WHO'S A GOOD BOY?

That Lockdown video of “The Secret of Novice Hame” was uploaded to YouTube at the end of May, 2020, which means RTD wrote it long before he knew he would be taking the reins as the showrunner once more.  I’m hoping this wasn’t something he tossed off as a way to pass the time during the Pandemic lockdown, because there are certain points within Novice Hame’s narrative which could now be fleshed out by Davies in the live-action series.

Here is one of them:

1] THE DOCTOR WAS AN ANIMAL IN AT LEAST ONE INCARNATION

“He hasn’t changed at all.  

I’ve heard so many stories about him over the years;

his hundreds of faces and forms,

the men and women and animals

who have taken that name.”

I once postulated that Mr. Peabody could have been a Time Lord from the Gallifrey of the Tooniverse, a TV dimension in which humans live side-by-side with sentient, anthropomorphic animals.

But now, it could be that the Doctor himself was Mr. Peabody, using that name as his alias just like he did with “John Smith” in his human male form.  And unless it is canonically shot down, I’m going to stick with that theory… at least in the Tooniverse, where both ‘Peabody’s Improbable History’ and ‘The Secret of Novice Hame’ take place.  (Also it should be mentioned that it is the same TV dimension for ‘The Simpsons’ which had crossovers with both ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Doctor Who’.)

The animation may have been crude in comparison to (most of) the animation today, but if ‘Clutch Cargo’ and ‘Crusader Rabbit’ are in the Tooniverse, so should this moving final testimonial.

'Doctor Who' is one of the few titles where I think stories from other media can be considered as having occurred in Toobworld as well.  We just don't always see it happen in the live-action dimension.  So I have no problem with this story taking place in the far future.  (Unless one of the Timeless Child's many earlier incarnations was an animal, there are still hundreds of other incarnations in the future where the regeneration could transform him into a dog, or a cat, or a horse, or a giant shoebill stork.

Speaking of horses, I used to theorize that Mr. Ed was a member of the Houyhnhnms from "Gulliver's Travels."  I still prefer that splainin, but what if Ed was actually another Time Lord?  One who was trapped on Earth by the ruling council of Time Lords?

Or maybe not.

At any rate, when Novice Hame and the Doctor were finally reunited, it was billions of years in the Future.  So none of us would probably be still alive to see that regeneration happen.

If you would like to read that Inner Toob story from the 2016 edition of the “Who’s On First?” blogathon, click here.