DOCTOR OFFSHOOTS continues. The ones we'll be discussing in this part will be less cloney and far more contrived in their origins. We will also deal with some Offshoots who may not actually meet the qualifications I established in the first part but still seem like Offshoots!
Didn't catch Part One? Here's the link: https://robtymec.blogspot.com/2022/08/analytical-doctor-offshoots-part-one.html. You should, at least, have a look at it so you understand what an Offshoot is.
REALLY GOOD OFFSHOOTS
We, now, move away from clones and things that are clone-like and get into some of the offshoots that were made in more unconventional manners. I use the term "good offshoots" as a sort of play-on-words. They're a good offshoot because they resemble the Doctor perfectly. But the term also relates to their sense of morality. As we will learn shortly, not all offshoots of the Doctor use his same code of ethics.
The Instantaneous Biological Meta Crisis created in Journey's End is probably the most contrived way an offshoot has sprung into existence (at least, in terms of the offshoots where we know how they were made - in some cases, that process remains a mystery). Having kept his severed hand "handy" in the TARDIS console room over the last little while (sorry, I had to do that pun!), it suddenly becomes a useful receptacle for his regeneration energy. Siphoning it off into the hand, this prevents him from experiencing a full regeneration. His wounds are healed but his appearance remains the same. Later, of course, Donna fully activates the process by touching the hand during a state of high anxiety. Somehow, this triggers a copy of the Doctor to grow in front of her.
He's not quite a perfect copy, though. He and Donna have somehow "fused" slightly. He has some of her personality and physical traits (only one heart, normal lifespan). She, in turn, has gained his knowledge. The alteration to the Meta Crisis Doctor's character appears to have made him slightly bloodthirsty. While the Host Doctor does not wish to wipe out Davros' Dalek Empire, his copy commits genocide with barely a second thought. Remembering the effect she had on him after the Time Wars, Host Doctor leaves Meta-Crisis Doctor with Rose in a parallel universe. At long last, Rose gets a version of the Doctor she can fall in love with.
It is during another Season Finale of New Who that we see a similar phenomenon. Admittedly, these offshoots almost don't fit the definition I've established for them. The two extra versions of the Doctor in The Vanquishers seem as if they are created out of a sort of freak space-time anomaly. This does almost feel like the Doctor crossing her own timestream in some weird way rather than having offshoots of herself. But, among the three identical versions of the Doctor existing at the same time, no one comes from either the future or the past (as would be the case on other occasions when the Time Lord meets himself/herself through time travel). She was, somehow, split three ways as she tried to return to our reality from Tecteun's void ship. The fact that Swarm was attacking her at the exact moment of departure creates these offshoots. This does seem like another fairly contrived process. But I would still say the Meta Crisis Doctor is far more over-complicated!
Once more, we see an example of "linking" during this adventure. The three Doctors can telepathically connect from time-to-time to give each other updates. Of course, two versions don't need to make the link after a while. They have managed to meet up and are now working together. As usual, we get all that clever shooting with a double or special split-screen effects that happen every time the Doctor encounters a duplicate.
Whether the three versions of the Doctor properly qualify as offshoots still remains questionable. The Doctor does point out to the Grand Serpent as he tries to kill her that she doesn't properly exist, right now, so his attack is useless. Which, again, makes her sound more like a Time Disturbance of some sort rather than a proper being that has been created from the Doctor. It doesn't help that it's the Personification of Time that they meet at the end of the story that merges the three Doctors back together. Almost as if this has something to do with temporal mechanics rather than a biological process of some sort. Finally, in all the other cases of offshoots, there's a "proper" Host Body. We don't actually seem to have one, here. They're the same being split into three.
With these sort of variations in place, can we truly call these offshoots?
I'm not entirely sure. But I thought it might still be nice to discuss them and leave the whole thing, momentarily, ambiguous!
REALLY BAD OFF-SHOOTS
The play-on-words continues. These off-shoots are bad because they do not physically resemble the Doctor at all. At the same time, their hearts seem to be filled with the blackest of evils.
Our first offshoot, like the multi-doctors in The Vanquishers, also falls into a bit of a grey area. As the delightfully tangled plot of Amy's Choice concludes (I really love this story - I may do an UNSUNG CLASSIC post on it someday), we learn that the Dream Lord was created by some psychic spores that got overheated in the TARDIS console and latched onto the Doctor's Id. The Dream Lord is, essentially, a manifestation of all things that the Doctor feels unworthy of. All of his defects of character.
There seems to be no actual organic component to the Dream Lord. He is a complete psychic manifestation that may not even exist in our reality. He only seems capable of contacting other beings when they're in a dream state.We do see his reflection in the TARDIS console right at the end, but the Doctor beats the Dream Lord based on the idea that he cannot affect reality. That, essentially, he can't really exist beyond our dreams.Which definitely implies that, in many ways, he's not actually real.
He might not even be a proper sentient being. But, rather, something from the Doctor's subconscious that it just meant to prey upon his vulnerability. He is described as a mind parasite so it's possible he has no free will of his own. All he can do is feed off the Doctor's guilt. That is his sole motivation. Which would imply that he's purely a predator rather than an actual individual. .
I tend to view an offshoot as being something that possesses the ability to act independently of its host and do its own thing. The Dream Lord seems to need the Doctor to survive and just performs the same thing on him over and over. He lives to torture the sentient beings he latches onto. He's not capable of doing anything else.
I also specified that an offshoot is an organism of some sort. As far I can tell, the Dream Lord is pure psychic energy. Something akin to the Mara. The Mara, however, could find ways into our reality and could even, under the right circumstances, adopt a physical form of sorts. The Dream Lord can't even do that.
Undeniably, he lacks two of the most crucial attributes for a fully-fledged offshoot.
Having said all that, however, I do feel that he is still an offshoot of sorts. In the end, he is something that was created from the Doctor. Which does make him, sort of, qualify.
If I'm to pin myself down a bit, I should also admit that I also think the triple copy of Thirteen in The Vanquishers are offshoots, too.. However, if you wish to dismiss them and the Dream Lord because they don't fit the qualifications, I can't argue with you.
FROM BAD TO WORSE
Our other Bad Offshoot works on a very similar principle to the Dream Lord. In fact, many fans speculate that there is a connection between the two. The Valeyard from Trial of a Time Lord is also created from all the darker aspects of the Doctor's personality. But he is far more of a danger to the Universe than the Dream Lord could ever hope to be.
The Dream Lord seems purely concentrated on just making life Hell for the Doctor. The Valeyard has a similar motivation but also has ambitions beyond that. He still needs to torment the Doctor in some ways. At the very least, he wishes to inherit the Doctor's remaining regenerations in order to prolong his own life. But he has also turned his attention toward Time Lord politics.
Although he struck a bargain with the High Council to have the Doctor silenced before he can piece together the Mystery of Ravalox, he has made alternate plans. He actually seems to be trying to take over Time Lord Society by stirring an insurrection and eliminating the Supreme Court of Gallifreyan Law. Clearly he works on a much grander scale than the Dream Lord aspires to.
But how did the Valeyard actually come into being? Thus far, every offshoot has been given an origin story of some sort. We see the process that creates them. This is the first example of one where we have no idea how the offshoot was made. We have only the briefest piece of expository dialogue from the Master during Part 13 of Trial of a Time Lord to go off of. And it really doesn't tell much. Admittedly, not knowing the Valeyard's full story does make him all-the-more sinister. It legitimately benefits the character.
Being the hardcore Who Nerd that I am, though, I have attempted to speculate on how the Valeyard was created in these two entries:
Who Is The Valeyard? - Part One:
https://robtymec.blogspot.com/2015/09/fixing-continuity-glitches-who-is.html
Who Is The Valeyard? - Part Two:
Who Is The Valeyard? - Part Two:
THE STRANGEST OF ALL THE OFFSHOOTS
An unknown origin is not exclusive to the Valeyard. There is one more offshoot to discuss that is probably even more mysterious than the Doctor's antithesis. And, most likely, is the most bizarre offshoot of them all.
Very little is known of the Watcher that appears in Logopolis. If we're being really honest, he's not really even a character in the story so much as he is an effect that makes the Fourth Doctor's passing all-the-cooler. He speaks no dialogue in all four episodes and just appears at regular intervals to enhance the funeral atmosphere of the tale. He's a beautiful device, really. There probably is no regeneration more memorable than this one. Thanks to the Watcher.
It's difficult to define him, really. I wouldn't quite say he's the next incarnation of the Doctor so much as a weird interim stage between the two incarnations that is, somehow, capable of existing in the same time and space as the fourth incarnation for a short while. The fact that he seems unformed and almost cocoon-like certainly adds to this idea.
He looks to be corporeal. But, at the very end of the story, he becomes ghost-like as he merges with the Doctor. Was he a sort of spirit the whole time? Difficult to say. He might only lose solidity at the time of regeneration. Or he could be something with no actual substance that is just good at appearing opaque most of the time. He can operate the controls of the TARDIS. So he can, at least, interact with material objects. But that doesn't mean he's actually solid.
There are also implications that he can travel considerable distances without the aid of the TARDIS. Through most of Part One, we see him watching the Doctor from the highway as he materialises his TARDIS around the Master's without realising it. During Part Two, he is waiting for the Doctor on a bridge on the Thames after Four's failed attempt to flush out his arch-nemesis. How did he get there so quickly? Is he just a really fast runner? Or has he some special means of travel? One even wonders if he used those same powers to transport Nyssa from Traken to Logopolis near the end of the second episode. The TARDIS doesn't seem to have moved from its original spot since it landed on the Planet of Mathematicians. It's possible, of course, that the Watcher landed it in the exact same place after taking it briefly to get Nyssa.
But there is a bigger question, here. How did the Watcher actually get from Earth to Logopolis to get the TARDIS and use it to pick up Nyssa (if, indeed, he actually transported the Trakenite in the time ship, at all). We certainly didn't see him board the TARDIS after he and Four have that big serious talk on the bridge. So is it possible that the Watcher can, somehow, teleport about?
Given how little we genuinely know about him, anything is possible, really.
It would seem, at least, that there is some similarity between the Watcher and the projection of Cho-Je that we see K'anpo Ripoche using during Planet of Spiders. Obviously, they are not exactly the same. Cho-Je is a fully-formed future incarnation that is, somehow, existing concurrently with the current version of the Doctor's old mentor. But we get little explanation of how these two versions of the same Time Lord are intermingling so this doesn't really help us to understand the Watcher any better.
If you do read my first entry of Who is the Valeyard?, I spend a bunch of time theorising about the nature of the Watcher. Rather than do a re-tread, here, I will just simply say that making him ambiguous benefited him as greatly as it did the Valeyard. When a story is well-crafted, we don't have to have every question answered. A little mystery, in fact, can make the whole narrative all-the-more engaging.
Both the Valeyard and the Watcher, I think, are a great example of this.
AN OFFSHOOT COUNT
Well, those are about all the different offshoots that I can think of from both New and Classic Who (if I missed any, I'm sure you'll let me know) There are some interesting patterns that they seem to adhere to. It is fascinating to see how similarly-crafted they can be, sometimes. Especially over the span of so many years.
If there was just one more thing to note regarding the analysis of this topic, it's that New Who seems to use offshoots a little more often than the Original Series did. The fact that we have seen more of them in only 13 seasons of the Revival (whereas offshoots spanned over 26 seasons of Old Who) also designates that they are used in higher concentration. Which can be a bit tricky, of course. Suddenly having an extra version of the Doctor running about can become a cheap way to resolve difficult conflicts in a plot. Unless a writer is careful, an offshoot can become a very easy Deus Ex Machina.
All in all, though, I have enjoyed how offshoots have been used most of the time. Some I like better, of course. But I do think they're a very fun thing to occasionally put into a story. They can take a narrative in very interesting directions. At the same time, they can also offer fascinating insights into the Doctor's own psyche!
When the Doctor claims to have a huge crush on herself during The Vanquishers, for instance, it definitely shows that Ten wasn't the only one with vanity issues!
Okay. Offshoots done. We've offered something more than just opinion for a couple of entries. I think I'll do a few more Season Reviews, now....
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