The Ongoing Adventures of the Fugitive Doctor

In 2020 Chris Chibnall broke Whovians’ minds with the introduction of a hitherto unknown incarnation of the Doctor played by Jo Martin known as the Fugitive Doctor.

This was not the first time we’d met an unknown incarantion of the Doctor — Steven Moffat revealed the existence of an incarnation between Paul McGann and Christopher Eccleston in 2013’s “The Day of the Doctor,” the War Doctor, portrayed by Sir John Hurt — but it wasn’t clear where Martin’s Doctor fit.

Eventually, we would learn that Martin comes before Doctor Who as we know it. She is a pre-William Hartnell incarnation, Hartnell being the first Doctor, the one from the show’s first episode, “An Unearthly Child,” in 1963. This wasn’t the first time that Doctor Who has shown us that there were Doctors before Hartnell; “The Brain of Morbius,” during the Tom Baker era, revealed eight incarnations before Hartnell.

Martin’s console room, by the way, may be my favorite console room of the modern era. It looks like a console room as designed by Herman Zimmerman, production designer of Star Trek in the 1990s. Had the Doctor apepared on Star Trek: Voyager in 1995, I feel the console room would have designed would have looked like this:

That is just… perfection. 🙂

Martin’s Doctor has appeared in a few episodes since her debut, some audios for Big Finish, and a comic series from Titan. I would like to see more. And so would others. Scrolling through Twitter the other day, I saw the tweet I’ve screenshotted at right. “As much as I’d love to have [Jo Martin] back on screen, it *has* to be as the Fugitive Doctor. Having her pull a 14 and come back as the new face of the main Doctor would be such a waste, especially if the showrunner wasn’t interested in [The Timeless Child] lore.”

Believe it or not, I have given this matter some thought. I have even written about how to do it in a way that honors the series at TrekBBS a few times.

Originally here, in 2020:

A series around Jo Martin’s Doctor would be really interesting, and I can already see ways of getting to that. Regeneration from Jodie to Jo is out — for “The Timeless Children” to make sense, Martin’s well in the past of even Hartnell’s Doctor — so maybe you do a multi-Doctor story that sees Jodie and Jo team up, there’s a cliffhanger, and the story continues with Jo’s Doctor alone. This leaves the door open for Jodie to return in the future, not unlike the way Sylvester McCoy returned in 1996. Or, if a future producer wanted to pick up beyond Jodie, he could always restart the series the way RTD did in 2005.

Then here:

I’ve said before that, if Jodie is leaving, I’d like to see Jo Martin follow her… not as the fourteenth Doctor, but as the pre-Hartnell Doctor she appears to be. To do that, I’d end Jodie’s run with a multi-Doctor story with Jodie and Jo, end it on a kind of cliffhanger, and follow Jo’s Doctor in the resolution at the start of the next series. If future producers want to continue forward from Jo, fine. If they want to follow on from Jodie (a la Philip Segal), they can do that, too. Lots of options.

And here

When some people suggested that Jo Martin could carry on as the Doctor, before Gatwa was cast, I thought this would have been the way to go from Jodie to Jo. Don’t have a regeneration. Have a multi-Doctor story with Jodie and Jo, and maybe for some reason Jodie’s companion or a pre-established Jodie character continues on with Jo, and we simply follow Jo Martin’s adventures for a time. It would leave Jodie open-ended so that, when the BBC decided to go forward, she could come back for a regeneration scene (if that were felt necessary), and it would open up a new era in the Doctor’s adventures where different kinds of things could be done since Jo Martin’s Doctor is the one that worked for the Time Lords at their behest.

Also here:

I suggested this before with Jodie, but it would work here as well. Have a two Doctor story with Jo Martin (Division era) and the current incumbent, and structure the story in such a way that the audience leaves with Martin, so it becomes a narrative passing of the torch. The “incumbent” is still out there, open-ended, and we could return to that Doctor whenever, but for now, the show will rattle around with Jo Martin in the past.

I’ve wanted a kind of “unconventional” passing of the baton from one Doctor to the next for, at this point, over fifteen years. Write out the previous Doctor and leave them open-ended, write in the new Doctor and go. “The End of Time,” the way it was structured, lended itself to doing exactly that… except then it didn’t.

Doing this with Jo Martin’s Fugutive Doctor would also be a way of doing a soft reboot on the series. It’s still Doctor Who, but now in a completely different era, and the continuity barnacles of sixty years are essentially washed away. Martin’s Doctor is a much earlier Doctor, working for the Time Lords and maybe a bit of a rebel. Because she’s so much younger, the things her later incarnations learned and experienced aren’t part of her history yet. Old villains may not even exist yet in the Fugitive Doctor’s “present.” Everything old is new again. Still recognizably Doctor Who, but fresh.

And whoever the post-Ncuti Gatwa Doctor is, they’re still out there, the stoyr isn’t done, ready to be picked up again when the time is right.

I like it. Let’s make it happen, Beeb! Your people can talk with their people, and their people can talk with my people. It’ll be brilliant!