Doctor Who Series 12: 10 Huge Questions After Fugitive Of The Judoon
6. Strewth What's The Truth About Ruth?
The 11th Doctor once said “I’ve had many faces, many lives. I don’t admit to them all.” He was of course referring to the War Doctor as the one incarnation he wanted to forget. No wonder the Doctor is as confused as we were when Ruth announced that she was a Doctor from her past.
In the wider Doctor Who multiverse there are many, many more incarnations of the Doctor scattered across various alternative timelines. Could the Ruth Doctor be from a different path? If the producer has considered the reasons why that could be an attractive option for some, he surely would not have gone down that route. Do we really want a hierarchy of Doctors, is it fair to make a false distinction between the ‘proper’ ones and the others? As the credits boldy confirm, Jo Martin is the Doctor.
The two Doctors do not recognise each other and naturally assume they came first. There is still a chance that Jo Martin's delightful Doctor is from the future and that something has happened to cancel out her memories of her past lives. She doesn’t even remember the sonic screwdriver, throwing a spanner in the works to the fan theory that she is an incarnation between the 2nd and 3rd Doctor.
The likeliest scenario is that she comes before William Hartnell, especially as the Master has told the Doctor that everything she thinks she knows is a lie. The fact that the Doctor doesn’t remember her could be part of the timeless child revelations to come.
One final thought, what if we are thinking too conventionally about it? Could she be a special Doctor where the numbers and chronology cannot apply – an amalgamation of all her incarnations, or a shadow Doctor in the mould of the Valeyard or the Dream Lord?