7 Doctor Who Mysteries That Will Never Be Solved

2. Who Were The Morbius Doctors?

In the Fourth Doctor story, "Brain of Morbius", there's a sequence where Morbius, another Time Lord, gets into a "psychic battle" with the Doctor, and we view images of past Doctors. Here are shots of the people we see. Can you spot the potential hiccup here? So that's kind of an issue. According to the writer of the story, these were indeed meant to be incarnations of the Doctor who predated Hartnell. Heck, one of the novels, written many years after the show went off the air in 1989, even tried to roll with that idea. Imagine if they tried that these days. The hue and cry would be insane! Plus not long after, we were introduced to the fact that Time Lords can only regenerate twelve times, and a few seasons later, the Fifth Doctor specifically states he's regenerated four times. So...what happened here? Honestly, any guess you can come up with is fairly decent. The going theory is that the Doctor was somehow, for some reason, projecting false images of himself during the psychic scan. There is no reason this isn't possible, though...why? Surely that'd be something that would require concentration, and his efforts could probably be better utilized elsewhere, especially during a psychic duel kind of thing. Perhaps, as some have suggested, the faces are actually previous versions of Morbius? It doesn't seem likely, but it does make much more sense, and is perhaps a fairly acceptable answer. Other explanations from fans state that these were future incarnations of the Doctor, which seems acceptable, but it doesn't seem likely. How would he see them? He's a Time Lord, yes, but he's not an oracle. Really, there is no satisfactory explanation here, and we're not likely to ever have one. The best suggestion here is either ignore it, or just go with the idea that these are previous versions of Morbius.