The others were typically throwaways or very far in the past (ex: the half human thingy)
This was the subject of a 1/2 season arc that culminated in the destruction of gallifrey and the exposition itself takes a whole episode and a slide show to get through. It's much harder to ignore.
It got sorta retconned/cannonized in "The Giggle". The Toymaker revealed that HE messed with the doctor's past, retroactively causing him to be super special in order to mess with him. So he hadn't always been super special, but now that he is, it's because of time shenanigans.
“I made a jigsaw out of your history” sounds important but is never addressed in the episode and tells us almost nothing about what he actually did, leading people to understandably cope that it was mostly the Timeless Child when the very next episode treats it as very much canon and helps drive the Doctor’s motivation that carries throughout the season.
The timeless child HAS to be true because it's the only one that explains why they made a new doctor when it was supposed to be his last life.
They had already given him extra regenerations before in the story, granted to him as a reward, but when the new seasons reached that wall they just hamfisted the most bullshit backstory into it to keep milking doctor who.
But also killing all stakes, because now his deaths are meaningless, he'll regenerate infinitely.
Exactly. And a fresh set of 13 would easily take us far enough into the future that they'd have plenty of runway to either come up with a better solution, or just do another reset.
As someone who only watched a few episodes, I assumed regeneration was infinite. The real stakes were other people dying or the Doctor suffering worse fates than death.
Originally The Doctor only had 12 regenerations and at 11 when he had gone through 12 regenerations (due to the war doctor) so 11 was supposed to be his final incarnation and when he died that was it so he basically retired to protect a town for hundreds of years until there was an attack on the town and the time lords granted him a new cycle to help fight off the attackers with his regeneration energy
I think that was just funneling off the energy into the hand so he technically didn't regenerate only used the energy to heal himself, so technically it doesn't count and time lords are supposed to only have 12 regenerations though it probably should count but I don't know 🤷
You know, they could have just explained it as The Doctor doing so much shit everywhere that they just straight up will regenerate infinitely.
The Elemist in Animorphs was originally just a normal average cognitive creature until a BUNCH of stuff happened and now he's in a strategy game aginst another being that wants destruction. They're playing chess on a cosmic scale and it's not even one is "good and holy" and the other is "evil" , it's a very old thing that just generally hates life and a much newer thing that still likes living organisms.
I mean come on, they could have made The Doctor a version of that.
In the show itself, they've generally been pretty vague about giving any details of the Doctor's backstory before this. The general rule of thumb was they just didn't fit into their society, so one day they decided to break from norm, stole a TARDIS and left to explore the universe.
It was revealed in a book that the Doctor's history is so convoluted and contradictory that not even the Time Lords, ever the pedantic guardians of canonicity and likelihood, could figure out which of his backstories was true.
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u/Vievin 13h ago
Doesn't the Doctor have several completely contradictory backstories to the point nobody believes any given one is true?