[[[Warning! This post was written over several days and is super long and contains a lot of detail about a film/tv show, meant to be submitted elsewhere, but since it was rejected I’m posting it here as it’d feel like wasted effort otherwise. So unless you’re a Doctor Who nerd who likes to nit-pick everything and has the patience to, don’t bother reading this — not having a go, but it will genuinely be a waist of your time. Thank you.]]]

Given the recent re-release of the classic 1965 movie Dr Who and The Daleks, I felt it appropriate to revisit one of Doctor Who’s oldest and, sadly, often overlooked mystery: how does the Cushing Doctor fit into canon? How does a human scientist who built a Time Machine in his back garden fit into the mainstream show about an alien time traveller with a stolen Time Machine?

Now, admittedly there is technically an official explanation for the Cushing movies as per the novelisation of The Day of the Doctor by Steven Moffat. In the book, it is explained that the films are actually movies within the Doctor Who universe (or Whoniverse) based on the Doctor’s experiences. Of course, there’s two main issues with this: one is that Cushing himself already explained the movies as a trick of the Toymaker (this was long before the 60th bear in mind). But the second issue is, all that aside, I just don’t like either of those explanations.

Fortunately, this is Doctor Who, and nothing is set in stone (no Angels Take Manhattan comments plz!!!) and even Moffat himself has said that the gaps in the story are as much a part of the franchise’s DNA that viewers should celebrate and make up their own ideas about. And since in any case the show (the flagship media of the franchise’s storytelling) has never (to my knowledge, at least) explicitly explained the Cushing Doctor, I say, let’s go for it.

Now, admittedly, the theory that I am going to present here has been made before, however it’s a theory that is itself full of holes and beyond a couple of sentences (and with no evidence) hasn’t really been explored in detail before. So rather than simply say ‘I think it’s this…’ I really tired to do my homework on this theory, and hopefully offer an alternative and much more interesting explanation as to how the Cushing Doctor fits into the mainstream canon.

With that settled, let’s jump into it.

So how do I believe that the Cushing Doctor is canon? He’s obviously not an alien with the ability to regenerate, so let’s try another way.

Let’s go back to the fantastic 2008 series finale Journey’s End.

As you all know (and if not, google it or watch the episode/full season) the Doctor’s severed hand, held within the TARDIS, ‘regenerated’ into a fully-formed being who was a physical copy of the 10th Doctor, but due to the interference of the human Donna, this Doctor was a part human-part time lord, a carbon copy of 10 but as a human, and without the ability to regenerate, but aging like a human instead. I propose that this half-human Doctor eventually aged into the Cushing Doctor, and that the Cushing Movies actually take place in the Pete’s World universe.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: yes it’s been said before, and yes, there are a lot of holes in this theory. In fact, Here are the biggest holes in this theory: Where is Rose? Why didn’t the Doctor recognise the Daleks? How could the Cushing Doctor have built such a complex machine as a TARDIS? How does he have a niece with no siblings? And possibly the biggest one — how is it that he just happened to have an adventure almost identical to the actual first Doctor in any case (in the second Doctor who serial ‘the Daleks’)? [actually, 2 identical adventures if you count Daleks invasion of Earth also]

Whilst these three questions may seem like huge holes in this theory, when you look at the evidence, not only does this theory make sense, but these ‘holes’ actually have pretty simple explanations that are actually supported by evidence. To be clear, when I say ‘evidence’, I will be drawing from two main sources: the show, and the movies (or things that the movie producers/showrunners/actors have said themselves).

As we address the ‘holes’, let’s look at some basic points and associated clues that suggest and will lead to the conclusion that the Cushing Doctor is the Half-Doctor.

Point 1. Physiology.

Obviously the first thing to look at is each character’s distinct physical characteristics. When you compare the Half-Doctor to the Cushing Doctor (as shown above) you can easily see physical similarities between the two. Both are tall and thin (almost the same heights even), with similar face shapes, pointy noses and well-kept hair (and similar hairlines). Obviously Cushing Doc’s hairline is a little further back, but that would undoubtedly be expected with age. The Cushing Doctor does also appear to be a little thinner in the face than Half Doc, but again with age, that’s neither impossible nor uncommon.

The eyes are the only main difference. Cushing’s were blue, but there are innumerable explanations for this difference. maybe half-time lord physiology allows peripheral changes such as hair and eye colour to regenerate if enough traces of regeneration energy are present, like the 10th doctor’s partial hand regeneration on both himself, river song, and even Davros? Or maybe they could’ve simply changed colour with time lord age? Or could it much more simply be that, being a human, the Cushing doctor later used some form of blue contact lenses that turned his eyes blue a-la Orlando bloom? [on a side note: Peter Cushing had blue eyes. Did he wear contacts or something in this photo? Because his eyes clearly aren’t blue, unless the quality just sucks that bad].

Presuming that the minor point about the eyes could have a simple explanation like the use of contact lenses (the most simple explanation presumably) looking at the two side-by-side from a purely appearance point of view, you can imagine Cushing Doc as easily looking like what Half Doc could or would age into in 30-40 years time (or maybe longer; we’ll get to that later). And the fact that it’s clearly established in Journey’s End that half-Doc cannot regenerate means that he may just have done that.

Point 2. The Cushing TARDIS is not of Universe One

This is a more subtle clue, but if you look at the evidence, it actually makes sense. In the first film, the Cushing Doctor claims the following:

My little fellow scientist. We’ve been working on TARDIS for many years.

The Cushing Doctor claims he and his granddaughter Susan have been ‘working on’ TARDIS (not ‘the’ TARDIS) for ‘many years’. Moments before that, he also claimed that a component that Ian almost sat on was part of ‘My latest invention’. Note that the Cushing Doctor is claiming to have invented TARDIS, effectively. I believe this is (partly) a lie: it’s either a ruse to cover up the nature of the device from the public/authorities who would like to get their hands on it, like Yvonne; or the Cushing Doctor has forgotten the precise origin of his version of TARDIS (we will get into the memory thing later; just go with it for now, it’ll all pay off I promise!!!)

In a deleted scene for Journey’s End that RTD himself has stated is canon the 10th Doctor gives the Half Doctor a piece of TARDIS Coral, which he states can be used to ‘grow your own’, with the DoctorDonna offering a suggestion on how to make it grow faster (the method of growth still takes hundreds of years, but don’t worry; this ties into something later. Look, I know I keep saying that, but in the words of Pete Tyler: trust me on this). I believe that this piece of Coral you see in the deleted scene grew into the Cushing TARDIS and there’s one key detail that may confirm it: it’s jumbled up interior.

I mean, look at that: that’s nothing even remotely like any of the sleek tardis interiors you see on the show — heck, even the makeshift one from The Doctor’s Wife didn’t look that poor quality. But if you think about it, a TARDIS grown in an alternative universe (coupled with the possibility of a man and his granddaughter ‘working’ on it for many years) might just look exactly like that. Consider this: when 10 first visits Pete’s World in Rise of the Cybermen, it’s established that the two universes have different energy signatures, hence why 10’s TARDIS cannot work as it’s the wrong form of energy, and also possibly slightly different laws of Physics, as it’s established within the Whoniverse that some alternative universes function differently. As the TARDIS coral is a living, growing thing, it stands to reason that as it grows, it may ‘adapt’ or ‘evolve’ due to the different type of energy it grown on and feeds on, and different laws of Physics it obeys (sort of like how you raise a baby with a specific language). But if the Cushing TARDIS grows on different ‘food’ as it were, then it would naturally look and function differently, which points to the Cushing TARDIS being possibly grown in an alternative world — Pete’s World. It may also explain why Cushing’s TARDIS is likewise a police box on the outside: it inherited peripheral traits such as the exterior and the broken chameleon circuit, but adapted to function in the alternative universe. And perhaps by the time of the second movie, the growth process had fully matured, or the Cushing doctor had mastered modifications of it.

Point 3. The Cushing doctor’s companions align perfectly with the half-Doctor’s family

This isn’t so much a ‘clue’ per se, but it calls into mind what at first looks like a throwaway line from Journey’s End, but which actually explains what at first appears to be a glaring hole in this whole thing, and actually makes this part of the theory fits perfectly.

In the first movie, the doctor travels with his granddaughters: Barbara and Susan. It’s not inconceivable that at some point, half-doc and Rose got busy, had a kid or two, who then gave him Barbara and Susan. However, in the second movie, the doctor travels with Susan and his niece Louise.

An immediate question arises: how can half-doc have a niece? He doesn’t have any siblings! And that’s true… but Rose does.

You may not remember, but Rose ends up with a younger brother: Jackie is pregnant with him in Doomsday, and by the time of Journey’s End, he is born and called Tony. I propose that Tony is the father of Louise, and given it’s not impossible for the Doctor and Rose to have married at some point, this would therefore make Tony’s child his niece too, via marriage.

Point 4. The Cushing Doctor doesn’t recognise the Daleks (or the events unfolding in the movie)… and that’s the way it should be (probably).

Admittedly, this one is a bit of a stretch, but I still believe it makes sense, just bear with me. Usually when people post about the Cushing-is-10.5 theory online, they just dismiss the fact that he doesn’t have memory of neither the Daleks nor the events of the 1963 serial The Daleks, of which the events of the movie mirror — or they use the classic ‘he forgot’ lazy excuse. I do believe that he forgot the Daleks, but I believe there is several juicy and horrifyingly nerdy explanations for this, which also explains one or two other things with this theory.

In the mainstream show, whenever two incarnations cross paths due to time travel (note: this is not bigeneration. However you feel about that concept, that has different rules and will not be discussed here) it’s explained that the younger incarnation cannot retain the memories of the paths crossing due to ‘timelines being out of sync’ — in other words, the timelines crossing. Examples of this phenomenon in the show include ‘The Day of The Doctor’ and Peter Capaldi’s last episode. Basically, whenever timelines cross, memories are lost.

In Journey’s End, when the half-Doctor is born, he retains all the memories of the actual Doctor’s past. However, note the following dialogue that he makes shortly after his inception:

HALF DOCTOR: Oh, that was me. My single heart. Because I’m a complicated event in time and space. Must have rippled back, converging on you.

Already, we can see something is off here: the half-doctor is described as ‘rippled back’, so this alone indicates an anomaly in his timeline due to it apparently ‘rippling’ or crossing back on itself, one that could almost certainly put his own timeline out of sync during the event and eventually lead to memory loss later. But consider also what the doctor says to Donna:

DOCTOR: You’re so unique the timelines were converging on you. Human being with a Time Lord brain

The timelines were simultaneously collectively converging. So this anomalous timeline of the Half-Doctor was converging with the timeline of the mainstream doctor, this is undoubtedly a case of their timelines converging, which wouldn’t put it out of possibility that this is an instance of the timelines being out of sync, and therefore one of the doctors should lose their memory. And since both 11 (Victory of the Daleks) 12 (the magician’s apprentice) and 13 (the battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos [side note: who tf named that episode???]) recalled the event, it therefore stands to reason that half-doctor is the one who lost his memory (eventually). However, it seems that the half-doctor had forgotten his entire past, as in the film, he did not remember the Daleks or the events unfolding. It seems that this is likely a combination of the timeline issue and his half-human aged brain being unable to recall that much information.

Point 5: Cushing’s age is never established, and where is Rose?

This is where we begin to delve more into the speculation side of the theory and start to formulate an idea of the timeline which led from half-doc stood on that beach in 2008 to Cushing doc sat reading a comic in the 1960’s.

First of all, there are three main things up to now which aren’t clear: the growth of TARDIS, the loss of the doctor’s memory, and the fate of Rose. Firstly, we know that in any case, Rose must have retained her own memory of the Medusa cascade event. We also know that by the time the doctor is the elderly man living in the 1960’s, Rose is nowhere to be seen — so in the time between having children and then in this Doctor’s personal timeline, Rose must have either died or left (possibly something to do with the Reality War, or possibly something else entirely). Whatever the case, it doesn’t matter: at some point after giving birth, Rose is out of the picture. The other issue is the amount of time that it took to grow the tardis. Now, in the Journey’s end deleted scene, the half-doctor states that it takes thousands of years to grow. Donna says something, seemingly a way to speed up the process, though I admit I find it hard to tell what it is she is saying, so I can’t tell exactly the minimum amount of time required for the Tardis to grow. However, even assuming it is a couple of hundred of years, it’s not out of the possibility that the half-doctor could potentially live that long: though it says he ages, it doesn’t say whether he had human ageing, or time lord ageing, which can take hundreds of years. So it may be possible that the half-doctor lived long enough for the tardis to grow, then travelled back in time to collect his family from the past. Personally, I find that unlikely and I believe that the simpler explanation is that the half-doctor simply managed to rapidly speed up the growth process that it only took a few years, presumably before most of his memory had gone until he lost it completely and came to believe that he designed/built it, possibly ‘working’ on it as it finished growing.

Now, watching the 1965 movie, it’s clear that both of his granddaughters are born and raised in that era — they aren’t 2010-2020 kids sent back in time and trying to fit in — they very clearly belong to that era, and were clearly born and raised then. So I believe that it’s most likely they travelled back in time before they had a child (and subsequently grandchildren). And in keeping with the assumptions made before, they likely took Tony into the past with them, hence how Louise was born, so I believe that they may have travelled back to a distant time — perhaps even as early as the 1900’s or the 1910’s. But what would compel them to do such a thing? They had Jackie and Pete there in the modern day, why would they abandon them for the past? It’s hard to say: perhaps Pete and Jackie are dead, and rose (the only guardian of Tony left) needed to escape from the grief, so she convinced the doctor to live in the past. Or, perhaps in taking Tony to see something in the past, TARDIS broke down, and the Doctor, perhaps losing his memory at an accelerated rate, couldn’t fix it/the technology needed to fix it wasn’t invented yet, so they may have had no choice. In any case, it doesn’t matter: I believe that, the Doctor, Rose, and Tony ended up living in the 1900’s/1910’s with a broken TARDIS.

Final Timeline theory

Taking everything we have discussed into account, I believe that the timeline from half-doc stood on Bad Wolf Bay to the Cushing Doctor sat reading comics goes something like this occurred:

After being dropped off in Pete’s world, the doctor managed to grow TARDIS at an accelerated rate. He, Rose and Tony took a trip to the past, but TARDIS either broke down or was not fully grown yet and they got stuck in the early 20th century — whatever the cause, they ended up stranded there. Having realised he had no way to repair it, the Doctor bought them the house (the one you see at the beginning of the movie) and hid TARDIS in his back garden. By now, he has lost his memory of his past fully, except possibly for scientific knowledge, and now believed himself to have been a genius but humble human scientist who built an incomplete Time Machine that he became determined to complete. He also had a child/children with Rose, who subsequently had the children Barbara and Susan (Tony simultaneously had Louise). During the time following, something happened that Rose and his children were not around. Following this, the doctor and his granddaughter Susan, who inherited his intellect, worked tirelessly to repair/enhance the growth of TARDIS until it was perfectly functional, just in time for Ian to arrive…

There we have it: I believe that we have successfully created a viable theory as to how the half-doctor developed into the Cushing Doctor. There’s just one major question that now needs to be answered.

Why did the Cushing Doctor have the (almost) exact same adventures as the main universe actual First Doctor (William Hartnell) did?

[Well, the real answer is that the films were based on them serials, so of course they share the same plot, but how do we answer in-universe and in relation to this theory?]

Personally, I think any explanation for this is apt. However, I have two personal theories. Either: 1) it’s some sort of game of the Toymaker who at some point visited that universe, or 2) it’s the work of time. In 13 (Jodie Whittaker)’s final series, it is established that Time itself is a sort of sentient entity that controls itself or is controlled. Presuming that the Pete’s World universe has some equivalent entity, perhaps that’s the cause: time mirroring what it sees. Alternatively, it may be something much more simple: it may just be parallel events occurring in two different universes. After all, the first episode featuring Pete’s world revolved around a parallel event: the cybermen beginning on Pete’s world — as they had on Mondas/Telos/wherever the hell else in the main Universe — as a parallel event. In any case, it doesn’t matter: it’s just how the story goes.