The entire history of the show looks like it’s been rewritten in a single moment.
Doctor Who fans are used to the show’s established canon being rewritten (the Timeless Child, anyone?), but the latest episode might have just snuck in another huge game-changer that rewrites history all over again.
Rogue sees the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) encounter a charismatic bounty hunter (Jonathan Groff) – though an attraction develops between the pair, their relationship gets off to a rocky start when Rogue mistakes our hero for a member of the shapeshifting Chuldur race.
Rogue escorts the Doctor at gunpoint to his craft – hidden from prying eyes so as not to cause a stir in Regency-era England – and performs a scan to identify his captive’s true origins.
The scan surfaces holographic representations of previous Doctors – the likes of Jodie Whittaker, Peter Capaldi, William Hartnell, Tom Baker and David Tennant (twice!) all appear, as one might expect.
“I’m not a Chuldur,” says the Doctor. “I’m something each older and far more powerful – I’m a Lord of Time, from the lost and fallen planet of Gallifrey. Now let me go, bounty hunter! We have work to do.”
But there’s more – another face also appears alongside the Time Lord’s past incarnations. Though the hologram image is a little distorted, it appears to be Richard E Grant, representing a former face of the Doctor.
Grant has appeared in Doctor Who in live-action before, playing Dr Walter Simeon in 2012 episode The Snowmen, and later The Great Intelligence, a faceless entity who assumed Simeon’s image, in 2013’s The Bells of Saint John and The Name of the Doctor.
There’s no good reason for an image of Simeon/the Great Intelligence to appear alongside the Doctor’s old faces, though – instead, Grant’s holographic cameo in Rogue appears to be a nod to another previous association with the Whoniverse…
In 2003, the Oscar-nominated star of Withnail and I voiced a new incarnation of the Doctor in the animated web series Scream of the Shalka.
A tale of worm-like aliens residing in an eerie English village, the six-part series – streamed on the official Doctor Who website – saw Grant’s gothic Doctor team with new companion Alison Cheney (played by Sophie Okonedo) in an effort to prevent a plot to terraform the Earth.
Scream of the Shalka was announced in July 2003 – with seven years having passed since the Paul McGann-starring TV movie had failed to initiate a series, Grant was billed as McGann’s official successor: the bona fide Ninth Doctor.
Then came the 2005 live-action reboot spearheaded by showrunner Russell T Davies – and with Christopher Eccleston cemented as the “real” Ninth Doctor, Grant’s animated version was relegated to unofficial status and written out of the canon.
So, what exactly does his inclusion in Rogue’s parade of past Doctors mean?
Are we to understand that the “Shalka Doctor” is in fact part of the show’s established history, with the events of the animated webcast taking place at some point prior to the adventures of the Fifteenth Doctor?
(Before anyone pipes up, yes, Grant did also play a version of the Doctor in 1999 Comic Relief sketch The Curse of Fatal Death, written by none other than future Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat, but we’re going to assume it’s not that short-lived incarnation being referenced in Rogue – or else where are Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent and Joanna Lumley among the holograms?)
This wouldn’t be the first time that Doctor Who has sprung a “secret” Doctor on us: in 2013, we met the War Doctor (John Hurt), a previously unseen version who slotted between the established Eighth and Ninth incarnations, and in 2020, we discovered that dozens of different regenerations – including the Fugitive Doctor (Jo Martin) – had preceded William Hartnell’s “First”, a twist first hinted at way back in 1976 story The Brain of Morbius.
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The question here is… if the Shalka Doctor is now considered canon to the live-action TV series, as Rogue seems to suggest, where exactly in the timeline does he fit?
Is he another pre-Hartnell Doctor? Or could he be a duplicate Doctor who split off from the original, the result of a previous bigeneration? After all, we only glimpsed the beginnings of the War Doctor’s transformation into Eccleston’s Ninth.
Odds are we’re not getting a clear answer anytime soon, with Rogue’s big surprise likely just intended as a fun little nod for fans. Not that we’ll let that stop us unpicking Doctor Who’s increasingly complex history to try and make sense of it all…
Doctor Who continues on Saturday 15th June on BBC iPlayer and BBC One. Previous seasons are available to stream on BBC iPlayer.
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