Thread by @demiurgent

(Spoilers for last season's Dr. Who.)

So. If the Doctor is the Timeless Child, with lives upon lives before their memories scraped away before they become the 'first' Doctor/William Hartnell... what if that means we never understood what @SawbonesHex's Sixth Doctor was?

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We know that thanks to the Fifth Doctor's regeneration being "different" thanks to poison and gadflys swirling around his head, the Sixth was unstable, given to fragments of earlier lives coming out now and again.

(I always thought @SawbonesHex was brilliant for the record.)

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And then we had the Trial of a Time Lord, where (yet more spoilers) the Valeyard prosecuted him, only to apparently be the "final incarnation" of the Doctor and all his worst impulses, looking to take the Sixth's incarnations and life.

...but what if we misinterpreted?

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What if the Valeyard was the last, darkest incarnation of the Timeless Child's pre-Doctoral days (I know we've seen a Pre-Doctor Doctor - the Intern, if you will, but bear with me). What if they wiped their memory as much to prevent their becoming a worse monster?

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What if that was part of what the First Doctor/Hartnell was fleeing -- the subconscious echo of the darkness of a past he wasn't permitted to remember? What if each new regeneration pushed them farther and farther from the Valeyard's evil...

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...until the Fifth Doctor's unstable regeneration and the Sixth Doctor's chaotic, unstable nature allowed elements of the Valeyard to reawaken... and act almost like a beacon, letting the Valeyard track down his future self.

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What if it wasn't actually the Doctor's future *regenerations* the Valeyard sought…but the Doctor's future *incarnations?* What if he sought to displace the mindwiped creature who'd displaced him, taking the Doctor's place moving forward and restoring the Valeyard's destiny?

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And though the Sixth Doctor defeated the Valeyard, what if he remembered just *enough* of his past as a result that when he regenerated into the Seventh... the Seventh remembered echoes of the Valeyard's own machinations, leading to his own agenda coming to the fore?

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When Testimony called the Doctor (through all his incarnations) the "Shadow of the Valeyard," that would simply have been descriptive as a result.

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And when the 13th Doctor wrestled with his identity ("am I a good man?") after pushing past the traditional regeneration limit, who's to say that wasn't a vague, repressed memory of the Valeyard, who had no such limits?

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I have no point beyond that, save to remind everyone that @SawbonesHex was bloody brilliant and deserves so much respect for all he brought to the role, and that new possibilities can lead to new revelations.

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(Admittedly, I also have a complimentary rant on how the Timeless Child means the Doctor actually was Rassilon, and when Rassilon is thrown off Gallifrey by the 13th Doctor, he ends regenerating into the Valeyard, and then is forcibly regenerated into the first Doctor.)

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(And, for that matter, a rant on how Rassilon went back, regenerated into *Omega,* and *then* regenerated into the Valeyard, but honestly I digress.)

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