#daniel joyce

[wanderingmadscientist]

Whenever someone tries to make Doctor Who's cannon consistent, or complains about the Timeless Child not making sense canonically, I point to the Eighth Doctor Adventures, in which in one book it talks about how the Time Lords are sterile, and reproduce via looms, and in another we meet the Doctor's dad.

[gallifreyanhotfive]

Friendly reminder that the Doctor has a half human half sister who was about 30 in 2002. Also reminder that Robert deLaurentis originally wanted to explore the Doctor's relationship with his sister as well as this sister's children, in particular a son who would be a Time Lord Renegade.

[doctornolonger]

Unnatural History - who Joyce *really* is...

From a little-viewed thread posted to rec.arts.drwho by Stephen Graves on September 15, 1999:

Right. The obvious explanation is that Joyce is the Doctor’s father, as portrayed by Sean Connery. That theory adds up quite nicely - his backstory matches that of the Doctor’s father in the Nth Doctor script "The Time of My Life," and his name - Joyce - is a play on Ulysses (the Doctor’f father in the Fathers and Brothers script), written by James *Joyce*. That’s all very well - Joyce may well be the Doctor’s father, but I think there’s a little more to it than that…

Firstly, he says that he isn’t a Time Lord, "though I have had some dealings with them in the past." The Doctor’s father, assuming he has one, *must* be a Time Lord. Fact. Then there’s the Doctor’s little memory on p.168, where he recalls both being a Loomling, and having a father. I’ll come back to this later.

Most of this comes from Chapter 17 - on p. 218, Joyce says to Sam "In the end all that matters is who’s responsible for what you do next. And it had better be you." What happens next, of course, is that Dark Sam throws herself into the scar, creating Blonde Sam in a paradox. You can probably see where I’m leading with this, but I’ll give you the rest of the evidence anyway.

At the end of Chapter 17, when Joyce is talking to Griffin, he says "The Advanced Research Project’s grants to your Society are contingent upon you providing us with appropriat biological data from your expeditions." And what do Faction Paradox’s rituals run on? Biodata - biological data.

I mean, it’s pretty obvious that Faction Paradox wouldn’t trust the child - a junior Little Brother - with such an important task as that which he had to perform in San Francisco. So, they discreetly observed him using Joyce, and he, in turn, took care of the *really* important stuff behind the kid’s back.

Wait, there’s more. Assuming Joyce *is* the Doctor’s father, that memory on p.168 takes on a new significance - the Doctor has both a father, Joyce, and yet he’s also Loomed. Isn’t that a paradox? :-)

Finally, there’s one other significant little detail. When Sam first meets Joyce, she notices that he’s got a tattoo, which he’s tried to remove without much success. Grandfather Paradox, in Alien Bodies, is supposed to have a tattoo which he removed by cutting off his own arm. Now, we all thought that was a reference to the Third Doctor’s tattoo, but what if it was meant to be Joyce, at some point in his future? Hmm…

[chazbabylonisapathologicalliar]

Ulysses coming along in the BBC books like:  

[rassilon-imprimatur]

When the Doctor’s father was incarcerated in Shada for “consorting with aliens,” the name Ulysses erased from Time Lord records, he merely had to bide his time. There would be no grand escape attempts, no rebellions. He didn’t need to wait for the Carnival Queen to burrow into President Romana’s skull and twist, setting free the Grandfather and the hordes of Shada’s criminals. 

His son’s origins and timelines changed with every regeneration, every biodata twitch and genetic temporal kick. At one point, the Doctor became a Time Lord without a father, without parents, a God reincarnated and sewn on a singing wooden loom laced with twitching and fleshy threads. 

With a sigh, a man made temporal impossibility simply shuffled out of his cryo-chamber or dreamscape. The prison at the heart of History itself, watching it as a secondary Eye of metal and rock, did not see a non-existent concept, and he merely walked out of Shada. 

Later, Professor Daniel Joyce entertains a guest, allowing himself to be open and curt regarding his relationship with the Doctor and his tangled history.

“His... shall we say his narrative, it tends to shift and change. Not just present and future, but his past. It becomes something as fluid and conceptual as Gallifrey’s, really. Legends and myths, all conflicting and contrasting and impossible. I managed to slip through one of these narrative blips. A break in my need to be there for him.” 

“... I wonder...” 

 “Mm?” 

 “You act, of course, like you’re the original. The real thing. The true history, always there when his biodata... erm...” 

 “Acts out?” He smiled at her. “Of course. Fathers are always there at the end of a bout of teenage rebellion.” 

 “... but have you ever considered that all of that, your history, your... perception of his, is just one of those narrative blips?” 

 He raised his eyebrow. 

 “Like, this Doctor. My Doctor. Velvet and curls and sandalwood.” She bit her lip, wondering if she’d gone too far. Might as well see it through. “What if you... only exist and have always existed just because of his narrative shift?” 

“Of course I’ve considered it.” His voice was soft, kind, and his smile was still warm as a tea mug. “It would be interesting, wouldn’t it?” 

 “... I s’ppose.” 

 “But I have too much to work on and focus to dwell on existential theoreticals. I prefer to think, either way, that I’m just here when he needs me.” 

“I always assumed there was some tension.”

"Of course. As in any family." 

 “... doesn’t he, like... have to clean up temporal messes and chaotic experiments you leave behind on occasion?” 

 “Technically that’s needing me.”

[doctornolonger]

Ulysses was a Time Lord explorer and the Doctor's father.

Despite the copious in-story hints and behind-the-scenes confirmations from the authors that Ulysses aka “Daniel Joyce” was the Doctor’s father, the Eighth Doctor books themselves never provided any explicit, definite proof. As a result, the Tardis Data Core Wiki splits its information about the Doctor’s father across three pages: “the Doctor’s father”, “Ulysses”, and “Daniel Joyce”. This creates a total headache, with page telling only a fraction of the one united story.

To fix this I’ve created my own version of what the three pages would look like (linked above), and while doing so I managed to find a whole lot of little connections that I’d never noticed before. Every day we inch closer to a complete picture of the Parkin Masterplan...

Edit: Since I wrote this post, I was able to convince the wiki admins to officially combine the pages based on my proposal! The link is updated to reflect the new, unified page. 🎉

[rassilon-imprimatur]

My friend Poseidome on Discord and Reddit was going through and analyszing passages of Unnatural History featuring Daniel Joyce, reminding why I love the book, once again sending me down the “Ulysses and Penelope” love trail, and just sharing some thoughts.

1) The way this scene is written, highlighting Joyce’s adult daughter with his second wife Anne (because remember, he’s Ulysses, so there’s Penelope to keep in mind) before he launches into a grumpy tirade about the Doctor’s companions, one can 100% read an implication that Joyce’s daughter was a TARDIS companion at some point in the past or (the Doctor’s) future. And I love that idea a lot. The Doctor traveling with a younger half-sister and showing her the universe is a really sweet idea and has so much potential to be absolutely angst ridden. 

2) The idea of Joyce needing to be a father figure, starving for that sort of relationship with someone again, actually adds such a sweet element to the Doctor asking Joyce and Anne to care for Eric, a young telepath, in Jonathan Dennis’ The Killing of a Flash Boy (an absolute forgotten gem of a story that is one of my stranger picks for top ten Eighth Doctor short stories). 

The Doctor met up with Grace for absolutely no plot related reasons only to fuck, send tweet. 

The universe getting smaller feels absolutely like a further nod to the Greyness from The Infinity Doctors mentioned earlier in the book, and Joyce’s comment can be seen as either a lovely canon-welding nod to the City of the Saved or the Post-War Universe. 

Christ I love this stuff. 

[rassilon-imprimatur]

It’s a “thinking a lot about Mister Saldaamir” day today. He... really is something of a Gallifreyan cryptid, isn’t he. 

Which, given that he was canonically the sort of child who’d come stomping back into House Lungbarrow with his pockets overflowing with animals and new pets, it rather makes sense that the Doctor’s dad would be best friends with Gallifrey’s equivalent of Mothman.