Fathers and Brothers (unproduced TV story)

Depiction of Fathers and Brothers from DWMSE 5.

Fathers and Brothers was a screenplay by John Leekley for a pilot to the Amblin Television series based off of the Leekley Bible. While sharing the same general beats of the opening story proposed in The Chronicles of Doctor Who?, this script added several new elements, including a 1940s human companion named Lizzie. Another notable shift from the Bible was that rather than being a continuation of the original series, Fathers and Brothers functioned as an origin story for the Doctor. According to Leekley, Paul McGann was first considered to play the Doctor for this script. (The Nth Doctor)

Plot

to be added

Continuity with produced stories

• The notion that each TARDIS derives its power from the Eye of Harmony is established in this script. This would feature in Doctor Who, from there becoming an established part of Doctor Who lore.
• The Doctor's parentage seen in this story and related unproduced works would also be referenced in the Doctor Who movie, albeit with minimal details. Cold Fusion would describe the Doctor's father as a Time Lord explorer who went on an "Odyssey", thus alluding to Leekley's name "Ulysses". Unnatural History depicted a version of the father based on The Time of My Life who used the name "Joyce", once more alluding to Leekley's version. Later, The Gallifrey Chronicles more directly depicted Leekley's Ulysses.
• Eight-legged Spider Daleks resembling the descriptions from Fathers and Brothers appeared in Fire and Brimstone as Daleks from a parallel universe.
• War of the Daleks showed Spider Daleks as one of Davros' creations in ordinary continuity.
• The novel The Infinity Doctors is set in a version of Gallifrey in which the various 1990s attempts to give a backstory to Doctor Who exist as in-universe coexisting and contradictory shifts in history. The Infinity Doctor is commonly thought to somehow be both the First and Eighth Doctors, reflecting that Fathers and Brothers would have shown Paul McGann playing a Doctor at the beginning of his adventures. Other aspects of the novel's Doctor also align with Fathers and Brothers: the Doctor is shown to own a TARDIS inherited from his explorer father which is stuck in a rectangular form, he seems to have already came in conflict with the Master and the Daleks, and despite still living on Gallifrey he has already travelled through space-time and fallen in love with Earth. The author's charity story Iris Explains includes in-character speculation that the Infinity Doctor is "a version of one of the origin story ones, you know, the one where Borusa's your spirit guide. That would make him a pre-canonical you."
• In The Infinity Doctors, the Infinity Doctor has a memory of climbing a mountain and discovering something while sheltering in an ancient cave, referencing the opening scene of Fathers and Brothers.
• Part of the opening of The Infinity Doctors ("Only the tallest of the ruins were visible now, the snows covered the rest. Not that there had been much to see before the ice had come, merely the ancient temples and amphitheatres, the last evidence of a race that had ruled by the sword and built an empire planet by planet until it had spread across the universe.") quotes one of the Master's speeches ("Look out there, across the mesas… And you will see the ruins of the temples of our ancestors. They ruled by the sword. They built our empire planet by planet.").
• In The Infinity Doctors, the Infinity Doctor briefly visits Skaro and describes its devastation by war, mentioning that insects came to swarm across the planet. This alludes to Davros' speech about insects and using insect DNA to make the Spider Daleks.
• Unnatural History has a scene where Sam Jones uses her experience watching 1990s American sci-fi television to make up a prophecy about the Doctor which completely corresponds to the prophecy seen in Fathers and Brothers, down to the involvement of a "wise old spirit who guides him". The Eighth Doctor then acts as if this is a serious secret which Sam should not know about, and is relieved to hear that nobody actually told Sam about the prophecy. In a later scene, a member of Faction Paradox alludes to the Prophecy's Time of Darkness, connecting it to the Greyness of the books' continuity. This prophecy is also said in The Gallifrey Chronicles.
• Father of the Daleks alludes to the Spider Daleks as an unproduced possibility. Davros notices an empty Dalek "arachnid chassis" and briefly contemplates how he "never got the design to work".