Doctor Who Series 12: 10 Huge Talking Points After The Timeless Children
3. Are The Morbius Doctor's Canon?
After avoiding being overly caught up with continuity issues in his debate season, Chris Chibnall has gone full on fanboy this year. Whether this proves to be too much for the general audience remains to be seen, but he has deliberately trespassed into a number of long running debates within fandom. Some of what is happening here is an attempt to fix continuity errors.
Although humans being the original Time Lords was a red herring, the controversial idea that the Doctor is half-human on his mother’s could still be true of his biological mother. The woman in white, who Russell T Davies interpreted as the Doctor’s Time Lord mother in The End of Time, is now surely Tecteun. That’s one contradiction potentially corrected.
Another is the flashback to the various faces the fourth Doctor saw when mind-battling with Morbius, a fellow Time Lord. The production team’s intention was that those faces were previous incarnations of the Doctor, prior to William Hartnell. Fans unwilling to accept that Hartnell was not the first Doctor or that the twelve regenerations limit did not apply to the Doctor, have always interpreted the faces as those of Morbius.
Once again, Chibnall allows for a certain amount of wiggle room by also including in the montage of the Doctor’s memories, various adversaries and friends. It’s not as if he’s saying that Sil or the Pting were hidden incarnations of the Doctor. It’s a shame that he felt it necessary to hedge his bets, and wouldn’t it have been fun to have included instead a few other faces who could feasibly have been hidden Doctors all along, such as the Curator?