MY INNER CONSCIENCE: "Hey Rob. Do you remember when you'd start a series in your Blog and finish it within a timely manner with little or no interruption?!"
THE REST OF ME: "Not really...."
I felt the inclination to write about something else rather than finish up my REVIEW OVERVIEW series. So, here it is:
Who can forget those last few minutes of Name of the Doctor? After several long episodes of wondering how it's been possible for Clara to die and return to the Doctor's life over and over, we're finally getting our answer. On top of that, all these previous incarnations of the Doctor are making quick little cameos. Sometimes with CGI and sometimes with body doubles. But it's all quite awesome.
But then, suddenly, something even wilder happens. Eleven comes along to rescue Clara from the weird dreamscape she's trapped in and an unfamiliar figure appears with his back to us. His voice does not sound familiar. Clearly, this isn't a previous version of the Doctor. At least, not one we've ever seen before. He turns around, at last, and it's that guy from Alien (and Spaceballs) who had the baby alien rip out of his chest. A credit appears on the screen saying that he's the Doctor!
"What the Hell?!" we all say to ourselves as the episode ends. Or, perhaps, we use a stronger word than "Hell". But I prefer to keep this Blog PG-13.
This, to all intents and purposes, is the first time we bear witness to a Hidden Incarnation of the Doctor. There would be more in the future, of course. Many more, in fact. But the concept begins being explored here.
Or does it?
THE HISTORY OF SECRET INCARNATIONS
If we're being super-duper-ultra-technical, secret incarnations were first displayed many years before Name of the Doctor. It's not even strictly a New Series thing. The first Hidden Doctors appeared way back in the Classic Days. When 'ole Tommy Boy was at the Helm.
I'm speaking, of course, of the notorious mind-bending battle that takes place between two rival Time Lords during the final part of Brain of Morbius. Just for a bit of fun, various technical personnel working on the story dress eccentrically and have pictures taken of them. Those images then appear in a flashback sequence as Morbius is willing the Doctor out of existence by regressing him through his prior incarnations.
Once more, we're in a state of shock. Surely William Hartnell was the very first Doctor? Who are these other eight blokes who have been thrown into the mix?!
We don't tend to remember this incident as well as John Hurt's surprise end-of-story cameo. Partly because it doesn't get the same kind of build-up that the War Doctor gets in Name of the Doctor. But, more significantly, the whole thing was left with a very ambiguous cloud hanging over it. There are some signs that point towards an idea that these aren't incarnations of the Doctor that existed before William Hartnell. Equally so, there are any number of visual cues that indicate that we are seeing a whole plethora of Doctors that we never knew existed until we watched that scene.
THE DETRACTORS
The quickest and easiest way to dismiss those eight faces that coalesce into existence after we see William Hartnell is to claim that they are not the Doctor at all. That they are, in fact, previous incarnations of Morbius. Which does have a sort of logic to it. We do see the Doctor pushing his enemy back through two iterations before doing some regression of his own. It's possible that the battle swings back in the Doctor's favor and we pick up where things left off with Morbius. We start sweeping through a whole host of the renegade Time Lord's past lives. We can even believe that, like the Doctor, Morbius had a penchant for wearing period clothing from Earth. It's all reasonably feasible.
Some like to cite Morbius' last words before the mind-bending equipment shorts out as being final evidence that we're looking at the Doctor's previous faces. "How far back do you go, Time Lord?!" (or words to that effect - as usual, I'm terrible with quotes!). But the dialogue is still highly subjective. Perhaps this is more a cry of desperation. Those really were Morbius' incarnations and the Doctor has brought him all the way back to his beginning. Morbius really just wants to know how much of the Doctor's past he still needs to go through since he's so close to losing. "Come on, Doctor!" he's actually saying, just in more flowery tones, "How much more do I need to regress you?! Cause I'm really close to being beaten, here!"
It helps that future stories will come along and dismiss the whole concept of incarnations existing prior to Hartnell. In a few years' time, we'll start getting tales like Mawdryn Undead and The Five Doctors. They will make very specific claims about just how many versions of our hero there are. From this period onwards, "the First Doctor" or "the fifth incarnation" (or titles of that nature) are no longer just terms used by fandom. They're ways in which various Doctors will identify themselves' in actual dialogue. Thus making it officially canon. So those other faces we saw in Brain of Morbius can't be the Doctor. His incarnations have very definitely been numbered.
There is another interesting theory that some fans have put forward about the mind-bending battle. They believe that the Doctor is throwing up "phantom images" to hide Morbius' imminent victory from him. That these are just faces he's making up in his imagination and claiming are real past incarnations. It's an interesting notion. But the idea that we're seeing previous versions of Morbius seems like a more solid possibility to me. In fact, until quite recently, I even subscribed to this concept, myself. I believed that Hinchliffe and his Band of Merry Techies were all meant to be Morbius and not the Doctor.
But then I had to eat my words...
SUPPORTIVE IDEAS
On the other end of the spectrum, there's plenty of evidence to support that these eight fellows are the Doctor's past lives. The strongest point is the actual "flow" that the images move to. We see pictures of Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee before we suddenly flip over to Chop Suey the Galactic Conqueror and Bust Statue Face. This seems to indicate that Morbius was winning, at first. But then the Doctor fought back a bit. But then Morbius presses the advantage, again. Which causes us to go back to Tom Baker, then Jon Pertwee, then Patrick Troughton, then William Hartnell, then the Eight Other Guys.
The fact that we jump back to Tom Baker's face before going down the line again clearly indicates that each time a Time Lord is losing, the image returns to the most recent incarnation and then regresses. So, if Morbius was suddenly being defeated, we should have seen Chop Suey and Bust Face again before seeing his other eight incarnations. We didn't, though. So we must assume that those incarnations belonged to the Doctor and not Morbius. The flow of images, at least, indicates this.
Morbius proclaiming: "How far back do you go?!" helps to support this, of course. Yes, it could be a cry of desperation as I stated in the last section. But it sounds more like: "Holy crap! Do you ever have a lot of previous incarnations!"
We see another strong piece of proof that the Doctor had lives before William Hartnell at the beginning of the next season. During the first few minutes of The Masque of Mandragora, the Doctor and Sarah Jane find that nice wood-paneled console room. While there, some interesting points get made.
The Doctor discovers a costume hanging off a wrack that we've never seen him in before. This seems to indicate that it was worn by an incarnation yet to be featured on the show. He also makes the startling claim that "this was the original console room". By An Unearthly Child, he's in the white-rondel-covered console room. So, sometime before Doctor Who started, he was in here. Perhaps, again, it was these hitherto-unseen incarnations that dwelt in this place.
SO WHICH IS IT?
Based on the evidence seen in Seasons Thirteen and Fourteen, it's fairly indisputable that those eight extra faces are meant to belong to the Doctor. Theories about them actually belonging to Morbius or the Doctor throwing up fake images are all well and good. But the signs point far more strongly to the idea that the Doctor's past goes much deeper than we realized.
The production team, of course, had every right to make these sort of allusions. Up until this point, no one had ever definitively claimed that Hartnell played the very first incarnation of the Doctor. So, if someone wanted to put forward the idea that he had predecessors, there was nothing in the established continuity of the show to stop them.
But, as I have already stated, content would later come along that would flatly contradict the notions in Brain of Morbius. We would, eventually, get stories that deal with the specific numbering of the Doctor's various incarnations. Which means, quite simply, that what we saw during the mind-bending battle between the two Time Lords no longer makes any kind of real sense. The two concepts do not gel. A compromise had to be made that would, somehow, allow the clashing issues to co-exist peacefully.
The most simple solution would be to claim that the Doctor had a whole other identity before the current one that he either no longer recalls or just doesn't talk about. During that particular existence, he had the eight faces that we see in Brain of Morbius. Then, somehow, he became this completely new person that we've been watching since Unearthly Child. If he has actually forgotten this whole other series of lives, we don't know why.
The first attempt to reconcile these differences would have taken place during the last two seasons of the Original Series. The production team began to work away at the Cartmel Masterplan: An ongoing storyline that would have eventually revealed that the Doctor had been this being known as the Other before he actually became the Doctor. Unfortunately, the show went off the air before the arc could be completed.
While I am loathe to get into Expanded Universe material, the New and Missing Adventures novels published by Virgin did finish the whole saga. Cold Fusion - a Missing Adventure book that unites the Fifth and Seventh Doctors - does make reference to the mind-bending sequence in Brain of Morbius and implies that these were various incarnations of the Other.
None of the stuff in these novels counts as official canon, of course. But it does, at least, show that attempts were being made to fix this fairly massive discrepancy. .
THE MYSTERY DIES AWHILE
As Doctor Who returns to our screens in 2005, solving the mystery of those eight extra faces in Brain of Morbius has, once more, been abandoned. Believe it or not, it's the sexual proclivity of Time Lords that causes this.
One of the most integral aspects of the whole Cartmel Masterplan was the revelation that Time Lords don't naturally reproduce. They require Genetic Looms to continue their species. Which causes all Gallifreyans that are related to each other to be cousins and nothing else. No Moms or Dads or aunts or uncles. Just cousins. This concept never actually got mentioned on the show, itself. Again, it is something that only comes along in the Virgin novels.
Quite early on in New Who, the Doctor speaks of being both a father and a grandfather. Which, pretty much, kicks out the concepts Cartmel was trying to bring in during those last two seasons of the Classic Series. Basically, the Lore that was starting to get built during that time has been effectively nullified.
Given RTD's strong desire to make the show as accessible as possible to new fans, it made perfect sense for him to stay away from Looms and Cousins and make the reproduction practices of Gallifreyans as simple as possible. Since no proper mention was ever made about these facets of Time Lord society in those last few seasons of Old Who, he did not contradict any kind of established continuity when he did this.
But to say that the issue has been completely muted forever would be difficult. This is Doctor Who. It's not afraid to make references to things that took place decades ago. They brought back the Macra in Series Three, for God's sake!
Once the show had been effectively re-established to a new audience, it started going back and taking care of all kinds of inconsistencies that were caused in its distant past. And, so long as doing this doesn't get in the way of effective story-telling, I'm perfectly fine with the whole process.
Which is exactly what we would eventually get with those mystery faces in Brain of Morbius. But not before the show introduces a whole different type of Hidden Doctor....
TWO IMPORTANT BEATS
While we have just-about fully discussed the topic of the Hidden Doctors in Brain of Morbius, there is still one more thing that needs to be covered. This particular sequence sets up a number of important precedents regarding how Reveals of this nature will be handled. There are two main ones that should definitely be highlighted before moving on:
1) Shock Factor
Naturally enough, suddenly discovering that the protagonist of your favorite show has had secret lives that you've never known about is going to be a bit jolting. But how the Reveal of such a concept is handled can enhance that unsettled feeling immeasurably.
Had they set their mind to it, the production team behind Brain of Morbius could have made things even more shocking. A discussion between the Doctor and Sarah Jane sometime after the mind-bending battle about who the faces were meant to be could have really juiced up the whole impact of the moment. Particularly when the Doctor reveals that he has no idea who those other incarnations were!
As it stands, however, suddenly showing us eight versions of the Doctor we've never seen before smack-dab in the middle of the story's climax was still quite effective. We're still picking our jaws up off the floor as the plot continues along at a bracing speed.
Which is the main point of revealing Secret Incarnations. It needs to be carefully-engineered so that the whole thing gives us a nasty startle. The less we see it coming, the better. So that when it does, suddenly, come popping out at us - we're left a bit breathless.
2) Teasing it Out
A Reveal of such magnitude is going to cause us to ask a lot of questions: Where does this Hidden Incarnation come from? Why have we never heard of him/her before? Will we, eventually, see Philip Hinchcliffe, Robert Holmes and Graeme Harper playing the Doctor in special anniversary episodes?!
It's of utter importance that the production team takes their time answering these various dilemmas. The tension and suspense that can be drawn out from such a mystery makes it all-the-more enjoyable if the fans can speculate over these things. So the answers to our many questions should not come too quickly.
In some cases, the teasing out of such an enigma can be taken to the ultimate extreme. Who exactly those eight faces in the mind-bending battle belonged to during Brain of Morbius, for instance, took over forty years to explain!
There are, naturally enough, other recurring patterns that will happen during the Reveals of Hidden Incarnations. Quite often, for example, we're not given a fully-detailed explanation of why the previous life was a secret to begin with. There is still, at least, a slight air of mystery to it all. The whole experience should also leave a sort of open door to explore other adventures involving these newly-discovered vestiges of the Doctor. We will even get multiple appearances of these secret characters from time-to-time. They return in later episodes (usually only in cameos). But all of these elements - and others - are somewhat less relevant. What's most important is to have a strong Shock Factor and to Tease Things Out for as long as possible.
Something that the surprise appearance of the eight faces in Brain of Morbius does very effectively.
Well, I have to admit: I've spent way more time discussing Brain of Morbius than I expected! I'll end this entry for now and continue looking at the Hidden Doctors that start popping up in New Who in a second installment of this little study....
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