She’s pre-Hartnell. That’s all there is to it.
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Pre-Hartnell. I think it was intended to be that. Like, Shauny said, her being a Future Doctor doesn’t make sense.
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Also, we know from the Fugitive Doctor Adventures, that she doesn’t recognise the Daleks - she definitely would if she were 6B or a future Doctor.
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I really don’t understand why Chibnall tried to backtrack and make her placement mysterious, is it because (like how he found out about Thasmin online) he heard the online discourse and didn’t want to confirm it either way?
I think it was so obviously intended to be pre-Hartnell but then he decided to change it (which we found out in interviews on the Fugitive Doctor Big Finish boxset).
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I quite like the ambiguity now more than ever because of that. I’ve always liked the 6b idea, and now its happened with 2 it could fit her in that way. It defo won’t but it’s a cool idea nonetheless.
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Oh yes I forgot about that.
I guess it could be explained if she had her memory wiped but ugh I hate memory wipes as explanations for inconveniences
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Yeah, memory wipe is such a lazy solution to everything…
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I think she’s wherever. I literally don’t mind her being placed at any point. I choose other because personally, she can be all, and she can be none.
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I don’t 
/hj
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I absolutely think she can be a future Doctor - it’s just a matter of perspective. I fully agree that the Timeless Child and Division storylines take place in Gallifrey’s relative past, and that’s where Fugitive has somehow ended up. However, there’s nothing to say that these events aren’t in the Doctor’s relative future! Following the events of The Time of the Doctor, we don’t know how many regenerations the present Doctor has, and there have definitely been stories which have implied that they now don’t have a limit (I need to check TARDIS wiki to remember which ones). Suppose, at some unknown future time, in circumstances we’ll never see, that an amnesiac version of our post-Time of the Doctor Doctor somehow ends up traveling through the portal from The Timeless Children and arrives in Gallifrey’s distant past - all the events of those story arcs can still play out. To address your Swarm point, he would have every reason here to think that Thirteen is a future incarnation, rather than the other way around, because why wouldn’t he, if he encounters Fugitive in the chronological past, and Thirteen doesn’t remember her?
I don’t think either incarnation not remembering the other confirms either placement - Fugitive not remembering Thirteen doesn’t automatically make her the earlier incarnation, and the Doctor gets mindwiped enough that she could lose her memories sometime after Fifteen’s time, before becoming Fugitive. As for how Thirteen and Fifteen can remember Fugitive - I don’t think Thirteen is ever explicitly confirmed as remembering anything, we only have the Once, Upon Time sequence, which is just the Doctor seeing events occurring somewhere in her timeline, and she assumes it is in the past - it isn’t a confirmed memory. With regards to Fifteen in The Story and the Engine, we hear later in the episode that all the stories in the shop are getting mixed up as it goes - maybe Fifteen’s recall is part of that.
To be clear - I fully agree that pre-Hartnell or 6B is the most likely interpretation. However, in a show like Doctor Who, where things are wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey and characters can experience events out of order, I don’t think a scenario like the one I’ve outlined can be ruled out.
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I think he doesn’t like to disrupt people’s headcanons even if it’s not what he personally believes
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But surely the point of headcanons is that they’re personal, and Chibnall as the head of the show had the unique power to make anything he wanted ‘canon’? 
like if you’re the head writer, you write stuff and then if fans have opinions that’s why they make headcanons
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They showed the Doctor’s memories going in reverse order in The Timeless Children from 13 back to 1. Then they switched to showing the timeless children kids, followed by the Morbius Faces, the Brendan memory of getting chameleon arched, then Fugitive. The second half of that was clearly going in order from the beginning. I don’t think it could be more clear that Fugitive is pre-Hartnell.
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Ah, but at least some of those memories originated within the matrix itself (most obviously, the Brendan stuff, which if I remember rightly is explicitly stated as a matrix memory, rather than a memory originating from the Doctor). Again, that doesn’t preclude her being a 6B or future Doctor - as long as the Doctor who had those memories originally uploaded them to the matrix before the “present day” parts of The Timeless Children, there’s no reason to assume Thirteen can’t somehow draw on them while in the matrix. In the case of 6B, they would be uploaded before The Timeless Children anyway, and in the case of a future Doctor, following the scenario I outlined in an earlier comment, they could still be uploaded in the matrix sometime in Gallifrey’s relative past.
I get that most people think that Fugitive is pre-Hartnell, and that’s fine, but until we get explicit confirmation (and I hope we don’t), I’m riding the future Doctor train to the end 
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It’s not that it’s what people think, it’s what’s evident from the episode. Brendan is the only thing that originated from the Matrix itself, I only included it because of the ambiguity of if Brendan represents the Fugitive herself, or if he’s representing a separate incarnation. Fugitive was just an image of her, with nothing else about her time, clearly the Doctor put two and two together and figured it out from what she just learned, at least as to who she is and where she is.
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I personally believe that Fugitive being pre-Hartnell is the intended reading of TCC, and what Chibnall intended for the character. However I will cope and believe she’s 6B because I think it works better for the character.
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I also like to think Fugitive as pre-Hartnell, and the Timeless Children as all pre-Hartnell for one other reason:
If they are in the Doctor’s future, then it’s explicitly canon that for the first 12 lives, the Doctor is a British white male. Then they are a white woman. Then a black man, and then sometime in the future they are a huge diverse array of people.
Of course, for production reasons that’s perfectly fine, it is an old show, but I like to think that originally the Doctor was diverse, different every time, and then like the chameleon circuit getting stuck as a police box, for some reason their whole regeneration cycle got “stuck” as cis white male, maybe something to do with the Time Lord tampering, something they did when they used the chameleon arch to fix the Doctor into a limited regeneration cycle.
Then only after being freed from the Time Lord limitations put on them, suddenly after The Day of the Doctor, they are free again to become a woman, then a black man, then whatever else we have next.
Just a bit of headcanon that makes me smile 
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I may have to listen to the interview on that release again
I do think Chibnall sees her as pre-hartnell. Whether she is the immediate antecedent to Hartnell I’m not sure. But I believe he’s giving fans the freedom to interpret it how they want. Being a fan I think he knows how important fan theories & fan fiction is. Especially with a show that continually adds to it’s canon.
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She’s very clearly pre-Hartnell and theories trying to place her elsewhere are some of my least favorite fan theories. I think the idea that the unknown Doctor introduced during an arc about unknown Doctors is actually a different, unrelated unknown Doctor is just very dumb.
The ambiguity in her placement is not whether or not she is pre-Hartnell, but what exactly the pre-Hartnell timeline looks like and where she fits in it
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But… how does that gel with your love of River? 
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