The Doctor's memories were a core aspect of their identity. When companions left, memories were what remained for the Doctor to hold onto. (AUDIO: Relative Dimensions) However, the Doctor's memories were unclear regarding their early life and origins. (COMIC: The World Shapers; PROSE: Who is Dr Who?, Unnatural History)
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Though nothing could be more important to seeing the time traveller through, for stringing their many lives together, amnesia was a common problem for the Doctor. On several occasions, most often with post-regenerative amnesia, the Doctor could not even remember their own name, and had to find an anchor which would allow them to restore who they'd been before. (TV: Doctor Who, PROSE: The Eight Doctors, The Gallifrey Chronicles, AUDIO: Something Inside, Orbis, TV: The Woman Who Fell to Earth)
On some occasions, memories were actively suppressed from the Doctor. By one account, the Division removed all the Doctor's memories of an unknown number of lives they'd spent as the Timeless Child. Afterwards, the Doctor became a child again, and the First Doctor began a new life on Gallifrey. (TV: The Timeless Children) These earliest memories were stored in a biodata module, kept aboard Division Control in the Void. (TV: Survivors of the Flux)
Crossing their own time stream
When multiple incarnations of the Doctor experienced the same event, the impact on the Doctor's memory varied. In many cases, knowledge of their future was lost, either as a natural result of their time streams getting back in sync, (TV: The Day of the Doctor) or as a result of their actions during the adventure. (AUDIO: Regeneration Impossible)
However, as with the Eighth Doctor briefly recalling all the times he'd met River Song, (AUDIO: Songs of Love) the Doctor was often able to "catch up" as the event was happening. The Tenth Doctor could finally remember the Fourth Doctor's activities seconds after they happened. Though he could not predict anything, he was able to track his past self, just by memory. (AUDIO: Out of Time) The Fifth Doctor also managed this, watching over his first three selves by memory during the Game of Rassilon. (TV: The Five Doctors, PROSE: The Eight Doctors) The Eleventh Doctor could "almost remember" as he joined events, but lacked many crucial details. (TV: The Day of the Doctor) Critically, the Tenth Doctor was able to depend on the Fifth Doctor's memories of his own actions to know how to resolve an issue with the TARDIS when it collided with itself. (TV: Time Crash) Later, moments into bumping into each other, the two Doctors remembered each other. (AUDIO: The Gates of Hell) Finally, during an encounter between the Fifth Doctor and the Seventh Doctor, both mentioned multi-Doctor events they could remember, including their involvement in the salvation of Gallifrey (AUDIO: Cold Fusion) by the Tenth, Eleventh and War Doctors. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
History
First Doctor
The Dalek Combat Training Manual, published during the Last Great Time War, claimed that a memory bomb had been concealed within the control console of the Doctor's TARDIS. The First Doctor, potentially under coercion by the Celestial Intervention Agency, had taken the Hand of Omega with him when he escaped from Gallifrey. The Doctor placed the Hand on Earth in the 20th century, aware that the Daleks would come to steal it in the hope of harnessing its great power. Accordingly, he pre-programmed the Hand to act against Dalek interests. Ultimately, the Doctor's scheme was delayed when he unexpectedly left the planet Earth, and the memory bomb wiped his mind of knowledge of both the Daleks and the Hand of Omega as insurance against his plan being discovered. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) As a result, the Doctor was unfamiliar with the Daleks until he encountered them on Skaro. (TV: The Daleks, Twice Upon a Time) The Doctor's memory of the plan itself would not resurface until his seventh incarnation, who would return to Earth to execute it. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks, PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)
Second Doctor
The Second Doctor confided to Victoria Waterfield that he could only remember his family when he really wanted to, and that the rest of the time they "[slept]" in his mind. (TV: The Tomb of the Cybermen)
To show Zoe Heriot the events of Operation Human Factor, the Doctor called upon his own memories to weave them into a narrative, using data passively gathered by the TARDIS to fill the gaps. (PROSE: The Evil of the Daleks)
The Time Lords erased the Doctor's memories several times whilst he was working for them following his trial. (PROSE: Save Yourself) They made him forget his companion Tarlos. (AUDIO: Colony of Fear)
Third Doctor
The Time Lords removed some of the Third Doctor's memories, specifically those which would allow him to operate his TARDIS during the Doctor's exile on Earth, following the Second Doctor's trial on Gallifrey. (TV: The War Games, Spearhead from Space) These were eventually restored, after the Third Doctor helped defeat Omega on a mission for the Time Lords, with the help of his first and second incarnations. (TV: The Three Doctors)
Sixth Doctor
The Sixth Doctor's memories were affected by him being taken out of time to Space Station Zenobia, leaving him unaware of the circumstances of his and Peri Brown's separation. (TV: The Mysterious Planet, Mindwarp)
Mortally wounded by Zor, the Doctor was found and saved by Jack Harkness, who he learnt was a former companion of a future Doctor. Preparing to enter a healing coma to fully recover, the Doctor assured Jack that he would "edit" the memory of meeting him prematurely. (AUDIO: Piece of Mind)
Seventh Doctor
The Seventh Doctor edited some of his "more useless" memories. (PROSE: Timewyrm: Genesys)
Eighth Doctor
The Eighth Doctor in particular was prone to amnesia. Immediately after regeneration, he lost all memories and forgot who he was. Interacting with the world around him, the Doctor was able to remember his clocks aboard the TARDIS, being with Puccini before he died, an encounter with Leonardo da Vinci, an early memory with his father on Gallifrey, and finally, his own identity. When the Bruce Master began to take the Doctor's body, he felt the Doctor's thoughts and memories including his recent experiences with Grace Holloway and the end of his seventh incarnation. (TV: Doctor Who)
Later on, the Doctor lost all his memories again, in a trap set by the Master. By mentally linking with his previous seven selves, the Eighth Doctor was able to regain what he'd lost, one incarnation at a time. (PROSE: The Eight Doctors) On another occasion, he erased his own memories after being forced to destroy Gallifrey, in order to store the compressed Matrix within his subconscious. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)
The Eighth Doctor also lost his memories inside the Cube, designed to suppress the psychic abilities of decommissioned soldiers, making him a useless subject for interrogation, to Eric Rawden's immense displeasure. (AUDIO: Something Inside) Later on, after being separated from his TARDIS for far too long, he lost them again while living on the planet Orbis. When Lucie Miller arrived, it took some time for him to remember. (AUDIO: Orbis)
During the Last Great Time War, the War Council were provided with the Doctor's memories and experiences of fighting the Daleks with his permission, which were recorded in the Dalek Combat Training Manual. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)
War Doctor
After the Doctor's first regeneration cycle successfully saved Gallifrey at the end the Last Great Time War, only the Eleventh Doctor retained any memory of this event, because "the time streams were out of sync". The War Doctor in particular believed he had destroyed Gallifrey using the Moment, (TV: The Day of the Doctor) causing the Ninth Doctor to punish himself for surviving, (PROSE: Meet the Doctor) refusing to take on travelling companions, by most accounts, (PROSE: The Eyeless) until Rose Tyler. (TV: Rose)
Ninth Doctor
The Ninth Doctor tried to remember his past by writing a journal. First, he remembered the "happy jumbled days" of his eighth incarnation, including travels with Charlotte Pollard, with Destrii and with Sam Jones. He found that the pages of the journal between the end of the Eighth Doctor's life and the beginning of his own life, a time which he did not remember, had been glued together and smelt like smoke, leaving their contents unknown to him. (PROSE: The Eighth Doctor Part 2)
In the early days of this incarnation, the Ninth Doctor claimed he couldn't remember the Death Zone incident, since this was "several lifetimes ago". (AUDIO: Way of the Burryman) However, the Eleventh Doctor would later recall taking the Seal of Rassilon from the Tremas Master. (TV: The Time of the Doctor)
After loudly announcing his status as a Time Lord at the Fluren Temporal Bazaar, (COMIC: Weapons of Past Destruction) the Doctor's memories became a valued prize. After luring the Doctor to her, Addison Delamar sought to auction off his memories only for the Doctor to broadcast them to the orbiting fleets. Overwhelmed by the Doctor's grief, the bidders left. (COMIC: The Bidding War)
Tenth Doctor
When his TARDIS collided with that of the Fifth Doctor, the Tenth Doctor was able to resolve the crisis having remembered watching himself do so from the perspective of his past self. (TV: Time Crash)
Like his other incarnations', the Tenth Doctor's memories were affected by a temporal crisis which left TARDIS travel almost impossible except between a series of Waypoints where they could recharge with vortex energy at every stop. Even being back in the Dalek City on Skaro, he was unable unable to remember his first encounter with the Daleks or the Genesis Incident, even with Sarah Jane Smith trying to jog his memory. (GAME: Lost in Time)
During the Kotturuh crisis, the Tenth Doctor was surprised to hear a message from the Eighth Doctor and admitted that his memories of him were "a bit wobbly", which he attributed to the circumstances of his earlier self's death, crash landing on Karn. (AUDIO: Echoes of Extinction, TV: The Night of the Doctor)
Eleventh Doctor
The Eleventh Doctor felt he had lived long enough to forget his own age. Unlike the Tenth Doctor, who was still plagued by his actions in the War, he could no longer remember the number of children on Gallifrey at the end of the Time War, having "moved on". (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
When stranded in the Void with a Type 1 TARDIS, the Doctor tried to tempt the ship to return to reality with his memories of the wonders in the universe. Rather than seeing beauty, the Type 1 saw only chaos and used the Void's energies to attack the universe, finding solace in the Doctor's memory of "silence will fall". The Type 1 was later convinced to abandon its crusade by the Doctor's TARDIS. (COMIC: The Lost Dimension)
A portion of the Doctor's memories, along with those of his companion Alice Obiefune, were stolen by the Scream and wound up in the Sapling. The influence of the memories allowed the Sapling to overcome their genocidal programming. (COMIC: The Scream)
All his memories were also transferred to his Ganger, made in his image. This meant both Doctors had the same relationship with Amy Pond, and the same basic consciousness, up to that point. The Ganger Doctor later sacrificed himself to stop another Ganger, Jennifer Lucas. (TV: The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People)
The Doctor offered his memories to Akhaten, nearly overwhelming the parasite with the weight of his life and experiences. (TV: The Rings of Akhaten)
When the Doctor was partially upgraded into the Cyberiad, his memories were partially accessed by Mr Clever, who used them to reconstruct the Cyberiad's knowledge of the Doctor and the Time Lords. In the subsequent chess game between the two, the Doctor wagered his memories to the Cyberiad for his freedom. (TV: Nightmare in Silver)
When repairing the telepathic circuits, the Doctor wiped all 1,200 years of his memory before Clara Oswald had him consult his Twelve Hundred Year Diary to help him remember. (TV: The History of the Doctor)
Before regenerating on Trenzalore, the Doctor remembered Amy Pond, "the first face this face ever saw." He also promised that he would not forget a 'one line of this life. Not one day.' (TV: The Time of the Doctor)
Twelfth Doctor
After regenerating, the Twelfth Doctor could not remember how to pilot the TARDIS, to Clara Oswald's horror, (TV: The Time of the Doctor) nor any of his friends' names. Upon finding that Clockwork Droids from the SS Marie Antoinette were cannibalising human body parts, he felt that the situation was familiar but could not identify it even after learning that the craft was a sister ship to the SS Madame de Pompadour, (TV: Deep Breath) which had been visited by the Tenth Doctor. (TV: The Girl in the Fireplace)
Later in life, all the Doctor's memories of Clara were erased, when both realised he had gone too far in her name, living through billions of years in his confession dial, dying again and again in a teleport-assisted loop, before staging a coup on Gallifrey, in order to pull Clara from her final moments. Afterwards, the Doctor told his story to a friendly face, who was in fact Clara, and did not recognise her. (TV: Heaven Sent / Hell Bent) This caused him to decide against erasing Bill Potts' memories, taking her on as a companion instead, during his time at St Luke's University. (TV: The Pilot) At the end of his life, the Twelfth Doctor was re-gifted his old memories, getting one last goodbye with Clara as a glass avatar of the Testimony Foundation. (TV: Twice Upon a Time)
The Twelfth Doctor had some suppressed memories, which he could sometimes remember, like meeting the Cloister Wraiths beneath the Capitol as a child. He believed that memories became stories, once they'd been forgotten. (TV: Hell Bent) By his time, the Twelfth Doctor had long since lost count of the number of deaths he'd seen, or the number of people he'd killed. He believed that moving on was the best way to save more lives, since outrage would only cause delays, while threats still lingered. (TV: Thin Ice)
An alternate version of the Twelfth Doctor, one who had joined the Voord, supplied them with a copy of his memories. The Voord used them to create the Museum of Terrible Fates as a trap for Clara Oswald. (COMIC: Four Doctors)
Thirteenth Doctor
As they regenerated into their next body, the Doctor relived memories from each of their past lives, recalling the magnificence of their TARDIS, (COMIC: The Many Lives of Doctor Who) Ian and Barbara, (COMIC: The Path of Skulls) the strangeness of some of their adventures, (COMIC: Card Conundrum) their love for London (COMIC: Invasion of the Scorpion Men) and for parts of Earth outside the UK, such as New York City. (COMIC: Time Lady of Means)
This regeneration, however, left the Thirteenth Doctor at a distance from her memories, while she tried to remember her own name again. Early on, she knew the word "doctor" was important, remembered her sonic screwdriver, and recalled having been "a white-haired Scotsman", but it took a face-to-face encounter with the Stenza Tzim-Sha to "knit [her] brain back together", restoring her memories. (TV: The Woman Who Fell to Earth)
Like her other incarnations', the Thirteenth Doctor's memories were affected by a temporal crisis which left TARDIS travel almost impossible except between a series of Waypoints where they could recharge with vortex energy at every stop. She realised this very quickly when she failed to recognise the place where the TARDIS had made an emergency landing, even though, by design, emergency landings were supposed to pick somewhere familiar — in this case, the Third Doctor's old UNIT HQ laboratory. (GAME: Lost in Time)
After learning about her past lives as the Timeless Child, meaning her own history was not what she remembered, the Thirteenth Doctor suffered a major identity crisis. (TV: The Timeless Children) Resolving that she was still the woman she chose to be, "the Doctor", who opposed the Daleks, (TV: Revolution of the Daleks) she pursued her only lead, Karvanista, desperate to find out more about the Division. (TV: The Halloween Apocalypse)
When given the chance, the Thirteenth Doctor was willing to sacrifice her own life in a time storm to get answers. However, the Mouri forced her out. While here, she re-experienced one lost memory in her personal time stream, reliving the Siege of Atropos from the Fugitive Doctor's perspective. (TV: Once, Upon Time) After being taken to Tecteun aboard Division Control, (TV: Survivors of the Flux) the Thirteenth Doctor was briefly able to enter the biodata module containing her stolen memories. It appeared to be an unstable structure. Swarm wrought destruction on these memories, however, in an act of revenge. The Doctor managed to claim the module but decided against opening it, trusting the TARDIS to hide it somewhere the Doctor would never find, unless she "really ask[ed] for it". (TV: The Vanquishers)
In a guide for her next incarnation, the Thirteenth Doctor admitted that she did not "remember much" of the War Doctor's experiences, but hoped that her successor would, stating that the War Doctor deserved to be remembered. (PROSE: A Short History of Everyone)
Fourteenth Doctor
After experiencing the bigeneration which created the Fifteenth Doctor, the Fourteenth Doctor and his new self, whom now existed separately from each other, reflected on their "whole lifetime". (TV: The Giggle [+]Loading...["The Giggle (TV story)"])
Fifteenth Doctor
Splitting from the Fourteenth Doctor as the result of a bigeneration, the Fifteenth Doctor and his past self reflected on their "whole lifetime". (TV: The Giggle [+]Loading...["The Giggle (TV story)"])
Parallel universes
In Auld Mortality's universe, the First Doctor, as in N-Space, had intended to leave Gallifrey only to be ambushed by his great grand-uncle Quences who wiped from the Doctor's memory his impulse to leave. The Doctor was regularly mindwiped and brainwashed through his robotic butler Badger before the unexpected arrival of Susan allowed the Doctor to break through the conditioning and restore his memories. (AUDIO: Auld Morality)
In the Unbound Universe, the Time Lords wiped the recently regenerated Third Doctor's memory of the knowledge needed to override the inhibitor on his TARDIS. (AUDIO: Sympathy for the Devil) Following the Great War leaving most of the universe dead, (AUDIO: The Library in the Body) the Doctor made a deal to buy it a few more centuries. This came at the cost of many of his memories, including his reuniting with the Master in Hong Kong. (AUDIO: The Emporium at the End)
Behind the scenes
- An early draft of The Zygon Inversion had the Twelfth Doctor claim not to remember his involvement with Operation Double, noting that it was over a thousand years ago for him. When Clara Oswald tells him that there were multiple Doctors present, he would initially conflate the event with the First Omega Crisis, the Game of Rassilon and the encounter with Big Ron.