The Emperor was an incarnation of the Doctor that was the supreme ruler of the universe in the far future, as well as the biological father of Miranda Dawkins.
The tyrannical Emperor was the last survivor of a great catastrophe that ravaged Gallifrey. For a thousand years, the Emperor reigned over the entire universe from his throne on the Needle. According to Ferran of the Klade, the Emperor controlled time and space travel with a ruthless secret police force, crushed any rebellion before it even began, and controlled the Senate of his empire through fear. (PROSE: Father Time)
The Emperor had censors who removed information from the Primer for the Spiral Politic. (PROSE: A Prelude to a Prelude)
On the night of his daughter's birth, the Emperor was assassinated by rebels. The entire empire fell into chaos overnight because the child (and only heir) was concealed on Earth in the 1980s. (COMIC: Miranda)
In a vision, the Eighth Doctor and Marnal saw that one of the four surviving elementals was the Doctor with short hair, sitting on a throne and holding his newborn daughter in his arms. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)
During the War in Heaven, Mother and Father were shown by a loa that, in the post-War future, the Elemental Emperor of a forgecity Throneworld would wander aimlessly in an "exile's century" while his Ministers and Magistrate waited for him. (PROSE: The Story So Far...) The Eighth Doctor wandered Earth for about a century following his involvement in the War, (PROSE: The Burning, Escape Velocity, et al.) and it was during this time that he met the Emperor's daughter Miranda. (PROSE: Father Time)
Behind the scenes[]
- Lance Parkin's The School of Doom, an interlude for Father Time published in the Myth Makers fanzine, foreshadows the Doctor's future as the Emperor. The Master asserts that he and the Doctor were two of the four surviving elementals, and they need to find the others and rule the new universe damaged by Gallifrey's destruction.
- The Tenth Doctor's alternate timeline in Four Doctors bears a striking resemblance to the Emperor: both feature the Doctor as the last of his kind, taking a different name, ruling over the universe as a tyrant, and even end in an assassination. Miranda's resemblance to River Song has also been noted.
- The Emperor was first mentioned in Father Time, the 1969 comic of the same name featured a character called Father Time - who was extremely similar to another future incarnation of the Doctor.