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There were a variety of different and contradictory accounts of the Doctor's early life before their travels with Susan. (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir) Most often, they had always been a Time Lord from Gallifrey, (TV: The War Games, et al.) but the Doctor's own memories were unclear regarding their origins. (PROSE: Unnatural History, The Shadows of Avalon, et al.)
All of the accounts were equally and paradoxically true due to the Doctor's biodata being retroactively manipulated (PROSE: Unnatural History) by a number of factors: subconscious regeneration influences; (PROSE: The Blue Angel) powerful beings such as Omega, (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors) the Great Intelligence, (TV: The Name of the Doctor) and Faction Paradox; (PROSE: Interference - Book Two et al.) and their adventures through time. (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir)
Earlier lives
Most accounts agreed that the First Doctor was the Doctor's first incarnation. (TV: The Three Doctors, Mawdryn Undead, The Five Doctors, The Time of the Doctor, et al.) However, several accounts suggested otherwise.
By the Fifth Doctor's lifetime, the Doctor had begun to forget great chunks of his life from before his trial and forced regeneration. (COMIC: The World Shapers, PROSE: Cold Fusion) In the Fourth Doctor's mindbending contest with Morbius, as many as eight previous faces were shown before the First Doctor's. (TV: The Brain of Morbius, PROSE: Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius) Explanations of this differed.
Previous regenerations
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By some accounts, the First Doctor had already regenerated once or multiple times. (PROSE: The Power of the Daleks, Cold Fusion)
Patience reminded the Doctor of several lifetimes he spent as her husband. (PROSE: Cold Fusion)
Memories from another time
- Main article: The Other
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According to one account, the Doctor was a genetic reincarnation of the Other, and was loomed into the House of Lungbarrow (PROSE: Lungbarrow) in the form of a small child. (PROSE: Human Nature) The Fifth Doctor recounted his birth to Patience, telling her that he was "born at Otherstide through the Loom of the House of Lungbarrow in Southern Gallifrey." (AUDIO: Cold Fusion) As the Eleventh Doctor told Amy Pond and Rory Williams, he slept in a cot as an infant. (TV: A Good Man Goes to War)
The Eighth Doctor sometimes believed they had been woven from a loom, and sometimes they believed they had a mother and father. (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress) The Doctor could not remember which was true and which was a dream. (PROSE: The Shadows of Avalon)
Origins outside of Gallifrey
By some accounts, the Doctor was not fully Gallifreyan. The Bruce Master theorised that the Doctor's biology could not open Artron's tomb, which could only be opened by a Time Lord. (AUDIO: Planet of Dust)
According to some accounts, the First Doctor was a human (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Daleks, et al.) from the 49th century (PROSE: Unnatural History) named Dr. Who, (PROSE: The Lair of Zarbi Supremo) who built Tardis (TV: The Chase) and had adventures with his grandchildren, Susan, John, and Gillian. (TV: "An Unearthly Child", COMIC: The Klepton Parasites)
The origins of the Other were shrouded in mystery. (PROSE: Lungbarrow) When the Seventh Doctor became John Smith, he dreamt the story of "The Old Man and the Police Box", about an old man from Victorian era England who built a timeship, travelled to another planet called Gallifrey, and taught the natives so they could raise their society into a mighty civilisation. (PROSE: Human Nature)
The Eighth Doctor claimed many times that he was half-human on his mother's side, (TV: Doctor Who; PROSE: Alien Bodies, The Infinity Doctors, The Scarlet Empress, Unnatural History, The Shadows of Avalon, Grimm Reality) and the Bruce Master arrived to this conclusion on his own through analysis of the Doctor's retinal structure, exclaiming "No wonder!" as he worked it out; (TV: Doctor Who) however, the Doctor himself also questioned the accuracy of these statements, (PROSE: Autumn Mist) once claiming it to only have been a ruse to trick the Bruce Master, (COMIC: The Forgotten) with his eleventh incarnation identifying his mother as a Time Lord. (COMIC: The Comfort of the Good) Ashildr would also speculate the Doctor was a half-human half-Time Lord hybrid, something the Twelfth Doctor neither confirmed nor denied. (TV: Hell Bent)
Childhood
The Doctor had many memories of growing up on Gallifrey and attending the Time Lord Academy. (TV: The Time Monster, Shada, et al.)
He was born on the Holiday of Otherstide (AUDIO: Cold Fusion) under a name that he concealed in despair. (TV: The Shakespeare Code) He was born under the sign of Crossed Computers, the symbol of the maternity service. (TV: The Creature from the Pit) Whilst Ashildr claimed that he was "a high born Gallifreyan" (TV: Hell Bent) and Clara Oswald said that he was born "into wealth and privilege", (TV: Robot of Sherwood) the Sixth Doctor said that he would be considered a "plebeian". (AUDIO: Cortex Fire)
According to his third incarnation, the Doctor lived in a "house that was perched halfway up the top of a mountain" in the mountains of South Gallifrey. (TV: The Time Monster, Planet of the Spiders) Known as the House of Lungbarrow, this house was one of the Ancient Oldblood Houses and overlooked the Cadonflood River. (PROSE: Lungbarrow) He grew up in Lungbarrow with his family. (PROSE: Lungbarrow, Unnatural History) A lonely and depressed youth, the Doctor did not get along with his family, being bullied by many of his cousins, who would call him cruel names to reflect the fact that the Doctor had been loomed with a belly button. (PROSE: Lungbarrow)
As a Time Tot, the Doctor played hide and seek with the First Rani, with his ninth incarnation recalling that his skill at finding her "drove [her] nuts". He held the Time-Tot hide and seek championship for forty-two years in a row. (COMIC: Weapons of Past Destruction) He also believed humans to be a myth as a Time Tot. (PROSE: The Shining Man)
As a child, the Doctor would play conkers. (TV: The Highlanders) He also toyed with trains, (TV: The Evil of the Daleks) and had a dream to one day drive one. (TV: Black Orchid) Amongst his favourite bedtime stories were The Three Little Sontarans, The Emperor Dalek's New Clothes and Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday. (TV: Night Terrors) He played in the tunnels under the Panopticon as a child. (AUDIO: Order of the Daleks) He also watched a meteor storm on Gallifrey with his father. (TV: Doctor Who)
When he was just a "small child", the Doctor's mother told him the story of Grandfather Paradox, a story which scared the Doctor so much that he worried that Grandfather Paradox was hiding in his wardrobe or under his bed. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles) Granny Five, the Doctor's favourite among his seven grandmothers, told him bedtime stories about the Solitract when he couldn't sleep. (TV: It Takes You Away)
As a child, the Doctor was frightened by the "mythological horror" stories about the Fendahl, (TV: Image of the Fendahl) looked to Omega as his people's greatest hero, (TV: The Three Doctors) and was told stories of the Pantheon of Discord. (TV: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith) The Doctor also had nightmares for years about an elderly lady who had been covered in veils after she died on a hot day, with the heat causing flies to swarm around her corpse. (TV: Heaven Sent) As a boy, he spent a lot of time by the sea, where he believed the dead were out there, whispering to him from the waves. (PROSE: Matrix) He also drew crayon sketches of the Solvers, based on the stories, which the Eighth Doctor later suggested did not do the real thing justice. (AUDIO: The Doomsday Chronometer)
During his formative years, the Doctor was "brain-buffed" at his home by his Avatroid Tutor, Badger. During this time, the Doctor was forced to learn by rote and was taught about the Legacy of Rassilon and the story of Otherstide. The young Doctor disliked this form of learning and would often cause distractions and try to escape his lessons. (PROSE: Lungbarrow)
According to research done by a Gallifreyan author, the Doctor lived in the Drylands for a time in his childhood. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) During this time, before joining the Academy, the Doctor would leave his house at night, going to sleep in a barn, despite attempts by his guardians to invite him back in to join "the other boys". During one of these nights, a hand grabbed his leg from under the bed and he was told he was dreaming and to return to the bed, where a female voice told him that "fear [was] a superpower", and that it could "make [him] kind". Afterwards, the Doctor heard a noise and sat up to find a toy soldier at the foot of the bed. (TV: Listen)
When Madame de Pompadour read the Tenth Doctor's mind, she said he had been "such a lonely little boy", (TV: The Girl in the Fireplace) with the Ninth Doctor identifying himself as the "only child left out in the cold". (TV: The Empty Child) He had at least two imaginary friends, named Binker (AUDIO: The Abandoned) and Mandrake. (AUDIO: The Widow's Assassin)
Education
Like all Time Lords, the Doctor was taken from his family at the age of eight for the selection process. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) Staring into the Untempered Schism as part of a Time Lord initiation rite, he reacted by running away. (TV: The Sound of Drums)
The Doctor attended the Time Lord Academy as a member of the Prydonian Chapter, and received tutelage from Borusa, (TV: The Deadly Assassin) and Azmael. (TV: The Twin Dilemma) While the Tenth Doctor claimed that he spent "centuries" at the Academy, (COMIC: Mortal Beloved) Maris also found evidence that his time at the Academy had only been twenty years. (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir) The Doctor would worry that he would be the first student at the Academy to fail after he failed at exams. (AUDIO: A Song For Running)
On his first day at the Academy, (TV: World Enough and Time) the Doctor formed strong friendships with both the Master and the War Chief. (PROSE: Divided Loyalties) The Master soon became the Doctor's "man crush", and the two friends formed a pact to see every star in the universe together. (TV: World Enough and Time) While he was "little", the Doctor and the Master, ran together (TV: Death in Heaven) across the fields of the Master's estates by Mount Perdition. (TV: The End of Time) The Master would often hypnotise others, and the Doctor would un-hypnotise them, having learnt hypnotism from the Master. (PROSE: The Dark Path) Alongside other friends, the Doctor would ride a skimmer. (AUDIO: The Paradise of Death)
While at the Time Lord Academy, the Doctor spent four days in the Cloisters, where he talked to the Cloister Wraiths, who told him of the prophecy of "the Hybrid", and showed him a secret passage out. According to his twelfth incarnation, the experience drove him "completely mad," and he was "never right in the head again" afterwards. (TV: Hell Bent)
Missy claimed that while growing up, the Doctor started calling himself "Doctor Who" to "sound mysterious", but "dropped the 'Who' when he realised it was a tiny bit on the nose." (TV: World Enough and Time) In choosing the name of "the Doctor", he also made a promise to himself to "never [be] cruel or cowardly" and to "never give up, [and] never give in." (TV: The Day of the Doctor) He also received the nickname "Theta Sigma", or "Thete" for short, from his friends at the Academy, (TV: The Armageddon Factor, The Happiness Patrol) using it to identify him uniquely amongst other Time Lords. (PROSE: Falls the Shadow)
During his first year at the Academy, the Doctor gained a troublesome reputation by trapping his teacher in a time-loop for a day, (PROSE: Island of Death) and "mucking about" with space-time portals, something the Tenth Doctor indicated were easy to create. (PROSE: Made of Steel) He also frequently played "truant" to drink with the Shobogans, visit the hermit on his mountain, and venture into Low Town with the Master. (PROSE: The Eight Doctors)
At the age of ten, the Doctor was "caught skinny-dipping with a pretty female cousin of [an] acquaintance". (PROSE: Unnatural History)
On "the blackest day of his life," he went to visit K'anpo Rimpoche on the side of the mountain his family's house rested on in South Gallifrey. While climbing the mountain, the young Doctor saw only dull coloured rocks and weeds. However, Rimpoche gave no words of advice when he heard the Doctor tell him all his troubles, but instead pointed at a flower, which the Doctor had dismissed as a weed. As he descended the mountain, the world no longer seemed so grim to him and the Doctor noticed the colours of the rocks and the vibrancy of life in the flowers. (TV: The Time Monster) The Doctor spent what he felt where some of the finest hours of his life with Rimpoche, being taught how to look into his own mind and being told ghost stories about the King Vampire. (TV: Planet of the Spiders, State of Decay)
At the age of thirty, the Doctor asked K'anpo Rimpoche the name of the mountain on which he dwelled. He had been told by Old Lady Nine Teeth that it was called Plutarch, where his cousins called it Lung, and his friends at the Academy called it Mount Cadon. His mentor told him that the mountain had all three names, and told him that whatever he called it would determine the way in which it was climbed. (PROSE: The Three Paths) The Doctor left the Gallifreyan equivalent of primary school aged forty-five. (PROSE: Shroud of Sorrow)
Still a "small boy", the Doctor wrote a treatise on the chromosomal origins of love. His tutor said that he missed the point entirely and gave him a "rubbish" grade. (AUDIO: The Wormery) When he was "just a kid" of ninety, he visited the Medusa Cascade. (TV: The Stolen Earth) The Eighth Doctor stated that he was a terror until the age of one-hundred-and-twenty, claiming that he was a late developer. (AUDIO: The Next Life) As his fourth incarnation recalled, the Doctor was a "spotty teenager" for fifty years. (COMIC: Doctor Who and the Time Witch)
When the Doctor was a young boy, Borusa told him off for his attitude, and that he would be lucky to receive a Class Three Doctorate. Borusa taught him to be seen to respect tradition, even though he did not, (COMIC: Vortex Butterflies) and also gave him a lecture on regeneration, telling the Doctor; "You will walk into a storm and a stranger will walk back out. And that stranger will be you." Borusa also told him to "never break eye contact with a shape-shifter", as he would "see it everywhere [he] look[ed], and [would] never be able to trust anyone again". (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor)
At the Academy, the Doctor and the Master joined the "Gallifrey Academy Hot Five" band, with the Doctor playing the lead perigosto. (PROSE: Deadly Reunion) He once attended a party on the Moon of Korpal, and met fellow academy student, Rummas, but was too drunk to remember. Soon after, he and Rummas began sharing Borusa as a tutor. (PROSE: Spiral Scratch) He was also part of the same zero-grav hyperball team as Padrac. (AUDIO: The Eleven) At some point in his youth, the Doctor became addicted to using vortex manipulators. The Eleventh Doctor once described his past self as "40-a-day man". (COMIC: Space in Dimension Relative and Time)
He and the Master also enjoyed building "time flow analogues" to disrupt each other's experiments. (TV: The Time Monster) At the Academy, the Doctor would often skip classes to practice yo-yos and juggling. (PROSE: Match of the Day)
The Doctor was taught at the Academy that "the universe [was] nothing but a functional chain of causality at every level, governed by the oldest and simplest laws," by a tutor the Eighth Doctor would later describe as "the most attractive person [he'd] ever seen", but the First Doctor retorted that, however much people tried to take the mystery out of things, they could not "diminish wonder, beauty and discovery." (PROSE: Longest Day) He also rode Vortisaurs bareback at the Academy, (AUDIO: Storm Warning) and played games with the principle of transmigration. (PROSE: Interference - Book One)
At the Academy, the Doctor conducted an experiment in which he created a bacteria known as the Ablative, with the ensuing scandal nearly getting him expelled until it was covered up by the Academy, who believed that all of the samples had been destroyed. (AUDIO: Planet of the Rani) Genniploritreludar taught the Doctor stellar engineering at the Academy, once asking him to recite the fifteen stages in the life cycle of the main sequence sun. (PROSE: Original Sin) In his fiftieth year at the Academy, the Doctor made an enemy of his fellow student, Valyes, after he fed a snapping wart fowl to Valyes' summer project. (AUDIO: The Next Life)
The Doctor didn't attend his time-travel proficiency lesson, which made him unqualified to operate a TARDIS, and rejected an offer to retake the lesson. (PROSE: Festival of Death) Though his tenth incarnation would later state he had failed the test instead. (TV: The Shakespeare Code) The Doctor also failed practical theology, but was highly commended for landscape gardening, (PROSE: All-Consuming Fire) and received a poor grade in Time Lord philosophy. (PROSE: Infinite Requiem) He received training in emotional detachment, (TV: The Invasion of Time) and was on the tech course with Drax. (TV: The Armageddon Factor)
The Doctor and the Master were bullied as children by Torvic and the Doctor was forced to kill Torvic to save the Master's life. He was later confronted by Death, who insisted he become her disciple. The Doctor refused and asked for Death to take away his guilt, causing her to transfer the memory of committing the crime to the Master instead. (AUDIO: Master)
The Doctor was also bullied by Anzor, who used a torture device called "the galvaniser" on his classmates to ensure that they did as he said. He particularly bullied the Doctor, forcing him to do his navigational homework as he was "too stupid to do it himself". He used the galvaniser on the Doctor at least once, as he later threatened to "revive [his] memory of [the] galvaniser" to terrify the Sixth Doctor. (AUDIO: Mission to Magnus)
On one occasion, the Doctor and the Master travelled into Gallifrey's history in search of Valdemar, a dark mass of life created by the Old Ones in the higher dimensions, which swept across creation and wiped out the Old Ones. They met a surviving Old One, who warned them of Valdermar's powers. The Doctor was shaken, and also horrified that the Master seemed fascinated by its power. (PROSE: Tomb of Valdemar)
The Doctor wanted to be an explorer when he was young, but because the Time Lords had already explored every time and place, he didn't believe there was any point to him becoming an explorer too. He then found a reason and whenever he felt hopeless, he remembered that reason. (PROSE: The Frozen Wastes) Despite this, the Doctor would later claim to have been a pioneer amongst his people, (TV: The Rescue) due to the subconscious memory of his life as the Other. (PROSE: Cold Fusion, Lungbarrow)
When the Time Lords created the Consolidator to conceal various dangerous historical secrets from the rest of the universe, unwilling to destroy the items or races in the ship in case they proved useful later, the Doctor and the Master were assigned to come up with a solution where their peers failed. The Master had the idea of using a black hole to tear a rift in time and send the Consolidator into the distant future, where the future Time Lords could deal with it, but the Doctor declined to have his name put down on the calculations as he questioned the ethics of the assignment. However, when the experiment was actually attempted, the Consolidator was apparently destroyed by a mistake in the calculations when it struck the edge of the black hole, leaving the Time Lords to hush the matter up. (PROSE: Harvest of Time)
As the Doctor grew up, he came to understand that he and the Master were not the same. (TV: Death in Heaven) Following an incident at the Academy in which the Master did not keep his word, he and the Doctor had a falling out, (PROSE: Last of the Gaderene) eventually leading the Doctor to realise that the Master stood against everything he believed in. (AUDIO: The Destination Wars)
The Doctor was also known to have attended the Prydonian Academy with the Master (PROSE: First Frontier) and the Rani. Thermodynamics was his special subject. (TV: Time and the Rani)
According to a nightmare the Fifth Doctor had under the Celestial Toymaker's influence, the Doctor first learned of the Toymaker when he was a youth at the Prydonian Academy. The Time Lords' data banks described him only as a vague legend. The Doctor and his friends Rallon and Millennia investigated the legend, travelling to the Toyroom in a stolen TARDIS. The Toymaker was in a dormant, disembodied state, but on their arrival, he possessed Rallon and made Millennia one of his living toys. The Doctor defeated him, and the Toymaker allowed him to leave, knowing that he would become an even more worthy opponent given time to mature. As punishment for his part in the apparent deaths of Rallon and Millennia, the Doctor was expelled from the Academy. (PROSE: Divided Loyalties)
The Doctor earned a Higher-Dimensional Physics degree at "Time Lord University". He was required to learn how to envision a superimposed array of 208 different 43-dimensional supersolids, taking eight years to master the skill. (COMIC: The Friendly Place)
Ultimately, the Doctor did not have an impressive career at school, passing his qualifying exams to become a Time Lord with only 51% — the lowest possible pass mark — on his second attempt. (TV: The Ribos Operation) However, this was a deliberate ploy to not to draw undue attention to himself, so he could eventually leave Gallifrey. (PROSE: Tears of the Oracle)
Career
The Doctor worked as a Scrutationary Archivist in the Bureau of Possible Events, (PROSE: Lungbarrow) and rose high in the ranks of the Time Lords, (PROSE: The Eight Doctors) until he was considered a "superior" on Gallifrey by some, (COMIC: Flashback) with his second incarnation claiming to have held a seat on the High Council during the "latter years of [his] first incarnation". (PROSE: World Game) He also made powerful enemies due to his controversial views on the Time Lords' non-interference policy, even being accused of being a meddler. (AUDIO: The Beginning) He also lost popularity when he voiced his opinions on evil being a genuine force to his contemporaries, who found "such black and white notions of morality" to be "archaic". (PROSE: Strange England) He possessed a Type 50 TARDIS, which he abandoned when he left and became a renegade. (AUDIO: Prisoners of Fate)
The Doctor learned of the existence of the miniscopes and was outraged by their cruelty to the specimens within. He campaigned to have them banned and, despite the non-interference policy of the Time Lords, was successful. (TV: Carnival of Monsters) His role in banning the use of miniscopes was known throughout nine galaxies. (PROSE: The Empire of Glass) He also successfully campaigned on Gallifrey to ban a chemical of Time Lord invention which converted vertebrae blood into acid, the formula for which he was never able to forget. (PROSE: The Age of Ambition)
On one instance, he saved a glowing life form from being killed by his old friend Magnus, resulting in a fallout between the two. (COMIC: Flashback) At some point, the Doctor fought in a war, (AUDIO: The Sontarans) and also served as an ambassador for the Time Lords. (PROSE: The Exiles)
Family life
The Doctor stated he had a mother and father, (TV: Doctor Who) as well as a family (TV: The Tomb of the Cybermen) and childhood, (TV: The Sound of Drums) but also confessed his uncertainty on whether his family was real or a dream. (PROSE: Unnatural History) He had at least one brother, Irving Braxiatel, (PROSE: Tears of the Oracle) an uncle, (TV: Time and the Rani) sisters, (TV: Arachnids in the UK) and seven grandmothers. (TV: It Takes You Away)
Travelling back in time, the Doctor rescued Patience and her granddaughter from a danger on Ancient Gallifrey. Eventually, the Doctor married Patience, and they had thirteen children together, (PROSE: Cold Fusion) both "sons and daughters". (PROSE: The Eleventh Tiger) The Tenth Doctor recalled being "terrible" at his wedding. (TV: Blink) The Doctor also had three known grandchildren: Susan, (TV: An Unearthly Child) John and Gillian. (COMIC: The Klepton Parasites) Clara Oswald also referred to the Doctor's "children and grandchildren", who were "missing" by the time of the Doctor's twelfth incarnation. (TV: Death in Heaven)
While Susan specifically identified the Doctor as her grandfather, (TV: "An Unearthly Child", "The Escape") and the Doctor likewise considered Susan to be his grandchild, (TV: "The Rescue", Marco Polo, The Sensorites, "Flashpoint") documents on Gallifrey were deliberately obscure about Susan's real family, some theorising that she was a direct descendant of a founding father of Gallifrey alongside a claim one of her parents was the President of the Time Lords. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) According to the Tremas Master, Susan was a young Time Lady from the Doctor's own time whom had stowed away on the Doctor's TARDIS, (PROSE: Birth of a Renegade) while other accounts had her being rescued from the time period of the Other by the Doctor, (PROSE: Lungbarrow) who later adopted her as his granddaughter. (PROSE: The Longest Story in the World)
Still maintaining a "friend[ship] of sorts", (AUDIO: The Destination Wars) the Doctor gave the Master a cameo brooch made of Dark star alloy after an incident involving the Master's daughter . (TV: The Witch's Familiar) The Doctor also brought Susan to watch him and a group of Prydonians perform a ritual in Arcadia. (AUDIO: The Toy)
Eventually, the Doctor came to live in a small house on a mountain with his "adopted granddaughter", Susan, who was described as coming from a distant and primitive time. Susan would tell the Doctor tales of him "building" the TARDIS and leaving their planet, becoming younger again and fighting monsters. Susan's tales became known by the guards of the High Council, and, after an incident outside the Capitol, the Doctor found that armed guards had infiltrated his house. (PROSE: The Longest Story in the World)
According to reports found by Maris, the Doctor was involved in a riot, and become wanted by the Celestial Intervention Agency for "interfering in non-time-travel-capable species' development". He left Gallifrey two days afterwards. (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir)