The BBC remains all in.

One episode, "Rogue", seems to have really had a positive response. It features the Doctor in a romance with a man in a Regency era storyline. I don't really relate to stories of men loving men; I am also not a fan of Regency fiction. However, just because something isn't tailored to my personal obsessions does not mean it is bad. In addition... I've come to realize how much can hurt someone to not see themselves onscreen. And men who love men deserve to see themselves in their TV shows and movies, and the Doctor, being an alien and genderfluid, is easily bisexual (if not more). I didn't relate to "Rogue" and it did not speak to me, but I felt it was *important*.

Spoilers:

An Action Writer Writing a Woman of Inaction
I think what sums up Chibnall for me: he's an action writer. He writes stories driven by fight scenes. This is fine if you're writing MACGYVER, SUPERNATURAL or even SLIDERS; it's a serious handicap when writing post-2005 era DOCTOR WHO. Since 1985, the Doctor has generally been a science hero who outthinks and outsmarts villains; the more violent versions of the character haven't been around for decades.

Chibnall clearly thinks it's inappropriate to have the Doctor throwing punches or firing guns except in isolated circumstances. Therefore, Chibnall... generally has the Doctor standing by while her allies fight because the Doctor is immobilized or passively present; alternatively, the Doctor's passivity leaves her overpowered and defeated until other characters rescue her.

Passive Pacificism
The Doctor -- and the sliders -- can be difficult to write. Even the great Tracy Torme struggled and sometimes flat out failed. "Luck of the Draw" from Jon Povill has the sliders using cleverness to escape and defeat their antagonists, but immediately with the next episode, "Into the Mystic", Torme's script has Rembrandt wielding a shotgun while Arturo attacks and overpowers sorcerers and security guards.

Russell T. Davies had the Ninth Doctor often stand around while guest stars sacrificed themselves to resolve the episode. He clearly regretted this because the Tenth Doctor was far more prone to using machinery and technobabble to remove enemies. The Tenth Doctor using a gun in his finale episode was presented as a moment of severe wrongness. The Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors were much the same except Steven Moffat was better at establishing his machinery and technobabble earlier in the story to deploy at the end.

Why not write a more aggressive Doctor?
Chibnall doesn't write the Doctor's pacifism effectively; in Chibnall's hands, pacifism is passivity. Chibnall is clearly more comfortable writing the Fugitive Doctor because the Fugitive Doctor is prepared to use violence while the Thirteenth Doctor won't.

The thing is, while most-2005 and onward fans know the Doctor as a pacifist, that's not the case for all Doctors. The Third Doctor was a gentleman spy who used martial arts. The Fourth Doctor did not hesitate to use violence but found it distasteful and grim, preferring humour and charm. The Sixth Doctor was downright aggressive against enemies.

The First Doctor was originally prone to fisticuffs until his characterization became more grandfatherly; the Second Doctor was a trickster, the Fifth Doctor was a non-violent diplomat, the Seventh Doctor was a master manipulator who used indirect means, the Eighth Doctor was a non-violent improviser, and aside from the War Doctor, Doctors Nine through Twelve were generally pacifistic except for the Twelfth throwing one angry punch in one episode.

Chibnall could have absolutely made the Thirteenth Doctor more like the Third, Fourth and Sixth Doctors, prepared to use weapons and martial arts.

Chibnall is clearly more comfortable writing the Fugitive Doctor, a Doctor who grabs weapons, punches enemies, tricks villains into shooting themselves. Chibnall wouldn't write Jodie Whittaker in the same vein.

Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice?
Did he feel too tied to the more recent presentations of the Doctor as a non-violent thinker? Did he feel Jodie Whittaker's presence was mismatched to more aggressive action and occasionally deadly intent?

Did he think the first female Doctor needed to represent women as non-violent and vulnerable and nice as opposed to hard-edged and combat ready?

For whatever reason, Chibnall chose a Doctor-character template that just wasn't in his skillset. Chibnall is not the sort of writer who comes up with impossible circumstances and then drops the Doctor/Quinn/Arturo into the situation and lets them piledrive through the problems.

Chibnall is a procedural screenwriter who creates problems and devises solutions within a formula that is resembles a cop show (BROADCHURCH) or a science fiction action show like STAR TREK. Chibnall's stories need his hero to use force and violence; he wouldn't do that with the Thirteenth Doctor and it clearly crippled him.

Vague Niceness
Chibnall's Doctor was thinly defined. In the finale, characters talk about how the Thirteenth Doctor is strong and heroic, Jodie Whittaker's performance seems to think that she is. But the Thirteenth Doctor is defined by standing around while the plot happens.

I can't imagine Matt Smith sitting in a cell waiting to be rescued by Captain Jack, but that seems to be Thirteen's defining moment. And because the Thirteenth Doctor was so vague and contradictory, none of the companions ever solidified.

Ryan, Graham and Yaz were simply scene partners for the Doctor to address and explain the plot; aside from Ryan being informal, Graham being older and Yaz being female, none of them cohered as personalities. When the Doctor has no identity, the companions have no clear purpose in how to support that identity. In contrast, the Eleventh Doctor was a childish goofball while Amy and Clara were ball busters; the Fourth Doctor was madcap while Romana was calm; the Ninth Doctor was tormented while Rose was passionate.

The Thirteenth Doctor was just vaguely nice -- which, I guess, brought us to a Thirteenth Doctor finale where she is incapacitated and has to be bailed out by the First, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Doctors.

Why these Doctors?
There is no particular in-story reason why the First, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Doctors show up as opposed any of the others. From a writing standpoint, one would think that the Thirteenth Doctor's psyche would be populated by the nicest, gentlest Doctors: the Second, Fifth, Seventh, Eighth and Eleventh.

Alternatively, the Thirteenth Doctor would be confronted by the aggressive sides of her character that she'd set aside: the First, Fourth and Sixth as well as the War Doctor and the Ninth and Tenth Doctor.

A more artful writer would recognize that the actors available were David Bradley, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann -- and find a psychological rationale. The First Doctor could be the Doctor's wanderlust, telling the Thirteenth Doctor that she has so much more to see. The Fifth could be the conscience, saying the Doctor can't allow her body to be misused and must fight even if fighting to lose. The Sixth could be the determination, urging the Doctor hold steady and wait for a chance. The Seventh is the strategist, crafting a plan. The Eighth is the Doctor's love for life and friendship, telling the Doctor that she won't be ready to let go until she sees Yaz one more time.

Instead, all the characters get nicely Doctorish dialogue that could have been delivered by any Doctor. Colin Baker, the meanest of the Doctors, is written to be as gentle as soft-spoken Peter Davison! (Admittedly, the Colin Baker is indeed the nicest one.) Chibnall is a professional who does a professional's job, but he doesn't capitalize on the opportunities he has.

Loveless
Another missed chance: Chibnall nonsensicially waited two episodes before the Thirteenth Doctor was leaving to address Yaz having romantic feelings for the Doctor and the Doctor feeling the same way but choosing not to pursue it because Yaz would age and die and the Doctor would regenerate.

The finale does a rather sweet job of handling this undercooked plot, however, with Yaz silently loving the Doctor and mourning this version of her and choosing to leave before the Doctor she loves becomes a new version, but Chibnall's undercooked, underdeveloped characterization remains a sore point. It's still baffling to me that Yaz and the Thirteenth Doctor have been on this show since 2018 and that Chibnall waited until 2022 to acknowledge the romantic tension.

Good Enough/Mediocre
Chibnall did a decent job with the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) and Tegan (Janet Fielding) having a last conversation. Chibnall also did a very nice job with a small exchange between the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and Ace (Sophie Aldred). Chibnall flat out contradicts the one audioplay featuring Davison and Fielding as their characters reuniting in 2006 and the one novel written by Sophie Aldred where Ace met the Thirteenth Doctor, Graham and Yaz. This is understandable as the majority of viewers aren't familiar with "The Gathering" audioplay or the "At Childhood's End" novel.

Functional
Ultimately, "The Power of the Doctor" is a functional, professional, adequate story with some pleasant moments where the Thirteenth Doctor is a passive passenger in her own story and where every chance for drama is mined professionally but minimally with a very moderate, adequate, unspectacular level of drama or humour. It's mildly enjoyable and sufficiently diverting, but the most memorable and gripping moment is at the end when Jodie Whittaker dies and regenerates, only to find she's somehow become David Tennant again for reasons unknown.

The Ending Wasn't Chibnall
Tellingly, this massive shock had nothing to do with Chris Chibnall. When Chibnall scripted "The Power of the Doctor", there was no word as to who would be the next showrunner or if there would be another season; it was unlikely the BBC would cancel DOCTOR WHO, but it was possible that anywhere from 1 - 3 years would pass before the show would return. Chibnall ended his script with the Thirteenth Doctor regenerating; incoming showrunner Russell T. Davies scripted the next page with the Fourteenth Doctor astonished to find he's somehow become the Tenth.

It's rather revealing that most significant development of Chris Chibnall's finale episode was the one page Chris Chibnall didn't write.

From a public relations standpoint, Davies draws a lot of media attention and interest, especially since he saved DOCTOR WHO when it had been off the air for almost two decades. The Chibnall era has been horribly reviewed and a critical misfire.

From a creative standpoint, it strikes me as a lateral move from Chibnall. Davies' first season of DOCTOR WHO showed that while he has a lot of passion and love for DOCTOR WHO, he is an extremely weak screenwriter with some truly bizarre tics. Nearly all of Davies' first season scripts have the Doctor standing around incompetently while a guest star sacrifices their life to defeat the villain. Even with Davies writing a more verbally assertive Doctor after the first season, guest stars continued to die while the Doctor stood there ineffectually. Viewers who found Jodie Whittaker passive won't see an improvement of this is retained.

Davies was also a deeply repetitive writer. Every year featured an invasion of Earth with increasing scale and mass casualties with the Doctor 'saving' the day only after Earth had been devastated with another invasion sure to come by the end of the next season. In the end, it was Davies' successor, Steven Moffat, who erased all the invasions from continuity as Earth had become an alien battlefield rather than a relatable version of the viewers' world.

Davies had a peculiar habit of fat shaming in his scripts, constantly calling out people as overweight. Davies had a strange formula of ensuring that the first person the companion talked to would die. Davies created truly horrific fates for guest characters without comment or emotional reaction such as one poor character who was forced to spend eternity as a face with no body on a slab of concrete. I find Davies' writing uncomfortable in how it presents the writer.

Since his departure from DW, Davies has conducted himself with honour and respect. He wrote a novelization of his DOCTOR WHO pilot and made sure to include references to Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall's writing, a delightful inclusivity. Also, in that pilot episode, Davies killed an entire family (slightly off camera), but in his novelization, Davies rewrote the scene so that the father sacrifices himself to save his wife and children who now survive in this version of the story -- which struck me as Davies regretting his savagery. Also, in a DW anthology, Davies contributed a cartoon in which he undid a brutal character death and revealed that this character (Harriet Jones) had survived after all. He declared in an interview that his story was canon.

When Davies' original lead actor and Doctor, Christopher Eccleston, insulted Davies in the press, Davies took the high road and declared that Eccleston was free to say whatever he liked, but that as Eccleston's (former) showrunner, he had "a duty of care" and would never engage in arguments with him through interviews.

Davies also wrote two volumes of an autobiography, THE WRITER'S TALE, where he confessed that during his time on DOCTOR WHO, he had engaged in rushed hackwork due to deadlines demanding that he put forward scripts that he felt were not ready for filming but could not be revised any further due to time constraints.

From what I can tell, the BBC has struggled to find a post-Steven Moffat showrunner. Chibnall, as Temporal Flux notes, was not selected as much as the only person who didn't refuse the role. I've heard (unsubstantiated rumours) that running DOCTOR WHO is considered the worst job in UK media because the BBC expects the showrunner to write 4 - 6 scripts a year while editing 9 - 12 additional scripts and overseeing all other aspects of production. Most UK shows have smaller episode orders and smaller scales of production so that a showrunner can be that directly hands-on, but DOCTOR WHO is on a much larger scale than a sitcom like NOT GOING OUT.

On American shows with even larger episode counts, showrunners will hire numerous additional writers and space out their own scripts over the course of a year, delegate physical production to subordinates with a massive team of staffers. The BBC has refused to fund DOCTOR WHO to allow the showrunner to hire a sufficient number of co-writers or subordinates and expects one showrunner lead in addition to handling what should really be the work of 5 - 10 people.

This is (supposedly/theoretically) why nobody really wants the job. It looks like Moffat was able to convince the BBC to give him longer breaks between his seasons and longer pauses in the middle of the seasons. This allowed him to recharge, although I think it's fair to say that his first episode as showrunner is certainly not as inventive and passionate as his final script. Thanks to the breaks, Moffat was able to maintain a baseline of quality.

It looks to me like Chibnall has been unable to get more time to write his scripts and has fallen into the same situation Davies confessed to in his autobiography. Chibnall's debut with Jodie Whittaker was a serviceable PREDATOR ripoff. Since then, he's fallen apart badly with scripts that are empty collections of set pieces without sense or characterization and reflect a writer hacking out pages to meet his deadlines.

I can only hope that Bad Wolf Productions taking over management will grant Russell T. Davies time to draft his scripts, resources to hire cowriters and a budget that lets him delegate effectively. With both the BBC and Bad Wolf funding the second Davies-era, it should have a lot more money than before.

Jenna Louise-Coleman was leaving with "Last Christmas" but during production elected to do one more season because she didn't feel Clara had spent enough time with the Capaldi Doctor.

David Tennant almost signed on for the first year of Steven Moffat's run and Moffat drafted a storyline where the Tenth Doctor would die in front of little Amy Pond's eyes; then the adult Amy would meet the Tenth Doctor before his death and Series Five would have moved towards Tennant's finale and regeneration. Tennant waited until the absolute last moment to decide that he wanted to leave with Russell T. Davies.

I feel pretty much the same way as TF does. It's unfortunate if Ms. Whittaker leaves, but it won't really matter unless Chibnall leaves too.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tv/13638876/do … ker-quits/

But that won’t change anything; Chibnall is the problem.  And I’ll admit Chibnall had some better ideas in his season two, but they came out half-baked.

I watched the New Year’s Day episode; and while it overall felt cheap (low budget), I was really floored by how the reunion with the companions was handled.  The companions belly ache and stick out their lip because the Doctor was missing for ten months, and the Doctor had just spent decades in jail!  Where was the Doctor’s rebuke?  Where was the lesson that people should consider others and not just themselves?  It would have folded nicely into the Ryan / Graham send-off as they accept each other as family; but instead, the thread was left half-baked.

That’s been a problem with Chibnall as shown in episodes like Kerblam!  The stories are teaching the wrong lessons and siding with the wrong people.  In any case, that’s my own quick take; I’m still not nearly invested in this era.  It’s been a big disappointment.

Jodie isn't the problem.

--Chaser9

Why does Chibnall have his characters behave so unimaginatively and predictably and have them engage in such futile actions -- aside from his inclination to have the heroes confront the villain for an early scene? The Doctor is trapped in a prison and... sits around making no effort to escape and she has to be rescued -- almost as though the writer simply couldn't come up with a neat way for his lead character to demonstrate the ingenuity needed to escape and also wanted to keep the Doctor contained until more of the plot had unfolded without her.

The Doctor finds her friends and she decides to... do pretty much what her friends did without her; confront the villain and demand an explanation as though people engaged in secret plots will naturally explain them in full if asked twice.

Chibnall simply doesn't have the wit or cleverness that these characters and this series demands; he doesn't know how to stage a confrontation, he doesn't have smart solutions to difficult problems, so the characters behave clumsily because their writer is clumsy. I really like Chibnall's work as a producer: gorgeous music, beautiful anamorphic lens filming, stunning location work, wonderful casting with the first Sikh woman aboard the TARDIS and the first woman to play the Doctor -- but he simply doesn't have the inventiveness, skill or innovative spirit needed to write a spacefaring time travelling heroine and her friends.

The frustrating thing is that the ideas aren't the problem as much as the presentation. Why not have the companions try to investigate the threat without the Doctor and be successful at infiltration but be unsure of what to do about whatever they discover? Why not have the Doctor not escape the prison because she wanted some time to think about the shocking revelations of the previous episode? And so on. The ideas are good; the presentation is shockingly poor.

I think Chibnall needs someone to write scripts for him from his story elements. Joss Whedon on ANGEL had David Greenwalt; Tim Kring on HEROES had Bryan Fuller; Robert Singer on LOIS AND CLARK had Tony Blake and Paul Jackson and Eugenie Ross Leming and Brad Buckner; JJ Abrams on FRINGE had Jeff Pinker and Joel Wyman -- Chibnall needs a partner.

I've never entirely understood why the BBC always has the DW executive producer be the story editor as well, maybe it's a budgeting issue, but every previous showrunner has been overstretched by the job. Russell T. Davies confessed in his autobiography that he was aware of how poor and clumsy his scripts were by the end, but it was often the best he could do when on his deadlines. Steven Moffat arranged to make fewer episodes over longer periods of time in order to cope with the workload. Maybe they could have hired some extra help.

So... the Ruth, the Fugitive Doctor, is indeed a past Doctor -- and it ties into the Doctors seen in "The Brain of Morbius." *spoilers&

"The Timeless Children" reveals the birth of the Time Lords and the secret origin of the Doctor. The Doctor is not a Time Lord. The Doctor is the first Time Lord. The Doctor was an abandoned black girl found on a distant planet by a Gallifreyan astronaut, Tecteun. Tecteun adopted the child as her own; the child died in an accident only to regenerate into a new body -- and Tecteun became obsessed with experimenting on the child to learn the secret of regeneration to ward off death. Tecteun forced the child to regenerate multiple times; the girl became a boy, changed race,  changed ages -- and while Tecteun couldn't learn anything from the child about where she'd come from her who she was, Tecteun finally learned how to graft regeneration into her own body and then other Gallifreyans but set a limit of 13 lives to control its use.

It's implied that the secret of regeneration also led to time travel, producing the Time Lords while the Time Lords continued experimenting on the child, allowing her to age to adulthood, dispatching her on various missions that would often take lifetimes, wiping her memory each time -- and then, for reasons unknown and erased, the child was mind-wiped once more, regenerated into a male form, locked to 13 lives and starting as the William Hartnell Doctor.

At one point, the Jodie Doctor looks at her own memories and there are clips from previous episodes and one of the clips is the additional faces in "The Brain of Morbius" and another is the Ruth Doctor.

The episode itself is a bit pathetic: Jodie Whittaker spends nearly the whole episode locked in a cell receiving all this exposition. At the end, Chibnall puts her in a position to blow up Gallifrey and the Master and she decides to do it but then hesitates and then stops and then a guest character blows up the planet for her so that the Doctor can run away. Chibnall doesn't have the imagination to come up with a satisfactory solution, so he creates a suicide plan for the Doctor and then has someone else carry it out. He's not a good screenwriter -- but this revelation -- I like how it makes the Doctor even more of a mystery. Who was she before she became the first Time Lord? Why was she abandoned? Where were her parents? Why couldn't she answer any questions about where she came from? Where did she come from?

Why did the Fugitive Doctor's TARDIS look like a police telephone box when the First Doctor's TARDIS only took on that form when landing in 1963 in the series premiere?

It suggests a much lengthier history behind the Doctor and the TARDIS and for every question of the Doctor's origin that's answered, a new question has been raised, and if the Doctor's Time Lord heritage and Gallifreyan origins are no longer where she started, merely a middle ground of her life, then Chibnall's decision to remove the Time Lords and the planet after Steven Moffat restored them makes sense.

It also explains a lot of peculiar continuity errors over the years. The First Doctor said that he had been "exiled" from his home planet, but the Second Doctor later said that he had run away. The Third Doctor said that he had lived for "thousands" of years but the Fourth Doctor confirmed his age to be around 400 years and mentioned that his departure from Gallifrey had involved some scandal he'd fled (which reduces the distinction between exile and running away). There's also those Morbius faces)

The Sixth Doctor was constantly bragging about his experience, but the Seventh Doctor hinted that he had personally interacted with Rassilon and Omega, the founders of Gallifreyan society at the dawn of time which if the Sixth had remembered, he would have discussed repeatedly.

Then there's the confused memories: Seven says he doesn't remember ever being a child while Eight recalls lying in the grass with his father and Ten speaks of running across fields as a boy. It looks like the Doctor's memories were edited to remove her pre-Hartnell lives from mind, but each regeneration seems to have opened up more and more with the Third remembering "thousands of years," the fourth recalling the pre-Hartnell lives -- and even the Second Doctor starting to feel that leaving Gallifrey was due to a subconscious instinct that she had been exploited, experimented upon, abused (and a woman forced to live in a man's body) -- and that her supposed excommunication was in truth an escape.

That said, Chibnall's grasp of plot, action, situation, resolution and exposition remain shockingly poor. I'm not sure what this person is doing writing television. He's a great producer: the anamorphic lens filming, locations, lighting, blocking, interiors and effects are beautiful as is the music -- to the point where I may rewatch Series 11 and 12 with the sound off and the score playing and then fill in the stories myself.

^^this

What's most shocking is that he made his Ruth Doctor far more interesting as a character than his ground-up creation starting in series 11. Is he genuinely capable but slagging it all deliberately? That doesn't make sense either.

But he did demystify the show and there's no way to say he reintroduced mystery. Not with the level of crudity he's put in (oh look, someone whose name is in key with the opening theme music caused mass murder of numerous children to a being from a magical other universe where they probably ride on unicorns too, and just to reverse engineer some DNA in a radical form of theft.)   The grossest horror gross-out movies are tamer than Teletubbies by comparison to Chibnall's handiwork. Unless it's a lie made by the Master. But Chibnall claimed he wrote this plot back in high school. Yup, it's fanfic at its finest...

I’ve been trying to give this a chance; but we’re now six episodes in, and I’m just not into it.  I also find it odd how much praise the new episodes are receiving, and even the ratings are good.  I’m a bit perplexed by it.  The rest of the post will contain spoilers if you haven’t yet seen the episodes.

21 episodes in now and while series 12 started with potential, it dropped everything by the end.

Ensemble pieces are hard. Chibnall and his team are hit and miss with a lot of the storytelling, which sometimes feels rushed or clunky. Series 12's finale is also the most cringe-inducing fanfic.

Most shows innovate. Fewer create. Good innovation allows a story to stand on its own, without people drawing and sticking to the material being borrowed from.  (think "Sliders" seasons 1 and 2 versus "Sliders" season 3.  Sliders season 3 and Chibnall's era are both identical in the scripting department, which is often cringey, 2D, and uninspired at best.  The actors I've seen in other shows; they're not the problem. I get the impression they're being told to play what's on paper and are not allowed add into these characters, which doesn't help.

Very loose sci-fi, if that.

The second episode uses a decent template and has some great guest actors as well... but "Rules of the Game" had far better writing. There's a comparison not made every day...  especially when their androids also can't aim straight. 

The Charlie Brown analogy will go far in Chibnall's era...

The villain was clearly shoehorned in, and needlessly given the strength of the story when he's not in it.

Chibnall's era is almost schizoid; so much inconsistency within the episode - never mind in his own arc. Especially in a team of writers, a lot of issues got out the writers' room when most of them needn't have.

The ideas is there but, in long standing Doctor Who tradition, the monster is "too cute". It doesn't help how much is played up for strictly laughs, rendering the whole piece pointless. 

One of his episodes was using something that looked 99% like Predator as well... or was that in series 12?

Don't bother. Skip to "It Takes You Away".

Then "Spyfall". Then "Fugitive of the Judoon". Then the 2-part finale. Then wait for people to comment on series 13; chibnall is either doing something bigger to be resolved next year or he's really not interested in the show and 2 seasons' worth makes "not caring" seem far more what's going on. 

Cat people were introduced in Classic Doctor Who.  The shadows and face jar were pretty nifty.  I disliked the flaunted spectacle but the adventure, based on Earth or not, was still there. Chibnall's is like a piece of paper with dots on it and you follow each of the numbers with a pencil and see what the connected dots add up to.

Chibnall's been acclaimed for other works. His Doctor Who and Torchwood works have been spotty at best. He's good for drama, but sci-fi is a radically different genre.  That was going on long before he became official showrunner.

"The Timeless Children" reveals the birth of the Time Lords and the secret origin of the Doctor. The Doctor is not a Time Lord. The Doctor is the first Time Lord. The Doctor was an abandoned black girl found on a distant planet by a Gallifreyan astronaut, Tecteun. Tecteun adopted the child as her own; the child died in an accident only to regenerate into a new body -- and Tecteun became obsessed with experimenting on the child to learn the secret of regeneration to ward off death. Tecteun forced the child to regenerate multiple times; the girl became a boy, changed race,  changed ages -- and while Tecteun couldn't learn anything from the child about where she'd come from her who she was, Tecteun finally learned how to graft regeneration into her own body and then other Gallifreyans but set a limit of 13 lives to control its use.

It's implied that the secret of regeneration also led to time travel, producing the Time Lords while the Time Lords continued experimenting on the child, allowing her to age to adulthood, dispatching her on various missions that would often take lifetimes, wiping her memory each time -- and then, for reasons unknown and erased, the child was mind-wiped once more, regenerated into a male form, locked to 13 lives and starting as the William Hartnell Doctor.

At one point, the Jodie Doctor looks at her own memories and there are clips from previous episodes and one of the clips is the additional faces in "The Brain of Morbius" and another is the Ruth Doctor.

The episode itself is a bit pathetic: Jodie Whittaker spends nearly the whole episode locked in a cell receiving all this exposition. At the end, Chibnall puts her in a position to blow up Gallifrey and the Master and she decides to do it but then hesitates and then stops and then a guest character blows up the planet for her so that the Doctor can run away. Chibnall doesn't have the imagination to come up with a satisfactory solution, so he creates a suicide plan for the Doctor and then has someone else carry it out. He's not a good screenwriter -- but this revelation -- I like how it makes the Doctor even more of a mystery. Who was she before she became the first Time Lord? Why was she abandoned? Where were her parents? Why couldn't she answer any questions about where she came from? Where did she come from?

Why did the Fugitive Doctor's TARDIS look like a police telephone box when the First Doctor's TARDIS only took on that form when landing in 1963 in the series premiere?

It suggests a much lengthier history behind the Doctor and the TARDIS and for every question of the Doctor's origin that's answered, a new question has been raised, and if the Doctor's Time Lord heritage and Gallifreyan origins are no longer where she started, merely a middle ground of her life, then Chibnall's decision to remove the Time Lords and the planet after Steven Moffat restored them makes sense.

It also explains a lot of peculiar continuity errors over the years. The First Doctor said that he had been "exiled" from his home planet, but the Second Doctor later said that he had run away. The Third Doctor said that he had lived for "thousands" of years but the Fourth Doctor confirmed his age to be around 400 years and mentioned that his departure from Gallifrey had involved some scandal he'd fled (which reduces the distinction between exile and running away). There's also those Morbius faces)

The Sixth Doctor was constantly bragging about his experience, but the Seventh Doctor hinted that he had personally interacted with Rassilon and Omega, the founders of Gallifreyan society at the dawn of time which if the Sixth had remembered, he would have discussed repeatedly.

Then there's the confused memories: Seven says he doesn't remember ever being a child while Eight recalls lying in the grass with his father and Ten speaks of running across fields as a boy. It looks like the Doctor's memories were edited to remove her pre-Hartnell lives from mind, but each regeneration seems to have opened up more and more with the Third remembering "thousands of years," the fourth recalling the pre-Hartnell lives -- and even the Second Doctor starting to feel that leaving Gallifrey was due to a subconscious instinct that she had been exploited, experimented upon, abused (and a woman forced to live in a man's body) -- and that her supposed excommunication was in truth an escape.

That said, Chibnall's grasp of plot, action, situation, resolution and exposition remain shockingly poor. I'm not sure what this person is doing writing television. He's a great producer: the anamorphic lens filming, locations, lighting, blocking, interiors and effects are beautiful as is the music -- to the point where I may rewatch Series 11 and 12 with the sound off and the score playing and then fill in the stories myself.

At the time, regeneration had yet to be established as a death; instead, it was a metatextual nod to the fact that while the Doctor would be a mercurial adventurer in time and space, he would now be played by a different actor who would emphasize different aspects of the character. It was only with the Third Doctor's demise that it was (in contrast to previous stories) presented as a form of death, a death of self, a death of identity, a death of the specific persona. Which means, retroactively, that if the Time Lords forced the Doctor to regenerate in "The War Games," they were executing him. But the Troughton Doctor doesn't protest death; he describes it as a change of what he looks like.

If TF's theory is right, then it's possible that he wasn't forced to regenerate; he was biologically masked/rewritten into a new appearance.

However... it's not just the fact that Ruth doesn't recognize the sonic screwdriver. Ruth does not recognize the term "sonic screwdriver," and refers to it as "that gizmo" derisively and when Jodie Whittaker calls it by name, Ruth declares that she is "smart enough not to need one." The Doctor would never be so disdainful towards a piece of technology that she created herself. Which means that this Doctor never created it. (?)

There's another aspect of DOCTOR WHO lore to consider: "The Brain of Morbius" has the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) telepathically attacked and he sees his previous faces. We see Pertwee, Troughton, Hartnell -- but then we see additional faces before Hartnell. (They were played by various members of the production team.) Fans took this to mean that the Doctor had regenerated in the past, before Hartnell -- but later stories quietly ignored this detail, with "The Five Doctors" confirming that Hartnell was the first Doctor period. However, the Seventh Doctor's era hinted at a mysterious figure in Gallifrey's distant past and curiously, the Doctor began referring to historical Gallifrey figures as though they were his contemporaries.

The Seventh Doctor novels further indicated that at the dawn of Time Lord society was a mysterious Other, a Time Lord who died but whose genetic material were later 're-used' in the biological machines that create Time Lords, whom the novels depicted as a sterile, sexless society. The final Seventh Doctor novel revealed that the Doctor is a reincarnation of this Other, and the "Morbius" faces were this Other's incarnations. However, as time has passed and as more time travel stories have altered the Doctor's past, this history has been thrown into flux with the Eighth Doctor novels having the Doctor at one point remembering both the Other backstory and a childhood with parents. The revived TV show would later present Time Lords as reproducing sexually, so these novels have been gently set aside as a parallel timeline.

Anyway. There is some (ignored) precedent for there having been Doctors before William Hartnell.