10 Most Paused Doctor Who Moments Ever

3. The Other Doctors (The Brain Of Morbius)

Doctor Who The Brain of Morbius other Doctors
BBC Studios

Long before The Timeless Children revealed a bunch of other Doctors for fans to speculate over, The Brain Of Morbius did something similar.

At the end of this serial, the Fourth Doctor engages in a mental duel with the monstrous Morbius, and during their battle, a machine displays the Doctor's current face. Perfectly ordinary, right? Well, things get much juicier from here. The machine then shows the Third Doctor, the Second, and the First, but rather than stopping there, it continues on, showing eight other faces before the duel comes to an end.

The serial never explicitly identifies these faces, and in the decades since The Brain Of Morbius aired, there's been a ton of speculation as to whether they're pre-Hartnell incarnations of the Doctor.... or whether they aren't. There's lots of evidence within the show to suggest that Hartnell is the true First Doctor, and yet, The Brain Of Morbius' producer Philip Hinchcliffe once said that he "attempted to imply" that the mystery Morbius Doctors were indeed pre-Hartnell incarnations.

While The Timeless Children does seem to back up Hinchcliffe's intent, discussion surrounding the Morbius Doctors will probably never end, and as a result, those mystery faces have easily become the most paused moment in all of classic Who.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!