Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different people?

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

I think he flipflops a bit on this, but on the whole what do you think?

In Time of the Doctor he describes Ten and the War Doctor etc in a way that suggests completely different persons,
"Ten regenerated once but didn't change his face" instead of "I regenerated once, but didn't change my face"..., before "I had vanity issues back then".

Then there is Ten's lament about him dying and a completely new man walking off after regeneration.

First Doctor called Two and Three "his replacements."

And when he meets himself he completely acts as if he is dealing with different people mostly (timey-whimey shenanigans aside like in time crash).

 

[Ithekro]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

He both is and isn't the same person. They are all the Doctor, and each newer one has all the memories and everything else that the previous versions had. Yet they are all different from each other. Different personalities, likes, dislikes, quirks, hobbies, tastes. Egos in many cases.

He thinks of himself as one person and yet different people at the same time. He has the luxury of that. He's lived for thousands of years and lived a few lifetimes in many of his bodies. Others only had a small run.

The First Doctor run around for a while and had a long life even before he stole the TARDIS.

The Second Doctor? No clue really. It seems like he had a short life since he was able to spend most of it with the relatively young Jamie, though some oddities exist for that Doctor, plus some hundreds of years jumped between Two and Four that doesn't seem to be coverable by Three.

The Third Doctor seems to have only been around for a short time as well given his mostly staying on Earth for part of the 1970s, plus maybe a decade running aorund in the TARDIS on the side.

The Fourth Doctor had the luxury of running around with Romana, so he could have gone around time and space for centuries.

The Fifth Doctor seems constrained to a short life with his list of overlapping companions, assuming they age like humans.

The Sixth could have been around for a century. Maybe two. He does has a gap between losing Peri and picking up Mel.

Seventh Doctors could have had a long life after Ace. It is hard to tell. He did do the TARDIS up a lot at some point before arriving in San Francisco.

The Eighth Doctor could have lived for a millenia and we probably wouldn't know (assuming he didn't age as much as the 11th Doctor does over the course of 900 years)

The War Doctor was likely fighting that War for centuries. I've come to assume his new age is in fact his life since getting a second chance on Karn and regenerating for the War. That the Ninth Doctor's 900 years old was 900 years after he regenerated from Eight to War.

The Ninth Doctor might have been around a century, or just a year. It is really hard to say just how long after Day of the Doctor the events of Rose really are.

the Tenth Doctor was only around for a handful of years if the Doctor is counting his age correctly in Earth years during his time.

The Eleventh Doctor...he was around a long time. 1,200 years or so it seems.

But then, the Doctor lies.

 

[Captaindemotion]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

It's probably like any of us looking back at our (much) younger selves - did I really like that programme, that band, did I really wear that haircut or those clothes - but magnified 100s-fold.

 

[Christopher]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

I think that both descriptions -- "the same person" and "different people" -- are based in human perceptions and assumptions about identity, and thus neither one really describes how Time Lords experience regeneration -- in the same way that "particle" and "wave" are macroscopic/classical concepts that can only roughly approximate the quantum reality that has aspects of both at the same time. If the Doctor "flip-flops," it's only because he (or the TARDIS translation matrix) is trying to use English words to approximate a Gallifreyan experience that there are no precise English words for.

Still, it does seem evident that the personalities and perspectives are different enough that they are effectively different people. Nine felt the need to say goodbye to Rose before he turned into Ten, and of course there was Ten's "I don't want to go." And earlier Doctors did sometimes talk about their other selves as if they were separate people. To some extent that's metatextual, a veiled acknowledgment that the actors really are separate people, but it does suggest that there is a sense of discontinuity.

But there are analogies for this in the real world. Sometimes human beings go through major, life-altering changes -- like, say, someone who used to be a counterculture rebel but then settled down and became a business-suited conservative, or a former agnostic who's become a born-again Christian, or a hard-partying womanizer who settled down and reinvented himself when he became a father. People like that might see their former selves as different people due to the magnitude of the change. Regeneration must be kind of like that, a realignment of outlook and attitude. If you don't think or feel like you used to, it would be hard to look back on your past self and see them as the same person.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

Still, even a human who went through dramatic changes in his life would still refer to "I" when speaking about his past.

The Doctor keeps calling other incarnations "he" and "they" when talking about them.

But I like your way of thinking about it as a dualism of sorts.

 

[Christopher]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

Still, even a human who went through dramatic changes in his life would still refer to "I" when speaking about his past.

Not always. There are contexts where someone who felt they'd changed radically might talk about their past selves as a different person, at least as a metaphorical device.

Really, human thought is so diverse that you probably can't find anything that somebody somewhere hasn't thought or believed. Lots of ways of thinking are rare, but you can't really say they don't ever exist. And of course the thought process of any fictional character created by a human has to be within the range of potential human thought.

 

[Mr Awe]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

It's probably like any of us looking back at our (much) younger selves - did I really like that programme, that band, did I really wear that haircut or those clothes - but magnified 100s-fold.

This is what I was going to say. If you look at yourself far enough back, you'll seem like another person entirely. Far enough back, and you might not even get along with yourself!

It's magnified for a Time Lord because everything changes abrubtly! But, if a human goes through a life alterning experience, they'll tend to think of themselves as different people before and after it.

Mr Awe

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

I think thats a major reason for the show's appeal. That he has been the same man from 51 years ago, when Ian and Barbara tresspassed his property in Toter's Lane, and that he's been sufficiently different, too.

Heck, even the incarnations themselves have been different, according to time. We all know about the First, of course. Four was more serious in the beginning, more jovial with Leela and Romana(s), and brooding in his last series. The Sixth was downright obnoxious in his first series, but he evolved (via the Big Finish stories) into a more mellowed old man, less prone to egotism. Even Ten, the shortest living incarnation of the Doctor, wasn't the same man he started as when he regenerated.

Point being, the character is richly textured, partly from the charistma of the actors playing them, and still sufficiently mysterious to keep you watching.

 

[Christopher]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

^What about Seven? He started out as a Troughtonesque clown but then evolved into a dark, Machiavellian cosmic chess player.

And how do you figure that Ten is the shortest incarnation? Surely Nine's tenure was much shorter. Unless you're counting the War Doctor as Nine and Eccleston as Ten.

 

[DWF]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

The sixth Doctor said it best of the second Doctor in The Two Doctors.

"I was him, he will be me."

 

[Doctorwhovian]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

It's interesting how they react to each other in the multi-Doctor stories. In The Three Doctors both the second and third sort of treat the first with reverance. It's not quite the same in The Five Doctors though (Although the First Doctor ultiametly is the one who saves the day pretty much). Second and Third don't get along of course in both stories, and the Sixth has a similar attitude to the second. Fifth and First seem to mostly get along though, although I always found it a bit weird that the Fifth didn't really aknowledge Susan that much.


The Tenth is of course "a fan" of the Fifth..and of course tenth and eleventh (and probably nine) didn't initially like the "War Doctor"...and of course there's the "Curator" and Eleven in "Day"...

Not sure how twelve would react yet, although he did seem to be fond of Eleven when he initially though Clara was dating the guy who looked like him.

 

[DWF]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

I think thats a major reason for the show's appeal. That he has been the same man from 51 years ago, when Ian and Barbara tresspassed his property in Toter's Lane, and that he's been sufficiently different, too.

Heck, even the incarnations themselves have been different, according to time. We all know about the First, of course. Four was more serious in the beginning, more jovial with Leela and Romana(s), and brooding in his last series. The Sixth was downright obnoxious in his first series, but he evolved (via the Big Finish stories) into a more mellowed old man, less prone to egotism. Even Ten, the shortest living incarnation of the Doctor, wasn't the same man he started as when he regenerated.

Point being, the character is richly textured, partly from the charistma of the actors playing them, and still sufficiently mysterious to keep you watching.

It's my thinking that in a Doctor's third season is when the writers finally understand the currect Doctor and truely begin writing stories for him. Matt Smith's third season was wildly out of control though IMO, but many of the other Doctors truely came into their own in their third seasons.

 

[Christopher]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

It's interesting how they react to each other in the multi-Doctor stories. In The Three Doctors both the second and third sort of treat the first with reverance. It's not quite the same in The Five Doctors though (Although the First Doctor ultiametly is the one who saves the day pretty much).

I think they had the same kind of regard for the First Doctor as the "elder statesman" of the lot, the one the others all deferred to even while they bickered with each other -- as if he were the parent and they were the children. I just don't think it came up as much in T5D as in T3D, because we didn't see the First Doctor interact much with the others until the end. But I daresay some of the reverence in T3D was toward Hartnell himself, metatextually, and that wasn't as much of a factor when Hurndall came in as a ringer.

although I always found it a bit weird that the Fifth didn't really aknowledge Susan that much.

Yeah... Poor Susan really wasn't treated well by the script. She was just sort of there, hovering around and not doing much. But then, that's sadly reflective of most of her tenure as a regular.

 

[DWF]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

I thought it was kind of funny that Susan twisted her ankle in The Five Doctors which was exactly the same injury she had at the start of Dalek Invason of Earth, her last story.

 

[jbny67]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

I thought it was kind of funny that Susan twisted her ankle in The Five Doctors which was exactly the same injury she had at the start of Dalek Invason of Earth, her first story.

Her first story was "An Unearthly Child".
"Dalek Invasion of Earth" wasn't even her first Dalek story. It was in series 2, with quite a few stories in between.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

I think he meant her last story.

 

[Christopher]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

I think he meant to say "her last story," because "Dalek Invasion" was the one where Susan left the TARDIS (whereupon she presumably went forward in all her beliefs and proved to the Doctor that he was not mistaken in his).

 

[jbny67]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

That makes sense. I didn't even consider that.

 

[JoeZhang]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

Off the top of my head - doesn't Three know about Four even though they don't meet onscreen (suggesting of course a wonderful off-screen adventure*).


* someone wrote a book based on this point but I forget which one...

 

[Christopher]

Re: Does the Doctor think of his earlier incarnations as different peo

Off the top of my head - doesn't Three know about Four even though they don't meet onscreen (suggesting of course a wonderful off-screen adventure*).

Are you talking about the bit in "The Five Doctors" where Sarah starts to describe the Fourth Doctor and Three says "Teeth and curls?" I've seen people interpret that as evidence that Three had prior knowledge of Four. But it's pretty clear to me that it's just meant to be Three interpreting Sarah's pantomime gestures toward her teeth and hair. (And it's also Jon Pertwee poaching a line written for Lis Sladen.)