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The
Twelfth Doctor
(2013 - 2017) |
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| Clara Oswald |
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The Best Doctor
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 From the beginning, the Twelfth Doctor was destined to be a distinctive incarnation of the renegade Time Lord. With The Doctor having exhausted all twelve of his regenerations by the time of the Eleventh Doctor - due to the Tenth Doctor regenerating twice ("The Stolen Earth/Journey's End") and The Doctor not regarding the incarnation he adopted to fight in the Time War as a true 'Doctor' ("The War Doctor", "The Night of The Doctor" and "The Day of The Doctor") - The Doctor should have died for good after the centuries-long siege at Trenzalore ("The Time of The Doctor"), but he was given a new opportunity at life when the Time Lords, reaching out through the rift in time he had been protecting for all that time, sacrificed the chance to escape the pocket universe they had been trapped in by giving The Doctor a new set of regenerations.
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| Deep Breath |
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From the moment this incarnation began, The Doctor was faced with doubts about his role as The Doctor, considering the implications of his unexpected gift and what he would become now that he had gone beyond predicted limitations. This fear was so great that his previous incarnation actually called his own future, in a few moments of privacy when he made it back to the TARDIS before his companion Clara, to ask Clara to be there for his future self and help that scared man learn how to be The Doctor ("Deep Breath"). Throughout his life, the Twelfth Doctor was often troubled by his own awareness of his inner darkness, most likely 'aided' by the knowledge that his current incarnation was essentially the same incarnation that would have 'given birth' to The Valeyard ("The Trial of a Time Lord") before his dark side's interference in the past altered his personal history. Early in this incarnation, he asked his companion if he was a good man, subsequently attempting to 'redeem' a damaged Dalek that he nicknamed 'Rusty' ("Into the Dalek"), but although he failed to reform Rusty in the exact manner that they had set out to achieve, turning Rusty against its people by inspiring it with The Doctor's rage at the Daleks rather than his wonder at everything else, Clara noted in the aftermath that, even if The Doctor wasn't always a good man, the fact that he was trying to be one was enough.
Despite this assurance, the Twelfth Doctor was often troubled by the ease with which he affected a detached manner in order to do what had to be done, expressing fear at what he was turning into even as he continued such questionable actions as taking his companions into danger to satisfy some grander plan. On one occasion, Clara Oswald was particularly angry at him when he took her to the Orient Express in space just to investigate a mystery when she had been promised a simple holiday after The Doctor put her in a position where she would apparently have to choose whether to kill a unique life form that was about to hatch from within the Moon over the deaths of all of humanity when the Moon shattered, when The Doctor had already deduced that the creature hatching wouldn't destroy Earth ("Kill the Moon" and "Mummy on the Orient Express"). While he often came across as aloof and confident of his own intelligence, The Doctor was always willing to acknowledge when others had good ideas, such as when he was on an underwater base and noted that acting commander Cass was the most intelligent person in the base after himself despite the fact that Cass was deaf ("Under the Lake/Before the Flood").
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| Dark Water/Death in Heaven |
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His concerns about his own inner darkness came to a head during a confrontation with The Master's current female incarnation, now known as 'Missy', who put him in a position where he could either take command of the Cyber-army she had created and lead them across the universe or stand back and let them destroy Earth, claiming that she just wanted to prove to The Doctor that the two of them weren't that different. Although tempted by the potential power that he could use to save the innocent, The Doctor finally proclaimed that he had come to accept that he wasn't a good man, a bad man, or any kind of leader, but simply 'an idiot' who wanted to help people, passing on control of the army to the Cyber-converted Danny Pink, allowing one of the army to choose their fate rather than impose his own will on them ("Dark Water/Death in Heaven"). This assault also demonstrated The Doctor's sentimental side, as he found himself working against Missy and the Cyber-army with the aid of UNIT, who revealed that an additional legislation had been added to the United Nations charter that appointed The Doctor himself to the position of President of Earth in the event of a significant crisis. Despite his new authority, The Doctor expressed a wish that his old friend Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart was still alive, with The Brigadier's daughter Kate agreeing with The Doctor's high opinion of her father and noting that the only thing her father had regretted about working with The Doctor was that his scientific advisor had never saluted him. When the crisis was concluded, The Doctor realised that the last Cyberman standing, which had just shot Missy and saved Kate, was the resurrected Brigadier, prompting The Doctor to salute his old friend at last, musing that The Brigadier would never be anywhere but by his side when Earth and The Doctor faced their darkest hour.
Even after experiencing this personal epiphany about his true nature, The Doctor reflected that this incarnation had been 'lost a long time ago' ("Face the Raven"), still considering himself damned for some of the actions he had been forced to commit in the course of his lives. The Doctor later proved that he was right to be concerned about what he could become when the death of his companion Clara - caused through her own efforts to try and 'be The Doctor' when her attempt to save a close friend backfired - led to him staging a coup of Gallifrey in a desperate attempt to save her life despite it violating several Laws of Time ("Heaven Sent/Hell Bent"). Although his actions had no permanent consequences for Gallifrey itself, beyond exiling Rassilon for his corrupt leadership and shooting the Time Lord known as the General - after confirming that the General had not exhausted all twelve of his regenerations and would thus survive being 'killed' - so that he could escape with Clara, a confrontation with the immortal Ashildir forced The Doctor to acknowledge that he was going too far. Speculating that Missy had brought him and Clara together to set up such a situation ("The Bells of Saint John"), providing The Doctor with a companion who would become so similar to him that they would be unhealthily invested in each other, The Doctor erased his own memory of Clara as he recognised that their relationship had become too close for him to acknowledge the need for limits regarding how far he would go for her. While he was still able to remember where he and Clara had been together, specific details about her face and personality were lost to him, and even her name came and went, although he remembered enough to change his clothes in her memory. However, regardless of this dark view of himself, The Doctor continued to win the admiration and friendship of his allies, with his companions always affirming their faith in The Doctor when even he doubted himself.
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| Heaven Sent/Hell Bent |
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In terms of his own personal skills, the Twelfth Doctor retained his predecessors' ability to make quick deductions about the threats he faced and likely ways out of the problems he found himself facing, ranging from quickly identifying the Aristotle as a hospital ship ("Into the Dalek") to discreetly reprogramming a Cyberman computer system without two incarnations of The Master noticing what he was doing despite them being only a few feet away from him ("World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls"). Much like the Ninth Doctor, the Twelfth Doctor was not as skilled at hand-to-hand combat as his third self, but was willing to resort to physical combat if he had to, such as struggling with the Half-Face Man ("Deep Breath") and knocking Sutcliffe down with a single punch ("Thin Ice"), although he was knocked down by a barbarian when he tried to volunteer to fight the Eaters of Light ("The Eaters of Light"). Although he was not a ruthless man, the Twelfth Doctor often showed a certain cold detachment when it came to the life of his enemies, such as when he confronted the mysterious half-faced robot and mused that he would almost certainly have to kill it while sitting in a restaurant ("Deep Breath"), and required an extra push from Clara to try and reform a Dalek as she accused him of giving up too quickly because he couldn't consider the idea that a Dalek could change ("Into the Dalek"). After new companion Bill Potts witnessed The Doctor appear relieved about the fact that he had just saved his sonic screwdriver while failing to save a young boy from drowning under the frozen Thames, when she asked The Doctor how many people he had seen die or how many people he had killed, The Doctor simply stated that he didn't know how many people he had seen die and declined to answer how many he had killed, telling Bill that he didn't have the luxury of outrage or more people would die ("Thin Ice"), even if he redeemed himself in her eyes by later asserting that a man's worth was judged by how he treated 'worthless' lives.
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| The Return of Doctor Mysterio |
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As with all Doctors, the Twelfth Doctor retained their traditional sense of morality, but he sometimes justified this morality with intellectual arguments rather than simply defining it as the right thing to do, such as twice leaving humanity, both on a large and a small scale, to cope with morally complex situations primarily to teach his current companion a lesson ("Kill the Moon" and "Thin Ice"). However, he still defined himself by his willingness to take the right action no matter how much harder it might be than resorting to an easier course, musing once to Clara that sometimes he could only choose the least terrible option of several bad ones ("Mummy on the Orient Express"). Although not the regular master planner and manipulator he had been in his seventh incarnation, the Twelfth Doctor was still capable of coming up with complex plans if he had the time, such as setting up an elaborate scheme to rob a bank in the far future that included him leaving tools in the bank and then erasing his memory of the plan so that the telepathic security system wouldn't realise what he was doing until the time came for the true heist, which would be carried out during a solar flare that disrupted what security systems he couldn't shut down ("Time Heist"). On another occasion, faced with his old foe the Celestial Toymaker ("The Celestial Toymaker"), who was seeking a new Toyroom as his original one was damaged, The Doctor defeated the Toymaker by pretending to surrender and then trapping the Toymaker in the TARDIS Zero Room and ejecting it, ("Relative Dimensions"). When Clara was forced to act as The Doctor when the two-dimensional race known only as 'the Boneless' had essentially trapped him inside the TARDIS by shrinking its exterior so that he couldn't leave the ship, she mused that the first rule of being The Doctor was working out how to use the enemy's strength against them, which allowed her to restore the TARDIS to full size by tricking the Boneless into channelling their energy into the ship ("Flatline"). Although The Doctor has always encouraged his companions to be strong, the Twelfth became notably uncomfortable when he witnessed Clara trying to more directly 'imitate' him, being far more comfortable when he was working with Grant, who acquired superpowers during a meeting with The Doctor when Grant was a child ("The Return of Doctor Mysterio"), or when he coordinated a subtle resistance against the powerful Monks ("The Lie of the Land").
In terms of his control of the TARDIS, while the Twelfth Doctor experienced the traditional post-regeneration difficulty in remastering use of the TARDIS ("The Time of The Doctor" and "Deep Breath"), he quickly overcame it, allowing him to save a nurse from an exploding ship by materialising the TARDIS around her on board her vessel, even though he was in the early days of this body and still questioning his new identity ("Into the Dalek"), take a trip to investigate his theory that there was some creature with perfect camouflage that existed throughout history ("Listen"), and slowly pilot the TARDIS above London while searching for a hidden street ("Face the Raven"). His telepathic abilities were not tapped as regularly as they were in his tenth incarnation, but he still used them to a greater extent than other Doctors, such as erasing Rupert Pink's memories with little more than the touch of one finger when he met the boy as a child before Clara would meet him for the 'first' time as an adult ("Listen"), once contemplating erasing the memories of his future companion Bill Potts ("The Pilot"), and put Clara in a telepathically-induced scenario with only the aid of a sleep patch ("Dark Water/Death in Heaven"). He also attempted to use his psychic powers as part of a complex scheme to defeat the powerful Monks, who had conquered Earth by telepathically altering the minds of the human race to believe that they had lived with the Monks for centuries, although he required support from Bill to actually throw off their illusion even when in direct contact with the source of the telepathic transmission ("The Lie of the Land").
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| Oxygen |
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A subtle but distinctive trait about this incarnation was the comparatively greater variety in his wardrobe. While most Doctors will choose a distinctive style of clothing just after their regeneration and retain that style for the rest of their life, ranging from the Fifth always wearing his cricket outfit save for exceptional circumstances to the Third varying his style of dinner jackets, the Twelfth Doctor's choice of attire could be either elegant dinner jackets in a style similar to the Third Doctor's favoured clothing, or a casual hoodie and dark jumper that bore only a superficial resemblance to his other clothes. Even his hair changed over the course of his life, The Doctor starting out with very close-cropped curly hair during his travels with Clara before adopting a shaggier hairstyle in his time as a university lecturer, only returning to a closer cut while feigning allegiance to the mysterious and powerful Monks ("The Lie of the Land"). While wearing the casual attire, the Twelfth Doctor was also known to use sonic sunglasses following the loss of the sonic screwdriver in a meeting with the child version of Davros ("The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar"), the sunglasses allowing him access to most of the features commonly associated with the screwdriver by simply tapping the sides or even issuing mental commands. However, he abandoned the more casual attire after the death of his companion Clara Oswald ("Face the Raven"), as one of their last remembered conversations included her observation that the velvet attire made him look more 'Doctory'. This change also saw him stop using the sonic sunglasses on a regular basis in favour of a new screwdriver provided by the TARDIS. However, he still kept the sonic sunglasses as an alternative to the screwdriver, such as using them to help himself 'see' when he was blinded after exposure to hard vacuum ("Oxygen" and "Extremis"), or when helping the First Doctor analyse their available information on the mysterious Testimony Foundation ("Twice Upon a Time").
Fundamentally more reserved than his predecessor when it came to expressing himself emotionally, the Twelfth Doctor was far less comfortable when it came to emotional matters, once describing a hug as just a way of hiding a person's face to explain why he didn't like doing so ("Dark Water/Death in Heaven"). On top of this emotional distance, he initially expressed some dissatisfaction with his past selves, with a psychic shapeshifter's attempt to ingratiate itself to him by appearing to him as variations of his past selves being met with only disdain ("Silhouette"). However, as time went on, he began to demonstrate a certain nostalgia for some of his past selves, such as appearing pleased when he believed that current companion Clara was dating someone who bore a marked resemblance to his previous self ("The Caretaker"), simultaneously enjoying a chance to work at Coal Hill School while undercover as a caretaker. On another occasion, when he rescued a woman who was essentially a sentient painting from an auction, the Twelfth Doctor decided to leave her at a cottage at a time when he knew that his eighth incarnation would shortly visit, recognising that the Eighth Doctor would be better suited to help the woman explore her humanity than he was ("A Matter of Life and Death"). When his investigation into the mysterious Glamour saw him reunited with his seventh incarnation's old companion Benny Summerfield, The Doctor not only informed the higher-dimensional beings responsible for the Glamour that he would be very angry if they tampered with Benny's memory to protect their own existence, but later told Benny that he still remembered the death of the knight Sir Guy de Carnac - a potential love interest of Benny's who had died to save them - despite the centuries that had passed since then ("Sanctuary"), assuring Benny that he remembered Guy whenever he found himself in France and he would always remember those losses that truly mattered ("The Big Bang Generation"). When he met his first incarnation and the two were confronted by the mysterious Testimony organisation ("Twice Upon a Time"), who proclaimed that The Doctor was 'The Doctor of War' and showed images of some of the more violent encounters he would experience in the intervening incarnations, the Twelfth Doctor protested to his first self that all depicted information was taken out of context (although he expressed it as 'missing the jokes'), actively rejecting the idea that he only brought death even as he was contemplating allowing himself to die for good after so many losses and farewells.
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| Robot of Sherwood |
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In general, the Twelfth Doctor often displayed a greater emotional reserve than his predecessors, such as once describing his companion Clara as his 'carer'- in the sense that she cared about things so he wouldn't have to ("Into the Dalek") - and was even shown using cue cards she gave him to keep track of how he should apologise to scared humans ("Under the Lake/Before the Flood"). Despite this general distance, The Doctor made it clear that he still cared about people when it counted, acting to protect a prisoner in a medieval dungeon when he was locked up by the Sheriff of Nottingham even before he learned that she was Maid Marian ("Robot of Sherwood"), using alien technology to make Viking girl Ashildir immortal when the alternative was to just let her die after she had helped him save her village ("The Girl Who Died"), and drawing up a fake will to make a group of street urchins heirs to the estate of a Victorian industrialist who had been abusing an alien life-form for his own benefit after the children helped him ("Thin Ice"). When damage to the TARDIS led to The Doctor taking up residence in the 1970s for a few months while the ship repaired itself, he formed a close bond with the Collins family while they acted as his hosts, but this temporary 'holiday' culminated in an out-of-sequence confrontation with The Master that had more regularly faced the Third Doctor ("Terror of the Autons" to "Frontier in Space") with The Master initially assuming that the Twelfth Doctor was the Fourth after the original damage to the TARDIS caused The Doctor to regenerate. After learning of The Master's attempt to harness the artron energy of the recovering TARDIS by turning his host family against him, the Twelfth Doctor informed the younger Master that his crucial mistake was trying to make this incarnation angry when that was his default state, the subsequent clash draining The Master of his stolen energy and apparently causing him to regenerate ("Doorway to Hell").
The Doctor's emotional state was deeply affected when a chain of events saw him meet his 'wife', River Song, while she was attempting a complex plan to steal a legendary diamond from the ruthless King Hydroflax, giving him a unique opportunity to see how River acted when she wasn't dealing with him, as River only knew of the First to Eleventh Doctors as she had never been told about The Doctor's new regeneration cycle ("The Husbands of River Song"). Although The Doctor was initially uncomfortable with River's actions in his 'absence', which included her essentially 'stealing' the TARDIS while he was otherwise occupied so that she could use it for her own purposes, as well as River being very nonchalant about killing another living being just to get a diamond - albeit killing a ruthless planetary dictator to acquire a very unique diamond - The Doctor soon recognised that River's feelings for him were genuine when she made a passionate speech about her love for him despite her belief that it was impossible for The Doctor to have any kind of deeper feelings for her when she had no way of knowing that he was there. With the threat resolved as the two attended their final 'date' on Darillium, The Doctor gave River a grim speech about how there were no happy ever afters and there was no way around the fact that this night on Darillium was their last night together, although he offered River another moment of hope when he revealed that night on Darillium could last twenty-four years, giving them that much time together before they had to part. He was particularly solemn for a time after River's final death ("Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead"), but River, guessing what was coming for her future even if The Doctor would not explicitly confirm it, left instructions with her assistant Nardole to give The Doctor the right incentive to continue his travels, Nardole quoting a passage from River's diary that affirmed that she loved The Doctor for his ability to be good even when he would gain nothing from it ("Extremis"). Following this last parting, The Doctor adopted a kinder approach to problems, such as saving the last residents of a space station where oxygen was payment by reprogramming the station's computers to preserve the last residents by altering the computer to consider the residents the reason for the station's existence ("Oxygen"), or helping Victorian soldiers form an alliance with a platoon of Ice Warriors so that both would join the Galactic Federation ("Empress of Mars").
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| The Pyramid at the End of the World |
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Although The Doctor has always attempted to take the lead when dealing with a threat even over local authorities, the Twelfth's discovery that he could now officially act as the President of Earth during a large enough crisis also reflected a shift in his modus operandi. Where the Eleventh Doctor often subtly encouraged others to take point in a crisis unless he explicitly had to take command, such as when he encouraged his companions to negotiate with the Silurians on Earth's behalf ("The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood") or arranging for UNIT to negotiate with the Zygons while he only assisted in the resulting treaty ("The Day of The Doctor"), the Twelfth Doctor quickly became comfortable with his role as President, stepping into the position once again during an apparent breakdown of the Zygon treaty ("The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion") and even taking point when investigating the less explicit threat of a mysterious pyramid that had appeared out of nowhere at a point on the borders of several different countries ("The Pyramid at the End of the World"). When the mysterious Monks took control of Earth and telepathically rewrote history records and memories to present the idea that they had always been there to guide humanity, The Doctor acted as their public announcer to infiltrate their invasion and learn their weaknesses, when he could have assumed a more discreet role in the Monks' new world order while working on his planned sabotage ("The Lie of the Land"). Where the Eleventh Doctor tried to return to the shadows ("The Wedding of River Song"), the Twelfth Doctor was far more willing to bend the laws of Time to make an impression, once 'celebrating' what may be his final trip after he was invited to a meeting with Davros by taking a tank back to the eighth century so that he could stand on top of it and play his guitar ("The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar"), speculating that he also introduced the word 'Dude' to humanity in the process. When dealing with an apparent plan to bring the powerful Fisher King back to life, The Doctor not only bent the rules by travelling back to a point when the Fisher King was buried to find out what was going on, but also took action that all available evidence suggested would be changing history to stop the Fisher King in the past ("Under the Lake/Before the Flood"), although it later turned out that he had actually created a complex bootstrap paradox where he gave himself the incentive to defeat the Fisher King because he knew how he would respond to certain faked information. However, this willingness to bend the rules did not extend to explicitly breaking them, such as leaving scientist Jason Clearfield to suffer disfiguring injuries and be contaminated by Wyrrester venom in 1944 because he knew that was going to happen ("The Crawling Terror"). Despite this, The Doctor let humanity decide whether or not to destroy the moon when he learned that there was a vast life-form about to 'hatch' from the satellite even when he knew that the moon would exist in the future (albeit when he already had reason to believe that there wouldn't be any real danger) ("Kill the Moon").
As with all Doctors, the Twelfth Doctor would take his companions into danger, but he was willing to sacrifice himself if the need arose to preserve his life or save others, always prepared to take on the riskiest assignments and responsibilities of the current situation rather than make others do it. When dealing with the mysterious Foretold, a creature that was active on a future space-travelling version of the Orient Express that was attacking the passengers in ascending order starting with the weakest, once three people had died at the creature's hands, The Doctor deliberately used his telepathy to create the illusion that he was the next-weakest passenger, taking on a telepathic imprint of a woman's psychological trauma ("Mummy on the Orient Express"). This allowed him to confront the Foretold and deduce its purpose himself, despite knowing that this would give him sixty-six seconds to work out what he was facing and how to stop it before it killed him. After arriving in an underwater base and realising that the base was being used as part of a complex plan to resurrect the mysterious Fisher King, who had been apparently buried there before the flood that created the lake where the base was located, The Doctor travelled back in time to learn how the Fisher King came to Earth, but found himself confronting the King directly, only just defeating him by using the power cell from the King's ship to destroy a nearby dam while The Doctor hid in the stasis chamber that would have been the King's coffin ("Under the Lake/Before the Flood"). When trapped in a twisted castle inside his own confession dial by the Time Lords to make him confess the secret of the Hybrid, The Doctor escaped by setting up a complex loop where he would 'sacrifice' himself to the Shroud trying to make him talk and then transfer the essence of his dying body into another version of himself created by the teleporter that had brought him to the castle, The Doctor thus condemning himself to a cycle of death and rebirth for over four billion years, with fragmentary memories of the preceding loops, until he escaped his prison by his own hands when he could have just confessed his secret and escaped earlier ("Heaven Sent/Hell Bent").
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| The Lie of the Land |
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Another example of his capacity for self-sacrifice was when he and his companions were trapped on a space station and were forced to evacuate by carrying out a spacewalk; with one helmet damaged, The Doctor made the walk without a helmet and only the protection of a more limited forcefield so that his companion Bill could use his helmet instead ("Oxygen"). Although he survived the experience, The Doctor was left blind due to his corneas being destroyed by exposure to vacuum, the damage remaining even after he used the TARDIS to grow a new pair of eyes. Wanting to keep this development secret from Bill and his enemies, The Doctor began wearing the sonic sunglasses, programming them to somehow transmit information directly into his brain so that he could be presented with at least the key details of his surroundings, such as a grid pattern of objects around him and quick biological details of living entities in the same room ("Extremis"). His vision was eventually restored by the powerful entities known only as the Monks, Bill making a deal with the Monks where they could have dominion over Earth if they would restore The Doctor's sight at a time when he needed to open a secure lock when he needed to see the numbers being displayed on the locking system ("The Pyramid at the End of the World"), The Doctor repaying Bill by setting up a complex plan to sabotage the Monks' control of Earth ("The Lie of the Land").
Like his sixth incarnation, the Twelfth Doctor particularly mellowed over the course of his life, starting out as an arrogant individual who often demonstrated a distaste for humanity's flaws while being unconcerned about others' feelings. He often dispensed with the niceties to become cold and calculating in critical moments that needed him to make an objective assessment of the situation, to the extent that his companion Clara once prepared a series of cards for him to read from to remember what he should say to scared humans ("Before the Flood"). His detachment meant that he could come off as unpleasant and ruthless, and often expressed fear of what he might become, this fear most likely reinforced by his awareness that this incarnation was essentially The Doctor that should have 'given birth' to The Valeyard ("The Ultimate Foe"). However, once again reflecting his sixth self's social development, the Twelfth Doctor later calmed to an attitude of quieter confidence, coming across as socially ignorant of how others would react to his involvement in their lives rather than blatantly dismissive. His personal development is best reflected by his interaction with his past selves; when a crisis caused by the Voord caused him to meet his immediate two predecessors early in his life, the Tenth Doctor initially assumed that the Twelfth Doctor was The Valeyard ("Four Doctors"), but when the Twelfth Doctor met the Tenth during a crisis involving a rift into anti-time while the Twelfth Doctor was working as a lecturer, the Tenth explicitly stated that he had a feeling that he was going to enjoy being the Twelfth ("The Lost Dimension"). In a confrontation with two incarnations of The Master, The Doctor affirmed that he fought the impossible battles not because he wanted to beat his enemies or because it was fun, but he fought because it was right, decent and kind, committing himself to the chance that he might be able to save some lives even if he fell ("World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls").
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| The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar |
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In keeping with The Doctor's concerns about his own dark side, some storylines saw The Doctor exploring the possibility of redeeming some of his adversaries. One of his early trips saw him engage in a complex scheme where he essentially acted on behalf of his current opponent's future self in order to give her a chance to save the last of an ancient species that she had been using as a slave ("Time-Heist"), using the codes and instructions provided by her future self to infiltrate a highly secure bank and free the slaves. When The Doctor learned that Davros was dying, after an unintended trip to Skaro's past resulted in The Doctor meeting Davros as a child ("The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar"), The Doctor appeared to be far more open to the idea that Davros regretted his past than he might have done in prior incarnations, the two sharing a brief laugh and Davros expressing apparently genuine admiration at the news that The Doctor had managed to save Gallifrey where Davros had failed to save the Kaleds ("The Day of The Doctor" and "Genesis of the Daleks"). Even after this encounter saw Davros try to steal some of The Doctor's regenerative energy to restore himself and various other Daleks, The Doctor refused to give up on the dream that his old enemies could be better, going to great lengths to enforce the human/Zygon peace treaty drawn up by the War, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors ("The Day of The Doctor").Whenever the peace was threatened, The Doctor would reinforce the need for the treaty via a complex scenario where the Zygons and the humans would seek 'the Osgood Boxes' in the Black Archive, two boxes guarded by the UNIT scientist Osgood and her Zygon 'sister', each box apparently presenting humans or Zygons with a fifty-fifty chance of destroying their enemies or themselves so that he could make them realise the pointlessness of war (in reality, the boxes were merely symbolic and didn't do anything as The Doctor would never have created something like that, but the principle was still sound). During at least one such stand-off, The Doctor explained that the boxes were intended to represent scale models of war, as nobody could know who would die in wars before the first shots were fired, launching into a particularly emotionally intense rant when one Zygon told The Doctor that he could never understand and The Doctor countered by briefly summarising how he was still haunted by the horrors of the Time War ("The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion").
Another complex chain of events saw him rescue Charlie Smith and Andrea Quill, the last prince of the Rhodians and their ancient enemies the Quill (the Quill condemned to serve the Rhodians after their defeat by a series of implants that prevented them using weapons) when their people had been wiped out in a war, sending them both to hide at Coal Hill School. Although Miss Quill in particular resented her restrictions, the two of them ended up joining a small group of students in acting as the first line of defence for potential alien incursions in the school, The Doctor recognising that Coal Hill had become a temporal hotspot due to his actions but also unable to stay and defend it long-term himself ("For Tonight We Might Die"). The Doctor's resolve to save others was reflected on a subconscious level, when he realised that he had subconsciously 'chosen' his current face during his last regeneration as it was the face of Caecilius, a Roman father who had been saved from Pompeii by the Tenth Doctor and Donna Noble ("The Fires of Pompeii"), The Doctor concluding that he had chosen this face to remind himself that his purpose as The Doctor was to save people ("The Girl Who Died"). This desire to save everyone worked against him after he nearly put the Web of Time at risk just to save Clara from her death even after he saw her die, but although he fled Gallifrey to try and save her, he forced himself to move past this 'need' when he erased his memory of Clara, his subsequent twenty-four years with River on Darillium ("The Husbands of River Song") helping him regain his moral balance and accept the things he couldn't change in favour of enjoying the moments he could share.
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| Extremis |
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Despite the trauma of his time in his confession dial, The Doctor's desire to give others a chance at redemption was given its greatest opportunity during his next meeting with Missy. Even after her attempt to force him to take command of an army of Cybermen or let them destroy the universe ("Dark Water/Death in Heaven"), followed by her trying to trick The Doctor into killing Clara when his companion was hidden in a Dalek casing ("The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar"), as well as an out-of-sequence encounter with The Master who had regularly fought the Third Doctor reinforcing their animosity for each other ("Doorway to Hell"), when faced with a chance to execute Missy for her sins ("Extremis"), as part of the planned execution involved him standing guard over the vault where Missy's remains would have been kept for a thousand years, he decided to take on that part of the role despite sparing Missy's life, hoping that time spent in isolation would give Missy the opportunity to reflect on her past and encourage her to change. To this end, The Doctor set himself up as a lecturer in St Luke's University, hiding the vault in a basement where he and his current companion Nardole would be immediately aware if anyone or anything went into or came out of the vault. Apparently working at the university for some time - exact figures were not provided, but rumours stated that he had been at St Luke's for over seventy years - The Doctor's lectures consisted of a wide variety of advanced topics where he could basically discuss what he liked, such as a lecture scheduled to be about quantum physics turning into a poetry lecture. Although he and Missy each acknowledged that Missy was capable of escaping the vault on her own and only stayed 'locked up' because she chose to be there, Missy nevertheless began to show genuine remorse for the people she had killed in the past ("The Lie of the Land"), the former villain even agreeing to help repair the TARDIS when the ship malfunctioned and travelled back to Earth while leaving The Doctor on Victorian-era Mars ("The Empress of Mars"), while The Doctor later left Missy in the TARDIS to conduct repairs (albeit with the controls locked so that she couldn't take the ship anywhere) while he and his current companions were on another trip ("The Eaters of Light"). The Doctor stated that his desire to redeem Missy was motivated by the belief that she was the only person in the universe he had ever met who was most like him, speculating that The Master had been his 'man-crush' when the two of them were at school, and expressing hope that Missy would change if given a chance to see the universe rather than trying to burn it ("Worlds Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls").
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| Worlds Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls |
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While working as a lecturer, The Doctor took a personal interest in Bill Potts, a young woman who officially worked in the university canteen but had nevertheless regularly attended his lectures even when she didn't completely understand what he was talking about, offering to become her personal tutor so long as she committed herself to her studies. Although Bill wasn't even an actual student, she swiftly agreed with The Doctor's rules, subsequently receiving a dramatic introduction to the TARDIS when she found herself being pursued by a mysterious creature that manifested from a pool of a liquid-like substance in the form of Heather, a young woman Bill had been interested in ("The Pilot"). Regardless of The Doctor's need to remain on Earth and Bill's initial questions about his real history, The Doctor and Bill quickly formed a close bond, to the point that The Doctor undertook a risky space walk that left him apparently permanently blind in order to guarantee that Bill would be safe ("Oxygen"), Bill later taking a risk that essentially betrayed Earth to the powerful Monks in order to restore The Doctor's sight because the alternative was to let him die ("The Pyramid at the End of the World"). After other trips to the past to solve such mysteries as a message written on the surface of Mars ("Empress of Mars") and the disappearance of the Ninth Legion ("The Eaters of Light"), The Doctor's time with Bill, Nardole and Missy came to an abrupt end when an attempt to test Missy's reformation with the 'simple' crisis of a ship trapped in the event horizon of a black hole, only for this crisis to result in a meeting with Missy's previous incarnation and a new branch of early Cybermen ("World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls"). Faced with two Masters and an entire city full of Cybermen, as well as Bill having been converted into a Cyberman herself due to The Master's manipulations, The Doctor resolved to keep fighting despite the scale of the odds against him as the time dilation effect allowed the Cybermen to rapidly 'evolve' to a more dangerous level, as well as him having sustained a lethal electric shock from a Cyberman during their escape from Floor 1056 that had triggered the start of his next regeneration even as he refused to let the change take place in the middle of the crisis. As Nardole took the civilians to safety on an upper floor, The Masters departed, The Doctor unaware that Missy had been shot by her past self, with the laser screwdriver set to disable her regenerations, while The Master had been stabbed so that he would regenerate into Missy. Standing alone, The Doctor triggered a series of explosions that destroyed the Cybermen and virtually the entire floor, but was left almost dead from his injuries, only surviving because Bill was 'restored' as a non-corporeal being by her would-have-been girlfriend Heather and left The Doctor in the TARDIS before she departed herself.
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| Twice Upon a Time |
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Waking up in the TARDIS, The Doctor still refused to regenerate, preferring to die the same man rather than keep changing and experiencing further losses, but found himself confronted by a surprise meeting when the TARDIS took him to the South Pole in time to meet his first incarnation as the old man approached his own regeneration ("Twice Upon a Time"). Brought together by an apparent temporal anomaly to save an army captain from the First World War who had been pulled into the far future, the two Doctors learned of the mysterious organisation known as 'Testimony', who collected those on the verge of death, and whose efforts to return the captain to his time period had been interrupted due to the paradox of the two Doctors. Faced with his first self and Testimony-recreated versions of Clara, Nardole and Bill - Testimony also restoring The Doctor's memories of Clara - after he saved the captain's life by bringing him back to a point a couple of hours after he left so that he would be saved by the Christmas truce of 1914, The Doctor was reminded both of the need for a Doctor in the universe at large and of the true meaning of his status as 'The Doctor of War', as he was the man who sought the moments of peace in large conflicts rather than the man who revelled in the chaos. Despite still pained at the loss of so many friends, The Doctor concluded that one more life couldn't hurt, passing on some advice to his successor before he regenerated.
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