The Doctor's early life
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, the Doctor had always been a Time Lord from Gallifrey (TV: The War Games, The Time Warrior) and had not regenerated before leaving in the TARDIS. (TV: The Name of the Doctor, The Time of the Doctor)
However, the Doctor's own memories were unclear regarding their early life and origins, (COMIC: The World Shapers; PROSE: Who is Dr Who?, Unnatural History) and several accounts suggested that they had non-Gallifreyan origins (human or otherwise) (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Daleks; TV: Doctor Who, The Timeless Children) or incarnations before the one who fled Gallifrey. (TV: The Brain of Morbius, The Timeless Children, PROSE: Cold Fusion, Lungbarrow)
The many contradictory accounts of the Doctor's early life were equally and paradoxically true due to the Doctor's biodata being retroactively manipulated by a number of factors, (PROSE: Unnatural History) such as; Omega, (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors) Faction Paradox, (PROSE: Interference: The Hour of the Geek) subconscious regeneration influences, (PROSE: The Blue Angel) and, above all, the impact of the Doctor's own adventures through time. (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir)
Birth and origin
No agreement in origin
According to most accounts, the Doctor was born on the home planet of the Time Lords, (TV: The War Games) Gallifrey, (TV: The Time Warrior, Death in Heaven) "the oldest and most mighty race in the universe", (TV: The Sound of Drums) on the Holiday of Otherstide. (AUDIO: Cold Fusion) When asked by Organon what star sign he was born under, he said that he was born under the sign of Crossed Computers, the symbol of the Gallifreyan maternity service. (TV: The Creature from the Pit)
According to other accounts, however, the Doctor was a human named "Dr. Who", (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Daleks) originating from Victorian era Britain, (PROSE: Human Nature) or another planet entirely (TV: An Unearthly Child) in the 49th century. A young member of Faction Paradox claimed to the Eighth Doctor that his "original" home was indeed a colony in the 49th century, until it was invaded by the Enemy, causing him to flee; the Enemy subsequently began rewriting the Doctor's history bit by bit "while [he] wasn't looking". (PROSE: Unnatural History)
The Doctor recalled having a family (TV: The Tomb of the Cybermen) including a mother, a father, (TV: Doctor Who) an uncle, (TV: Time and the Rani) sisters, (TV: Arachnids in the UK) and seven grandmothers. (TV: It Takes You Away) However, the Eighth Doctor expressed uncertainty as to whether this family was real or a dream. (PROSE: Unnatural History) He had at least one brother, Irving Braxiatel, (PROSE: Tears of the Oracle) but Maris could find no Gallifreyan documentation on him despite hearing that he existed. (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir)
By some accounts, Time Lords were sterile as a result of the Curse of Pythia, and, as a result, they reproduced through mechanical Looms. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible, Lungbarrow) The Fifth Doctor remembered that he was loomed into the House of Lungbarrow on the holiday of Otherstide. (PROSE: Cold Fusion) After screaming as he was dragged out from the Loom, (PROSE: The Blue Angel) the Doctor's first word was "Again?" (PROSE: Human Nature) Maris found a birth notice claiming the Doctor had been loomed but also found various other, disagreeing, origins for the renegade. (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir)
By other accounts, the Doctor did have parents, (TV: Doctor Who, PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir) either because he was born before Rassilon's invention of Looms, (PROSE: Cold Fusion) or because all Time Lords had parents. (TV: The End of Time)
The Eighth Doctor claimed to Professor Wagg that his mother was human, which the Bruce Master also determined through analysis of the Doctor's retinal structure. (TV: Doctor Who) Although he would indicate to Chantir that this was a ruse to trick the Master, (COMIC: The Forgotten) the Eighth Doctor repeated the claim many times, (PROSE: Alien Bodies, The Infinity Doctors, The Scarlet Empress, Unnatural History, Grimm Reality) and personally struggled with whether he was half-human or Loomed, (PROSE: Autumn Mist, The Blue Angel, The Shadows of Avalon) as he could not remember which was true and which was a dream. (PROSE: The Shadows of Avalon)
The Eighth Doctor's memory of his mother's appearance resembled Penelope Gate, a human time traveller who had a child with the Time Lord Ulysses in the generation before the Doctor's; (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles) the Infinity Doctor remembered that his mother's name was Penelope. (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors) One of the many contradictory origins for the Doctor that Maris found was that the Doctor had been born to "a human mother" and a "Time Lord father" on Otherstide. (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir)
The Eleventh Doctor later insisted that his mother was a Time Lord, (COMIC: The Comfort of the Good) and the Twelfth Doctor neither confirmed nor denied Ashildr's speculation that he was a half-human half-Gallifreyan hybrid. (TV: Hell Bent) 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)
Memories of other lives
The Other
- Main article: The Other
Some accounts said that the Doctor's biodata included memories from a founder of Time Lord society called "the Other". (PROSE: Remembrance of the Daleks, et al.)
According to one account, these memories indicated that the Other was an old man from Victorian England who invented the TARDIS to help the police, then left Earth to introduce civilisation to a jungle planet called Gallifrey. (PROSE: Human Nature)
By one account, the Doctor had these memories because, after the Other committed suicide by throwing himself into the Prime Distributor for the Looms, he was reincarnated as the Doctor. The First Doctor eventually travelled back in time to early Gallifreyan history to pick up the Other's granddaughter, who instinctively recognised him as her grandfather. (PROSE: Lungbarrow) According to other accounts, the Other was instead an alias used by the Doctor when he travelled back in time to influence Rassilon in early Gallifreyan history. (PROSE: The Scrolls of Rassilon, COMIC: The Lost Dimension)
The Timeless Child
- Main article: Timeless Child
According to long-redacted information which the Spy Master found in the Matrix some time after Gallifrey returned from the Last Great Time War, the Doctor had originally been the Timeless Child, an endlessly regenerating being of an unknown species whom Shobogan explorer Tecteun found standing beneath a dimensional gateway on another planet. Across several regenerations, the Child was studied by their adoptive parent Tecteun, who used what they had discovered to grant regenerations to all Shobogans, turning them into the Time Lords of later Gallifreyan history.
Information about the Timeless Child's life after they were briefed about the Time Lord agency called the Division was redacted from the Matrix's databanks altogether, save in the highly allegorical form of the life of fictitious Irishman Brendan, which ended with Brendan's memories being forcibly and painfully erased as he retired from police duties. The Master believed that the Child, with their memory erased and their body regressed back into a child, had become the Doctor with whom he had attended the Academy. (TV: The Timeless Children) The image of the Timeless Child beneath the gateway was unearthed from the Doctor's most hidden memories by the Remnants on Desolation; (TV: The Ghost Monument) the Master later claimed that the history of the Child was buried "deep in all [Time Lords'] memories". (TV: Spyfall)
Soul
After the end of the War in Heaven, following the erasure of the Time Lords from history, (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell, The Adventuress of Henrietta Street) the Doctor was originally Soul, a member of the Council of Eight, who suffered amnesia and, after the two landed the Jonah in a junkyard in London, 1963, believed that Zezanne was his granddaughter. (PROSE: Sometime Never...)
Youth and upbringing
The Doctor was born with a name which they would come to "conceal in despair". (TV: The Shakespeare Code)
The Sixth Doctor said that he was considered a "plebeian" on Gallifrey. (AUDIO: Cortex Fire) According to Clara Oswald, however, the Doctor was born "into wealth and privilege". (TV: Robot of Sherwood) Ashildr similarly described the Doctor as "a high-born Gallifreyan". (TV: Hell Bent) The Eighth Doctor himself remembered growing up with all the privilege that came with belonging to an "important", political family on Gallifrey. (AUDIO: Must-See TV)
The Third Doctor remembered living in a "house that was perched halfway up the top of a mountain" in 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) The Doctor grew up in Lungbarrow, either with his parents (PROSE: Unnatural History) or his cousins, who would call him cruel names to reflect the fact that he was loomed with a belly button. As a result, the Doctor grew up a lonely and depressed youth. (PROSE: Lungbarrow)
As a Time Tot, the Doctor played hide and seek with the 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 42 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)
The Doctor grew up in a large city. When he asked his mother where babies came from, she told him that they were delivered by storks, a claim that he was suspicious of given how few storks he saw before going to a zoo at the age of ten. He heard that a baby was due next door and watched the house, seeing the midwife come and go and making him think that the new baby had been brought by her in her bag. The Sixth Doctor would later blame his "idiot parents" for not telling him about sex. (PROSE: The Twin Dilemma)
As a child, the Doctor would play in the tunnels under the Panopticon. (AUDIO: Order of the Daleks) He also toyed with trains, (TV: The Evil of the Daleks) and had a dream to one day drive one. (TV: Black Orchid) He also watched a meteor storm on Gallifrey with his father, (TV: Doctor Who) and read a book about the von Neumann seeding probe's landing on Gallifrey. (PROSE: Spore) When the Second Doctor met children in the Land of Fiction who seemed to be from an E. Nesbit or Kenneth Grahame story, he found they reminded him of "golden summer days and childhoods long ago". (PROSE: The Mind Robber)
Among his favourite bedtime stories were The Three Little Sontarans, The Emperor Dalek's New Clothes, Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday (TV: Night Terrors) and Maximelos and the Three Ogrons. (PROSE: Nothing O'Clock) Granny Five, the Doctor's favourite among his grandmothers, told him bedtime stories about the Solitract when he couldn't sleep. (TV: It Takes You Away) The Doctor also heard stories about the Solvers and drew crayon sketches of them. (AUDIO: The Doomsday Chronometer)
When he was just a "small child", the Doctor's mother told him the story of Grandfather Paradox. It scared the Doctor so much that he worried that Grandfather Paradox was hiding in his wardrobe or under his bed. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles) He was also frightened by the "mythological horror" stories about the Fendahl. (TV: Image of the Fendahl) Other legends he learned included the Pantheon of Discord, (TV: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith) the Kin, (PROSE: Nothing O'Clock) the Shakri, (TV: The Power of Three) and the Kar-yns. (COMIC: Tulpa)
He 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 lingering, whispering to him from the waves. (PROSE: Matrix)
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 Doctor disliked this form of learning and often caused distractions and tried to escape his lessons. (PROSE: Lungbarrow) He looked up to Omega as his people's greatest hero. (TV: The Three Doctors)
According to the Twelfth Doctor, "as a boy" he always wanted to drive a steam train - as soon as he knew what a steam train was as they didn't have them on Gallifrey. (PROSE: A History of Humankind)
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) and the Ninth Doctor identified himself as the "only child left out in the cold". (TV: The Empty Child) His imaginary friends included Binker (AUDIO: The Abandoned) and Mandrake. (AUDIO: The Widow's Assassin) According to the Eighth Doctor, he had no friends as a child "for a long time", and spent much of his time crying alone in the dark. (AUDIO: Must-See TV)
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 (TV: The Deadly Assassin) in the Class of 92. (TV: The Armageddon Factor) He received tutelage from Borusa, (TV: The Deadly Assassin) Azmael (TV: The Twin Dilemma) and Gostak. (AUDIO: The End of the Beginning) 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 had a room at the Academy, (AUDIO: Time in Office) and 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, the Doctor formed a strong attachment with the Master. 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) The Master suspected that he had a crush on him from the start. (AUDIO: The Bekdel Test) According to an account which portrayed the War Chief as a different Time Lord from the Master, the Doctor also befriended him on his first day. (PROSE: Divided Loyalties) According to River Song, the Doctor also had a crush on the Rani while they were at the Academy. (AUDIO: The Bekdel Test)
While they were "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) The Doctor, the Master, and the Rani formed a trio. Borusa realised none of them would have a future on their homeworld. The Doctor was also happy to be a scientist, and spent his time preforming "silly" chemistry experiments with his other friend Drax. (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey) The Doctor also had a friendly relationship with Vansell, whom he called "Nosebung". They also both knew a student with the nickname "Toast rack". (AUDIO: Neverland)
During his time at the Time Lord Academy, the Doctor's personal hero was Omega, (AUDIO: Omega) whose statue in the Capitol was ancient by the time the Doctor was attending the academy. (COMIC: The Lost Dimension) While at the 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 the Twelfth Doctor, 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) When skipping classes, the Doctor and the Master would hide from Borusa in the alleys of the Capitol. (TV: The Timeless Children) The Sixth Doctor retained traumatic memories of once being chided by one of his teachers, Professor Findle, for being "a nasty piece of work" whose only concern was to "meddle". (PROSE: Power to the People)
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," the Doctor went to visit the Hermit 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, the Hermit 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 were some of the finest hours of his life with the Hermit, 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 the Hermit the name of the mountain on which he dwelled. He had been told by Old Lady Nine Teeth that it was called Plutarch, while 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) Later, Ansillon claimed that as the Hermit he had guarded the caves of Perdition. (AUDIO: Blood of the Time Lords)
The Doctor left the Gallifreyan equivalent of primary school at the age of forty-five. (PROSE: Shroud of Sorrow)
The Doctor was originally a medical student and took the Hippocratic Oath. Although he gave it up after two years to instead specialise in science, he still stood by his oath to help the sick long after he left Gallifrey. (AUDIO: Farewell, Great Macedon)
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) where he sealed the rift. (PROSE: Report on Term's Work) 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) The Thirteenth Doctor remembered hot-wiring warp drives as a teenager on weekends, though she quickly noted that Gallifrey had neither "teenagers" nor "weekends". (TV: Ascension of the Cybermen)
When the Doctor was a young boy, Borusa scolded him 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. He told the Doctor, about the process: "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 his friend Padrac. (AUDIO: The Eleven) At some point in his youth, the Doctor became addicted to using vortex manipulators, with his eleventh incarnation recalling himself as a "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) and to preform forbidden science experiments. (AUDIO: The Eleven) The Doctor, the Master, the Rani and at least seven other young Gallifreyans were part of a group called "the Deca". (AUDIO: The Rani Elite, PROSE: The Quantum Archangel)
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." Despite this, the First Doctor believed 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) played games with the principle of transmigration, (PROSE: Interference: Shock Tactic) and learnt of the species that had risen to prominence in the Dark Times known as the "Old Ones". (PROSE: The Knight, The Fool and The Dead)
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 and rejected an offer to retake it, making him unqualified to operate a TARDIS. (PROSE: Festival of Death) His tenth incarnation would later state he had failed the test all together. (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 in the same tech course as the First 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. (PROSE: The Frozen Wastes) By some accounts, the Doctor remembered being a pioneer amongst his people. (TV: The Rescue; PROSE: Cold Fusion) By another account, because the Time Lords had already explored every time and place, he didn't believe there was any point to him fulfilling this dream, and he sought another reason to have hope. (PROSE: The Frozen Wastes) The Doctor did once visit the world of Machasma with the Master at one point. (AUDIO: Darkness and Light)
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)
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) 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)
According to a nightmare the Fifth Doctor had under the Celestial Toymaker's influence, the First Doctor 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) According to other accounts, the Doctor continued his education and graduated. (COMIC: The Friendly Place, TV: The Ribos Operation) et. al)
The Doctor earned a Higher-Dimensional Physics degree at "Time Lord University" and 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) He passed his qualifying exams to become a Time Lord with only 51% — the lowest possible pass mark — on his second attempt. (TV: The Ribos Operation) A low mark on an essay about temporal mechanics that he wrote contributed to his low passing grade. Even years later, however, he insisted the paper deserved a higher mark. (COMIC: The Lost Dimension) By one account, his low grades were a deliberate ploy to not to draw undue attention to himself, so he could eventually leave Gallifrey, (PROSE: Tears of the Oracle) while other accounts indicated they were the grades he truthfully deserved. (COMIC: The Lost Dimension, et. al)
He graduated with "only" a double gamma. (AUDIO: The Rani Elite) The Doctor graduated with the Master in the Panopticon. (TV: The Timeless Children) The Doctor's time at the Academy, like the rest of their early life, was in flux due to their travels through time, as Maris found while investigated this point in the Doctor's life; she found one document that claimed he attended the school for twenty years, while another claimed his education was centuries long, while other evidence claimed he was expelled, possibly for his political ideals. When she visited the Academy, it seemed as if everyone remembered the Doctor, but there was no agreement on what his schooling was like; she both heard that he graduated with high grades and that he barely graduated with his 51 percent mark. (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir)
The Fourth Doctor once claimed to have received an O-level in Starship Weaponry from Gallifrey Comp. (COMIC: Doctor Who and the Star Beast)
While the Thirteenth Doctor once claimed to have received a doctorate at the "University of Gallifrey", (COMIC: Herald of Madness) Maris found evidence that the Doctor never obtained a doctorate, only to also find evidence that the Doctor had. She also found evidence that he had a degree in cheesemaking. (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir) Indeed, the Eleventh Doctor once stated he had a doctorate in both cheesemaking and medicine. (TV: The God Complex) Maris also found evidence that there was a warrant for the Doctor's arrest, only for there to be no record for such a warrant in her notes. Maris also believed "Time Lord University" did not exist but found evidence that the Doctor studied Higher-Dimensional Physics there and that the Doctor trapped one of the school's lecturers in a time loop, only to be sanctioned by the chancellor of the university. (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir)
Career
Career on Gallifrey
Though in one account, the Doctor worked as a lowly Scrutationary Archivist in the Bureau of Possible Events, (PROSE: Lungbarrow) others held that he rose high in the ranks of the Time Lords, (PROSE: The Eight Doctors) until he was considered a "superior" on Gallifrey by some in the incarnation later known as the First Doctor. (COMIC: Flashback)
According to the Scrolls of Gallifrey, the Doctor soon became a Councillor, much like the War Chief, and enjoyed a long but unfulfilling career which he saw as little more than that of an "intergalactic policeman"; he made no secret of wanting more out of life than this. (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey) The Second Doctor later claimed 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)
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)
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) According to one account, this ban occurred during the Presidency of Rassilon and some time before the Eternal War. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords)
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, the First Doctor saved a glowing life form from being killed by his old friend Magnus, resulting in a falling out between the two. (COMIC: Flashback)
Prior to his departure from Gallifrey, the First Doctor was in contact with the Corsair. On the instructions of a future Doctor, the Corsair stole the Hand of Omega to bring it to him. (PROSE: One Virtue and a Thousand Crimes)
A brilliant scientist of Earth
One account referred to the Doctor as the greatest human mathematician, whose equations had at long last united Space and Time fully into the inextricable concept of the Idea of the Living Matter. This had allowed him to construct the TARDIS, a machine which could withstand and travel through Eternity and Infinity in a microsecond. (PROSE: The Equations of Dr Who)
A similar account identified Dr Who as being to Albert Einstein what Einstein had been to Isaac Newton, a master-mind who had at last fully understood spacetime and would come to use the knowledge to set out on a mysterious odyssey across all of Time and Space. (PROSE: Who is Dr Who?)
Dr Who was well-known to Earth's government in the space age and resided there, notably being called by them as a matter of course to interrogate a Dalek who had been found adrift in space. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Daleks)
Family life
Children, grandchildren, and friendships
According to one account, one early incarnation of the Doctor married Patience, and they had thirteen children together. Eventually, the First Doctor traveled back in time, rescued Patience and her granddaughter from danger on Ancient Gallifrey. Patience was unsure of who the First Doctor was but then observed that he wore her husband's ring. (PROSE: Cold Fusion) The First Doctor later stated that he "supposed you could put it that way" when asked if he had sons, daughters, or both. (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 stated that Susan was his grandchild, (TV: "The Rescue", Marco Polo, The Sensorites, "Flashpoint") documents on Gallifrey were deliberately obscure about Susan's origins, 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 who had stowed away on the Doctor's TARDIS. (PROSE: Birth of a Renegade) Other accounts had her being rescued from the time period of the Other by the Doctor, (PROSE: Lungbarrow, Cold Fusion) who later adopted her as his granddaughter. (PROSE: The Longest Story in the World)
However, the Curator maintained that Susan was the Doctor's biological granddaughter. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor) According to one account, 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)
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, who had come to know the Master (AUDIO: The Toy) but feared him, (PROSE: Time and Relative) to watch him and a group of Prydonians perform a ritual in Arcadia. During the occasion, the Master gave Susan a toy that was secretly a communication device he would use to track the Doctor if he ever left their homeworld. (AUDIO: The Toy)
Regenerations
According to most accounts, the Doctor's trip with his granddaughter Susan to a junkyard in London, 1963, occurred before his first regeneration. (TV: The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors, The Time of the Doctor, Twice Upon a Time) However, by some accounts, the Doctor had already regenerated several times before he went with Susan to the junkyard, (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius, The Power of the Daleks, Cold Fusion) though the Eleventh Doctor told Clara Oswald that he had regenerated only twelve times after that body. (TV: The Time of the Doctor)
Patience reminded the Doctor of several lifetimes he spent as her husband. A renowned explorer, the Doctor was a pioneer and lived in the House of Blyledge. The Doctor had thirteen children across several incarnations and multiple grandchildren, although most of his family was killed in a government culling of the womb-born. The First Doctor traveled back to this period, rescued his past-self's newborn granddaughter Susan, and met with Patience in order to rescue her. (PROSE: Cold Fusion)
While the First Doctor was able to remember being a pioneer amongst his people, (TV: The Daleks) the Fifth Doctor and the Sixth Doctor had only vague memories of their life from before what they remembered to be their second regeneration, (PROSE: Cold Fusion; COMIC: The World Shapers) with great chunks were missing further back. (PROSE: Cold Fusion) According to one account, these memories of the Doctor's earliest lives were wiped by the Divison, explaining why the Doctor had assumed they only regenerated thirteen times because they were made into a child once more. (TV: The Timeless Children)
During 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) The Fourth Doctor later told Romana that "Time Lords have ninety lives", and that he himself had already gone through "about a hundred and thirty". (TV: The Creature from the Pit) Xoanon, a computer copy of the Doctor's brain, spoke with not just the Fourth Doctor's voice (TV: The Face of Evil) but also voices resembling Chub's, Toos', (TV: The Face of Evil, The Robots of Death) and Parsons'. (TV: The Face of Evil, The Invisible Enemy)
Leaving Gallifrey
- Main article: The Doctor and Susan's escape from Gallifrey
According to reports found by Maris, the First Doctor, two days before he left Gallifrey, was involved in a riot and become wanted by the Celestial Intervention Agency for "interfering in non-time-travel-capable species' development". Maris then found documentation that disagreed with this story, leaving her confused as to the Doctor's past. She later realised the Doctor's past was constantly changing. (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir)
According to the Tremas Master the Doctor had fled Gallifrey during reprisals after a failed student revolution, accompanied by Lady Larna who had been hiding in the TARDIS which he stole. He knew Larn as “Susan” and she affectionately called him “grandfather”. (PROSE: Birth of a Renegade)
One account depicted the Doctor and Susan leaving Gallifrey to take the Hand of Omega away from the current chaos on the planet. (COMIC: Time & Time Again)
An Astral Projection of the Doctor's life depicted him fleeing Gallifrey alone with the Hand of Omega after his Cousin Glospin claimed to have evidence that didn’t originally come from the House of Lungbarrow’s loom. The Hand of Omega guided his TARDIS back to the Dark Time where he encountered the Other’s granddaughter, who recognised him as her grandfather. (PROSE: Lungbarrow)
The Eighth Doctor recalled leaving Gallifrey accompanied by Susan after she caught up with him as he was about to close the TARDIS door. (PROSE: The Eight Doctors)
The Doctor's brother, Irving Braxiatel, who held the position of Lord Burner to President Pandad VII, allowed "an old man" and "his granddaughter" to flee Gallifrey, even though Braxiatel had been given the order to erase them from history. The very same day, President Pandad died when a power relay in his office overloaded; an inquiry headed by Braxiatel found that this was an "accident". (AUDIO: Disassembled)
One account depicted the Doctor and Susan together being chased by armed guards into a repair shop (AUDIO: The Beginning) where the Doctor was guided to steal one particular TARDIS by an echo of Clara Oswald. (TV: The Name of the Doctor)
Some accounts held (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) or implied that Susan was the daughter of the President of the High Council at that time. (TV: Hell Bent) Susan later recalled the Doctor had not explained why they needed to flee Gallifrey. According to her memories of the event, he simply told her they needed to get away, and she explained the recollection by saying that Gallifrey "just wasn't our home anymore." (AUDIO: The Beginning)
The Master and the Rani were desperate to know where the Doctor had gone, while the Doctor's original TARDIS hired Maris to find her owner. (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir) According to some dissenting accounts, Dr. Who himself built the Tardis he escaped him. (TV: "The Executioners", PROSE: The Equations of Dr Who, Human Nature)
Behind the scenes
- In light of the revelations in The Timeless Children, Jonathan Morris theorised that Xoanon's non-Tom Baker voices (provided by Pamela Salem, Rob Edwards, Anthony Frieze and Roy Herrick), as heard in The Face of Evil, may in fact have been drawn from forgotten incarnations of the Doctor (similar to the Brain of Morbius Doctors) which Xoanon had drawn from the Doctor's subconscious.[1]
