#The Three Doctors

[lonelyzarquon]

DOCTOR WHO | The Three Doctors

[improbabledreams900]

The Three Doctors (1972–73)

[intuitive-revelations]

Tales of the TARDIS | Reunion Hugs

"We never really did this sort of thing, did we?" "We do now!"

[terranceholdsapencil]

Look its the sillies

"So it's after you, or should I say us?"

"That's right. And as they can't help us, we'll just have to help ourselves."

"Twinkle, twinkle little star." 🎶 [...]

"Must you?"

"Are we going to take this attitude to my music all the time?"

"Yes, I'm rather afraid we are."

"Oh dear."

Based on this beautiful picture:

Silly edition: "Oh, so you're my replacements. Huh. A dandy and a clown. Have you done anything?"

"Well, we've, er, assessed the situation."

"Just as I thought. Nothing."

[nkp1981]

2nd and 3rd Doctor In "The Three Doctors", 1973

[science70]

William Hartnell, Jon Pertwee and Patrick Troughton as the Doctor, photoshoot for Radio Times, London, 1972.

Photography: Ray Rathborne

[notyoujamie]

1914 / 1970s or 1980s / 2013

[upslapmeal]

the poor Brig is constantly about 0.2 seconds away from giving Two an early regeneration

[dailyclassicwho]

@walks-the-ages requested Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart being bewildered and skeptical in The Three Doctors

[mycroftholmesian]

The Three Doctors (1972-1973)

I very much enjoy Three Doctors! It is genius that they don’t get along 😆 The Second Doctor with Jo is charming. Having him back with Benton and the Brig was so good! It is story to me that is a Joy for a Whovian. 😊

[giddyaunt425]

The Three Doctors be like

[beakyelk]

Doodling along to another of my favourites - The Three Doctors!

[improbabledreams900]

The Brigadier: a little confused, but he’s got the spirit (The Three Doctors)

[mintyimperiatrix]

so wild theory time but what if the Master is Omega's son

ok hear me out because that sounds insane but i think it kinda works? cause first off we know now thanks to the Timeless Children that the Doctor is the daughter of the Other(/Tecteun). the Other is a scientist and explorer and while their morality's differ to the extreme the Doctor does, on the surface level, adopt these traits from them.

we also know that the Doctor, in their first childhood, had a friend on Gallifrey. a friend with no name. a friend who... accidentally killed her during a fight. i know i'm not the first to say that the kid on the cliff is the Master but it's a good starting point

so then we get to Omega, someone who was friends with the other two Founders and yet easily the one who's life we know the least about, at least from before he was chucked into a black hole. he wasn't an explorer like Tecteun, he was an engineer. he wanted to build his own things, be famous for his achievements and use them to obtain godlike power but when his usefulness ended he was thrown aside by Rassilon. does any this sound familiar?

All of those traits are shared by the Master.

lets cut to the End of Time real quick. the Master builds a device to bring Gallifrey back into the universe, allowing the next 'ascension' to take place (before the Doctor broke the machine) but when his moment of glory was about to come Rassilon, like Omega before him, threw him aside. obviously this is all pretty circumstantial and doesn't actually prove anything but then there's this exchange earlier in the episode

"Two Children of Gallifrey" could just be a poetic way to refer to two random Time Lords. except we know it doesn't, because the Doctor isn't a random Time Lord and even if the average Time Lord doesn't know that the Matrix Does. so if the Doctor is the daughter of one of the Founders then she is (almost) literally a 'Child of Gallifrey'. take the same idea and apply it to the Master and logic dictates he would be the child of either Rassilon or Omega

i think the most interesting part happens after that though, when the Time Lord dude refers to them as 'the Enmity of Ages' (which would be an amazing name for a band just saying) and Rassilon immediately knows that this means the Doctor and the Master. the only time we've seen him meet either of those characters before is in passing during the Five Doctors. it's easy to infer that he'd know the Doctor from their role Time War but the Master? he didn't fight in the war, he mostly refused to work with the Time Lords during the War and then hid himself as Professor Yana when it got too much so why would Rassilon, who has only seen the Master once when he was tied up on the floor in the body of a Trakenite, know that the Master was the other half of the Enmity of Ages?

you Could say he learnt of the Master's reputation during the Time War but i frankly don't think he'd care about that? so to me at least it feels like the best explanation would be that he's met the Master before, way back when he was first President. and the reason he's so disgusted by the Master, the reason he finds it amusing that the Doctor's 'final act' is the murder of Gallifrey is because he knows who these two are. he is staring at the children of his fellow Founders, realistically these two are the only people in the universe he might consider a threat to his power or his status, and much like he did with their parents he tries to use both of them before casting them aside but just like before they both come out the other end alive

also saying the Enmity of Ages to me infers a greater conflict than just that of two normal Time Lords. from any single character it would be just a dramatic phrase but this is directly from the Matrix itself, which knows all of Time Lord history, so they are a Big Deal

but now we skip to everyone's favourite episode: The Timeless Children (genuinely one of my favourite finales it gets such a bad wrap). we learn the Doctor has unlimited regenerations, or at least had unlimited regenerations at some point because whether they still do or not is kinda up to interpretation. it was the Doctor's biology which allowed the Time Lords to unlock the power of regeneration, however the Other limited the number of regenerations to 12 lives when giving it to the rest of the population. i think Tecteun's presence in Flux implies that she never limited her own regenerations and you could probably say the same to Rassilon's, with that being his secret of immortality.

now in the episode the Master claims that Tecteun took the ultimate sacrifice by testing the raw ability on herself, but suppose she didn't. suppose she had another test subject first. suppose she promised one of her friends that his son, the best friend of her own child, could become the first Time Lord to receive the gift of infinite life. suppose then that Omega, wanting glory for himself and for his son, agreed to this and allowed Tecteun test her discovery on the boy, who was then granted an endless cycle of regenerations to match his friend's. from there Tecteun, now knowing the ability would work, put into herself, into Rassilon and into Omega before limiting it to a dozen lives per person and spreading it out among the population.

it's a lot of inference i'll admit but it would add a good few extra layers to these lines:

and this of course opens the door to the possibility that other character's we've met of cryptic origin with seemingly impossible knowledge but too dark a morality to be the Doctor could be the Master instead. characters like Lee Clayton or Gat (obviously not both at once) could be an early version of the Master. maybe Magus and Hazel from the Forgotten Lives books are also past versions of the Master. hell if you want to go wild maybe even the War Chief is the Master from before they had their memory wiped (but thats very unlikely)

also as i was finding the right screenshots and clips for this post i found these as well...

the way the Master refers to the Founders as 'our parents' (Tecteun and Omega being referred to as separate parents, as a Thoschei shipper i'm not touching the sibling theory with a forty foot pole) does make me wonder if he found out about his own past too but didn't tell the Doctor, not wanting to admit that he was the reason for the Doctor's first regeneration, the reason for Tecteun's torture and experimentation on her and the reason she could safely discover the ability for herself

so yeah who's to say that the Master isn't Omega's child who, like Tecteun's child, was captured by the Time Lords, regressed into a child, restricted to only 12 regenerations and robbed of all their memories. maybe he isn't any of that though. i mean maybe he is just a whiny crybaby who wants to be as important as his best friend. maybe he was the Timeless Child and the Doctor was the kid who pushed her. maybe he's actually Rassilon's child instead. who knows? not me!

[terranceholdsapencil]

Just watched the three doctors and its definitely my favourite serial yet,,, the best part is the brigadier being constantly done with the whole situation

The first time he sees two?

"Oh, no."

"Oh, yes.

"Yes, but you're not the"

"Yes, it is, sir. It's the first one."

When he enters the Tardis for the first time?

"So this is what you've been doing with UNIT funds and equipment this whole time"

Theyre besieged and stuck in the tardis?

"If only I could find my recorder, I could play you a little something to pass the time."

"We must be thankful for small mercies."

With THIS face:

When 2 leaves?

"As far as I'm concerned, Doctor, one of you is enough. More than enough."

Also when 1 and 2 appeared I forgot how much I missed them :) idk I love them both sm and Im so happy they could appear again. Especially 2 whose episodes were mostly missing

[partiallithopseffect]

something something the doctor isn't a person theyre an idea. something about pretending to be the person you used to be. who everyone thinks you still are.

you regenerate and you're a different person. different face, different thoughts. but you have all these memories of this good, sweet, silly man with all these friends. so you call yourself him. you become him. and then you meet him, and of course he regenerated too. he's a shadow, and you're the shadow of a shadow. you're both just pretending, trying to be a doctor, trying to heal the universe. you're a function. a set of responses. you both are. and then you argue with him about recorders