September 8, 2024

"It's A Matter of Memory" - Part One

“I made myself a promise, that I'd soon forget we ever met. But something sure is wrong. I forgot to remember to forget”

In the years immediately following 1972’s The Three Doctors, fandom at large assumed, for the sake of simplicity and clarity if nothing else, that the First and Second Doctors must have forgotten their participation in the events of the story after being returned to their “bits of our timestream” (as the Troughton Doctor phrases it). On the face of it, that makes sense. A Doctor who has seen his own future and is able to recall it might try and avoid it, or at least disrupt it accidentally, and we had already seen the Time Lords block or erase the memories of the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe in The War Games (1969). 

Of course, it need not be a deliberate act on their, or anyone’s part, it could also have been an unavoidable natural process related to moving up and down one’s own timestream (a fan explanation seemingly endorsed more than a decade later in The Trial of A Time Lord (1986) when the Valeyard suggests that the Doctor’s amnesia is “possibly a side effect of being taken out of time”. What was important was that the Pertwee Doctor did not spend the events of the Omega crisis smugly sure it'll turn out okay; so he obviously can’t remember having done all this twice before. 

So far? So simple. Then the next multi-Doctor story came along. In The Five Doctors (1983, written by Terrance Dicks, who commissioned and edited The Three Doctors and re-drafted more than a little of it) the Troughton and Hurndall¹ Doctors clearly remember the events of The Three Doctors and we know this, because they say so out loud more than once.

Hurndall recognises Pertwee as he arrives in the Tomb of Rassilon shortly after him, and then later asks “Where’s the little fellow?” in reference to Troughton. Then the Troughton and Pertwee Doctors’ bickering relationship picks up where it left off in The Three Doctors and on both their parts. There’s none of the caginess from the beginning of the earlier story, and anyway, long before this, the Torughton Doctor has told a nostalgic Brigadier “Don’t forget Omega!”and commented of Lethbridge-Stewart’s replacement Colonel Crichton, “Mine was pretty unpromising too”. Both of which are direct references to the earlier serial. 

So clearly, the Hurndall and Troughton Doctors do remember the events of the ninth anniversary jamboree. Because we see and hear them do it. That’s inarguable. And bear in mind that the fan assumption that they wouldn’t was also an ex post facto imposition anyway. It was always itself a retcon, not prompted by the text itself but instead by external logic and a judicious application of Ockham’s Razor.  

The problem with this, of course, is that again the later Doctors don’t recall solving the whole Borusa/Rassilon problem on the last go around. The Davison Doctor is genuinely surprised that Borusa turns out to be the villain, which he wouldn’t be if he’d done this three times already. (He also, surely, wouldn’t have suspected Borusa of being the traitor in Arc of Infinity, he’d have known, three times over, that his betrayal was coming a bit later on?)

So, the First, Second and Third Doctors remember The Three Doctors during The Five Doctors, but the Second, Third and Fifth Doctors don’t remember The Five Doctors during The Five Doctors, despite them having done this already once, twice and three times each, right? 

Right.

A year and a bit later, the Troughton Doctor is back in The Two Doctors (1985). Again the latest Doctor in the story shows no recollection of having been through these events before. Initially, the script suggests that this is because history has changed and the Troughton Doctor died on Space Station Chimera, but this is quickly passed off as a red herring and replaced with something much less interesting in plot terms. There is also an off-hand mention of how the drug Dastari has given Troughton’s Doctor affects the memory. This works as a handwave for the purposes of this story alone but doesn’t help us in relation to any others.

(This story does, though, make clear that occasional contact between incarnations of the Doctor is an inevitable result of his lifestyle, and not just something that happens in extreme circumstances, by having the Colin Baker Doctor say “When you travel around as much as I do, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll run into yourself at some point.” A far cry from The Five Doctors’ claim “… it only happens in the direst emergencies”. But then much of The Two Doctors, especially the ending, seems like it’s setting up the Troughton Doctor and Jamie as recurring guest stars for late 1980s Doctor Who, and maybe this more casual explanation is meant to facilitate that.)

We can skip lightly over Dimensions in Time. Not because it doesn’t ‘count’ (whatever that means) but simply because the various Doctors don’t actually meet one another in it. They just sort of… Well, whatever it is that is happening there.² In that skipping we arrive at the end of the twentieth century in the process.

Another fan theory of this era, developed as a consequence of actually noticing what happens in the The Five Doctors rather than ignoring it, and that can be applied to The Two Doctors as well was that the “past” Doctors in multi-Doctor stories would remember what happened in them until they regenerated, at which point some process related to the transmogrification would remove those memories from the Doctor’s head. That’s something that works with relation to the twentieth century series, and allows us to see the Troughton Doctor’s three appearances after The War Games as a series of sorts, wherever in his life before it they fit.³

When Doctor Who came back in 2005, Russell T Davies initially expressed a lack of interest in multi-Doctor stories, very properly taking the view that the show needed to establish itself for the new century before indulging in such things. When one was made, two and a bit years into the revival, it was done as a charity minisode special, and not written by Davies despite him still being “showrunner” at this point. (Which might imply a genuine lack of personal creative interest in multi-Doctor stories on Davies’ part.) That’s not something that can be said of the writer of 2007’s Time Crash, Davies’ eventual successor as Doctor Who’s boss Steven Moffat, who would go on to write more multi-Doctor stories than anyone else. 

Time Crash is a splendid one-set, one-scene piece in which the David Tennant and Peter Davison Doctors bicker in a manner reminiscent of Troughton and Pertwee. At the beginning of the story, the Tennant Doctor is surprised that Davison’s has appeared, but by the end he is specifically able to save the day because he can remember the story from when he was played by Peter Davison. 

Let’s run through that for a second time, after all the Doctor did: At the beginning of the story the Tennant Doctor cannot remember being the Fifth Doctor in this story, but at the end of the story he can.

What this seemed to more or less prove, at least for the purposes of this story, is that the Tennant Doctor’s memories adapt around the change in his own personal history that meeting himself inevitably involves. At the beginning of the story he can’t remember it once but by the end he can remember it twice. This is literally just what happens onscreen.

This actually ties in nicely with another aspect of The Two Doctors. There, when the Troughton Doctor is infected by Androgum DNA the Colin Baker Doctor worries that the effects of this will eventually “reach me”, and at the middle of Part Three we do see this begin to happen. Yes, it is averted, but the later Doctor is aware that the actions of Dastari (which are prompted by the later Doctor and Jamie’s interference in Chessene’s plans) in hybridising the past Doctor could result in a timeline where he has lived his life in-between as a Time Lord/Androgum cross. 

So put these two stories together and what we have is another, more complex explanation for why the “current” Doctor doesn’t remember the events of a multi-Doctor story from when he was in it played by a different actor. It’s because the mere act of the Doctor meeting themselves involves a change to the Doctor’s own personal history, and they therefore can’t remember those events because they haven’t actually happened yet. They happen to each incarnation of the Doctor simultaneously and their memories are rewritten as they go. It’s a paradox (para-docs?)⁴ but it fits what we see onscreen in all multi-Doctor stories up to this point. 

In later Moffat stories, such as A Christmas Carol (2010) The Wedding of River Song (2011) and Night  and the Doctor: Good Night  we see that mere humans (e.g. Amy Pond and Kazran Sardick) can just about cope with the multiple overlapping sets of memories that result from having lived multiple versions of their own life, so it would be odd if Time Lords couldn’t. We also see both Amy and Kazran react to their own history changing and in the process changing their memories, but without it involving significant changes to where they are and what they are doing in their present.

For example, Amy is still going to marry the same man and on the same day in both the reality where she has parents and the one where she doesn’t because history is flexible enough to fix itself around that dislocation. This fits in with what we’re told in Turn Left (2008) - which is admittedly a Dr Lite story not a Dr Plus story - that the “time beetle” which attaches itself to Donna can feed on the changes in history it causes because it “...changes a life in tiny little ways. Most times, the universe just compensates around it.”

At the time, this seemed like the final piece of a puzzle. Albeit one no one had deliberately designed, and why the Second and Third Doctors remember The Three Doctors in The Five Doctors but not The Five Doctors from  the last time around in The Five Doctors? Because the events of these stories, involving as they do the Doctor’s past colliding with his present/future, rewrite history on the fly? 

This is what we see in microcosm in Time Crash. The later Doctors can’t remember the last time these stories happened to them until the end, because the whole thing hasn’t happened yet. The change to the Doctor’s own personal history is still in progress. This also fits neatly with the Sixth Doctor’s belief that it is possible his earlier self was killed on Space Station Chimera and means that there is jeopardy for the Doctor’s past selves in the Death Zone or on Omega’s World. That they have a future self does not mean they cannot die. 

And yet, in his column in Doctor Who Magazine #475 Steven Moffat himself proposed a different answer to my original question, and made detailed reference to the stories above. He did this because by that point he had written another multi Doctor story The Day of the Doctor which asked all of us new questions about this topic. But we’re going to come to that quote, and its implications for Moffat’s own multi-Doctor Who stories, in Part Two.