The Doctor's final incarnation
By some accounts, the Doctor eventually reached their final incarnation and then subsequently met their death.
Knowledge of the final Doctor[[edit] | [edit source]]
When Ruath used a Time Scoop to view the Doctor's time stream, she advanced the viewer to the Doctor's final face. After remarking "So that's what you become! Well, that's no good to me," she shifted the Time Scoop to the Fifth Doctor, whom she thought would be easier to manipulate. (PROSE: Goth Opera [+]Loading...["Goth Opera (novel)"])
The Tremas Master told the Sixth Doctor that the Valeyard was "an amalgamation of the darker sides of your nature, somewhere between your twelfth and final incarnation". (TV: The Ultimate Foe [+]Loading...["The Ultimate Foe (TV story)"]) This phrasing would be repeated by the Seventh Doctor (PROSE: Matrix [+]Loading...["Matrix (novel)"]) and the historical text A Brief History of Time Lords. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"]) One account, which identfied the Valeyard as a Watcher, specified that he was an amalgam of the dark side of the Doctor's final two incarnations. (PROSE: Last of the Time Lords? [+]Loading...["Last of the Time Lords? (feature)"])
Eventually, in an incident even more "strange" than the many "adventures and experiences" leading up to it, Dr Who arrived at the point in Infinity-Eternity where he found the "final goal" for which he had always been searching. (PROSE: Who is Dr Who? [+]Loading...["Who is Dr Who? (short story)"])
Some accounts doubted that there was ever such a thing as a final death of the Doctor, and consequently a final incarnation. Shortly before the Tenth Doctor's regeneration, Ood Sigma told him that although "[his] song [was] ending", "the story never ends". (TV: The End of Time [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"])
Identities of the final Doctor[[edit] | [edit source]]
The Doctor's thirteenth incarnation[[edit] | [edit source]]
By various accounts, the Doctor's final incarnation was the thirteenth of their original regeneration cycle.
By one account, the Tremas Master said that the Valeyard came from between the Doctor's twelfth and thirteenth incarnations. (PROSE: The Ultimate Foe [+]Loading...["The Ultimate Foe (novelisation)"])
In a story related by the Valeyard, the thirteenth and final incarnation of the Doctor supposedly composed a set of scrolls which detailed his work to bypass the limit of twelve regenerations and that the Valeyard himself was created as a Time Tot on a mud planet orbiting Etarho as a result of the Doctor's experiments. The Valeyard's claim, however, was doubted by the Sixth Doctor. Indeed, the Doctor found what appeared to be his final incarnation on Etarho to have been the Valeyard masquerading as him. (AUDIO: Trial of the Valeyard [+]Loading...["Trial of the Valeyard (audio story)"]) Following his eleventh regeneration, the Tenth Doctor continued to associate the Valeyard with his uncertain future and briefly suspected the successor to his next and apparently final incarnation of being him. (COMIC: Four Doctors [+]Loading...["Four Doctors (comic story)"])
When Ace entered the Doctor's mind, she saw that it had space for thirteen total selves, with the incarnations beyond the Seventh Doctor still being Watchers yet to be molded into distinct incarnations, including the final thirteenth incarnation. (PROSE: Timewyrm: Revelation [+]Loading...["Timewyrm: Revelation (novel)"])
The Relic[[edit] | [edit source]]
By one account, a Doctor lying in the Eighth Doctor's future appeared to have died in Dronid, and his body became the Relic, becoming the subject of an auction on Earth in the context of the War in Heaven. After the various powers who wanted to acquire the still-potent cadaver were dispatched, it fell to the pre-War Eighth Doctor to dispose of his future self's body, which he destroyed. (PROSE: Alien Bodies [+]Loading...["Alien Bodies (novel)"]) However, the War in Heaven would later "end" in such a way that it seemed never to have happened at all, resulting in a post-War universe where an amnesiac Eighth Doctor who had never gone on to fight in the War properly survived, never becoming the Relic. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell [+]Loading...["The Ancestor Cell (novel)"], The Adventuress of Henrietta Street [+]Loading...["The Adventuress of Henrietta Street (novel)"])
The Eleventh Doctor[[edit] | [edit source]]
As the War Doctor and the Tenth Doctor's siphoned regeneration had counted as two of his twelve regenerations, the latter was the Doctor's eleventh and penultimate regeneration. (TV: The Time of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Time of the Doctor (TV story)"]) Though the Tenth Doctor considered briefly that Jackson Lake could either be the "next Doctor" or the "next but one", (TV: The Next Doctor [+]Loading...["The Next Doctor (TV story)"]) he later believed that he only had one incarnation left, the Eleventh Doctor. When a Multi-Doctor Event brought the Tenth Doctor into contact with the Eleventh Doctor and the Twelfth Doctor, he was hesitant to believe that the latter was also his future self until the Blinovitch Limitation Effect proved it. (COMIC: Four Doctors [+]Loading...["Four Doctors (comic story)"])
As the Eleventh Doctor understood himself to be the "last Doctor", he did not initially believe that the Twelfth Doctor could be his future self when he encountered him during the younger Doctor's retirement in Victoria London. With his memory of this Multi-Doctor Event erased, (AUDIO: Regeneration Impossible [+]Loading...["Regeneration Impossible (audio story)"]) the Eleventh Doctor maintained the belief that he was the final incarnation of the Doctor up to the time he participated in the Siege of Trenzalore.
Twelve regenerations, Clara. I can't ever do it again. This is where I end up. This face, this version of me.
When he explained this to Clara Oswald, she acknowledged it as the currently-established set of events, but begged for him to "change the future". The Doctor told her that he was unable to rewrite the timeline on that scale, but that the Time Lords would have possessed that power at their height, prompting Clara to subsequently plead with the Time Lords through the crack in time connecting Trenzalore to Gallifrey. Accepting her request that they "help him change the future", they sent the Doctor a new regeneration cycle allowing him to enact a "regeneration #13" which transformed him into the Twelfth Doctor, averting his originally-fated point of death. (TV: The Time of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Time of the Doctor (TV story)"])
Ginger Doctor[[edit] | [edit source]]
According to one account, a ginger incarnation of the Doctor (PROSE: Battlefield [+]Loading...["Battlefield (novelisation)"]) "believed himself to be the last". Daughter of Mine mentioned him to the Thirteenth Doctor, who did not recognise this incarnation. (AUDIO: Shadow of a Doubt [+]Loading...["Shadow of a Doubt (audio story)"])
The Curator[[edit] | [edit source]]
The Curator, who had retired to become the curator of the National Gallery, (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) was seen as one of the Eleventh Doctor's future incarnations when his timeline became distorted, appearing at the end of his lifespan opposite to the First Doctor. (COMIC: The Then and the Now [+]Loading...["The Then and the Now (comic story)"]) However, numerous accounts presented evidence that the so-called First Doctor himself was not necessarily the true beginning of the Doctor's lifespan. (TV: The Brain of Morbius [+]Loading...["The Brain of Morbius (TV story)"], Fugitive of the Judoon [+]Loading...["Fugitive of the Judoon (TV story)"], The Timeless Children [+]Loading...["The Timeless Children (TV story)"], PROSE: Lungbarrow [+]Loading...["Lungbarrow (novel)"])
Behind the scenes[[edit] | [edit source]]
- Paul Cornell, who mentioned the Doctor's final incarnation in several of his stories, wrote a depiction of the Doctor's final life in his short story The Last Doctor.[1]
- Craig Hinton's Doctor Who lore indicated that the Doctor's thirteenth and final incarnation would survive after death as the Red Guardian.
- The unproduced comic story The Last Regeneration would have featured the final incarnation of the Doctor being ginger.
- Steven Moffat intended the character of Doctor Moon in Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead to be the uploaded mind of the Forty-Fifth Doctor who had died in battle. (REF: Showrunner Showdown [+]Loading...["Showrunner Showdown"])
