch, taking his memories of being a Time Lord away from him entirely, and planting a set of false memories, and at the same time, assigning to him a set of knowing or unknowing babysitters in the form of false Granddaughters, Susan and Barbara, just close enough to the real people to divert any recollection into the false channels.

 

Of course, the Cushing Doctor resembles neither the original Hartnell Doctor, nor the Troughton Doctor, nor the Pertwee Doctor. Is this a hole in the theory? After all, the human versions of the Master and the Tenant Doctor looked just like their Time Lord selves.

 

However, if you look to the end of the War Games, it’s clear that the Doctor is being forcibly regenerated against his will and is trying to hold on. So if in fact the Cushing Doctor is between Troughton and Pertwee in sequence, then clearly, he must be a regenerated or partially regenerated Doctor. The Cushing Doctor could have been an intermediate form on the way to Pertwee, frozen temporarily in process (Romana’s regeneration during the Tom Baker years suggests that the Time Lord’s during the regeneration process could express a variety of forms before they settled on the new version). Or he could have been a full regeneration.

Or he could be a chameleon arch imposed regeneration which would open the door to the question – if and when the arch fails would he snap back to Troughton, albeit an aged and worn Troughton, or would he leap to Pertwee? Remember that Troughton was resisting the process, so if he managed to assert himself, he might well have gone back to his prior identity/form temporarily, which might go to explaining the anomalies in the Troughton Doctor in the Five Doctors and Two Doctors.

 

But am I talking through my hat here? Is there anything, even a tiny bit of evidence in the canonical series to suggest even the remotest possibility that somewhere in the Doctor’s Timeline, there’s a lingering trace of a ‘Human’ Doctor?

 

Actually, yes there is. Consider the McGann Doctor’s TV movie. There’s a scene in which the Master breaks into the Doctor’s Tardis, starts poking around, and then announces triumphantly that he’s discovered the Doctor’s secret! He claims that the Doctor is ‘half human! On his mother’s side!’

 

That one little line has caused a lot of consternation in fandom. Most people just hate it, want it evicted from the canon, and just don’t want to deal with it. There hasn’t been anything in any of the previous seven incarnations of the Doctor and all his adventures to support it.

 

But it’s there. Well, bear with me. But supposing that the Doctor was at one point regressed or devolved to mere human, that he became the Cushing Doctor and spent time as such, a forgotten and blocked episode of the Doctor’s life. Wouldn’t that have left enough of a signature on the Doctor’s timeline and on the Tardis that the Master might have detected it? Maybe the Master found the right information, but simply drew the wrong conclusion. Maybe what the Master found was the buried signature of the Cushing Doctor?

 

The Cushing Doctor’s family, or some of them may be Time Lords, or human agents of Time Lords. Or perhaps they’re just innocent humans who have had their memories tinkered with so that they really do believe that they’re the family. Or maybe they’re innocent humans with implanted post-hypnotic suggestions for use upon certain conditions. No way to tell really.

 

This version of Susan is much younger than the one the Hartnell Doctor is travelling with. Twelve and thirteen years old in the two movies. That’s very suggestive. This may be an effort to trap the Cushing Doctor, by giving him an earlier version of Susan from before his flight from Gallifrey. The Hartnell Doctor eventually had to lose Susan, and the Troughton Doctor continues to mourn the loss. So having a Susan around would give the Doctor a reason to cling to the human identity, recovering the rest of his memory would only leave with with the pain of loss.

 

However, Susan’s the only character who sticks with the Cushing Doctor through all his adventures. The fake grandaughter, Barbara, disappears sometime after the first movie, as does the boyfriend, Ian. By the second movie, a fake niece, Louise appears.

 

So if anyone is an actual agent, it’s most likely Susan. But who is this Susan? It’s possible that she’s the real Susan, merely plucked from time on Gallifrey at an earlier age, to accompany the Cushing Doctor. Perhaps her misuse is what provokes the Hartnell Doctor to go renegade? Do I have anything to back that up? Nope, sheer audacity.

 

Or it’s possible that Susan is actually another Time Lord, regenerated into a younger form. Romana perhaps. She does seem overly familiar with the Tom Baker Doctor when she joins him. Again, I can’t back it up. It’s an audacious conjecture.

 

Whatever Susan is or isn’t, she’s clearly not an ordinary little girl. In the first movie, she shows unusual knowledge and intelligence, and she’s actively helping the Cushing Doctor to build or repair his Tardis.

Speaking of which: The Cushing Doctor did not build his Tardis. That’s just a false memory that he was implanted with to explain the fact that he’s got a blue police box which has unusual properties. Even stripping him down to human, the Time Lords can’t sever the connection between the Doctor and his Tardis. The never could, through all the incarnations of the Doctor. The best they can do is cripple it a little bit by keeping it from flying off, or occasionally direct it where they want to go. But they can’t take it away from him, or him from it. This seems to be mutual, as we see in the Smith Doctor episode “The Doctor’s Wife.” Well, if they can’t take the damned thing away from him, or they can’t get rid of it, then the only real way to manage the situation is to plant a set of false memories about it in him. Otherwise, the whole tissue of false memories will start to fall apart steadily.

 

So what’s he and Susan doing puttering around in the Tardis? Take a look at the interior. There’s no Tardis Console, just a junk room gone mad with hanging wires, levers and odds and ends. What’s going on? The Time Lords have disabled the Tardis by removing or sealing the Doctor off from the console room. So he’s unconsciously jury rigging an alternate set of controls. By the second movie, he’s refined the controls considerably.

 
Why would the Time Lords do this to the Doctor? Well… they’re Dicks! haven’t I made that point? Provided sufficient examples?

Ah, but there may have been a deeper agenda. See, even as early as Pertwee and Baker, the Time Lords were trying to use them to screw Dalek history. The Baker effort was intended to foreclose the entire existence of the Daleks – a mixed failure – since the Baker Doctor seems to have introduced enough randomness into the Dalek mix to arguably paralyze them with several civil wars. Pertwee had gone far enough back in time that the Daleks were still fighting the Thals, their original enemies.

So here’s the deal. The Time Lords really just want to put paid to the Daleks, unmake them once and for all, because they’re becoming a bigger and bigger headache… particularly the time travelling ones, and that’s leading to the Time War. But the Daleks are protected by ‘fixed points in time.’ So a direct assault to rewrite them out of history would simply unravel the universe.

Failing that, the Time Lords have to be sneaky. So the Pertwee and Baker missions are along the lines of trying to skirt around the edges, small low level incursions, long shots designed to unmake or at least weaken them without unravelling reality.

Now, here’s the thing, the Hartnell Doctor had several encounters with the Daleks when he was running around free and out of control. At least a couple of those were at early or perhaps pivotal times in Dalek history.

So, what if they can just go back and meddle with that? Send out something less than a full Time Lord to the same points, create a small parallel or pocket reality reality, that you might be able to use as a temporal patch or bypass, a better parallel reality where the Daleks don’t come out so well. You could then excise a portion of the original timeline, suture in the alternative reality, avoid a paradox or fixed point in time issue… and screw the Daleks.

It’s a gamble. The parallel reality they create may not be materially better than the original reality, in which case they don’t need it. Or it may be worse, in which case they just pull the plug. But there’s a chance that having two realities to choose from will give them some options. And because this is a neutered ‘Human’ Doctor they’re sending in, there’s a lot less risk of time static with the Time Lord version.

So the Cushing Doctor, with some handpicked minders, and a head full of implanted memories that should make him easier to manipulate, gets sent back to the same point where the Hartnell Doctor. The two Doctors and two Tardises appear at the same point in space, but because one of the Doctors is human, they don’t have a paradox. Instead, the human Doctor shunts off to the temporary parallel reality, and the adventure proceeds from there.

Now, what happens at the end is interesting. The Cushing Doctor ends up in Rome. No big deal, several of the Doctors seem to have ended up in Rome, and both the Hartnell and Tenant Doctor had adventures there. On the other hand, Rome is out of sequence for the Hartnell Doctor. He doesn’t go to Rome until the second season, several adventures after the first and even second encounters with the Daleks. And when the Hartnell Doctor goes there, he goes for a vacation. He doesn’t materialize on a battlefield.

What does this tell us? It implies very strongly that the Cushing Doctor has at least one, and possibly several unrecorded adventures between the two movies. Enough goes on that he loses one of his fake granddaughters and their boyfriend, and picks up a fake niece.

The fact that the Cushing Doctor is running free, albeit under supervision, suggests that whatever game the Time Lords were playing was working, or at least still in play. Because at some point, they send him up against the Daleks in another temporary parallel reality adventure, with the Invasion Earth movie.

At this point, or perhaps sometime after this, they decide to pull the plug. Maybe it just hasn’t produced the results they were hoping. Or more likely, the Doctor is breaking free of the Chameleon Arch. He’s figured it out, or found the key, or whatever, and he’s reverting back to his time lord self.

 

What’s the most likely point for the Cushing Doctor to start breaking free? The events of the end of the second movie. Because this adventure was when the Hartnell Doctor had to give up Susan. This was undoubtedly a painful and traumatic experience for the Time Lord Doctor. This is the original memory that’s most likely to start breaking through the the false memories implanted by the Chameleon Arch. He remembers losing Susan, and at that point the rest of the memories after that will come…. and the anger at what’s been done to him, that will come too.

 

The Time Lords, in desperation crash land him on Earth, locking him and the Tardis there, and they use the energies released by the unravelling chameleon Arch to trigger or complete the Doctor’s regeneration, blocking the memories of the Cushing Doctor, until they figure out what to do next.

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