was Buck Rogers a Time Lord?

Now that this week’s screencap quiz has been guessed properly, I can share this other screengrab from the same source. I almost used it for the quiz — it’s from the same episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century — but I thought it might be too easy to guess:

If this was video and we let it run, we’d see Buck coming up those stairs and entering the scene. I can’t remember from the show: Is this supposed to be Buck’s apartment or something?

It makes me wonder, because that coat rack has obviously been stolen from the Doctor’s TARDIS. Did Buck run into the Doctor in the 25th century? Maybe the Daleks tried to invade Earth again, not having learned their lesson from the 195,352 other times they tried to invade Earth and failed.

Or, wait… What if Buck Rogers was himself in fact the Doctor? He could have been a future regeneration of the Doctor whom we’ve yet to meet. Is what we’re looking at here in fact some future TARDIS cleverly disguised to look like a 1970s science fiction TV show set?

The coat rack is like the Doctor’s totem: there’s been one in the console room since at least the Tom Baker days (perhaps earlier — I can’t recall) and there’s been a coat rack in the TARDIS in the rebooted show since at least “Smith & Jones.”

Hey! Maybe Gil Gerard was the Doctor, and he was stuck in 1970s Los Angeles because the TARDIS broke down or something, and he made himself useful as an advisor on a cheesy sci-fi TV show.

You can’t disprove it. Go ahead and try. Can’t be done.