If you follow the current timeline, it should go-
Hurt->Eccleston->Tennant->Tennant->Smith->Capaldi->Whitaker->Tennant->Tennant/Gatwa
Hurt was the real 9th doctor, but we call Eccleston the 9th doctor. And (if I get this all right) Tennant regenerated as himself twice, so he should be the 11th, 12th, 15th and Doctor 16 and a half. But people call him the 10th doctor. And Jodie Whitaker should have been the 14th Doctor, but people call her the 13th Doctor. And then Tennant came back and then there was the bigeneration of him and Gatwa.
And just to add to it all, there’s also a female clone of Tennant out there somewhere.
Is anyone else as confused as I am?
EDIT: Oh god, I just realized it gets even more confusing because now there’s all the Doctors before Hartnell.
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He’s number 15.
The War Doctor wasn’t the Doctor because he abandoned the promise he made and the name along with it. So, Tennant was the 10th. He didn’t fully regenerate that other time in the Meta-Crisis, so he was only/still 10. The Other Tennant is a human, not a Time Lord, and so not the Doctor. Plus, he lives in another universe. The Doctor’s Daughter was also a clone and also not a new Doctor, because she wasn’t the product of a regeneration.
Then we had Smith, Capaldi and Whittaker as 11, 12 and 13.
13 regenerated into 14 (Tennant again). Then the Bi-generation happened, which again wasn’t a regeneration from 14’s POV (same face, same personality), but was a full regeneration in that it produced a new Doctor, number 15.
So, they’re only a new Doctor if they are a product of a full regeneration, who uses the name ‘the Doctor’, isn’t a clone, is a Time Lord, and isn’t a weird spin-off (I’m looking at you, Peter Cushing).
I’m not saying the above makes ‘sense’ outside of the Whoniverse, but I think it’s a reasonably accurate summary of the official position!
That all works, until, as I said in my edit, we now have to count all the doctors before Hartnell that also called themselves The Doctor. Like the Fugitive Doctor.
But the Doctor doesn’t remember them. The Doctor is counting from the first Doctor they remember, which is also our 1st Doctor, and then proceeding from there according to the (made-up!) ‘rules’.
Hartnell will always be the First Doctor, no matter who that character was before that. So we can call Jo Martin the Zeroth Doctor, as some have, and number the rest negatively if we ever learn about them, or we can just refer to them by a descriptor, like the Fugitive Doctor.
It’s also unclear now when exactly the character first took the name “Doctor”, but what is more clear is that the numbering is a convention for the viewers, not really for the characters themselves.
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They call Hurt’s character “The War Doctor”, but as I recall he made the decision himself to not go by “Doctor” because of what he knew he had to do, so it’s almost like he abdicated the title.
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The metacrisis doctor was a kind of botched regeneration, which ended up half human (presumably on his mother’s side), and thus doesn’t count either.
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Tennant’s doctor in these three episodes is seen as a distinctly different doctor than 10, just “with the same face”, so he counts as 14
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We still don’t know whether this bi-generation thing is stable at all. Maybe we won’t see David Tennant as often as we think we will.
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Jenny’s case is unusual, as she was a clone of the Doctor, who the Doctor treated as his daughter. And you know the inside joke, that the actress who played Jenny (Georgia Moffett) was the real-life daughter of the actor who played the 5th Doctor. And the further meta-joke, which is that David Tennant eventually married the actress who played his clone/daughter.
I’ve seen Alabama family trees more straightforward than this, but I suppose that’s just what happens with long-term, transdimensional, transuniversal time and space travel.
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SPOILERS BELOW!
As far as I can tell:
William Hartnell to Paul McGann are Doctors 1-8 in standard order. John Hurt is the 9th incarnation of the Doctor, but is called the War Doctor. Christopher Eccleston is the 10th incarnation, but called the ninth. David Tennant is the 11th, 12th, 16th and possibly co-17th incarnation, but is called 10 or 14. Matt Smith is the 13th incarnation. called the 11th. Peter Capaldi is the 14th (or possibly first of a new regeneration cycle), called 12. Jodie Whittaker is the 15th (or maybe 2nd new) incarnation, called the 13th. Ncuti Gatwa is the co-17th, or possibly third of the second set of Doctors, but is called the fifteenth.
Jo Martin is also some incarnation of the Doctor, but nobody (perhaps even including Chris Chibnall) knows what that’s about. Also the rest of the Timeless Child stuff makes this somehow even more of a clusterfuck, but I’m not even going near that one. Also the Curator exists in there somewhere.
See? This is why I’m confused!
All part of being a Doctor Who fan.
For naming purposes, we really only number the ones who are the “main character”, so John Hurt and Jo Martin don’t get numbers per se, and David Tennant gets 10 and 14 because those are treated as distinct and separate characters, while 10’s “fake-out” doesn’t result in a distinct incarnation so doesn’t get numbered separately.
Basically, lots of asterisks in the numbering, but the numbers are more for fans being able to easily differentiate them in conversation than anything. They’re only rarely referred to in the show itself.
You seem insistent on overcomplicating things that have explanation easily at hand. Hurt isn’t counted because the character relinquished the title for the period of time that he existed. Tennant is only 10th and 14th. The metacrisis Doctor was not the Doctor, they weren’t even Timelord. And Gatwa isn’t “sharing” the current generation. The bi-generation is best explained as time loop - 14 will continue to live and emotionally heal, and at some point will regenerate into 15, who pops up where they’re introduced in the show (ie “doing rehab out of order”). And to your last point, Jo Martin’s Doctor pre-dates the current cycle, which is pretty plainly established by Chibnall themselves, so I’m pretty sure they understand it.
To keep it even more simple, just believe the show runners when they say which iteration is which instead of deciding they’re wrong about the show they are making for reasons that have already been explained.
@CrabAndBroom @FlyingSquid There’s also the Valeyard, which fits in somewhere between the 12th and nth Doctor, as well as Arabella Weir’s alternate Doctor, Richard E. Grant’s Doctor (who might be an alternate universe Doctor or a future incarnation).
The Children in Need skit can be ignored - as much as I adore Rowan Atkinson in the role - as well as the stage version. And Mark Gatiss, as great as he would be in a legitimate story.
And that’s Numberwang, folks!
As far as I understand it, Gatwa is the Fifteenth with the “second Tennant” Doctor being the Fourteenth (distinct from the Tenth). To add even more fun to this, it’s been implied that 15 technically comes from a point in the future of the Doctor’s personal time line (“we do rehab out of order”) and 14 will properly regenerate into 15 when he has healed his mental and emotional wounds.
Regarding the “Hurt” Doctor, he ‘temporarily’ discarded the name of the Doctor during the Time War, reclaiming the name “the Doctor” afterwards (hence Eccleston being the 9th). The official name of the Hurt Doctor is “the War Doctor”.
As far as confusion, eh it comes with the territory. At this point I let the BBC sort it out 😊
Gatawa is the 15th Doctor. (Even though there are more versions of himself).
In Matt Smith’s final episode “The Time of the Doctor”, he did acknowledge he was the 13th version of himself, but only the 11th “Doctor”. Therefore no more regenerations. (Until the Timelords sent him more)
I have not seen Jodie’s run, and can not comment on the storyline from her Doctor.
I did find this article listing all versions of the Doctor. https://www.dexerto.com/tv-movies/doctor-who-every-doctor-and-actor-who-has-played-them-2030888/.
Hope this helps.
Spoiler about Whitaker in case you don’t want to know:
spoiler
Based on Whitaker’s run, there are more Doctors before Hartnell. His memory of them was just erased. So that doesn’t work either. Also, the ‘no more regenerations’ thing doesn’t work even though it was in that episode because we find out that the Doctor is not Gallifreyan, but comes from another universe and has an unlimited number of regenerations. And it looks like Davies has accepted that.
Which is what makes this far more confusing.
Looking at the full picture, “The Doctor” is on 15. The version number of the Timelord that goes by the Doctor is not currently known.
The link I posted references all of them.
In the anniversary series “Once and Future” the Doctor, zapped by a new weapon during the Time War, is being haphazardly “de-generated” through a bunch of his own incarnations, past and future, with their attached knowledge and experience, and at one point
spoiler
in the persona of the Eighth Doctor he says “I get the sense the numbering system breaks down after me” and shrugs it off as unimportant.
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