Jodie Whittaker
On 16 July 2017, Whittaker was announced as the Thirteenth Doctor in the science fiction television series "Doctor Who"; she is the first woman to play the title role. She had previously worked with incoming "Doctor Who" showrunner Chris Chibnall on "Broadchurch". She admitted that she had to "tell a lot of lies" after being cast to keep the information secret and used the codeword "Clooney" when talking about the role. She urged fans not to be afraid of her gender, saying ""Doctor Who" represents everything that's exciting about change. The fans have lived through so many changes, and this is only a new, different one, not a fearful one." Chibnall said that he always wanted a woman for the part and that Whittaker was their first choice.
The Doctor (Doctor Who)
The BBC novel "The Eight Doctors" was written by respected Doctor Who writer Terrance Dicks, the same author who wrote "The Five Doctors". In it, he tries to reconcile the continuity errors of the 1996 movie, while having the Eighth Doctor meet and interact with each of his previous selves, although the Eighth Doctor visited each incarnation one at a time rather than all eight of them appearing in the same place. Later Eighth Doctor novel "Interference – Book One" sees the Eighth Doctor briefly meeting the Third, although this occasion results in the Doctor unwittingly changing his own history so that the Third Doctor will regenerate ahead of schedule (A change that is later 'reset' in the novel "The Ancestor Cell" thanks to the TARDIS taking action to preserve the original history). In the Past Doctor Adventures, the novel "Heart of TARDIS" features the Second and Fourth Doctors dealing with two different ends of the same crisis, with the Second Doctor trapped in a dimensional anomaly created by a government experiment and the Fourth recruited to stop the experiment destroying the world, but although they are at one point both in the Second Doctor's TARDIS, the Fourth Doctor and his companion hide on the opposite side of the console from his past self and the Second is never aware of his future self. In "The Colony of Lies", the Second Doctor briefly interacts with the Seventh Doctor in a VR simulation, but it is unspecified if this is the actual Seventh Doctor or just a VR program he left to advise his past self. In "Wolfsbane", like in "Heart of TARDIS", the Fourth and Eighth Doctors deal with separate ends of the same crisis, the Eighth stopping the threat in November 1936 while the Fourth ties up loose ends in December of the same year, but the two incarnations never meet directly, and due to the Eighth Doctor's current amnesia none of the other characters realize that the two Doctors are the same person.