Re: From the Archives .....

On 20/04/2024 22:05, Blueshirt wrote:

The True Doctor wrote:
 

On 20/04/2024 14:15, The Last Doctor wrote:

>
But wait - Aggie is saying that Deadly Assassin predates
Nightmare of Eden therefore the 12 regeneration limit is
absolute.
But Brain of Morbius came before that, and on screen showed
11 faces of the Doctor prior to Tom Baker’s. Therefore using
Aggie’s logic, Peter Davison

>
No it doesn't. The faces other than Hartnell, Troughton, and
Pertwee were the faces of Morbius and that's what it says in
the novelization by Terrance Dicks who wrote the original
script.

  Correct, that is what it says in the Target novel. Nobody has
ever disputed that.
 

Morbius is winning the game because his faces are on the
screen indicating that the more past regenerations you have
had the stronger your mind becomes in the game. Hinchcliffe
didn't write the story, it was Dicks.

 Robert Holmes re-wrote the script as you well know and it was
the intent of the Production team of that story that those were
the faces of the Doctor. When you watched "The Brain of Morbius"
as a child, that was the intent behind that scene. This is a

Nope. When I watched the story as a child the faces were presumed to be those of Morbius as he was winning.

simple fact that has been mentioned many times over the years by
members of the production team (whose faces they actually were)
and it is easily researched.
 

They were playing previous incarnations of Morbius. They knew full well there were no Doctor's before Hartnell and The Three Doctors. The only thing they might have been able to get away with would have been to suggest that there were different faces given to the Doctor by the Time Lords between Troughton and Pertwee while he was working on missions for the CIA. Most kids not being old enough would not have even recognised Troughton or Hartnell.

Terrance Dicks - like some fans - did not like the idea of
pre-Hartnell Doctors, so revised it in his novelisation. So yes,
in the Target novel they are the faces of Morbius.
 

Dicks wrote the original story. He never intended them to be the faces of the Doctor. He got really pissed off at the changes that were made to it and wouldn't have his name associated with it on screen.

There has been plenty of interviews with Uncle Terrance over the
years where he explained why he changed it. But him not liking

He changed it back to the way he originally wrote it.

the idea of pre-Hartnell Doctors is the short version! He was
aware of the original intent behind that scene in the episode
though and has often talked about it.
 

The original intent was to show the face of the Doctor when he was winning and that of Morbius when he was winning.

But of course the idea that there had been earlier Doctors
didn’t originate with Morbius.

>
It didn't originate anywhere because The Tenth Planet is the
only Hartnell episode that establishes the existence of
regenerations (bodily renewals) and Hartnell states there and
then that he's never done it before.

 Not correct. Clearly the idea originated or it wouldn't have
been part of the original "The Power of the Daleks" script.
However, the idea wasn't followed through with.

No. The idea was to de-age the Doctor and pretend that Troughton was a younger version of Hartnell. That's why the chose an actor of a similar height and look, but younger. The when Troughton quit they realized they couldn't make the Doctor younger still using the same idea of bodily renewals so they had the Time Lords change his fact to the of Pertwee instead and therefore they could also use a taller actor. Regeneration was never established until Tom Baker came along, and it was the same principle as Hartnell to Pertwee, actor of similar height and both must have curly hair, and on top of that the Doctor had to learn some sort of meditation process to cause the regeneration to happen, and it was still bodily renewal. Only when they got to Romana II did they show that a Time Lord could actually regenerate into someone who looked dissimilar and who was of a different height or species even.

 

So Troughton opens a draw and looks a Hartnell's past
possessions or keepsakes. This does not infer past renewals.
Earring and bracelet in the 1960s inferred pirate. In some
past adventure or other Hartnell had to dress up as a pirate.

 The [second Doctor] line about a previous "renewal" was cut from
the draft script following a discussion among the production
team.

So they realized it would contradict what Hartnell said in The Tenth Planet.
 >
At a guess it was only in the script as a way to explain

to the children of 1967 that this sort of thing ("renewal") had
happened before so don't worry the Doctor isn't dead, this

It was already explained will enough by Hartnell. There was never any intention for the Doctor to have different appearances. Troughton was supposed to be a younger version of Hartnell. Tom Baker was supposed to be a younger version of Jon Pertwee. Only after Romana II did they decide the Doctor or Time Lords in general could regenerate into different forms.

happens all the time, sort of thing. Not because they actually
wanted to expand the show with pre-Hartnell Doctors. But the
idea was still there.

There was no such idea. The fact that the Time Lords had to intervene in The War Games to give the Doctor a choice of a new face implied that this was not possible through Renewal, which basically was a form of de-aging. Regeneration was not referred to until The Planet of the Spiders as far as I remember and did not imply anything different to Renewal, ie. de-aging until Romana II, since Lala Ward looked nothing like Mary Tamm. There was also some sort of requirement for some sort of ability of psychic projection if it was to be achieved for anything other than reversing old age but that idea was abandoned for Romana but brought back again with the Watcher and abandoned again straight after.
Bi-generation is out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon and cannot be accepted as being canon.
Doctor Who ended in 2017.
--
The True Doctor https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCngrZwoS0n21IRcXpKO79Lw
"To be woke is to be uninformed which is exactly the opposite of what it stands for." -William Shatner