Doctor Who has, apparently, just been Ruined Forever by the revelation that the next actor to play the lead role will be a woman, Jodie Whittaker.  So I thought I’d take a look at all the other times the show’s been Ruined Forever, with a view to establishing what, if anything, the canonical backstory of the Doctor is.  We know – more or less – what it is now – but has it always been like that?

Well, no.  Let’s start at the very beginning – actually, let’s start before the very beginning, with the untransmitted pilot version of the very first episode, “An Unearthly Child”.  Concerned by the strange behaviour of a pupil, two teachers follow her to the place where she lives with her grandfather… which turns out to be a time machine in a junkyard, a thing that appears like a police telephone call box, but is larger and more miraculous on the inside.

The thing is, in this version, the Doctor and his granddaughter Susan have what appears to be a definite origin.  “We come from the forty-ninth century,” the Doctor says, very specifically.  In the transmitted version, this becomes much less definite – “We come from another time, another world”.  (The characterization of the two also changes – in the first version, the Doctor is colder, more focused, and Susan is a weird space-cadet type.  As transmitted, the Doctor giggles and is endearingly scatty and absent-minded, and Susan is much closer to a normal teenager.)

So, at this stage, the Doctor is quite simply a mystery.  Which is pretty much the brief that existed for the show, at the time.  A memo apparently went floating around describing the Doctor’s character as “a crotchety old man, at least 725 years old”, but even that much specificity didn’t make it to the screen.

There are odd things about the first Doctor, and other things which aren’t odd, but which – in the light of future canon – should be.  The Doctor can be hurt by being hit under the heart (“The Sensorites”), and Ian Chesterton listens to his chest in “Edge of Destruction”; there’s certainly nothing here to suggest that he has more than one heart.  Susan, too, appears to be only a more or less normal human, possibly slightly psychic (she can listen in on Sensorite telepathy, for instance) but not particularly unusual.  At the end of “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, Susan leaves the TARDIS – actually, is deliberately left by her grandfather – to marry the undeniably human David Campbell, and there’s no suggestion that there will be any weird inter-species problems with their relationship.  Given that she has at least ten times his life expectancy, and won’t die at the end of that time but will change into a different person, that seems a bit strange… until you remember that, at the time, that backstory simply didn’t exist.  Susan Foreman, at the time, simply was a more-or-less normal human who could marry another normal human without any problems.

The first Doctor wears a ring with a blue stone, which is apparently important (in “The Web Planet”, for instance, the Doctor makes a great fuss about loaning it to one of the Menoptra).  The significance of this is never entirely made clear.

In “The Time Meddler”, we meet another of the Doctor’s people for the first time.  The Meddling Monk has a more advanced “Mark Four” TARDIS, and is estimated, by the Doctor, to come from “about fifty years ahead of me”.  They each know the other is a time traveller, but that’s clear from all the anachronisms left lying around – they don’t recognize each other personally.  Now, there’s no earthly reason why they should, but this becomes a point of some significance, later on.  (It’s been suggested that the Monk is an early regeneration of the Master, but I don’t buy that – the Master veers between being a megalomaniac conqueror and a nihilistic destroyer, but the Monk is just a gadfly, a silly chap doing the sort of mucking-around many people would like to indulge in, given access to a time machine.)  While they have a shared background as time travellers, the Doctor and the Monk don’t show any particular signs of a shared cultural identity; there is no indication, at this point, that either is anything but a (more scientifically advanced) human.

Then William Hartnell became too infirm to continue with the series, and the big change happened, at the end of “The Tenth Planet”.  An exhausted First Doctor is found lying on the floor of the TARDIS, and when his companions flip him over onto his back (instead of sensibly leaving him in the recovery position), the TARDIS dematerialization SFX plays, and the Doctor’s face seems to brighten and glow… and the screen whites out, and instead of William Hartnell, there’s Patrick Troughton.

The regeneration is not really explained, at this point.  “It’s part of the TARDIS; without it, I couldn’t go on.”  The first Doctor’s ring with the blue stone no longer fits; is it some sort of prop that the Doctor no longer needs?  The Doctor initially appears confused and disoriented, but when he’s settled down, it’s apparent that this is not just a younger version, this is a whole different personality – more impish, more madcap, but also capable of great passion and commitment; the Second Doctor throws himself into situations with much more zeal and energy than the austere First.

He also becomes more obviously different.  He carries a “five hundred year diary”, and it transpires that he needs one – in “The Tomb of the Cybermen” he claims to be four hundred and fifty years old, in a rather touching little scene which dwells for a moment on the psychological consequences of such longevity.  He’s still basically human, though… or is he?  In “The Dominators”, the eponymous villains use their medical scanner on the native Dulkians, and come up with a description startlingly like that of a Time Lord; they scan ordinary human Jamie McCrimmon, too, and describe him as a much more primitive type – but they don’t bother scanning the Doctor, merely assuming that he’s the same species as Jamie.  In “The Wheel in Space”, the Doctor spends much time confined to the space station’s sickbay… but he dodges a comprehensive examination, and in any case the station’s crew have other things to occupy their minds.

After three years in the part, Patrick Troughton – a very versatile actor, and concerned with type-casting – decided to move on.  And he went out in a ten-episode spectacular, “The War Games”, which finally took all the vague hints and possibilities about the Doctor’s background and made something solid out of them.  In this one, the Doctor runs into a renegade from his own people, the War Chief, who is helping a bunch of alien fascists assemble a super-army out of soldiers kidnapped from different periods of Earth history.  The Doctor defeats the War Chief and his alien chums, but is unable to move all the soldiers back to their own times, so he calls upon his own people for help.  They are the near-omnipotent Time Lords, who live somewhere outside normal time and can see all of history, but have sworn never to interfere with it.  The Doctor’s passion for goodness has made him break that law, and – though they recognize his good intentions – the Time Lords will punish him, by changing his appearance and confining him to one time and place, modern-day Earth….

So, it’s another sea change in the show… and, incidentally, one that only works because it’s the Second Doctor here.  The Second Doctor is passionate about helping people and fighting evil and generally doing the right thing; the First Doctor is openly opposed to changing history, even with good intentions (as in “The Aztecs”) and frequently has to be chivvied and even bullied into helping his companions and others.  It’s easy to imagine the Second Doctor stealing a TARDIS and setting out on a quixotic cosmic crusade… but he didn’t; it was the First Doctor who stole the TARDIS, and his motives are much more obscure.

However.  We have a name for what the Doctor is, now, and names have power.  With the arrival of Jon Pertwee as the third Doctor, we not only get another personality change – the new Doctor is elegant, patrician, aristocratic in tone, the very opposite of the anarchic anti-establishment Second Doctor – we get a chance to define what a Time Lord is, and how they differ from ordinary people.  We see it in the very first Pertwee episode, in “Spearhead from Space”, where the Doctor gets a full-on medical exam, and is found to have two hearts and a blood type that can’t be categorized.  He is different from humans in other ways, too – his strength of will can inspire humans to break through the Nestenes’ mental conditioning, for instance.  In later stories, we’ll see the Doctor’s alien heritage give him all sorts of funny little gimmicks – he can make things disappear (“simple transmigration of objects” in “The Ambassadors of Death”), he can go into a death-like trance (“The Daemons”, “Planet of the Daleks”), he’s an expert in Venusian Aikido… his sonic screwdriver, introduced in the Troughton years as, well, a screwdriver, now becomes a versatile and reliable plot device.

Besides seeing much more of the-Doctor-as-a-Time-Lord, we also get to see a lot more of the Time Lords themselves.  In particular, in “Terror of the Autons” we get to meet the Master for the first time.  The Doctor and the Master are friends and rivals of long standing – they went to school together, albeit “in a way”.  And, when they meet up in “Terror of the Autons” we get one minor, but possibly significant, point arising: Time Lords recognize each other, in spite of the physical changes of regeneration.   (Usually.  There’s one instance of a Time Lord not recognizing the Sixth Doctor, but that could just be explained as, well, a forgetful Time Lord.)  In many cases, a regeneration is something Time Lords don’t even bother commenting about – as with Cardinal, later President, Borusa, who’s never played twice by the same actor.  (This is the other argument, by the way, for the Meddling Monk not being a version of the Master.  A weaker argument in terms of psychology, a stronger one in terms of in-universe canon.)

Occasional bits of Time Lord lore surface.  The Time Lords have disabled the TARDIS’s key “dematerialization circuit”, and placed blocks on the Doctor’s memory to remove his knowledge of time travel theory.  They keep tabs, surreptitiously, on existential threats like the doomsday weapon in “Colony in Space”.  And then we get “The Three Doctors”….

“The Three Doctors” is a cheap and gaudy gimmick story for the show’s tenth anniversary, but it’s an interesting one nonetheless.  The Doctors demonstrate telepathic abilities, the Time Lords are revealed to have a lot of unexplored backstory of their own… and what is one to make of the First Doctor, hovering outside the actual story, acting almost as if he’s got an independent existence beyond his history as the Doctor?

This is a silly idea.  Isn’t it?… Except it’s reinforced only a few stories later, in “Planet of the Spiders”, where the next Time Lord we meet keeps his next incarnation around as a sort of personal assistant until he dies…. In the interim, we find out the name of the Time Lords’ home planet – Gallifrey, tossed out almost off-hand by the Doctor in a conversation in “The Time Warrior”.  And we learn, in “Carnival of Monsters”, that the Time Lords will violate their non-interference directive if they feel strongly enough about something.  Indeed, the Time Lords are emerging as people who are more than happy, at times, to put their high ideals aside for the sake of expedience.  Which makes them, ultimately, more interesting and more useful as characters.

It’s fair to mention, by the way, one point where the series has been absolutely consistent; the Doctor’s people are the Time Lords.  Always.  They’re not Gallifreyans or anything like that; even the ones who don’t live like lords – and there are a great many – are still Time Lords.

But anyway.  “Planet of the Spiders” marks the end of Jon Pertwee’s tenure, and in a quick fade from one face to the next, Tom Baker took over.  The show became less Earth-bound, the Doctor became more alien.  Humans might still be his favourite species, but there is never any suggestion that he might, himself, be human.  Time Lord biology gives him new tricks like his “respiratory bypass system”; training and experience give him sensitivity to breaks in time, or let him hypnotize people out of the need for oxygen.  Authoritative to the point of casual arrogance, offhandedly brilliant, armed with encyclopaedic knowledge and a magnificent disdain for parochialism, the Fourth Doctor is every bit what the First claimed to be: a citizen of the universe.

It’s during the Tom Baker years, of course, that the Time Lord backstory starts to harden and crystallize – or, possibly, fossilize.  We’ve heard a few anecdotes about the Third Doctor’s childhood on Gallifrey, we’ve seen a few robed figures fretting in control rooms… but “The Deadly Assassin” took the viewer right to the Time Lords’ home and revealed them in… well, not actually all that much glory.

Blame evil BBC leftists if you like (though Doctor Who has put the boot into left-wing nonsense too, in its time), but the portrayal of the Time Lords as something very like the House of Lords – archaic, protocol-obsessed, too bound up in its own fine traditions to recognize a real and insidious evil at its heart – is distinctly subversive.  The aloof superhumans of “The War Games” have become all too human and all too fallible.  The lurking evil, of course, is the Master.  After the untimely death of actor Roger Delgado, this writer-favourite villain had vanished from the show, only to be brought back for this special as a decomposing corpse, scheming and cackling as he plots to seize the Time Lords’ power.  This is the story that establishes several of the Official Rules for Time Lords.   It establishes the fixed limit on regenerations – twelve, for a total of thirteen lives in all – while also suggesting there are ways around this; the Master, whose thirteenth and final body is dripping ooze on the floor wherever he walks, thinks he can renew himself with the Time Lords’ own power source, created many millennia ago by the enigmatic Rassilon, and now poorly understood by those blundering old duffers, his descendants.

(I’d also point out one comparatively minor character, the ineffectual Commentator Runcible, who illustrates some of the points I’ve made so far.  Ineffectual he may be, but he’s still a Time Lord – he and the Doctor both studied at the Academy under Cardinal Borusa – and while he’s presumably been on Gallifrey all through the Doctor’s career, he still recognizes the Doctor, even though Tom Baker looks nothing like a young William Hartnell.  His only comment on the discrepancy is “Have you had a face-lift?”)

This is, perhaps, a key story for understanding how the Time Lord backstory came to be – and, as with “The Tenth Planet” and “The War Games”, it’s nothing to do with there being a unified concept of the Time Lords at the back of everything.  “The Deadly Assassin” is just a story the writers wanted to tell, constrained by some practical details such as Roger Delgado’s death… just like “The Tenth Planet” and “The War Games” were story-form expressions of the practical need to replace William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton.  The “canon” was being made up as they went along.  And, in some ways, it still is….

Story expediency, indeed, is at the heart of the next visit to Gallifrey, in “The Invasion of Time”, a six-episode story hastily Frankensteined together after a submitted script proved to be unworkable.  (A pity, really.  I’d have loved to see a fifty-thousand-seat arena full of warrior cat-people, as realized on a 1970s BBC budget.)  It doesn’t really add anything to Time Lord lore, beyond a few more gimmicks and props left behind by Time Lord hero Rassilon – in this case, the components for the supposedly awesome Demat Gun, which turns out to be just a garden-variety death ray.  A four-episode story is desperately stretched out with the addition of a loopy sequence of Sontarans wandering in the bowels of the TARDIS (played by an abandoned Victorian mental hospital.)  Popular companion Leela is written out with hardly a by-your-leave, married off to wimpy Time Lord guard commander Andred in another instance of Time Lords not worrying about marital difficulties with humans.  (I feel inclined to salute Louise Jameson, here, for her efforts to establish a burgeoning romance with Andred, despite being given not a single line’s worth of help by the script.  You can see her gamely exchanging concerned glances and non-verbal offers of help in the background… futile, I’m afraid; there was more chemistry between Leela and Time Lady Rodan, or between Andred and K9, than there was between Leela and Andred.)

A few other elements of lore emerge from the Tom Baker era – some would later be important, others wouldn’t.  The location of Gallifrey is sort-of established (“Names means nothing,” the villainous Sutekh sneers, but the galactic coordinates he demands aren’t any more use to us poor mortals); more Time Lord backstory emerges with the appearance of the villainous Morbius (whose “mind-bending contest” suggests – is, indeed, the only thing to suggest – the possibility of incarnations of the Doctor before William Hartnell); the Time Lords are shown to be answerable to higher powers, themselves, when the Doctor is plucked out of space-time and sent on a bizarre fetch quest by the White Guardian who needs the six pieces of the Key to Time….

This full-season meta-story also introduced a new companion, the Time Lady Romana, played initially by Mary Tamm, and in the next season she would further muddy the waters by regenerating into Lalla Ward.  In the process, she “tries on” several other faces and forms, before settling on Lalla Ward.  Is the regeneration process flexible in some odd way?  Possibly, given later incidents involving the David Tennant Doctor… but that’s a matter for the future, and certainly wasn’t in anyone’s mind during “Destiny of the Daleks”.  The canon, like Romana, continues to be malleable….

Two closely linked stories ended the Tom Baker era; in “The Keeper of Traken” the Master reappears, charged up with vital energy after the events of “The Deadly Assassin”, but still decomposing – he achieves new stability by stealing someone else’s body in this one; it doesn’t seem to be a Time Lord ability, it might be something the Master has learned to do.  In “Logopolis”, an enigmatic white figure keeps hanging about – and it turns out to be the Doctor’s next incarnation, waiting to manifest itself as Peter Davison.  Again, one has to wonder, do the various incarnations have some sort of existence outside their continuity as the Doctor?

Peter Davison is a perfectly fine actor, but his rather conventional charm was no replacement for Tom Baker’s larger-than-life charisma; also, by this time, the show’s continuity had grown large enough to eat itself.  The next trip to Gallifrey serves to bring back the character Omega, last seen in “The Three Doctors” standing at ground zero of a matter/antimatter explosion powerful enough to turn a black hole inside out and make it a supernova.  Surely he must have been killed in that?  “No!  He exists,” is all the explanation we’re getting.  To add to the continuity overload, this particular storyline also features the Time Lords’ new guard commander, Maxil, played by Colin Baker.  And, when Peter Davison’s Doctor succumbs to fatal poisoning, he regenerates as… Colin Baker.

However, before that, we get the next big anniversary do, “The Five Doctors”, more properly “The Four Doctors Because Tom Baker Wouldn’t Play Ball And Only Appears In Stock Footage From An Unfinished Story”, more properly yet “The Three Doctors And A Stand-In For The Now-Existence-Challenged William Hartnell”.  Well, they tried.  Various incarnations of the Doctor are snatched off to the cheerfully-named Death Zone on Gallifrey, as part of a plot by the current President to steal immortality from the ghost of Rassilon.  The President gets immortality, all right, but not quite as he’d have liked…. Along the way, we find out that Jon Pertwee’s Doctor knows what Tom Baker looks like, and the Time Lords offer the Master a new set of regenerations, which implies that, well, this is possible….

But on to Colin Baker, and his big contribution to the “canon” of regeneration, in “The Trial of a Time Lord”.  This one takes that weird question – do the separate incarnations have an independent existence? – and replies with a big fat affirmative, in that the main villain is a potential future incarnation of the Doctor, who has set up a rigged trial with the intention of seizing all the Doctor’s future lives for himself.  And that, in itself, tells us about the Time Lords’ ability to manipulate the process of regeneration – clearly “twelve regenerations and that’s it” is at best a gross over-simplification by this point.  Not to mention the Doctor’s attempts to defend himself by calling evidence from his own future….  By this time, the supposedly idealistic Time Lords positively reek of corruption, complacency, and sordid Realpolitik; the transformation from off-screen deus ex machina to on-screen bad guys is complete.

By this time, though, the sordid machinations of the Time Lords were nothing compared to the sordid machinations among the production team of a show in terminal decline.  After a lengthy hiatus – or what seemed like a lengthy hiatus at the time, though we know now it was nothing much – Colin Baker departed, not without acrimony, and when the Doctor returned, he underwent a sudden change into Sylvester McCoy… who then underwent a sudden change of his own.  After a first season spent as a clown with a social conscience, rather like Patrick Troughton, the Seventh Doctor suddenly blossomed into a master manipulator, the sort of benign but devious mastermind that the Time Lords should have been.  The show’s continuity was mercilessly pillaged and retconned, to the extent that the TARDIS’s first appearance in a London junkyard proved to be part of an elaborate gambit with an ancient Time Lord superweapon, destroying the Daleks with a superpowered version of “don’t you throw me into that there briar patch”.  The Seventh Doctor, not content with elaborately-plotted genocides of the Daleks and the Cybermen, displayed an equal talent for benign ruthlessness on a personal scale; his hapless companion Ace did a whole lot of growing up, under some none too subtle goading…..

It was all pretty interesting, actually, but the show’s ratings were in terminal decline at this point, and the Doctor’s plotting wasn’t good enough to save it.  And so Doctor Who went into a long hibernation… awakening briefly, in 1996, for a one-off TV special where McCoy regenerated into Paul McGann, and the Master into a CGI snake which then possessed the helpless body of Eric Roberts.  It’s hard to decide what to make of this one.  The Doctor suddenly claimed to be half human, and the technology inside his vast Gothic TARDIS interior suddenly required a human touch to operate it.  Maybe, if a series had materialized after this one, we would have got a bit more explanation.

As it is, the show vanished for nearly a decade, before coming back with a bang, and with Christopher Eccleston at the controls.  Initially, the backstory is still there, but simplified; the Ninth Doctor is the last of the Time Lords, who have fallen in a mutually destructive conflict with the Daleks.  But the weight of continuity and irate fans cannot be denied, and soon the Daleks are back….. Eccleston’s regeneration is pretty much standard stuff (yeah, the star of the show dies and comes back as someone else – y’know, standard stuff) – but this is a modern-era show, and it is bold enough to flirt with some sexual issues, in particular by introducing the pan-sexual Captain Jack Harkness and even suggesting the Doctor wouldn’t mind a bit of that himself….

Then David Tennant becomes the Doctor, and the Time Lords are not quite dead after all, in fact they’re getting better, and my goodness does the canon about regeneration get interesting.  The Doctor gets his hand cut off, but since he’s “still in the first eighteen hours of my regeneration cycle”, he can just grow it back… and the severed hand becomes a plot McGuffin in its own right, until – in a blatant bit of fanservice – it gets grown into a spare David Tennant who is human and can go off with Billie Piper’s Rose Tyler and live happily ever after.  The Doctor is shot by a Dalek, but gets better… did he, I wondered at the time, regenerate back into David Tennant?  Turns out I was right, which is one of the few right guesses I’ve made about the show.  It also transpires that Time Lords can lock their Time-Lordness away in a little artefact and become fully human for an indefinite time… the chosen artefact, in the two cases we see, is a pocket watch, but do you know something?  I reckon a ring with a blue stone might work just as well.  And it transpires that the Master did get that new set of regenerations he wanted for Christmas after all, and Rassilon is back, and, and, and….

And then Matt Smith arrives, and the game gets changed again, because the main villain of the first Smith season is an all-consuming crack in time, and ultimately it destroys the entire space-time continuum and can only be fixed by the Doctor papering over it, from the outside, essentially reconstructing the entire universe from scratch.  So, if you like, all previous continuity is now optional; anything that happened on-screen in the whole of the preceding series might, now, have been rearranged to suit the Eleventh Doctor’s taste.  Continuity is dead.  Long live continuity?

Because, in the final Smith episode, we return to the twelve-regenerations rule; there was one missing regeneration (the War Doctor, played by John Hurt, in the hiatus between Paul McGann and Christopher Eccleston), and David Tennant did actually burn a regeneration to stay as David Tennant… so, when the Matt Smith body wears out, that’s it, that’s yer lot, the Doctor is dead.

Except he isn’t.  Because, in a specific breaking of this particular rule, the Time Lords sneak a bit of Time Lord magic through that crack in the universe, and they give the Doctor a new set of reincarnations.  How many?  We don’t know.  Indeed, two major villains have specifically said they don’t know how many lives the Doctor has left, now.

And we got Peter Capaldi as the Doctor – a brash, abrasive, distinctly alien Doctor – and Hints began to be dropped.  Big Hints.  We’d already had a couple, with Tom Baker wishing good luck to his successor “whoever he or she may be”, and the Neil Gaiman scripted episode “The Doctor’s Wife” mentioning a Time Lord who’d had both male and female incarnations… and now we get the Master himself, or rather herself, reborn as a psychopathic Mary Poppins… and this is not just the Master being a special case, because the Doctor shoots a (male) Time Lord General, who promptly regenerates into a female one (and, it is implied, is usually female, and was just taking a penis out for a spin in that one incarnation.)  Like I said, Big Hints.

And so we come to the upcoming Christmas special, in which, we are assured, Peter Capaldi will regenerate into Jodie Whittaker… and, one has to wonder, is that really so peculiar?  In a show where the lead character regularly changes bodies anyway?  A show where alien ghosts possess dead bodies, where a civilization of vengeful lizard people slumbers beneath the Earth’s surface, where the population of Britain can fly away on a giant space whale, where Egyptian gods lurk in labyrinths beneath the pyramids of Mars, where the Earth is secretly ruled by ghoulish figures who are forgotten as soon as you look away from them…?  I could go on.  Any fan of the show knows how long I could go on for.

But the Doctor’s never been female before! – Well, so what?  In all the universe of time and space, there are still a few things the Doctor hasn’t done, or been.  So, why deny the character this new experience?

Because of canon?  If this long screed has had any purpose at all, it’s to show the fundamental truth about the fixed canon, and that truth is that there’s no such thing.  And that’s a good thing!  It’s a great thing!  If the canon were fixed and immutable, Doctor Who would have been the Adventures of Bill from the Forty-Ninth Century from its start to its miserable end back in 1966!

But the canon is not fixed.  The canon is constantly changing, constantly in motion, constantly being elaborated on and retconned and just plain changed.  Doctor Who‘s longevity is mostly down to its mercurial nature; it is not just one format, it is outer-space adventure and educational historical and Gothic horror and surrealist fantasy and a dozen other things, depending on the views of the production team and the needs of the story.  It changes all the time, whether from the whim of an auteur, or in response to practical pressures, or sometimes just out of naked desperation.  Try to put its continuity into a straitjacket, and you might as well hammer a stake through its heart and bury it at a crossroads.

If Doctor Who works at all, it works by being infinitely flexible.  There are as many possibilities in the show as there are stars in the Universe – and the show takes pains to point out how big the Universe is.  The production team are exploring a new set of possibilities, where the Doctor is female.  Some will complain about this, some will salute it as a development long overdue.  Me?  I’m going to do what I always have done; buckle myself in, and hope I’ll enjoy the ride.