Maybe - it would have made a more interesting story if he had been…
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Yep, that’s definitely what he was doing (and I believe I posted about this and @deltaandthebannermen had no idea!)
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I was probably half asleep due to watching Doctor Who and the most boring Christmas Special Ever.
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It was in the first 5 minutes!!!
Too much wine and figgy pudding…
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Well, I don’t drink but it might have been the pudding.
It was probably just Capaldi’s performance…
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I fell asleep during it too😅 Though to be fair I was extremely tired that day.
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Anyway, back to @thegallifreyanrebel 's excellent thread on Adoption.
I was trying to think about if adoption had ever been the subject of an audios or books. Nothing is springing to mind but I’m sure there’s something somewhere.
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Yeah, I’d love to know if there’s any extended media that deals with that.
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Currently working on a blog that details the First Doctor’s childhood, as The Empty Child and Listen imply that the Doctor is care experienced (umbrella term for foster care, adoption, kinship, residential care, & special guardianship) & how that fits into the references to the First Doctor’s family, so excited to post it😊
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And I’m so excited to read it!
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How did I not instantly think of this…
River Song was put into an orphanage as a child!
An orphanage run by The Silence…
Then she went and found her birth parents, became friends with them, and married the Doctor, after trying to murder him.
She’s probably not a good role model though.
(I am inclined to make everything about River Song!)
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I love how that deepens their bond with each other😍
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I’ve just realised that the Doctor and Tecteun parallels River and Kovarian, two children corrupted and brainwashed by psychopathic monsters.
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I have a short script idea, set in the Judoon Prison where the 13th Doctor is processing what she discovered on Gallifrey, and thinks back to these previous stories, realising that what she’d discovered had been there all this time. Will definitely share the script once I’ve completed it!
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To explain why the Doctor didn’t question those moments like saying they were a Time Lord pioneer in The Daleks, the Third Doctor saying he’d been a scientist for several thousand years in The Mind of Evil, the Pre-Hartnell faces in The Brain of Morbius, and them saying it was a long time since they brought women’s clothes in The Woman Who Fell to Earth, which Chibnall said was an intentional foreshadow to the fact that they’d been a woman before, I was thinking that the mind-wipe was designed to make the Doctor not question stuff like that if ever memories bled through, they were programmed to just ignore it and move on.
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TYING TOGETHER THE DETAILS OF THE FIRST DOCTOR’S EARLY CHILDHOOD
While Chibnall was the first to explicitly confirm that the Doctor is care experienced (an umbrella term for foster care, adoption, kinship, residential care, special guardianship) he wasn’t the first to introduce that idea.
In the Series 8 episode Listen written by Steven Moffat, the TARDIS went to the early part of the First Doctor’s life, when he was a young boy sleeping in a barn he’d ran to outside of the Capitol, and was visited by two unseen people.
With how the Woman calls the place that the Doctor had run away from a house and refers to the children living there not as the Doctor’s brothers but as the boys, this implies that the Doctor was living in a children’s care home, and those two people who came to him were likely the care workers of the house.
With what this care worker says, it might’ve been a military orphanage he was living in. That could be what all orphanages on Gallifrey are like which wouldn’t be surprising, or that care worker was just forcing his own interest onto the Doctor and the other children.
Either way, the glimpse we saw of the First Doctor’s childhood was paralleling what we saw earlier in the episode of Danny Pink, who lived in a children’s care home as a boy with an interest of the army.
The Doctor having been in a children’s home fits perfectly with what Reinette said after glimpsing the Doctor’s childhood, because feelings of loneliness are common for those who grow up in care homes.
How the First Doctor ended up in the home, I think that could be answered by what the Ninth Doctor said in The Empty Child.
After Tecteun mind-wiped and force regenerated the Doctor into a baby boy, she dumped him at the doorstep of the children’s home. And whether Time Lords are natural or machine born, she fabricated a birth record so he believed he had been born like everyone else. To add, I doubt the Doctor is the only Time Lord and Division Operative to have been reset because of no longer aligning with Division.
We know from multiple references that the First Doctor had a family and a family home.
“Well, when I was a little boy, we used to live in a house that was perched halfway up the top of a mountain” - 3rd Doctor, The Time Monster
“I was with my father, it was a warm Gallifreyan night” - 8th Doctor, TV Movie
“Have you got a brother” - Martha
“No, not anymore. Just me” - 10th Doctor, Smith and Jones
“But of course it’s meant to be the Doctor’s mother. That’s certainly what I’ll tell the production team. Euros knows it already. David, too” - RTD in The Writer’s Tale about the Woman in The End of Time
“Sisters. I used to have sisters” - 13th Doctor, Arachnids in the UK
“I had seven, but grannie five, my favourite, used to tell me about the Solitract” - 13th Doctor, It Takes You Away
This means that the Doctor wouldn’t have been in the children’s home for his entire childhood. Some time before he went to the Academy, he was either fostered or adopted by a family who lived in the house perched halfway up a mountain.
Some fans say that the Doctor not being from Gallifrey means that the Woman in The End of Time can’t be the Doctor’s mother. But I think what they mean by that is that she can’t be his birth mother, but there’s no issue with that. Whether the Woman was the Doctor’s adoptive or foster mother, that doesn’t make them less of a mother, a mother is mother no matter what kind, the scene and the intent still has the exact same impact as it had before, a mother helping their child in their time of need. My mother (adoptive) would go to the ends of the Earth for me, and I her. And I think it’s better that she wasn’t his birth mother because it means we haven’t seen one of two people who are the reason for the Doctor’s existence, adding to the mystery of their identity and origins.
And some time after being adopted or fostered, the Doctor goes to the Academy, graduates, has a family of his own as a father and grandfather, then for multiple reasons decides to run away from Gallifrey with his granddaughter Susan and the rest as they say is history.
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I absolutely love this scene from Flux, Once, Upon Time. Jodie’s performance is amazing, you can really feel her desperation for answers about her origins. It’s really resonating with me right now because there’s answers I want about my birth family that I feel like the universe is denying me, and it’s really frustrating.
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An incredibly underrated episode which I really like.
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I was enjoying Flux a lot while it aired but then didn’t really care for this episode on first watch. The rewatch of Flux as a whole a few months later though was when I really came to appreciate it.
I’m keen to get to Flux again as I thought it contained some of the best stuff from Jodie’s era.
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In The Church on Ruby Road, Ruby applied and got onto the TV show Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace, the foundling spin off of Long Lost Family, but after doing a DNA sample which got submitted to multiple DNA databases (Ancestry UK, My Heritage DNA, 23andMe) there no matches with anyone, not even cousins, which in this day and age is impossible, you’d have matches with hundreds of fourth cousins, so I wish this had been acknowledged in the show. The Goblins started causing Ruby trouble the day she started filming Born Without Trace, and so I think to cause her bad luck they went back through time and stopped every member of her birth family from doing a heritage DNA test, so when Ruby’s DNA was submitted to the DNA databases, there’d be no matches.
I recommend watching Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace, it’s really good. It shows why the Doctor being a foundling is a fantastic addition to the character.
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