… and nothing but. As Mr. Chiball et. al. put forward in Fugitive of the Judoon we have a new Doctor in the House … potentially. Whatever form the ‘Ruth Clayton Doctor’ turns out to be, and there are plenty of clues in her TARDIS, it potentially set forth a dogmatic problem for the Tour, but one which we’ve seen before.
You see we’re sticklers for Doctor Who History ’round here, just like it says on the tin the site came in, and no matter how convoluted that history can and has become, we believe in the through-line that many production teams down the years, including Mr. Chibnall, have endeavored to maintain. The spine, even limiting factor of this was set forth by Robert Holmes in The Deadly Assassin. The Timelord regeneration cycle is limited to 13. So while the whole of civil society refers to Jodie Whittaker as the 13th Doctor, thanks to very clever and attentive plotting begun by Steven Moffat in The Name of the Doctor with the revelation of John Hurt as the ‘War Doctor’ and concluding in The Time of the Doctor, we (the Royal we) know her as the 15th Doctor, and our nomenclature reflects this.
Where the ‘Ruth Clayton Doctor’ fits into all of this, if she does at all–and all of the attendant speculation that goes along with it, is of course uncertain. The Tour however, is quite certain of are two things:
1. We’ll be seeing Jo Martin again before series 12 concludes, and …
2. The Tour will not (amend that–most likely not) be accommodating her in the overall timeline as far as our nomenclature goes, should she turn out to be a proto-Hartnell Doctor or a sandwiched Doctor shoehorned in between the Troughton and Pertwee Doctors or one of the faces that flashed by in The Brain of Morbius.
And the reason for that means in Tour terms is quite simple. It’s a royal (‘we’) pain.
We did this once already, back in 2014, moving and renaming the whole of the Eccleston, Tennant, and Smith galleries to fold in John Hurt. Doing all that, and by extension updating all of the linkages, is not something the Tour would like to undertake again.
For what we can do though, we have put together a small gallery of Jo Martin images. Whether this grows into something more depends on the rest of Series 12. She could be mainstreamed into the larger Wings of the Tour or … could be more of an offshoot much in the way Richard E Grant is.
Time will tell, always does.
