The Doctor’s origin is actually laid out in The Mind Robber. Fact?

I’ve been following Philip Sandifer’s fanatastic blog as he steps through and analyses each Doctor Who story starting from 1963 (and its counterpart, Adventures With The Wife in Space on Tachyon TV), but his last post has just blown my mind. He’s up to the final few stories of Patrick Troughton, specifically The Mind Robber:

The primary threat in this story is that the characters will become fictional. This is, of course, a brilliant use of existential horror and one of the highlights of the story. But thinking about that from a remotely human perspective, it does not actually make any sense. The only way in which a person can meaningfully be threatened by fictionality is if they are already a character in a story. In other words, if they are already in some sense fictional and what is going on is not "becoming fiction" but rather "losing realness." After all, the story does establish that fictional characters cannot be destroyed, and at the end, for no explained reason, the Doctor and company avoid the explosion of the Land of Fiction. Why would this be?

The conclusion is pretty stunning, and I’ve been thinking about it for close to two days now, and I can’t poke any huge holes in it at all. Long time Doctor Who fans should settle down with a cup of tea and start reading with an open mind, because The Mind Robber is the origin story of The Doctor.

That’s fantastic.