8 Doctor Who Fan Theories That Became Fact

One of the longest-running Doctor Who theories stems from the 1976 serial The Brain Of Morbius, in which Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor engages in a psychic wrestling match with the titular patchwork creature.

During this scene, the Doctor's previous three faces (Pertwee, Troughton, Hartnell) appear on a nearby screen, but interestingly, it doesn't stop there - in fact, we see eight more mystery faces before the Doctor wins the contest.

Though some speculation has argued that these faces are past incarnations of Morbius, the far more popular theory is that they're past incarnations of the Doctor - incarnations that came before William Hartnell. This was also the intent of the production team, although the theory was never explicitly confirmed within the show.

But in 2020, that changed. Series 12 finale The Timeless Children revealed that the Doctor isn't just an ordinary Time Lord - they're a powerful creature from another world, the first ever being to possess the gift of regeneration.

The episode also informed us that the Doctor has had more lives than we think, even going so far as to show the Morbius faces during the scene where the Thirteenth Doctor breaks out of the Matrix (pictured below).

Some fans even believe that the entire point of the Timeless Child twist was so that current showrunner Chris Chibnall - who grew up watching the Fourth Doctor - could make the Morbius Doctors canon.

Whether you subscribe to that notion or not... that's exactly what he did.