October 2, 2024

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

“Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. Turn and face the strange ch-ch-changes.”

Last month, we were looking at the question of multi-Doctor stories, and whether the “past” Doctors can remember what happened in them - and concluded that the on-screen evidence, contrary to fan assumption, suggested that they did, with the first three Doctors remembering The Three Doctors in The Five Doctors. If you need to catch up with that, that post is here.

“There’s a phenomenon among multi-aspect Time Lord self-encounters, which would be better documented if I hadn’t just made it up, called Memory Syncing. With more than one Doctor in play memories can start leaking from one to the other. What, you doubt me? Then how, pray, did the Second Doctor know the fate of Zoe and Jamie in The Five Doctors when that was still in his future? yeah, not so clever now, are you! we’re not just making this up as go, you know.”

Steven Moffat, Doctor Who Magazine #475

What Mr Moffat is doing here is proposing that the reason the first three Doctors can remember the events of The Three Doctors in The Five Doctors is that they gained some of the memories of their later incarnations due to them all being in the Death Zone; with the implication being that reason they forget them in the first place for a similar, or at least connected reason.  

While Moffat passes the idea of as a bit of silly improvisation we’re all free to quibble with, the logic of it does seem to underlie his own The Day of the Doctor (2013) and its novelisation.¹ “The timelines are out of sync. You can’t retain it.” the Smith Doctor tells Doctor Hurt as they celebrate saving Gallifrey.

This seems to offer a natural, physical explanation for how the Doctor(s) could forget such extraordinary events and more than once. It perhaps ties in with the Tennant Doctor’s comment earlier in the story that having “three of us [together] could cause some pretty serious anomalies”.

Perhaps the forgetting and the anomalies are part of the same problem/solution? This also covers why the Smith Doctor does not seem to remember meeting his future incarnation (the Curator) when expecting to die in The Time of the Doctor and would also suggest that proximity to the Valeyard should mean the Sixth Doctor will forget most of the trial scenes in The Trial of a Time Lord. (Lucky him.)

But other aspects of The Day of the Doctor itself cut against this idea. Unlike previous stories in which past Doctors reappear alongside the series’ present star, there’s no difficulty in pinpointing when The Day of the Doctor happens for the Tennant Doctor. 

At the beginning of The End of Time (2009/10) the Tennant Doctor recalls marrying Elizabeth I, something that happens in The Day of the Doctor and in the presence of Doctors Smith and Hurt, neatly placing this story between that one and The Waters of Mars. But according to the logic above, he shouldn’t be able to remember it all.

Equally, earlier in The Day of the Doctor, the Tennant Doctor is outraged that the Smith Doctor cannot remember events in 1562 from when he was, er, him and Smith doesn’t offer “out of sync timelines” as an excuse. Earlier still, as the portal between the twenty first century and 1562 opens, the Smith Doctor says “I remember this… almost remember,” muddying the waters still further. 

But fundamentally, the Tennant Doctor has already been shown to remember the events of The Day of the Doctor in a story made four years before it. Now this is really very swish of Mr Moffat, but it causes problems for his “forgetting and local wi-fi” theory of Time Lord memories, because it means he can’t forget what happened when he was with The War Doctor and Doctor Smith, because we have seen him remember it already. 

Furthermore, in The Five Doctors the Troughton Doctor refers to “Omega” when talking to the Brigadier on twentieth century earth, which is before he’s in close proximity with his other selves. So the “wi-fi” explanation won’t fly for that one. On top of that, in The Time of the Doctor, which is both a Moffat story and immediately after The Day of the Doctor, the Smith Doctor recalls being given the Seal of Rassilon in the Death Zone by The Master. This happened to the Pertwee Doctor in The Five Doctors.

If the “past” Doctors’ memories of events in multi-Doctor stories leave their heads and are only returned when they’re in close proximity of their future selves, then how can he remember this? He can’t. 

The “wi-fi” explanation also, to be honest, doesn’t work terribly well for the scene with the “phantom” Jamie and Zoe in The Five Doctors itself. Why so? Well, even if the Troughton Doctor had somehow picked up on the Pertwee Doctor’s memories of his trial (and that this point in the story he doesn’t yet know he’s in a multi-Doctor one) and thus knew Jamie and Zoe’s ultimate fate, surely he wouldn’t have taken the risk of killing them by stepping into the Schrödinger’s force field with which they present him? 

After all, if the Troughton Doctor is, as he surely has to be, from before The War Games then even if he (temporarily) knows what eventually happens to Jamie and Zoe, he also has another, younger Jamie and Zoe travelling with him. Presumably sitting in the TARDIS in 1983 wondering how much longer he’s going to be at this shindig of the Brig’s and speculating why they weren’t invited for canapes. It could be this Jamie and Zoe that are behind the force field and the Doctor would be risking their deaths to do as he does in that scene.²

There is also a broader problem with this. Yes, the “wi-fi” idea is articulated in Dalek (2005) The Sound of Drums (2007) and The End of Time, and all of them make clear that the Doctor ought to be aware of the presence of other Time Lords when they’re on the same planet as him. (This doesn’t seem to be the case in the twentieth century series, so maybe it’s something that is only so post Last Great Time War. Or maybe this kind of wi-fi reception is as spotty as that on trains in the UK.) However, other stories seem to suggest that this telepathic “wi-fi” field doesn’t apply when those two Time Lords are in fact the same Time Lord.  

In Time Crash, the Davison Doctor not only does not recognize Tennant s being himself, but does not even recognize him as a Time Lord. Indeed he suggests Tennant is a fan “One of that LINDA lot!” and therefore implicitly human. Or maybe an Abzorbaloff. In The Next Doctor, Tennant’s Doctor believes it perfectly plausible (at least initially) that Jackson Lake is a future incarnation of himself; and in The Day of the Doctor, it is the Curator's face that the Smith Doctor recognizes (and indeed vice versa) they do not achieve mutual recognition through “wi-fi”. Later, in Fugitive of the Judoon (2020) a great deal is made of the fact that the two Doctors don’t / can’t recognise each other.

Further support for the Doctor's inability to recognise themself via telepathy is found in The Five Doctors, were the Hurndall Doctor does not recognise Davison as being a future Doctor ("Who might he be?") but does recognise the Troughton and Pertwee incarnations as such, but only because he remembers meeting them before in a story he shouldn’t be able to remember.

All these examples seem to suggest that, at best, Time Lords are automatically telepathically aware of one another unless the Time Lord in question is themselves, not especially if the Time Lord is themselves. In such cases, telepathic contact must be deliberately initiated, as shown in The Three Doctors where, despite being in close proximity, the Pertwee Doctor does not have the Troughton’s awareness of the situation on Gallifrey until after their first telepathic conference.

This suggests that very far from there being a “wi-fi” effect, multiple incarnations of the same Time Lord in the same place are telepathically oblivious to one another unless they make a deliberate effort not to be. This may, in fact, be a biological safety method to guard against the very problems caused by crossing one’s own time-stream in the first place. 

So Steven’s theory, which he openly invited quibbling with, so I don’t feel too bad³ about doing so, doesn’t quite work. Not in reference to the actual TV stories. Including the ones he wrote. So it can’t quite be the complete explanation. It has to be just part of what inconsistently happens when the Doctor meets themselves. 

So, what have we got? 

Well, since then we’ve had a couple more multi-Doctor stories, Moffat’s own Twice Upon A Time (2017) and the aforementioned Fugitive of the Judoon (2020) from Vinay Patel and Chris Chibnall. In the former, the Capaldi Doctor encounters the Hartnell (Bradley) Doctor at the very end of his life, literally a scene of so from the end of it in fact, and in it Bradley does not have memories of The Three or The Five Doctors, nor does he regain them through “wi-fi” once he comes within close proximity of Caps.

This is because, of course, it’s important for plots and character reasons for Bradley’s Doctor to not know about his future until he meets Capaldi’s, even though those other multi-Doctor stories must be in his past, what with him only having a few hours to live.

What might be in play in here is another fan theory, and one I favoured myself for a number of years; that the “past” Doctors retain their memories of their encounters with their future selves, but lose them when regenerating, as part of some process to protect the timeline. Whether that’s a natural result of regeneration, timelines being out of sync or something built into the process at some point, we don’t know.

A version of this underlay early drafts of The Zygon Invasion (2015) where the Capaldi Doctor couldn’t remember The Day of the Doctor, but Clara could, but this version never reached the screen. But it might explain why the Hurndall Doctor in The Five Doctors can remember being the Hartnell Doctor in The Three Doctors, but the Bradley Doctor of Twice Upon A Time can’t remember either. We know he’s already started regenerating. It’s even used as an excuse for David Bradley not being identical to William Hartnell. Maybe the memory is the first to go?

Of course, this can’t work entirely with reference to The Day of the Doctor, because a Tennant Doctor who could remember the events of the end of The Day of the Doctor would behave very differently in The End of Time than he does onscreen. So given that we know the Tennant Doctor doesn’t forget marrying Elizabeth I with past and future hims as witnesses, and given that we also know that the Tennant and Hurt Doctors will forget saving Gallifrey because we are actually told this, then the “timelines out of sync” explanation refers only to the saving of Gallifrey, but not the preceding story with the Zygons. (Possibly this is somehow related to the time lock or the parallel pocket universe into which Gallifrey is dumped. I don’t know.) 

However, there’s another way: take the “re-writing your own history” hypothesis I came up with in Part One, and apply it to The Day of the Doctor. Maybe the events of The Day of the Doctor do, like The Three Doctors, etc, have an impact on the Doctor’s personal history, and there’s confirmation is in the story itself? After all, when the Tennant, Smith and Hurt Doctors are held in the cell at the Tower of London the Tennant Doctor says to Doctor Hurt: “It must be really recent for you? The Time War. The last day. The day you killed them all.” 

It doesn’t occur to Smith or Tennant’s Doctors that Dr Hurt could be from during the Time War, presumably because the events are, as the series has stated more than once “time locked” and travel in and out of them, even time travel in and out of them, is meant to be impossible. He has to be from after.  

What this has to mean is that, as far as the Tennant Doctor’s memory is concerned, he carried on being John Hurt for some time after the Time War ended. Otherwise, there would be no time/place for the Hurt Doctor to visit his future selves from. Except that we see Doctor Hurt regenerate (most of the way) into Christopher Eccleston immediately after he leaves his future selves in the gallery. This leaves no time at all between the Last Day of the Time War and him regenerating.

It’s a strange inverted echo of the Troughton Doctor The War Games / The Five Doctors problem and again it strongly suggests that the simple act of the Doctor meeting himself unavoidably produces changes to his own personal history. (This is something that we know is at least possible because in The Day of the Doctor itself an incredulous Tennant Doctor asks his next self “You’re not actually suggesting we change our own personal history?” He’d hardly ask this question if it was actually impossible to do.)

The Doctor(s) saving Gallifrey also suggests this. While the story tries hard to suggest that this might have been what secretly happened all along, and that the Doctor has been wrongly carrying guilt for centuries, this isn’t necessarily so. In Dalek the Eccleston Doctor says that he “saw” the Time Lords burn and in The Day of the Doctor itself, the Tennant and Smith Doctors repeat that.

SMITH DOCTOR: 

Because the alternative is burning.

TENNANT DOCTOR: 

And I’ve seen that.

SMITH DOCTOR: 

And I never want to see it again.

Surely means that the first time round, Gallifrey really did burn and the Doctor(s) do alter history when they save it. 

As fans we’re tying ourselves in knots because of a simple fannish need. To know that Doctor Who happened as we saw it. But Doctor Who itself tells us that characters’ own personal histories can be rewritten, meaning that events cannot have transpired exactly as we saw them onscreen. We also see that cancelling out or altering certain events in someone’s past doesn’t necessarily have an impact on their present self’s personality and location. (I.e. surely an Amelia Pond with parents wouldn’t experience the events of The Eleventh Hour in the way they unfolded onscreen). Thus the Doctor can change his own personal history without it having an enormous impact on their own present moment, unless circumstances are particularly extreme.⁴

The Doctor’s past now happened differently to how it played out on television and that we therefore shouldn’t expect the details of these two serials to match, any more than we expect The Eleventh Hour to magically contain Amy’s parents once we’ve watched The Big Bang. (It doesn’t, I checked.)

So, there you go. The Doctors do (usually) remember the events of multi-Doctor stories, excepting that time they saved Gallifrey at the end of the Last Great Time War, and the reason we don’t see the Doctor's remembering events from past Doctor adventures prior to them happening is because those events change the course of the Doctor’s own personal history, sometimes in small ways and sometimes in massive ways.  

The events of The Three Doctors and the changes to the Doctor’s past that resulted meant that the First and Second Doctor’s lives unfurled differently, the Second Doctor that we see in The Five Doctors has certainly lived this altered history. This Second Doctor was caught by the Time Lords and sent on his way without Jamie and Zoe, but he didn’t regenerate immediately afterwards. At some point before or subsequently, possibly after history had changed again, he, along with Jamie and Victoria ran missions for the Time Lords.  

Because of the events of The Day of the Doctor, the War Doctor saved Gallifrey (although he forgot he did) and regenerated into the Eccleston Doctor earlier and in different circumstances. And so on. 

Alternatively, we can take at face value Russell T Davies’ announcement on the commentary for The Giggle (2023) that the bi-generation seen in that story, while presented as an unprecedented event, has now rippled backwards down the Doctor’s timeline and resulted in every one of their previous regenerations now occurring as a sort of split rather than a bodily regeneration⁵ and assume that at least most the “past” Doctors seen in guest appearances are actually the result of this process. (Although it doesn’t fit the dialogue in any of them terribly well, it doesn’t have to history has changed around it.)

Either way, what we have on DVD and CD is the Doctor’s original personal timeline, not the altered one created by anniversary specials. It is the Doctor’s life as we have seen it, but not as it now happened. Which, of course, means that no Doctor Who actually happened. None of it is canonical. So probably best just to throw all those discs in the bin now. 

I know I have. Now, I’m just off to get some matches.