WMG / Doctor Who – Classic Series

Beware of unmarked spoilers - WMG pages are always Spoilers Off

Specific speculation on the Eccleston era onward goes into Doctor Who – New Series

Specific speculation on the latest series goes into Doctor Who (with spoilers) (contains spoilers).

Archived confirmed/Jossed speculation for the final Tennant years post-"Last of the Time Lords" is in Doctor Who Series 4.

Specific speculation of Matt Smith's first series goes into Doctor Who Series 5

Specific speculation on Matt Smith's third and final series goes into Doctor Who Series 7

General speculation on Doctor Who goes into Doctor Who – Whole Series.

The Daleks seemingly killing Davros in "Genesis of the Daleks" kickstarted the events leading to the Great Time War.

After Davros was seemingly killed but actually put into suspended animation, the Daleks seemingly wanting to "Survive" above everything else took over and they began to go even more out of control than had, say, the Doctor not gone along with the operation in the first place or else simply killed off the species. The Emperor Dalek was produced out of the remaining active production facilities, and that's when things really began to get out of hand. With no "Creator" to answer to, the Daleks only had their directives to answer to. Genocidal or not, Davros was the rational side of the Daleks, so when he "died" they seemingly had no control over themselves and eventually the Time Lords stepped in and that's where the final stand begins....

The Fourth Doctor was mostly on a sugar rush

Five's regeneration issues seen in Castrovalva are just the results of a sugar crash

The War Chief is a prior regeneration of the Master.

A renegade Time Lord himself, the War Chief's modus operandi is almost identical to the Master's: form an alliance for power with a very powerful alien race, bringing time travel technology and hypnosis to the table.

This idea has been pretty entrenched and has a lot of history behind it. In fact, the roleplaying game assumed the War Chief and the Master were one and the same.

Zoë is a descendant of Sherlock Holmes.

• Isn't Sherlock Holmes a fictional person in the Whoniverse?
  • No: Holmes appeared in "All-Consuming Fire" and Mycroft appeared in "The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel".
  • In "All-Consuming Fire," though, a great deal of care was taken to explain that "Holmes" and "Watson" were not even close to their real names, but were pseudonyms to protect their identities. So the Sherlock Holmes books do exist and are not believed to be true; they're just fictionalized truth instead of pure fiction.
  • However the Latter "Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel" features Mycroft under his correct name which would suggest that Sherlock Holmes is indeed called Sherlock Holmes in-universe irregardless of any statements made in "All-Consuming Fire"
    • "Adventures of the Diogenes Damsel" is a Bernice Summerfield audio. First, Benny has met the real Holmes and Watson and confirmed that she would use the pseudonymes to discuss them in "All-Consuming Fire." Second, Benny is the definition of an Unreliable Narrator, even in-universe.
• Sadly, Jossed in canon. "The Snowmen" specifically states Sherlock Holmes is fictional. And the actual character who inspired Holmes is a Silurian in a lesbian marriage to a human, which presumably rules out having biological descendants.

Susan is either three-quarters human or three-quarters Time Lord.

Assuming that Susan's grandmother was never mentioned in the old series, and given the unreliability of the Expanded Universe, it is entirely possible that Susan's grandmother was human seeing as how human beings have been stated to be the Doctor's favorite species. The "three-quarters" part comes from the fact that the Doctor's child may have married either a human or a Time Lord.

• Possibly Jossed by Ten's claim that there's never been a half-human Time Lord, making the first part of this WMG impossible.
• Important to note that Time Lord isn't a species. Not all Time Lords are Gallifreyans ("A Good Man Goes To War") and not all Gallifreyans are Time Lords (long-established, but underlined in "The Invasion of Time"). So Susan could easily be a hundred percent Gallifreyan and still not a Time Lord.
• She is canonically stated to be a Time Lord and from Gallifrey at least. However, it is indeed correct that the identity and fate of her grandmother was never mentioned and does remain a mystery.

Susan isn't the Doctor's biological granddaughter

She is, possibly, another Timeless Child, or at least something similarly powerful, and the Doctor took it upon himself to keep her out of the hands of Gallifrey's High Council. This final act of impertinence is what got him branded a renegade for life by the Time Lords. In the end he decided to leave her in a relatively insignificant period in Earth history because he knew the other Time Lords wouldn't think to look for her there, and he knew given the circumstances it wasn't right to make himself the only important person in her life.

Susan is the Doctor's biological granddaughter... not the First Doctor's granddaughter

He had children later in his life, possibly around his Eighth lifetime, and Susan went back in time to see her granddad in his younger days. I imagine this is pretty common in a society where time travel is commonly accessible technology.

The fifth Doctor is the final incarnation of the original Doctor. The Sixth Doctor is a reincarnation, and the beginning of a new 13 body lifecycle.

In The Brain Of Morbius, we are introduced to several of the Doctor's before the first. If these are to be believed, then the fourth Doctor is actually the twelfth Doctor, and the fifth Doctor is the thirteenth. This is why his regeneration ends with him claiming "it feels different this time", and why the sixth Doctor has such a hard time trying to settle down: because he's just reincarnated into a new lifecycle, and he's essentially been reset to his factory settings. No wonder his mind is a bit boggled — he's actually a brand new first Doctor.

• The First Doctor is definitively and officially the first (as he explicitly mentions in The Five Doctors), with no prior regenerations. On the other hand, there may be more than one "First Doctor."
  • He says that he is the original Doctor. The First Doctor. But he wasn't always called the Doctor...
• This seems unlikely, given that the Eleventh Doctor explicitly tells Craig "Eleventh" in The Lodger.
• I've heard it argued the other heads seen in the battle weren't the Doctor's, but were actually Morbius's.
  • The fact that the previous three Doctors appear when the Doctor is losing their mental duel, but the unfamiliar ones start to show up when he rallies and is driving Morbius's consciousness down in defeat, this makes a lot of sense: both Time Lords were using mental strength from their previous selves as shields of a kind.
• Or, if this is correct, think of The Two Doctors. There was possibly a time between The War Games and Spearhead from Space, where the Doctor could have regenerated any number of times, and the one in The War Games was fake (think of Devious). And there's the time between Doctor Who and Rose. If this is true:
  • One is One, Two is Two, Three is Eleven, Four is Twelve, Five is Thirteen, Six is One, Seven is Two, Eight is Three, Nine is Nine, Ten is Ten, and Eleven is Eleven. Any objections?
• It's strongly implied by "The Name of the Doctor" that all of the numbering is off, as the Doctor has one incarnation that "doesn't count." But we'll have to wait and see.
  • Turns out it is. Apparently incarnations who don't act like a Doctor don't count as the Doctor. The Doctors we see, assuming they're canon, are incarnations of our protagonist before becoming "The Doctor."

The Missing Episodes are missing because of the Time Lords wiping Jamie's and Zoë's memories of their adventures with the Doctor.

They are quite thorough, you see.

• The reason a number of them are being found is because, thanks to The Great Time War, everything that the Time Lords have done is being reversed or falling apart.
• Unfortunately for this theory, the majority all but one of the complete Second Doctor serials are from the Jamie/Zoë season. And it wouldn't account for the loss of episodes from before Jamie joined.
  • Time war. It explains everything. Thanks, Russell!
    • I just had to.◊
    • Wait - does this mean that the Time War was caused by Superboy Prime punching history, or was Superboy Prime caused by the Time War?
• The Time Lords specifically preserved their first encounter of The Doctor, thus giving an illusion that The Doctor came to them but they never went with him. At the time of writing this — 23/XI/2009 — not a frame of footage from "The Highlanders" (Jamie's debut) survives.
  • Actually, those clips the Moral Guardians Down Under deemed too violent or frightening survive.
  • Repeat — the Time War explains everything. The Time Lords preserved that episode, not us — and the Doctor wiped the Time Lords out. Multiple times.

The Time Lords screwed up and wiped everyone's memories except Jamie and Zoë's.

Fixes the problems with the above theory.

The Missing Episodes are missing because the Doctor accidentally wiped them.

One's regeneration had suspiciously few side effects. Instead of his getting direct amnesia (which would happen a lot to the Doctor later), he wiped many of the records of his adventures telepathically. (Most of the ones with Susan survived because she was a Time Lady.)

Two wiped his records telepathically the same way, but Jamie was a stabilizing influence. If Two hadn't met Jamie, we would have no more televised records of his adventures than we have televised records of Eight's.

The missing episodes are missing because someone from the future travelled to the past to save them from being wiped/tossed out/burned, thereby causing them to be missing in the first place.

"Dr. Who And The Daleks" is a TV show in the Doctor Who and Buffy the Vampire Slayer worlds.

First, we must combine four pieces of information:

1. Due to (among another things) a cameo by The Doctor and Rose in the Buffy comic, the two shows take place in the same universe. (See this page for more info).
2. In the Buffy episode "Smashed", Andrew says that he's seen "every episode of Doctor Who" on DVD. Now, this sounds contradictory with #1. But remember that it's impossible for him to have seen every episode on DVD: Not only are there missing episodes, but the reconstructions of said episodes by Loose Cannon Productions are only available on VHS. So it can't be the Doctor Who we all know and love.
3. The Doctor Who episode "Remembrance of the Daleks" has an announcer on TV introduce an episode of "Doctor Who". But again, it can't be the Doctor Who for obvious reasons.
4. John Peel, who novelized most of the early Dalek serials, states in his book that in the Doctor Who universe, the movie "Dr. Who And The Daleks" was created by Barbara Wright as a way of making some money from her adventures and alerting people to the existence of the Daleks, without giving away too much about the real Doctor.

Now, all of this creates a gigantic timey-wimey ball of contradictory canon weirdness. But wait!

So, in the Doctor Who universe there's a movie and TV show called "Dr. Who". Now, the movie "Dr. Who And The Daleks" could not have come before the TV show; the people in "Rememberance" didn't recognize the Daleks. So the only possible conclusion is this: In the Buffy/Doctor Who universe, "Dr. Who And The Daleks" was a popular kitsch classic TV show from the mid-1960's that got adapted into two equally kitsch movies. The existence of this hypothetical show cleans up the Fridge Logic that comes with the "Rememberance" sequence and Andrew's "I've seen every episode of Doctor Who" statement.

This may set a record for the largest ever density of Fanwank. Or would if the Cartmel Masterplan didn't exist.

• The Protectors of the Plot Continuum mission Hidden Truths, Hidden Lies establishes that the spread of missing episodes varies from universe to universe. It's quite possible that in some 'verses, the BBC never junked a frame. In others, there are missing and B&W episodes right up until the advent and popularization of the VCR (which would mean that only Six and Seven would have complete runs).

In The 'Verse of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who lasted only one season.

This was threatened in Real Life. And the Buffyverse is usually worse than Real Life.

In The 'Verse of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who is nothing like the Doctor Who in our real world.

It's actually spelled Dr. Huw, and it's a cartoon drawn in Futurama s' drawing style, about an ambiguosly-Asian dentist whose daughter may or may not have a magical, pink-haired fairy living in her fishbowl... (So, basically more like Scrubs meets the Fairly Odd Parents?)

The Destroyer from the Seventh Doctor serial Battlefield is from the same dimension as the Judge

• They're both blue humanoid monsters threatening the end of the world and the end of humanity, and they are both believed invulnerable until they are sucessfully destroyed by humans wielding projectile weapons. Also, both are fought by a blond girl wielding a sword.

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart is descended from Jamie Mc Crimmon.

We know that the 'Stewart' part of Lethbridge-Stewart comes from a Scottish clan, and it just so happens that that clan fought alongside the Mc Crimmons at the Battle of Culloden. By saving Jamie's life at Culloden, the Doctor unwittingly ensured that Jamie would go on to have descendants, some of whom married into the clan of their Stewart allies, some of whom in turn married Lethbridges, and thus the Brigadier came to be. This would also be a neat way for the Doctor to have unintentionally secured his own future: by saving Jamie's life, he caused the Brigadier to exist, and thus set up all the help he received from Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT over the years. This also makes it rather amusing to imagine that the few times the Brigadier met Jamie, he was unknowingly giving orders to his great great (repeat ad nauseum) grandfather.

The end of Trial of a Time Lord was a glitch in time serving to foreshadow the Time War.

The Time Lords are the reason the Doctor has regeneration trouble

The Second Doctor had no post-regeneration trauma. The later Doctors all have it. The Time Lords were responsible for forcing the Second Doctor to regenerate into the Third Doctor, and so it's possible a spanner was thrown into the works there.

• This is reasonable, seeing as the master had no problem, and neither did Romana, River or anyone else. It's only the doctor that has a hard time. What happened to the doctor, relating to his regenerations. One was forced on him. He must have been given a drug that had permenant side effects on regeneration organs.

The First Doctor avoided regeneration trouble because he "died" naturally.

The First Doctor is the only one who died of being "worn out" (the Time Lord equivalent of "natural causes"). Two was forced to regenerate. The rest all died after suffering massive physical trauma (radiation, a violent fall, poisoning, being murdered by Michael Grade, etc...).

Perhaps "dying before your time" — violently, abruptly, or with major damage — causes the regeneration to be flawed. Most Time Lords lived long, full lives and viewed regeneration more as rejuvenation (which is how Two describes the process after One changes) then as the emergency survival mechanism all the later incarnations use it as.

In other words, if the Doctor had lived a calmer, less dangerous life, then his regenerations would have gone far smoother.

• Supported by how an elderly-appearing Time Lord regenerates offscreen in "The Five Doctors" into a new, middle-aged body. The other Time Lords react like he's had a rather minor medical procedure.
  • As well as Time of The Doctor..The Eleventh Doctor died of old age and the regeneration took literally a second as oppose to others which took roughly a half a minute or longer. which makes sense as regeneration was originally designed to extend natural lifespan not to act as instant resqawn like in video games.

Hermann (the butler from City of Death) is the Master.

The Butler Did It. It's that simple!

• He actaually regenerated properly at the end of The Deadly Assasin but looked all charred and cadaverous again in Keeper Of Traken after being blow up in Scarlioni's mansion.

The Fourth Doctor "danced" with Romana.

There's the off-screen relationship between Tom Baker and Lalla Ward, but let's look at the canon evidence. She's a hot scientist, she's a Defrosting Ice Queen, she's a Time Lord, and she (in her second incarnation) was a redhead. Since the Doctor has expressed a desire to have red hair himself, it's obvious he fancies redheads.

• That doesn't explain his second love, the peroxide blonde Rose.
• Um, Romana II was as blonde as could be. I'm not sure why you'd think she was a readhead.
  • He likes both redheads and blondes. By the way, his peroxide blonde count stands at two, with Madame de Pompadour as number two. (Incidentally, the Real Life Madame de Pompadour wasn't a peroxide blonde, judging by her portraits. Perhaps the production team stuck with Sophia Myles' adopted hair colour because it would add to the "courtesan" image — peroxide blonde hair spent a considerable amount of time being associated with the oldest profession.)
    • There's Astrid, too. Another blonde.
• The Doctor and the first Romana also had a Slap-Slap-Kiss thing going on.
  • Well, given how according to Moffat, the Doctor can only reveal his name to his spouse, and given how the second line Romana I said was "My name is Romanadvoratrelundar..."
    • The problem with that is that most Time Lords go by their names. Only a small number go by a "handle."

The Time Lady that Leela bumps into in "The Invasion of Time" is an earlier regeneration of Romana.

Rodan changed her name and regenerated because she was afraid that she'd get into trouble for her part in the invasion: she knows exactly how corrupt timelord society is and didn't want to take any chances.

The producers of the show invented the character of Romana after the actress who played Rudan (Hilary Ryan) was unavailable, so this fits quite well.

It also explains why the White Guardian picked her to accompany the doctor, as she had proved herself already. As to why she doesn't tell the Doctor, it's possible that her memories of the invasion were wiped for extra protection.

Leela and Andred did have the time for some romance during "The Invasion Of Time".

We know from the Revived series episodes "The Doctor's Wife" and "Journey to the Center of the TARDIS" that the TARDIS's interior can contain discontinuities in time as well as space. Near the end of "The Invasion of Time", Four is evading the Sontarans with Leela, Andred and Borusa, and there's a brief Scooby-Dooby Doors gag in which the group split up and enter three different doors that face different ways, only to meet up in the same room an apparent instant later. Borusa scolds Four for letting such anomalies occur in his ride.

At the time, the scene was merely a quick gag in an otherwise-tense situation. However, if the discontinuity was even worse than Borusa realized - or if Sexy was playing matchmaker - then it's entirely possible that Leela and Andred, who'd gone through the same door, really stepped through it into an entirely different area of the TARDIS. They spent a considerable period of time alone together while searching for a way out, stepped through one of the TARDIS's temporal distortions, and then popped up in the room where Four and Borusa had just arrived. Small wonder that Leela - who usually doesn't do that sort of thing - gave a yelp when she bumped into the Doctor, and small wonder that she and Andred seem to have hooked up completely out of the blue: for all we know, Sexy kept them running around in circles for weeks together, just the two of them, with plenty of time to hit it off.

Season 6B

This theory, being a widespread fan theory, itself belongs in WMG even though it was around long before TV Tropes.org. At the end of the Second Doctor's last story, "The War Games", companions Jamie and Zoë are sent back to their own times with memory wipes, and the Time Lords force him to regenerate into the Third Doctor and send him to Earth.

However, in "The Five Doctors", the Second Doctor recognizes illusions of them as fake because the illusions recognize the Brigadier, while the real ones had their memories of him wiped. This shouldn't happen; he regenerated right after those memory wipes, so he shouldn't know about them and still be the Second Doctor. Moreover, in "The Two Doctors", Jamie and the Doctor are on a mission for the Time Lords, even though Jamie didn't even know about the Time Lords until "The War Games" - which was the Second Doctor's and Jamie's last serial if Season 6B isn't true.

The 6B theory is that the last episode of "The War Games" has many stories crammed in between the memory wipe and the regeneration (which we see at most half of), during which the Doctor was working as an agent for the Time Lords. The theory originates with Paul Cornell, who would later write Doctor Who novels and audios and has written for the show itself in the new series.

There is other evidence for 6B in-series. In The Three Doctors, Two is brought over without any companions. But he always had a companion during his original run until the Time Lords took them away in the last serial. He started with Ben and Polly; and once he met Jamie, the pair stuck together.

And in "The Two Doctors," there are two difficulties that can only be explained In-Universe by 6B. One is that both Two and Jamie have aged a lot from Two's original. Mind you, Time Lords live a long time; Two physically aging (he has grey hair, even) means that he probably spent a few centuries adventuring alone.

The other is that Two in "The Two Doctors" has a remote controlled TARDIS — something no Doctor has had before or since. Six is jealous of it, even. But during his run, Two had no control over where his TARDIS went at all. The remote control was clearly provided by the CIA. It was removed when Two finally was turned into Three — the TARDIS was sent to earth with him in non-working order, so the remote control was removed with all the other working parts.

• It can get convoluted. For instance, there's a reference in "The Two Doctors" to Victoria being temporarily away, which is obviously meant to imply that the Doctor and Jamie were from the Jamie/Victoria era and that this is why Victoria isn't in the story. If they're from season 6B, the Doctor must have picked up Victoria again just so that the story can explain why she's not there.
  • On the other hand, the Doctor had absolutely no control over the TARDIS during the period when he traveled with Victoria, so the idea of having dropped her off somewhere (before Season 6B) with the intention of coming back for her seems unlikely.
  • In some variants of the theory, Victoria didn't rejoin the TARDIS; rather, Jamie thought she should be there because of all the tampering that's been done to his memory. This is the case in World Game, for example.
• The "Five Doctors" scene doesn't make sense even if 6B explains why the Doctor knew about the mind wipe. Jamie and Zoë could have been taken from a time period before their memories were wiped — it just isn't correct to conclude that not having their minds wiped means they must be fakes.
  • It doesn't matter if Two's reasoning in "The Five Doctors" is valid; what matters is, he knew about the mind wipe! It doesn't matter that Jamie and Zoë could have been scooped out from before "The Invasion"; what matters is that Two believes that they would have taken after a mindwipe that, without Season 6B, would've happened shortly before Two ceased to be Two. Someone scooped him out from under the noses of the Gallifreyan justice system; it's better if that someone is the CIA.
  • Note that the Second Doctor can SEE that both Jamie and Zoë are clearly a bit older than they were when the Time Lords sent them home, and thus knows that they absolutely MUST come from a time post-mindwipe. And he himself is clearly older than he was during the tribunal — which would strongly imply a time after the tribunal, which is impossible without Season 6B.
• In "The War Games" itself, it seems obvious that the scenes happened at the same time.
  • The usual explanation for this is that we don't see the Doctor change—we see at most half a regeneration—and he was rescued by the CIA at the last second, leaving the tribunal to think that sentence had been carried out. Perhaps the CIA stalled his regeneration, just like Ten stopped himself from turning into Eleven.
• This is canon in some parts of the Expanded Universe: back in '69-70, the comic strip saw the Second Doctor begin the exile on Earth, only later having his face changed by sentient scarecrows. Terrance Dicks has also written a novel — World Game — that has the Second Doctor as an agent of the Celestial Intervention Agency after "The War Games" and setting up his appearance in The Two Doctors as well.

The Valeyard is the Second Doctor from "The Two Doctors".

Never mind Season 6b. The reason that the Second Doctor in "The Two Doctors" looks older is because he's a Second Doctor from an alternate universe who was brought into our universe by the Celestial Intervention Agency to act as their agent because "their" Doctor refused to. They allow Jamie and Victoria to go along with him, but they eventually die of old age (Jamie is noticeably older in "The Two Doctors"), and the Alternate Doctor goes through the rest of his regenerations in quick succession thanks to the dangerous missions the CIA keep sending him into, hence the Valeyard being "somewhere between [the Doctor's] twelfth and final incarnations." He literally is one of the Doctor's future selves, just an alternate one. He eventually becomes bitter and twisted as a result of his enforced slavery - in fact, as early as "The Two Doctors", you can sort of see it happening. To mollify him, the CIA eventually agreed to give him the remaining regenerations of the "real" Doctor and allow him to take the Doctor's place in our universe - hence the trial.

You know it makes sense.

• But then why would the Second Doctor's transformation into an Androgum in "The Two Doctors" threaten to eventually affect the Sixth Doctor? That only makes sense if they're two parts of the same lifespan.
  • Because the alternate Second Doctor and the Sixth Doctor still share a psychic link; they are 'almost' the same man, and one could still be the predecessor of the other (the alternate Second Doctor could still have a sixth incarnation who looks and appears to be almost exactly like the Sixth Doctor we know and love), so they're almost identical to each other, except one comes from a slightly different alternate universe. As such, the alternative Second Doctor's androgum transformation still affects the Sixth Doctor psychically, but he confuses this with it altering his past. He isn't actually becoming an Androgum, but is psychically convinced that he is.

Zoë is not what she seems.

Space Station W3 (The Wheel in Space) is an artificial universe like Castrovalva, and all its crew, including Zoë, are either constructs like Shardovan and Mergrave or in on the scam.

Rationale: None of the Wheel's occupants find it extraordinary that the Cybermen, so down on their luck that they can't take over the Wheel except by stealth, can cause local meteor storms by setting off novas 25,100 lightyears away (and therefore 25,100 years ago). The Cybermen can set off the novas because the stars around the Wheel are really very close and attached to the inner surface of a crystal globe where the Cybermen can get at them. No-one on the Wheel seems to notice this. Either they can't perceive the impossibility, just as the Castrovalvans couldn't perceive the logical flaws in their environment, or they know it's impossible but see no need for the Doctor to know that.

Following this train of thought leads to the conclusion that the pocket universe existed to get Zoë on board the TARDIS and that she was a conscious or unconscious agent for whoever set the thing up, be it the Celestial Toymaker, one of the Guardians, or the CIA.

If it's the CIA, then this is a timeline without Season 6B, and the Second Doctor's part of "The Two Doctors" happened some time in Season 5. Zoë would be a chameleon-arched Time Lord. Perhaps she was created from a Time Lady called Zodin.

• Also, Shardovan destroying Castrovalva could explain why Zoë's "2000" isn't our "2000". Castrovalva's destruction meant that that world (which was created by the Master) could never become the Space Wheel and, thus, that Zoë's timeline never happened. But, since it happened in the Doctor's past, Zoë still existed when she was with the Doctor. This would mean that the Master set this up to use Zoë as his agent. Zoë joined the Tardis to force Two into "The War Games" so that he would (eventually) become Three. That way, Three would be there, trapped on Earth without a working TARDIS, when the Delgado Master kept trying to take over the Earth. Fans of the new series already know that the Master likes to mix the Doctor into his plans...

The destruction of Shardovan is why there are so many missing episodes

The Doctor had few run-ins with Time Lords between when Susan left and when Two was forced to regenerate. Since the Wheel in Space is directly related to a pocket universe created by a Time Lord, the presence of a resident of this place as his companion helped stabilize the records. But, since the place ceased to exist in its own timeline before Zoë could be born, much of the Doctor's personal history prior to the Space Wheel is recorded only in fragments, especially when the Doctor was the only Time Lord in the area.

The Master's final death was in "Planet of Fire".

From the Master's personal chronology, he first fought the Doctor in several offscreen encounters with the First and Second Doctors. He was, at one point, in conflict with Skaro and executed there, but they granted his request to be taken back to Gallifrey by the Doctor, with the events of the Made-for-TV Movie taking place for him before having met Doctors 3-6. He was resurrected by the Time Lords to fight in the war, and ran off to the end of the universe, where he hid until the Doctor arrived in Utopia. Sometime after the end of Season 3, he ran away to 1970s Earth, where his and the Doctor's meetings happened more or less in order, until he met the sixth Doctor twice and the seventh once before finally dying at the end of "Planet of Fire".

• Probably Jossed by "The Doctor Falls", as Missy remembers that the Doctor has died by falling: an event that Four suffered while defending Logopolis from the Ainley-Master.

The Master is killed in every episode he appears.

Every time we see the Master, it's an earlier version. The Doctor keeps killing him at earlier and earlier stages in his life, creating more and more paradoxes.

• This would explain his Villain Decay; he's actually getting more and more badass, we're just seeing it all in reverse order.
• The drums were eventually blocked when he grew a goatee.

Time Lord names are bestowed at initiation, and hence have ceremonial significance; anonymity is thus a universal mark of Time Lord rebellion.

The Doctor, The Master, the Meddling Monk, the War Chief, the Rani... it certainly seems that once you leave Gallifrey, you lose your name; even the otherwise most iconoclastic Time Lords feel this to be appropriate. Romana would seem to be an exception, but she began her journeys with the Doctor thinking she was doing the business of Gallifrey; it's possible she changed to a suitably anonymous moniker (as in the BBV audio plays with "K9 and Mistress") once she made the decision to abandon Gallifrey of her own accord and remain in E-space.

The Doctor is part human by way of Stable Time Loop.

A love affair between Susan Foreman and Captain Jack Harkness in the 22nd century created a hybrid bloodline, which culminated in a mostly human time traveler who would come to be known as the Other. The Other somehow ended up in Gallifrey's distant past, and was subsequently reincarnated as the current Doctor. So his soul is part human, anyway...

• That makes it squicky that Jack kissed the Doctor. Then again, with his sexual appetite and the Timey-Wimey Ball, Jack has probably snogged many distant relatives by now. Perhaps a few closer ones as well in his original century.
• Time Lord civilization is at least a billion years old, so the genetic distance between Jack and the Doctor in that circumstance would be far greater than the distance between any two human beings on Earth.

Sutekh the Destroyer (from "Pyramids of Mars") is aware of the Beast (from "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit") and is consciously imitating him.

He goes by the name "Satan" and sounds like Gabriel Woolf. That can't be coincidence. Since the Osirians are a bunch of Ancient Astronauts posing as gods, it's likely Sutekh decided to take the identity of an even more Sufficiently Advanced Alien that fitted his place in the pantheon.

• Somewhat like the Daemons, you mean?
• Isn't there a line in "The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit" where the Doctor mentions the various races who have taken on the characteristics of gods and demons (Like the Daemons and the Osirans), and the Beast claims to have inspired them all? Sutekh and his race may be acting on some race memory in adopting a simmilar MO. They may even be related to the Beast and his species (such as his "Son" who showed up in Torchwood series 1), or literally inspired by him.

Everything after the end of "Trial of a Time Lord" takes place in the Matrix.

At the end of "Trial of a Time Lord", the Doctor pops up from out of nowhere, having staged a miraculous escape from the Matrix as it was imploding after a battle with his Evil Dark Half, The Valeyard. He then leaves with his companion Mel, bidding the Inquisitor at his trial a warm farewell and suggesting that she should run for President — and as he's leaving, the Valeyard turns around, disguised as a minor character called the Keeper of the Matrix, and chuckles sinisterly...

Hold on, hold on, hold on. There's more than a few things wrong with this picture:

1. Where did the Doctor come from?
2. Why is he leaving with Mel — a companion who he hasn't even met yet (owing to complicated Timey-Wimey Ball reasons)?
3. Why would he be inclined to wish the Inquisitor well at all, much less suggest that he'd vote for her? The woman just presided over a Kangaroo Court whose sole purpose was to shop him to disguise the crimes of the Time Lords in destroying Earth to protect their secrets. The Doctor — the Sixth Doctor particularly — isn't that forgiving, especially since less than an episode earlier, he'd been angrily berating the Time Lords for their corruption.
4. The Valeyard was last seen dying... somehow... in the Matrix. How did he escape? How did he take over the Keeper's body? And how come no one has noticed that the Keeper now looks like a totally different man (a younger and taller one for a start) and, in fact, looks exactly like the Valeyard?

Possible solution — the Doctor didn't escape from the Matrix. He's still in there. The rest of the series was a Lotus-Eater Machine Dream stage—managed by the Valeyard to torment him. The illogical ending of the series (including his final battle with the Valeyard, involving Megabyte Modems and such) was a ruse to convince the Doctor that he had won so he wouldn't question his new environment and try to escape.

This explains a fair bit about the rest of series. The Sixth Doctor's curiously unexplained regeneration? Forced by the Valeyard as part of his torture. The Seventh Doctor's Character Development from cheeky little Scots chappie to angsty, tortured Time's Champion? The Valeyard making the Doctor's life increasingly difficult and complex. We can even bring in the new series if we want — what better way to torture the Doctor than make him think he's blown up his own planet and committed genocide against his own kind and, to rub this in, making the only thing that would possibly make this atrocity worthwhile — wiping out the Daleks at the same time — a hollow victory by constantly bringing them back to face him? The Doctor hasn't done any of these things; in fact, he possibly hasn't even regenerated, and what we think is the new series is a fantasy concocted in the mind of the trapped Sixth Doctor as he floats in the Matrix, trying to work out where he is.

Or, you know, possibly not.

• Also, the Doctor's averted regeneration (which has numerous gaping logical holes in it) in "Journey's End" could be the Valeyard coaxing the Sixth Doctor's unconscious mind into slowly giving him his remaining lives, one at a time. After six more averted regenerations, the Valeyard will extract the Doctor's dark side from the Matrix and send it back in time in order to complete the stable time loop that created him.
  • It looks like Ten has found a way out. Hey, he's the Tenth Doctor, born of the Time Vortex itself; of course he could force his way out... though the cost was high.

The First Doctor is not the "First" Doctor.

The Doctor could have had one or two regenerations before the first episode of the series.

• Jossed by "The Five Doctors":
  "I am the Doctor, the original, you might say!"
• But hinted at in "The Brain of Morbius", in the mind-battle thing that the Doctor fights Morbius in; after the Doctor's first four selves a lot of faces we don't recognize appear, and as the Doctor seems to be losing that battle it seems heavily implied that they're previous incarnations of him. Ah, the wonders of Doctor Who and consistent continuity...
  • It has been suggested that the other faces were those of the Doctor's past reincarnation known as the Other (from Virgin's line of books). Alternatively, the other faces were Morbius's.
  • 'Confirmed as of "The Timeless Children, only in a much more traumatic way.

The One we know from his original run was Two(a) left in a chameleon arch too long.

"One" always wore a special ring that could open the Tardis. Two proved he wasn't One by showing that the ring no longer fit, and it was never used again. "One"'s death by old age released Two(a) from the arch.

We do see the real One in "The Five Doctors", and he does look and act similar to the "One" of the original run. But he's not quite the same.

This is why, in "The Three Doctors," "One" is forced to teleconference. The CIA tried to pull the wrong "One" into the scene, and the Blinovitch Limitation Effect wouldn't allow an extra Two in the immediate area, even if he looked like One.

Rose Tyler is one of the Wolves of Fenric.

The Wolves of Fenric were introduced in the original series episode "The Curse of Fenric". In that serial, various descendents of Viking settlers were touched by the titular Curse, which made them psychically suggestable and also connected to the Vortex (it is this that enabled Ace to accidentally create a Time Rift with a chemistry set). Rose can open her mind to the "heart of the TARDIS", ride the powers of the Vortex and become "the Bad Wolf".

• This also makes sense why the Doctor particularly took to Rose so quickly: her status as a "Wolf of Fenric" meant that she (consciously or unconsciously) recognized that she was like his last (canon) companion on some level.
• Not only that, but the rest of her family line (and, therefore, Wolves of Fenric) includes precognative Martha Tyler (from the original series serial "Image of the Fendahl"), time traveler Sam Tyler (Life On Mars), "magic" user and time traveler Stephen Tyler (CBBC drama The Magician's House), powerful psychic Gabriel Tyler (DW Expanded Universe novel Damaged Goods by Russell T Davies) and demon-posessed Johnny Tyler (Second Coming, an ITV serial also by Davies).

The reason why the Fourth Doctor's secondary TARDIS control room has no Time Rotor...

The Doctor mentioned that the secondary TARDIS control room (the "wooden" room) could have been his original control room. When he was using it as his main control room it had the Time Rotor, but the Time Rotor was moved to the more well-known control room when he started using it and it never went back.

Romana's soul is connected to Smith's watch.

There was a female voice in the watch, a major part of Latimer's inspiration. Since the Rani, the other major female Time Lord in the series, does not go about inspiring human schoolboys to greatness, and since Romana has already demonstrated her love for the trappings of public schools, is it possible that the Chameleon Arc served as a portal to a pocket-world containing the souls of multiple Time Lords?

• According to the writers, had the seventh Doctor continued without being cancelled, his companion Ace would have eventually joined the Academy to become a Time Lord. The novels with the Seventh Doctor aren't continuity, so her fate is currently unknown. Just a thought...
  • RTD and others have said that they don't consider the novels out of continuity; he just doesn't plan to make them explicitly part of canon either. So with no Word of God to confirm or deny how canonical the books are, it's up to Fanon for the foreseeable future.

Time Lords regenerate into different people so they can safely meet themselves when travelling through time.

In "Father's Day," it's implied — and to some extent shown — that nasty things happen when you meet yourself. But in "The nth Doctors" specials, The Doctor doesn't seem to have this problem, or at least not as badly. (It just tends to temporarily age the earlier incarnation.) The regeneration mechanism was purposely designed with this in mind.

• So the different forms and thought patterns trick the Reapers into identifying the Time Lord as two separate individuals? Wow, that's actually one of the best theories ever.

• In "The Three Doctors," it is implied that it takes a great deal of energy to break the First Law of Time in this fashion. This may be a property of TARDIS travel, however - a safety feature, as it were. In "The Five Doctors," a Time Scoop is used to break the First Law of Time, and no one's especially fussed.
• Breaking the First Law of Time can happen accidentally. It may have happened accidentally in "The Two Doctors" - Six didn't go to Seville specifically to rescue Two and Jamie, and Two certainly wasn't told his future self would be there.

The Doctor was being metaphorical when he said he was half-human.

Let's face it, he's saved Earth specifically how many times? How many of his companions were humans? And he's probably dealt with the Earth many more times offscreen? He meant it in an affectionate way, not a literal way.

• However, being half human was not just a line of dialog, but a plot point—a human eye was needed to open the Eye of Harmony.
  • Clearly, that jibe of Eight's about the half-broken chameleon arch is true...
    • Wouldn't a Half-Human Hybrid have an eye that's also a hybrid, and thus he wouldn't have a human eye? My solution is that, when he regenerated, he absorbed nearby human DNA. Or some other regeneration mishap altered his biology.
• If the Doctor was just being metaphorical, why would he have said he was half-human on his mother's side?
  • As a joke. Mother Earth, anyone?
  • He had a flash of precognition to the events of Journey's End. He was still confused and having trouble with his identity, and saw a brief image of his future self, the one that grew from his hand. That Doctor was indeed half human. And the source human half? Donna Noble, making her his "mother".
  • We learn in Voyage of the Damned that he edged out descendants of David the Great for the last room in an in Judean inn. As this troper understands things, that did not happen unless you were a Roman citizen and/or descended from David yourself. Since the Doctor is not a Roman citizen, this means that his mother was a Human who had turned Gallifreyan somehow.
• In the comic the Forgotten the 8th Doctor claims he used a Chameleon Arch to seem half-human. Perhaps the Doctor made the Eye of Harmony open for human eyes rather then Time Lord Eyes to stop the Master opening it. He made his eyes human.
• It could also be a cultural thing. He's spent so much time on Earth and among humans, and keeps hanging around humans so much (preferring their company to his own people by light years!) that Eight figures he's close enough to a human to count.

Alternately, Eight did regenerate partly human.

Seven died on the operating table after multiple gunshot wounds and heart surgery. Even under the best of circumstances, we're talking massive amounts of blood loss and transfused blood - human blood. He probably had more human blood in his system than Gallefreyan at that point. This explains why he had a very delayed and glitchy regeneration. Of course, Eight being Eight, he wasn't bothered by it. Maybe he thought it was the best of both worlds. He was even at peace with the idea of not regenerating again. This is why it took massive intervention from the Sisters for him to be able to regenerate into War Doctor

The Doctor represents the Superego, the Rani is the Ego and the Master is the Id.

Think about it! The first Master was going to be written off the show by having him be revealed to be the Id to the Doctor's Ego, but that doesn't quite work. (A corrupted version of this story is where all those brotherhood rumors come from.) The Freudian brain is made up of three parts, not two, and the Doctor is far more a representation of morality than of logic, especially lately. The Master is driven by pure self-interest, and the Rani is coldly logical to the point of amorality. Just imagine a scenario back on Gallifrey where the Doctor and the Master are arguing over something the Master wants to do that the Doctor doesn't approve of, and the ever-exasperated Rani has to mediate a compromise. Works, doesn't it?

This theory has some Unfortunate Implications: it implies that each of them is dysfunctional without the other two. That's not that far off. The Master is already insane and out of control, the Rani is a merciless tyrant, and the Doctor himself can teeter along the edge of Well-Intentioned Extremist-style spookiness if there's no one to hold him back. In fact, the Doctor seems sanest during the season three finale when he has the Master to bounce off of and use for comparison. This also makes shipping any of them with each other even weirder than it already is.

• Corollary: Life On Mars and Doctor Who take place in the same universe, only Life On Mars is a level down.
• Specify please - New Who S3, not Old Who, (i.e. Ten, not One) yes?
  • All three of them are archetypes who change slightly based on trauma/experience/growth etc. just like in an actual psyche. That's regeneration. The trio from any one time period "fit" each other. So yes, both old and new Who. Or did you mean which season 3? In that case, yes, Ten, because the Master didn't show up in the classic series until Three's era. Unless you think the War Chief is the Master, but that's a whole different WMG.

Timelords use Regeneration to diversify their gene pool

Space and Time may be open to them, but when you're practically immortal, there's plenty of downtime to go "dancing". While the canonicity of Timelord sexual reproduction is widely debated, if the natives of Gallifrey do sexually reproduce, then they likely developed regeneration so that their offspring can avoid an incest taboo - their siblings will be genetically different. Then again, if his entire planet is "family", no wonder the Doctor spends so much time on Earth and has trouble giving more emotion than "just a handshake" to his companions in the original series.

The Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) provided the inspiration for the WWI soldier's song "Smile Smile Smile."

You have seen the lyrics, right? He wound up in the trenches through some time-shenanigan or other and wound up temporarily joining with a platoon (in a non-combat capacity), and he doubtless saved everyone nearby from all the exploding nastiness you get in a war at least once.

The Doctor featured in The Movie wasn't number 7 into number 8

Rather, he was 10.5, regenerated. At some point in the future, half-human 10.5 regenerates into a form remarkably similar to the seventh doctor and gets through the Time Lock because he already had. This "remarkably similar to the seventh" form regenerates into what we know as 8 during the movie and vanished- perhaps dying in the Time War. As for the main Doctor, we never see his eighth incarnation, which began and ended during the course of the war.

• Doctor 10.5 said that he couldn't regenerate.
  • If the 'real' doctor can be wrong, the half-human one definitely can.
• The reason 10.5 had only one heart and the "remarkably similar to the seventh" form has two is, a Time Lord only grows their second heart when they regenerate for the first time. (This is a well-known theory.) Also, the reason the movie Doctor says he is half human is that he is half-human. 'On his mother's side' is referring to Donna's contributing the human half.
• It's been confirmed on the show that the Eighth Doctor in the movie was a previous incarnation of the REAL 10th Doctor, not the 10.5 model.
• Nonononono, It's been confirmed that the Doctor's Eighth Incarnation bears an astonishing resemblance to the Doctor seen in the TV movie. Nothing more, nothing less.

Davros' deformation and omnicidal tendencies can be traced back to an incident involving rice pudding.

The Seventh Doctor clearly struck a nerve in Remembrance of the Daleks.

The Eighth Doctor's Big Finish adventures with Lucie Miller lead directly to his regeneration

It was cut from the final broadcast, but it's generally accepted that Tenth has an Estury accent because he picked up Rose's. So obviously, Ninth's accent indicates that the last person Eighth was talking to regularly was from Oop North. And the most likely candidate is Blackpool-accented Lucie.

• So when was Seven hanging around with Liverpudlians?
  • There's Hex, but the timing isn't right. Eight should have had Benny's accent or Chris Cwej's (whatever that accent would be). Come to think of it, Six didn't have any Scottish companions, did he?
  • Seven must have loved Hex. And Six knew Jamie McCrimmon, if only briefly.
  • We don't see the adventure that led up to Six's regeneration, so it could easily have been one with Six, Mel, and Jamie. Hopefully one in which Six and Mel went back to Culloden to rescue Jamie and restore his memories.
• Jossed by "Day of the Doctor": If anything, Nine's accent came from War hanging around with Clara.

The Master and The Rani are Jamie and Zoë

Jamie and Zoë were becoming progressively more fixated on the wonders of the universe, and the Time Lords figured out who they were. They knew they had to keep these two from the universe as long as possible and, hopefully, keep them human; so they wiped their memories, separated them from the Doctor, and put them back on Earth. Please note that the Time Lords never did anything similar to any other companion of the Doctor, so it is highly likely they had particular reason to fear Jamie and Zoë. For now, the Doctor is still Two and is just kept in Time Lord jail.

This does not work, as the two are still haunted by subconscious memories of travelling with the Doctor; the Time Lords detect this has a destabilising affect on the Doctor, the universe, Gallifrey, and Jamie and Zoë - their memories get murkier and murkier, detecting things from all sorts of timelines, and the Time Lords start to fear them uncovering their true identities. So the Time Lords pull them back and make them travel with the Doctor, doing what the Time Lords want them to do, but they make sure to keep Zoë and Jamie separate - they travel with the Doctor at separate times, and Jamie gets a human guardian - Victoria, whose memory is edited to make her think that she never stopped travelling with them (or wanting to). Zoë may get her own human guardian. The Doctor knows that the Time Lords are preoccupied with Jamie and Zoë, but doesn't know why, and he eventually pulls the plug on the whole thing by refusing to travel anymore. The Time Lords are absolutely furious with the Doctor, since he might be creating two mass-murdering megalomaniacs, which is why they banish him to Earth and make him regenerate - they take away a significant portion of his life and then do more, a surprisingly harsh sentence.

But it is done, and there is still the question of Jamie and Zoë. They decide to start fresh, regressing their ages (or making them regenarate into babies, one or the other) and sending them back to be contemporaries with the young first Doctor. They all meet and become friends as young children, and the Time Lords forget about it - if there's no famous Doctor in their time, what's going to introduce Jamie and Zoë, who now use other names (say, X for Jamie and Y for Zoë) to the universe, providing everyone keeps to the rules? All predictions on them as children say that they probably will follow the rules.

But the mind-wiped-ness is not as stable as hoped, and when X and Y turn 8 and look into the fabric of space time, all hell breaks loose. X and Y now have subconscious memories of being Jamie and Zoë, and this affects them differently - both become subconsciously angry at the Doctor for not being the Doctor they know. Y turns to knowledge, science and being a genius again. X tries to push the Doctor into being the 'hero' by being the 'villain'. Also, all the time changing and identity shifts have given X and Y issues with their identities, and they create new names, or titles - 'The Master' and 'The Rani'.

Twelve regenerations isn't a physical limit; it's a legal limit

The Time Lords are able to regenerate forever; however, this created a huge population problem. Therefore, the Gallifreyan government imposed a strict twelve-regeneration limit. It's clear that Time Lords can voluntarily NOT regenerate (as the Master showed), and this was made compulsory for Time Lords who have lived out all thirteen lives. However, with the Time Lords gone, there's no-one to enforce the law any more; the Doctor can regenerate as many times as he likes.

• Strongly supported by the Time Lords' offer to grant the Master more regenerations ("The Five Doctors"). But, at the same time, contradicted by the LONG Master story arc in Four's tenure where the Master's attempt to regenerate a thirteenth time led to a degenerated, scarred, monstrous form ("The Deadly Assassin").
• Could also be a bit of both. New series episodes such as "Let's Kill Hitler" and "The Angels Take Manhattan" suggest that there's a finite amount of regeneration energy a Time Lord can call upon. It gets used in large amounts whenever a full regeneration takes place and is hard to get back, naturally capping out at 12 (physical limit). While it's well established that it's perfectly possible to gain or be given more regenerations, but such a thing is typically illegal (legal limit). This is why we never see it except when offered to the Master by the Time Lords (The Five Doctors) or in new series episodes where the Time Lords are no longer a factor.

Every story after "The Mind Robber" is just dreams of the Doctor — just fiction.

Recently suggested by The Doctor Who Magazine. At the start of the next serial "The Invasion", the TARDIS is shown reforming (after falling apart during the previous serial). Jamie wakes the Doctor up saying the emergency unit has worked and Zoë then asks if they are on their way anywhere, or if they are stuck (in nowhere). The TARDIS reforming scene is supposed to show that the entirety of "The Mind Robber" took place in the Doctor's mind; but what if the Doctor is still stuck in The Land Of Fiction, and his victory against The Master of The Land Of Fiction was a ruse to make him think he'd won?

Susan is the Doctor's granddaughter... and also the granddaughter of Jack Harkness.

In "Everything Changes", the first episode of Torchwood, Jack mentions that he was pregnant once and is trying to never be again. (Cue Ianto.) The other parent was Nine. The child will go on to produce Susan.

• You need to stop skipping biology class. His "pregnancy" was probably similar to Gwen's in "Something Borrowed". Also, isn't Susan canonically from Gallifrey? And where did Jack ditch that poor child after it was born? And how did Susan end up with the First Doctor?
  • Yes, Susan is from Gallifrey. Jack ditched her mother somewhere where One would find her. Susan is with One because humans are much shorter-lived than Time Lords, and her mother had the lifespan of a normal human. (Being a fixed point in the universe is not hereditary.)

The Doctor IS half human

That's why he always tries to protect the Earth and praises humanity - obviously, he was mocked for his ancestory as a child, and he feels the need to constantly prove that humans are great. Or else go Spock-like and put them down to prove he's not one of them.

• Also, consider how many of his favourite writers and artists are human? Humans can't possibly be the only creators of culture in the universe, yet he always gushes about them. Also there's good reason to think that his mother was probably British, given how much he hangs out in Britain as opposed to other places on Earth

Time Lords only gain their second heart after their first regeneration.

That Three has two hearts is obvious to those at the hospital that took him in, and they didn't cut him open to find out. Seven having two hearts looked and sounded so wrong to Grace, a doctor, that she killed him trying to fix that problem. But Ian Chesterton, a science teacher, thought One was human, and when he listens to One's heartbeat, it sounds normal (read human) to him. Something changed between One and Three; since we are told two hearts are normal for Gallifreyans, the change most likely happened when he regenerated into Two.

• If so, then why would Jenny (The Doctor's Daughter) have two hearts?
  • What if every regeneration changes Timelord's DNA and number of hearts is coded in it?
• Two was examined by Gemma Corwyn in "The Wheel in Space" and she didn't notice anything odd about his heartbeat either.
  • See the "Zoë is not what she seems" WMG. The people of the Wheel may have known about Time Lords from the beginning of their recorded history (which begins before their actual history, strangely enough).
• Alternatively, before the first story, and perhaps before he left Gallifrey in the first place, the Doctor had some medical emergency which, for some reason, required one of his hearts to be removed/disabled. When he regenerated into the Second Doctor, it just got fixed.
• Or maybe, if the Doctor is conscious and wishes to pass for human, he can get both his hearts to beat in perfect sync with one another so they sound like just one heart. He taught this trick of mind-over-body to Susan so Coal Hill School's nurse wouldn't notice anything odd. In "The Edge of Destruction", One was only faking being unconscious until he could figure out what had injured him, and Two likewise played at being out cold in "The Wheel In Space" so he could listen in on the Wheel staff's conversations unsuspected. Problem solved.
• Another oft-voiced suggestion is that One DID have two hearts, but due to the simple matter of old age, one of his hearts had already failed prior to "An Unearthly Child", thus Chesterton said his heartbeat sounded normal - in fact, he had one working heart and one dead heart. Not surprising, then, that he would die of old age within another 3 years, if he was already weak from suffering major organ failure...the regeneration got both his hearts working again normally.

Gallifrey is the world of Chrono Trigger.

Gaspar was the first Time Lord, and the End of Times is within his TARDIS.

Not everyone is a Time Lord.

This theory is way-way out there, but it's entirely possible that not every single fictional character ever created is a Time Lord.

• For example, Vector Prime, as a living machine that can bend the fabric of time and space, is obviously a TARDIS, though probably only because he chose one to transform into.
• What about the idea that every fictional character is a Time Lord ''except'' the Doctor?
• Obviously. Only some characters are; the rest are companions.
• Of all the crazy theories floating around here, this is the most absurd!

The first regeneration was a symbol of maturity in Gallifreyans.

Romana regenerates, giving much thought to her form, after the quest for the Key of Time - not because she's hurt, but because she considers herself a mature Gallifreyan. This is why two hearts is considered the default for Gallifreyans - that one-heart stage is childhood. One was rebelling against Gallifrey when he held onto his first form as long as he could (unless he was a chameleon-arched Two(a), in which case all bets are off).

Romana I regenerated into Romana II because she had a terminal illness that she'd concealed from the Doctor.

She'd been taking medication on the sly to prolong the life of her Romana-I body, which suffered from a chronic health problem particular to Gallifreyans. Her illness was somewhat stigmatized in their culture, so she kept it a secret from the Doctor for fear that he'd think less of her if he knew. She brought a supply of medicine along when she was assigned to work with the Doctor on the search for the Key to Time, but once the pair of them started using the Randomizer to direct the TARDIS afterwards, she didn't have the chance to pick up any refills. Rather than admit her illness and oblige the Doctor to risk the Black Guardian finding them, by returning to Gallifrey for more, she permitted her condition to progress to a point where she had no choice but to regenerate. Because she opted to do so before her body had declined to the brink of death, restoring herself didn't use up as much regeneration-energy as normal, so she had plenty to spare on trying out new, healthy shapes.

The entire history of the Doctor has been one long game of Xanatos Speed Chess against the creatures of the Cthulhu Mythos

.The Expanded Whoniverse novels not only drew the Old Ones and Endless Ones into the ambiguous canonicity of the novels, but also stated that Rassilon himself named them. The Vortex opening that drove the Master mad was obviously closed after a while because of its connection to the domains of Nyarlathotep and so forth. Each of the Doctor's recurring enemies, as well as many of the one-shots, is connected to one of the more powerful beings - the Daleks to Hastur, some of the more hideous aliens to Shub-Niggurath, and so forth. On an early visit to Earth, the First Doctor found himself on a steam yacht named the Alert and was able to arrange Cthulhu being rammed. Since then, he has been attempting to deal with them however necessary. His death in Turn Left was due to being caught by Deep Ones while regenerating and stabbed in both hearts; through Heroic Willpower and at least one of the regeneration WMGs above, the regeneration limit simply no longer applies, because this is someone who has repeatedly forced the abyss to avert its gaze.

Castrovalva would have become or launched the Wheel in Space if Four hadn't died falling off that radio tower.

Either Four would have avoided going there in the first place, or he would've found a way out that did not involve the residents killing themselves for him. Four likes impossible geometries. Castrovalva, left alone, would have advanced until it had finally launched a space station - with one Zoë Heriot on it...

If the missing episodes ever turn up, then they will be chock full of Fanservice.

Point one: most of the First and Second Doctor episodes that currently exist were rescued because they were in the possession of Arabic countries.

Point two: none of the soundtracks are lost.

So, the episodes that remain missing are missing because they had footage that was offensive to the Arabic countries and so was never shown in them. This would tend to be sexual footage. Most of the Ian-Barbara-Susan-One episodes exist; most of the ones that don't involve medieval Arabs. Episodes with young female travelling companions who aren't related to the Doctor don't fare so well. Polly was a swinger, and most of her episodes are lost; the only Ben-Polly-One episodes that survive are set in Antarctica, and by the time we get Ben-Polly-Two, it's Ben-Polly-Jamie-Two. Only a couple of Dodo stories exist too. Likewise, the only completely intact Jamie-Victoria-Two series is set on a very cold planet. (It appears that Victoria updated her wardrobe after her first appearances.) Zoë's episodes mostly survive despite her looking sexy partly because her skin is completely covered by catsuit and partly because VCR tech was starting to trickle down into more homes.

• A fair bit of footage from that era only exists today specifically because it was retained in censors’ archives.
  • That only josses details. The censors might go easier than the Arabs on sexual imagery, but they'd likely object to much of the same stuff. When the era of free love ended, it crashed.
    • Unlikely. You'd think there'd be more accounts of it, or modern 50+ people telling tales of wanking to the episodes, or their memories of them.

The Doctor never got over his possession by Sutekh in "The Pyramids of Mars"

Self-explanatory. Sutekh turned the Doctor into his puppet, and the Doctor only thought he got free. He has been carrying out Sutekh's will by destroying everything.

The Time Lords are descended from Sidereals.

Bureaucratic, arrogant, scheming, double dealing, watching the universe from isolation while using others as their agents (in a very hush-hush-no-we-didn't way) to control the universe, able to warp time on a personal level, and capable of mental communication and ESP, whose only proactive members have to go into exile. Death is even one of their gods (according to the spin-off novels).

Zoë comes from our time.

She knows of the Karkus, a cartoon character from the year 2000. 2000 has already passed. Therefore, it's entirely possible that she's from what is now the present day. It's known that the Doctor Who universe has more advanced science than ours, especially in and beyond the 21st century; creating the Wheel in Space should be no problem, since they've managed to send astronauts to Mars already.

• She was "born in the 21st century," so she can't be from any earlier than 2015 or so. But that's now close enough to be 20 Minutes into the Future.
  • The above WMG and comment were obviously written some years before 2015. At the time of writing this comment (April 2015), the objection no longer applies.

The Doctor is not only the Valeyard, but also the Master!

Given how power-mad the Seventh Doctor became with his act-of-god actions, and given how war-crazed Nine got, it's clear that Time Lords just get crazier and more megalomaniacal as time goes on. (Does Yen look well-adjusted to you?) So he becomes the Valeyard, and then The Master, and then he goes back and inserts himself in his own timeline and attends the Academy with himself. Then in a fit of madness, he starts the whole mess that causes The Doctor to flee Gallifrey with his granddaughter in the first place.

The Sixth Doctor was not 'totally tasteless' as many people claim.

He simply wore the outfit to piss off as many people as humanly (...Gallifreyanly?) possible.

• The Big Finish audio "The Sandmen" gives one possible benefit of the coat ( chameleonic creatures like the Galyari find it painful to look at, making it a great defense against them), though it doesn't go so far as to suggest the Doctor had that in mind when he obtained it.

The Doctor is The Doctor mkII - or, in modern parlance, the Doctor 2.0.

Recently suggested by the Doctor Who Magazine. Like the Master, the Doctor was revived by the Time Lords. This would explain why, in the "Brain Of Morbius," he was in his fourth body and why we saw faces before that. They were of the Doctor mkI.

The First Doctor had a heart attack from which he never recovered.

Since he had a heart in reserve, it wasn't life-threatening enough to cause regeneration. He just went on with only one WORKING heart; the other repaired itself when the next regeneration came along.

• The problem with this theory is that the Doctor was never treated as having two hearts until the Third Doctor.
  • It was so bad that it took TWO regenerations to fix?
    • Hey, hey, here's an idea: the Doctor has always had two hearts, but stopped/slowed down one whenever somebody came at him with a stethoscope. Either that, or when someone actually heard the second heart, they just went, "Nah, couldn't be." Remember, One and Two were mavericks, even more so than his future incarnations. Obscuring his second heartbeat fits in with the "disguise/low profile" thing.

The Flip-Flop two-disc audio set was a connecting point between two different parallel dimensions.

Doctor B caused the apocalypse that Doctor W arrived to find and Doctor W caused the apocalypse that Doctor B arrived to find. Not the same guy.

The Karkus comes from a webcomic from the year 2000.

Well, you haven't seen him in your newspapers, have you?

• Unfortunately, that webcomic was hosted on Geocities.

The Fifth Doctor is a rampant sociopath trying to work for the forces of good.

Let's examine this one, OK? He decides the only way to deal with a mostly-harmless obese frog-alien is to splash him with a deadly poison. He's a serial killer, albeit not convicted. The Fifth Doctor has repeatedly shot a dying alien in the chest because he could. He nearly let the "villain" Omega blow up the universe before deciding to shoot the guy anyway. Then he decided to end a war between humans and aliens by killing every single person there for the sheer hell of it. To stop the Master, the Doctor chose to wipe out the population of an entire world. In a later encounter, the Doctor banished the Master to the distant stars alongside an alien race who would be wanting to kill the Master for his deeds that adventure. And when it came to a multi-Doctor adventure, he's the only one to be seduced by evil.

Perhaps finally, the Fifth also sat by and watched as his archenemy burned to death with a look of Dull Surprise on his face... in an adventure where he already killed a companion with his own hands and decided the best way to heal the mortally injured was to set them on fire.

Oh, and he was directly involved with starting the Great Fire of London. Not only did he start it, but he openly built up the fire and made it larger than it would have been.

Come on. The Fifth is a rampant sociopath, but it seems to only be obvious in retrospect. And even then, most of the survivors forgive him because he did mean well and because he's cute.

• Is that why the Tenth Doctor is such a fan of him?
• Well, considering that the Tenth straddles a line between Chaotic Good and Well-Meaning-Sociopath every day, very likely. Ten likes Five for being young and liberated, the first to be free of the strictures of his earlier selves — and since "his earlier selves" includes the free-spirited bohemian Four, Ten must be thinking of this rampant but well-meaning sociopathy.
• In the novelization of "The Twin Dilemma", the Doctor comments that, as Five, he was "on the verge of becoming neurotic". We might not have understood at the time because Six had his own mental issues around then, but now that we've had time to think about it...
  • To further expand, one can even see this explaining why the Fifth was so damned energetic at times... sure, he just killed off god-knows-how-many people averting this adventure's disaster, but at least he saved so many others through his actions — or tried to save them, at least. In fact, Nine and Ten are kinda like this — Tenth even more than Five. Although Nine and Ten at least show remorse before someone points out what they did... which also makes Five seem like a little like a child given a loaded gun and not understanding why the loud noise made their dog die. Again, lending credence to the theory.
    • So, Teegan was the primary force keeping Five from losing touch with reality completely?
    • Honestly, this troper (and creator of this WMG) would not be shocked one bit. Right after Teegan leaves, the Doctor randomly curses at the not-present Daleks for several minutes before Turlough dares to speak up, and he certainly seemed to be losing it a little bit during his time with just Nyssa (anyone else think he accepted death just a little too easily?). It certainly seems like Teegan was some sort of a stabilizing force in the Doctor's persona — though Peri seems to have been a stabilizing force as well, seeing how the Fifth didn't randomly leap into insanity during his final story. One can only wonder what would have happened had Teegan not returned to the TARDIS...

Davros is Stephen Hawking

Crippled and in a wheelchair? Check. Brilliant scientist? Check. Large ego? Check. Survived something they shouldn't have? Check.

Sometime in his youth, Stephen Hawking was made immortal in a similar manner to Jack Harkness. This is how he is still alive when he was projected to be dead within two years of being diagnosed with motor neuron disease. Eventually, he ends up on Skaro several millenia in the past. Kaled medicine restores his ability to speak and turns him into one of them, driving him insane in the process. The Dalek voice is based on his own speech synthesizer voice.

To prove this theory, someone must get Stephen Hawking to do a Dalek imitation.

Time Lords only have titles, not names

Though some of those titles are pretty obscure. (What's a Borusa, anyway?)

Time Lord names are granted only after they become Time Lords

Before, they use whatever name they were born with or are used to. They enter the Academy, go through hell, and emerge as a Time Lord; then they are given a new name that suits their personality, and they embrace this new identity and never look back.

The link from Old Who to New Who is not direct — it goes through a severe Temporal Paradox

So, according to New Who Word of God, nothing is explicitly non-canonical. That means the Faction Paradox novels are true. And that means that one of the Eighth Doctor's former companions killed the Third Doctor about one series arc too early.

Problem: The last serial of the Third Doctor's almost certainly cannot be solved without someone dying. It cannot be prevented, either — the Doctor gave that jewel to Jo Grant some time before; if he wants Sarah Jane to live, odds are he'll have to die. And Four loved Sarah Jane as much as he loved any human...

So, from getting Four early, we are forced to get someone like old-series Five early. This is why Sarah Jane was able to fall hopelessly in love with the Doctor. We'll get at least parallel Sarah Jane episodes and parallel Romana episodes (including E-Space — and yes, Five + Key of Time is a scary thought).

This Five will not die by radio tower.^note Perhaps rather than regenerating, he'll use the Zero Room to heal himself - similar to how he needed it in Castrovalva to finish off his regeneration. He'll be hurt, perhaps severely, but he won't regenerate. He may refuse to (he managed to delay regeneration on Androzani for some time the first time around). So we'll get variants of the normal Five episodes, likely up to and including the Androzani disaster.

If the Time War hadn't already been violently settled when Five had the Key Of Time, then the Time War will gain heat about when "Trial of a Time Lord" happened in the original timeline. Six will cast the killing blow here like he did to Skaro — or else Nine will. The Doctor will remember Seven and Eight — he's a Time Lord and knows how things might have gone — but this time around he'll never have been them. Nine got a few of the Seven genes; Eleven might get a few of the Eight genes.

• Excellent theory - but this troper is a little more worried about how Genesis of the Daleks would have unfolded than Key to Time... though that's possibly due to the fact that he's yet to see the Key to Time arc. Either way, a longer tenure for Five also means a much higher death count throughout the stories thanks to how his own stories happened...
  • "Genesis of the Daleks" couldn't get much more bloody than it already is and still allow for NuWho canon (we still have Daleks, after all). Maybe Harry dies.
  • Remember how powerful the Time Vortex is? The Key of Time has the same power to change space-time, only it doesn't kill the Time Lord incarnation who's using it. (Probably.... though, given that Romana regenerated at the beginning of the next season...)
  • And a higher death count would help explain how the Doctor of New Who sees himself ("The Oncoming Storm") and how surviving higher lifeforms see him. Four did get caught in a few genocides (he once reprogrammed a computer because he felt like it — and did it wrong), but Five has triggered at least two simply because he showed up.
  • Also, perhaps the Fifth Doctor would have been much more jaded by the time of his 'original' stories in this new continuity. After all, 7 more years of death and destruction around him could not be good for the psyche - even for one as well-adjusted as the Fifth's tended to be. Maybe he'd (gasp!) notice when the Master showed up.
• One more side effect of this theory — maybe the NuWho Doctor isn't lying about his age — not strictly, anyhow. In classic continuity, the Doctor was 941 when he shifted from Six to Seven, and it is presumed that he was Six when he was 900. In the paradox iteration, whatever caused the Doctor to turn into Nine could've happened right when, or shortly before, he turned 900.
• The Third Doctor-died-early paradox was settled in the novels themselves: the Doctor who died early would become Grandfather Paradox, but the timeline was reset to normal (or approaching normal) when the Doctor defeated Grandfather Paradox and destroyed Gallifrey the first time in the novels.
  • Okay, general theory confirmed, details jossed? (Ontological inertia being what it is, defeating Grandfather Paradox probably shouldn't bring Three back — but, since the Timey-Wimey Ball rules Doctor Who time travel...)

The Shalka Doctor was erased by the Time War.

The webcast "Scream of the Shalka" introduces a Ninth Doctor played by Richard E. Grant. But when the new series begins, he's never mentioned again. What happened? Well, the Time War actally. In the original time line, the Eighth Doctor regenerates into the Ninth Doctor, the one we see in "Scream of the Shalka". If Whoniverse time is somewhat parallel to Real Life time, that must've been somewhere in mid-2003. "Shalka" happens, and then some time in 2004 the Time War erupts. The Doctor gets caught in the middle of it. By 'early 2005', the war is nearly taking place in hell. At this point, the Doctor accidentally kills his earlier, Eighth self, before he can regenerate, which causes a major paradox. What happens then is 'hordes of travesties', 'the nightmare king' and all those other abominations: the timeline is trying to cope with the paradox. It kills almost everyone involved with the Doctor in his Eighth and Ninth incarnations, the Time Lords and most of the Daleks, before everything is sort-of consistent. Almost all records of these Doctors (read: TV episodes) are erased, going back as far as the early Seventh Doctor (read: cancellation of the show in 1989). This also gives the Eighth random bouts of amnesia, and some small logical errors (the Doctor being half-human for a while, the Seventh forgetting to check the area before he lands and gets shot). The Nestene Conciousness tries to make heads and tails of everything, and Autons arrive on Earth in a London department store. The newly regenerated Doctor rushes off to deal with them, as records of the Doctor resume. Then "Rose" takes place. In this episode, the new Doctor checks himself out in a mirror. He hadn't had time to do that yet. Later Eighth Doctor stories are the timeline trying to fill in the glitches in the timeline.

• This also works to explain much of the Expanded Universe. The comics, books and audio plays are often in many key ways contradictory with each other and, in certain cases, with the TV series, especially those featuring the Eighth Doctor; it's the universe's way of trying to resolve the paradox. The effects even go back through the Doctor's timeline, significantly affecting the Seventh Doctor (the Doctor Who New Adventures) but also the previous six to a lesser degree (the Doctor Who Missing Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures). Heck, there are even some very significant gaps in the Doctor's early years (the TV adventures that were wiped by the BBC in the 1970s) that might have been wiped away as a result of Timey-Wimey Ball problems following the Time War.
• Alternatively, the Shalka Doctor is the Ninth incarnation in an alternate universe in which the Time War never happened. I mean, he has traits of the War and Ninth Doctor and he even states himself to be his ninth incarnation.

The Rani is Holly Marshall.

In the Land of the Lost (1974) episode "Elsewhen", Holly encounters a blonde woman, apparently in her twenties, who calls herself "Rani", who turns out to be Holly's older self come back in time to help her. Rani admits that she can time travel at will and understands the technology of the Land. Given that the pylons of the Land display TARDIS-like properties, it seems plausible that at least one is a TARDIS; the future Holly used it to escape the Land to Gallifrey where she became a Time Lady (just as Ace would have if the classic series had never been cancelled).

Adric has Aspergers

He's socially awkward, he doesn't seem to realise when he's offended people, he tends to take things too literally, and, of course, he loves maths and logic.

• This troper has Asperger's and he hates math.

Adric's entire species is short on empathy deep down

We see his people and learn the secret of his species in his first serial. Only one form of his species looks fully humanoid; the other two are closer to arthropod. So Adric probably is more like a super-intelligent spider, mentally, than like a normal human being.

In "Terror of the Autons," the Third Doctor didn't say "Tea-Lady"; he said "T.Lady"

"This place is strctly out-of-bounds to everyone but the Brigadier's personal staff and the T.Lady."

As in abbreviation of Time-Lady who is his probation officer - except he's under sentence rather than on probation. The Doctor isn't exactly forthcoming about being a convict; he just says that the secret of the TARDIS has been taken from him, probably so as not to affect his career in a military organisation. So when a member of his own species turns up every now and then, he says just that, rather then her occupation.

The Third Doctor has a prisoner tattoo

We see a glimpse of it in his debut serial. After that, he always wears long sleeves. The tattoo is meant to warn other Time Lords not to let him hitch a ride on their TARDISes. He still bore it after "The Three Doctors," but the Time Lords did rig it so that when he regenerated again, it wouldn't stick.

The Eighth Doctor partially foretold the events of Journey's End in the TV Movie

The Hand Doctor is half-human. His human side comes from Donna, making her his mother. As the Eighth Doctor was very prone to prognostication, this is what he was actually talking about.

• Possibly Jossed by the comic mini-series Doctor Who: The Forgotten. It is revealed in a flashback involving The Eighth Doctor that The Doctor's claims to be half-human, as well as his erratic behavior during the TV Movie, were a Batman Gambit to throw The Master off-guard, accomplished in part through a half-broken Chameleon Arch (a.k.a. The Eighth Doctor's trademark fob watch!)
  • Well, you picks your Expanded Universe Alternate Continuity and you takes your choice. The BBC Books Eighth Doctor Adventures had already explained that the reason the Doctor said he was half-human was ... that he was half-human, son of a Time Lord called Ulysses and a human called Penelope. (Penelope Gate from the Virgin novels? Could be...)

Ian and Barbara were killed in The Stolen Earth/Journey's End

As soon as they saw a Dalek, they would have known the Earth was in deep shit. What they couldn't have known is that this is a different faction for whom the mud-on-the-lens trick doesn't work. They were probably awesome to the last, and likely died bravely.

• As depressing as this is, I put this in my own personal Canon. Along with the WMG of the Dr. Who movies being anti-Dalek warning movies, this just makes too sense to not be true. Ian and Barbara, you shall be missed.
  • Jossed in Sarah Jane Adventures "Death of the Doctor".

The Master in some of the spin-offs isn't really the Master

David McIntee once had a throwaway idea that, when the Master was being cured of his Cheetah Virus in his novel First Frontier, a clone was created, and this was the Master in the TV Movie. While he never actually used this theory in any way (except in attributing a quote from the TVM to "the (ersatz) Master" in The Dark Path), it's a fun idea. Looking through the spin-offs there appear to be two clones, plus the Master. The timelines go like this.

• The Real Master: First Frontier -> Happy Endings -> The Adventuress of Henrietta Street (as the Man with the Rosette) -> New series.
  • Note that the Man with the Rosette says that he is clean shaven because the Doctor has a beard. Therefore the last time he met the Doctor they can't have both been clean shaven, therefore he isn't the TVM Master.
• Clone #1: First Frontier -> Dust Breeding -> Master
  • Big Finish audios version, who reverts to the Geoffrey Beevers incarnation.
• Clone #2: First Frontier -> The Eight Doctors -> The TV Movie -> Sometime Never... -> The Gallifrey Chronicles -> The Glorious Dead (Doctor Who Magazine strip).
  • This is the version who got trapped in the Eye of Harmony and spent a couple of novels appearing on a screen in the TARDIS. In an alternate timeline where the Doctor regenerated into Richard E. Grant, his conciousness was transferred into a robot body that couldn't leave the TARDIS (Scream of the Shalka).

Melanie, known as 'Mel,' was a companion of the Seventh Doctor first.

Ok, bear with me on this one. During the third part of Trial of a Time Lord, we are randomly introduced to the new companion Mel. In fact, the Doctor points out that this doesn't take place long after the conclusion of the trial... but we never saw when the Doctor first met Mel. In fact, the series skirts around this by instead having the first televised adventure of Sixth and Mel together outside the trial run right into the Seventh Doctor's regeneration. The key problem here?

Unlike practically every other companion to be there for a regeneration, Mel doesn't bat an eye at this.

So, considering the time-traveling apsect of Doctor Who, this could mean that Mel first met the Seventh Doctor rather than the Sixth. This helps explain why we never see Mel officially join the Sixth Doctor, and helps explain why the Sixth Doctor just wanders off with her at the end of the Trial without the Time Lords objecting.

In terms of how this fits the timeline, it must be further along the Seventh Doctor's lifespan after the show was placed on hiatus.^note Obviously after Ace left the TARDIS, unless Mel somehow forgot about Ace... which is unlikely). The Seventh Doctor, being incredibly clever at this sort of thing, realizes that this is before the Master snatches Mel randomly from time and space and gives her a small explanation about some key things before she's dragged back in time later on. Odds are also good that many of the Seventh-and-Mel audio dramas and novels can take place in this time unless specified - especially considering there wasn't a whole lot of offscreen time given to Mel and Seventh. Of course, Mel is eventually ripped from her time with the Seventh and sent to help testify his case, and time unfolds as we've already seen before.

...ok, so it's a little convoluted to explain away why Mel doesn't seem all that disturbed at the Doctor regenerating,^note he is, after all, turning into the Doctor she's more familiar with; but with this franchise, pretty much anything goes.

• Alternately: 'Mel' was Melody Pond, which is why she didn't bat an eye at regeneration. She's already known the 11th Doctor. Wouldn't be the first time she met the doctor out of order in the timeline, either.

The Meddling Monk worked with Cessair of Diplos for a time.

• She commanded the Stone Circles, and he helped with Stonehenge...

The Brigadier, Jo, Tegan, Ace, and Grace all recognized Mr. Saxon for who he was.

Of course, there was little that Tegan or Grace could do, being citizens of other countries. And Jo was in the Amazon rainforest, so she probably didn't vote in that election, either.

• And the Brigadier was in Peru.

The Rani has never appeared in the new series because she's too busy being Rani Mukherji

Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic, Dil Bole Hadippa and Saawariya all contain clues as to her true identity. In TPTM she is a nearly immortal being. In Dil Bole Hadippa she spends much of the movie in disguise, hinting that Rani Mukherji is not as she seems. And in Saawariya she plays a character that's narrating (from afar!) a story that may or may not be true; sounds pretty Time Lord, right?

• None of these movies did well financially, meaning few people are picking up on these hints; eventually, she'll go crazy in 2012 and cause the end of the world.

Sozin and Roku were previous regenerations of The Doctor and the Master

Right down to the frolicking in fields and the gay and the mutual adversarial respect.

Every Doctor we have seen is official

We all know that as well as the Doctor that we know and love there have been others such as The Shalka Doctor, The Curse of Fatal Death Doctors, Dr. Who and (Evil) Future Doctors; such as Merlin, Muldwych and the Valeyard. This is how they all fit into the Doctor's personal time line.

The Curse of Fatal Death Doctors: Rowan Atkinson's Doctor was the true Eighth Doctor, chronologically speaking. After rapid regenerations, the Doctor eventually becomes a woman. It is during this female incarnation that The Last Great Time War starts.

When she returns to Gallifrey, The Doctor has some of her regenerations restored and becomes someone who looks an awful lot like Seven, and then the person we call Eight.

Now for the interesting part. During the heat of the War, the TARDIS saved the Doctor from Gallifrey, forcibly removing him from the battle and refusing to return to Gallifrey.

Angry at the TARDIS, the Doctor ejects the Eye of Harmony (possibly trying to kill it) and ends the war.

Distraught and alone, the Doctor returns to the one planet he was ever able to call home besides Gallifrey - Earth. He uses the chameleon arch and becomes the human we know as Dr. Who. This human Doctor holds inside of him some memories of his past life, such as Susan, Skaro, the Daleks, and the phrase TARDIS.

This explains why Tardis (Doctor Who's ship) is a police box. This Doctor is constantly going back to the Daleks (that is, to places he has been before) to try and stop himself from starting the War in the first place.

At the end of these adventures, Doctor Who finds his Fob Watch and becomes The Doctor once again - specifically, the one we call the Eighth Doctor, but physically older. (It was a long war.)

The Doctor offered to take his family travelling with him. They rejected the offer, feeling that the man they knew was a lie, and they would hate the Doctor. Either that, or they do come with him and live out their lives in the TARDIS.

Either way, human lifespans being what they are, the Doctor winds up alone again. So he hits random on the TARDIS and ends up stranded on Earth for 100 years, thus becoming Muldwych. (He chose to call himself Muldwych because he knew he would tell his past self that this was his name.) These hundred years were in the time of King Arthur, explaining why he also took the name Merlin.

Over time, he would return to his TARDIS and drift through space for many years/eons and end up looking like the Shalka Doctor. It is in this form that the Eighth Doctor dies...simply from getting old. He dies and regenerates into the Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccelston).

As for the Valeyard, he is either, as he claims, a later incarnation of the Doctor who found himself back on Gallifrey (probably driven insane by breaking the Time Lock ala Dalek Caan)....

Or the Meta-Crisis Tenth Doctor (aka Ten(b)) as many people think (possibly including the original Ten.) This Half Human Doctor wanted to frame his other self to get regenerations, as he had none in the first place.

• 10B does fit the description of coming "between his 12th and final incarnation" even though that sounded impossible at the time; 11 being the true 13 and Handy being made from the severed hand and cast-off regen energy. However, rather than him become deliberately evil, better if he gets his brain cooked real good by something that is eventually reversible.

Ace founded the Time Agency.

The New Adventures used to be canon and are still deuterocanon; it's possible that many events in the books happened. Ace may have been last seen as a time-travelling vigilante with a wrist-mounted computer and a firm belief in peace through superior firepower. What's the Time Agency but a bunch of time-travelling vigilantes with wrist-mounted computers and no real aversion to the use of superior firepower to bring about peace? And the fall of Gallifrey ensured that Ace would pass her vision on.

• Russell has said that "canon" isn't something he worries about; he's quite happy for the fans to decide what they consider canon. He even offered an explanation for how Gallifrey has apparently been destroyed twice, suggesting that at some point it was resurrected, only to become involved in the Time War with the Daleks. (The books and audios have taken this comment and run with it.)
• It would be totally awesome if it turned out Ace founded the Time Agency.
• And this could be why Jack lost two years worth of memories. At some point he was helping the boss on a two-year mission and Ace was reunited with the Doctor towards the end of it. He told her about the vital role Jack would play in his life, and to ensure that came to pass she wiped her top agent's memory, creating a classic Stable Time Loop.
• There's some hints in the last seasons of the Classic series that Seven was grooming Ace as a successor of sorts, with at least one source saying she was set up to go to the Time Lord Academy, as in become a Time Lord in her own right (using the gender-neutral here since Ace probably wouldn't call herself a "lady.") Of course, this would be prior to the Time War, but say Ace got just enough training to make her even more dangerous before The Doctor convinces her to flee Gallifrey. And if she figured her "Professor" was dead, then someone was just going to have to be around to keep the timelines fixed and make any remaining Daleks wet themselves in fear.

The Black Guardian is the same being as the Trickster in The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Let's examine this: uber-powerful being dressed all in black who hangs around just outside reality, making Faustian deals with people? And gives them little trinkets to remember him by, backed up with gentle verbal persuasion if necessary? And says "Waking or sleeping, I will be with you always"? C'mon!

Rani Chandra is The Rani

There is no way both characters have the same name and do not have a connection. By the way adding this to the "Luke Smith is the Doctor" theory above, it would mean Clyde Langer is The Master.

Doctor Who is a TV Show within its own canon.

Don't ask me how the BBC managed to get a hold of this info.

• It is; Eastenders exists within Doctor Who, and Doctor Who exists within Eastenders, ergo DW must be a TV show within DW.

The events of Curse of the Fatal Death were all just a weird dream had by the Eighth Doctor.

This might explain his initial shock and surprise at the end of "End of Time part II", when he regenerated and initially thought he was a girl.

Whatever caused Romana to regenerate was the same thing that gave K-9 laryngitis.

We just didn't see it happen.

The Sixth Doctor was a Tsundere.

After attempting to kill Peri during his regenerative crisis, he felt extremely guilty but was too shy to admit it. He used his arrogance as a cover-up. If we had seen any of his adventures with Mel, then he would've softened up a little.

• Supported by his Big Finish audio adventures.

The Meddling Monk hears drums.

The Master did not always go by "the Master". Up until Terror of the Autons, the Doctor had him written off as a jackanapes. The Master also has a vendetta against the Doctor. Hmm...

• But their personalities don't match at all, the Monk's plans aren't as diabolical as The Master's, and The Doctor only seems to recognize The Monk as "that dumb kid from that one class", as opposed to "a former friend I attended the academy with".

The Vogans restore and reuse alien rockets.

That explains why that rocket has "United States" on it.'

Jo Grant shot the Master in "Frontier in Space."

At the end of "Frontier in Space", the Doctor is shot at by the Master and falls down unconscious while Ogrons run about and general chaos reigns. There's a sudden cut, and we see Jo hovering over the Doctor, with no sign of any Ogrons or the Master. And Jo, for some reason, has the Master's weapon in her hand. While the Doctor was unconscious, Jo, believing him to be dead, wrested the gun from the Master and shot him, forcing him to retreat to his TARDIS and escape; this explains why he did not remain and prevent Jo and the Doctor from escaping. The Master was on his final incarnation, and so either tried and failed to regenerate or prevented himself from regenerating, and this caused his body to decay into the husk we see in "The Deadly Assassin" and "The Keeper of Traken".

Marinus orbits a red dwarf star.

It is pretty clearly a human colony (noone corrects the Doctor when he refers to them as human, and there are wolves hanging around), and yet Arbitan is over 2000 years old, and Yartek not much younger. Obviously, we are talking about very short years.

Salamander was a good man when he invented the Sun Store.

Afterwards, he was granted power and it went to his head.

Eventually, Ian and Barbara deduced the truth about how their old boss really died.

They wouldn't know about the different Dalek factions until the Medusa Cascade, however.

Edward Waterfield was given descriptions of all thirteen Doctors, and all known companions.

How were the Daleks to know, until they got the security photo, which Doctor and companion(s) they would be dealing with? There were two different Doctors in this time frame alone, after all.

Trantis from "The Dalek's Master Plan" is a Dominator.

In "The Daleks' Master Plan", delegates from all the outer galaxies form an alliance to attack and conquer the solar system. This is reminisced upon in "The Dominators", when the henchman Tober mentions that the Dominators are "masters of the ten galaxies". This sounds rather implausible, but upon simple observation, one can see that Trantis bears the most resemblance to the Dominator species, among the outlandish variety of aliens that form the rest of the council. The simple explanation is that the Dominators from Trantis's galaxy, while fairly powerful in their own right, have a serious case of power delusions, and see themselves as masters of the universe. This goes unmentioned in the Master Plan (most likely to avoid pissing the Daleks off), but is evident in The Dominators.

The Weeping Angels are derived from the Medusa statue seen in "The Mind Robber".

Said statue appears as stone but comes to life as the heroes look away, has a very strong physical resemblance to the Angels, and it's dangerous to look into its eyes, which is also how the Doctor defeats it: forcing it to look at itself. Thanks to the Timey-Wimey Ball, a race of interspatial killers was born from that very statue (or alternatively, the historical Medusa) and went on to torment the newer Doctors.

The Fifth Doctor's celery was more than just a decorative vegetable.

This explains it all.

• Uh, actually that's Confirmed in "The Caves of Androzani," though that isn't the reason.

One (or both) sides in the Time War arranged the assassination of the Seventh Doctor.

So, the Seventh Doctor... kind of gets killed for no reason in the Made-for-TV Movie. Or does he?!

The Seventh Doctor, as we all know, fancies himself The Chessmaster, and he's certainly the kind of Manipulative Bastard who'd have all kinds of plans and schemes for dealing with the Time War and the various problems arising from such an eventuality, both Dalek and Time Lord (particularly those keen on a bit of Ultimate Sanction) related. He's pretty good at them as well, which means he's exactly the kind of dangerous threat that has to be dealt with or at least neutralized. The Eighth Doctor, however, is a bit flighty, not really the sort for planning ahead, a bit sensitive and sweet — not really the sort who's equipped to fight a horrific intergalactic temporal war. Quite a coincidence, then, considering he's the one (apparently) who ended up fighting it. Almost as if someone planned it that way.

Here's how it goes; whoever's behind it first makes a deal with the Master. You're dying, on your last legs anyway — get yourself 'killed', demand that the Doctor bring your remains back to Gallifrey personally, and then distract him and divert him somewhere where he's likely to be killed (or at least regenerate). Say, a dark alley in a dangerous, crime-ridden part of town in San Francisco. To sweeten the deal, you can have his remaining regenerations. The Master agrees, allows himself to be turned into that snake-goo thing, and the Doctor comes a-calling. The Master gets into the TARDIS' inner-workings and buggers around a bit, sending him to Earth (and, incidentally, knackering up the external scanner, meaning the Doctor can't see what's outside even if he doesn't just charge out the door like we've seen him do so many times before — which also explains that whole "why doesn't the Doctor just check the scanner" plothole everyone complains about as well). That's Part A; get the Doctor to Earth.

Part B concerns those gangsters who try to kill Chang Lee. At least, that's apparently why they're there,and certainly why we assume they were there — they certainly shoot his mates, but when Chang Lee's dead in their sights, they just sort of stand there and sneer for a bit. As if they're waiting for something else. They've obviously been lurking there a while, given that they were hiding when their supposed 'targets' were just happily walking away, and only revealed themselves after their presence was accidentally exposed. Then the TARDIS appears — not only right in front of Chang Lee, but conveniently exactly where the gangsters have a perfect shot at whoever happens to walk out the door. They shoot it — and then reload, wait for the Doctor to come out, and then shoot him. And then bugger off, without even bothering with Chang Lee — who, we're led to believe, they're supposedly there to kill in the first place. If Chang Lee was their true target, this makes no sense whatsoever.

That's because they were never interested in Chang Lee — they were hired by parties unknown to whack the Doctor, and Chang Lee and his mates just stumbled upon them and had to be silenced as witnesses. Of course, they've probably got no idea why they were hired or what they've been part off — they are freaked out by the TARDIS — but it's either a hell of a coincidence or someone's arranged things so that the Doctor appear in that exact alley at that exact time when a whole load of machine-gun packing gangsters just happened to be spraying bullets around. If he gets shot and dies there and then, great — if not, he gets carted off to a human hospital where, having no understanding of Time Lord physiology, they'd no doubt bugger up somehow and end up killing him anyway. Either way, result. Whether the Master (who the Time Lords, as we eventually learn, are quite happy to use as a puppet) gets a new body or, as even the plotters would have to concede is more likely, the Doctor gets a new regeneration, either way The Chessmaster that is the Seventh Doctor is taken out of play. Win-win.

So who's behind it? Obvious money's on the Daleks — they've got an obvious motive, what with the whole 'arch-enemy of the Doctor' thing, and it would explain why they suddenly developed that interest in legal niceties and put the Master on trial rather than just exterminating him first and not even bothering with a question. Then again, given the complex nature of the plot described, the Time Lords — who love these kind of byzantine plots and scheming, aren't exactly immune from being bastards to the Doctor even pre-Time War and have that whole Ultimate Sanction plan in a drawer ready to be pulled out whenever they feel like becoming Gods (and they have to know the Doctor ain't gonna like that) — are suspects as well. Plus, a new Doctor might be more malleable and easy to handle than the Seventh Doctor, who has his own plots and schemes on the boil as well.

Either way, the Seventh Doctor did not die randomly. He got put into checkmate.^note Either that, or I've been watching the TVM too much recently and have been thinking about it too hard...

The Daleks wanted the Master to be their puppet

The Daleks had intended for the Master to usurp the Seventh Doctor's body, expecting him to infiltrate and disrupt the Time Lords' social order in their worst enemy's guise, leaving Gallifrey vulnerable to Dalek attack. The Master was perfectly happy with the idea, as he'd wanted a body that could properly regenerate for ages; he didn't know the Daleks were plotting against Gallifrey itself, but he did assume he could turn their eagerness to eliminate the Doctor to his own advantage. The gang members' attack on Seven was an accident that messed up the villains' schemes because the Master has such a hard time tracking down the newly-regenerated Doctor.

Ian and Barbara knew about regeneration.

In part six of The Keys of Marinus, the Doctor would have had to consider the possibility that Susan might be killed and regenerate. He would have had to warn Barbara, Sabetha, and Altos that Susan might look quite different.

Tavius was the first to use the cross as a symbol of the Faith.

The purpose of the pendant was to symbolize the command to take up one's cross daily.

Zoë negated her own timeline in The Invasion.

One problem that crops now and again in Doctor Who fandom is what order the Second Doctor's three "21st-century" stories (The Moonbase, The Wheel in Space and The Seeds of Death) are supposed to take place in. You end up with a contradiction whichever order you choose:

• Wheel comes before Moonbase, because in Moonbase everyone knows about Cybermen but in Wheel no-one does.
• Moonbase comes before Seeds, because the weather control's less sophisticated and the plot wouldn't work if T-Mat had been around at the time of Moonbase.
• And Seeds comes before Wheel, because in Seeds humanity never got beyond lunar orbit but in Wheel they're out as far as the Asteroid Belt. But Wheel comes before Seeds because Zoë isn't familiar with T-Mat (or Ice Warriors).

So they all come before each other.

Here's one solution: By travelling into her own past in The Invasion, Zoë changed the timeline. In the original timeline, Vaughn's plan worked; he gained control of the Cybermen, became dictator of Earth, and used their technology to get humanity spread all over the inner Solar System. When Zoë shot the Cybermen's fleet out of the sky, she negated that entire timeline and humanity never got further than the Moon.

Arcturus told Hepesh about the Ood.

Peladon and Torbis, meanwhile, thought the whole thing was propaganda.

The Sixth Doctor's instability was a backup plan of the Master's that didn't work properly

As the Fifth Doctor lay dying, he hallucinated his incarnation's companions urging him to stay alive, something similar to what he saw as the Fourth Doctor was dying. However, he suddenly hallucinated the face and voice of the Master ordering him to die and laughing evilly, almost drowning out his friend's voices. He'd a few moments before mentioned how the regeneration he was starting to go through felt different than before, and the Sixth Doctor was clearly unbalanced and barely holding himself together. So, what happened?When the Fifth Doctor was recovering in Castrovalva, which turned out to be a trap of the Master's, the Master took the oppertunity to plant a cruel psionic suggestion in the mind of the vulnerable and recovering Doctor as a backup plan in case the Doctor once again escaped his clutches, designed to kick in when he regenerated next to try and make the Doctor unconciously abort the regeneration. Much later, in The Kings Demons, when the Doctor failes to psychically take control of Kamelion from the Master, the Master mocks him by calling the Doctor weak minded...and then suggests that it's time for the Doctor to regenerate, a comment that doesn't make any real sense. This was a veiled reference to the suggestion that was planted in the Doctor's mind. When the Doctor did eventually regenerate, the suggestion kicked in, which was the hallucination of the Master. The companion hallucinations were the Doctor's mental defences fighting the suggestion. The result was that the Doctor overpowered the suggestion and survived the regeneration...but severely damaged his sanity doing it. Over time, with Peri's help, the Sixth Doctor worked to recover his sanity...until Sil re-opened the mental wound in Mindwarp, ruining the Doctor's recovery and leading to his insane behaviour prior to his trial. Maybe it was even this mental damage that caused the beginning of what might one day become the Valeyard?

Grace and Chang Lee are immortal like Jack

They were brought back to life by the TARDIS.

By the 51st century, Desperus was civilized

This troper came away from Planet of the Ood with the sense that worlds like Desperus were where the Harriet Beecher Stowes and William Wilberforces of the 2G&BHE tended to wind up.

Steven Taylor used the Zero Room

He was none too stable, except when Vicki and the Doctor hear him in the TARDIS, he's calmed down quite a bit. The Zero Room's calming influence did the trick.

Silurians are somehow related to the Ice Warriors

I haven't seen any of the classic Silurians (only Smith era), but those silurians look rather similar to the Ice Warriors as seen on Peladon. They certainly look alike, they have the same green skin/scales. And they both wear head coverings and green clothes

Six looked like Maxil because...

Romana looked like Princess Astra because she liked her appearance, so the Doctor took Maxil's appearance because he liked it.

• Or the Fifth Doctor was just fed up with being The Chew Toy and was ruminating on people who annoyed him during the regeneration.

The Seventh Doctor is Ace's biological father

Not sure if this is canon due to not having seen enough Ace episodes, but I don't think we ever learn the identity of Ace's father, and they are eerily similar...

Susan's parents were killed by The Master

A little theory I came up with. The Master killed Susan's parents out of hatred for the Doctor. Thats why he left Gallifrey to escape the guilt of his child's death. he took Susan to protect her from the Master. Then to stop her sadness he Chameleon arched her to erase her parents out of her memory but having them be in the back of her mind (Hence her calling One Grandfather). But around Dalek Invasion of Earth she started to regain those memories. The Doctor out of fear of her anger and her sadness he left her on earth claiming it to be for her to grow up (hiding the real reason of protection for the both of them). In my version Sam Beckett tells Five to go to her and reconcile.

• Thete had the Master written off as a jackanapes before Terror of the Autons.

If the TARDIS had arrived in Spain at that time instead of Tenochtitlan, Barbara would have tried to ensure that Castile did not come out on top.

Castile, which took over most of the peninsula, was the really nasty Proud Warrior Race. And while the conquistadores had to keep Queen Isabella deceived about what they were doing lest they be hanged, that was only while she lived; the Castilian ethos made the US Indian Wars look tame. And Barbara's goal was to avert the Evil Versus Evil aspect of the Spanish vs. the Aztecs.

That woman who griped at Seven right after the climax of "Survival" was Jackie Tyler.

The one who shows up here at the 1:55 mark. She's just credited as "Neighbour"...

• "Survival" took place in Perivale around 1989, while "Father's Day" indicates that Jackie moved to the Powell Estate in Peckham some time after 1987. Not too difficult to reconcile, one way or another.

Romana didn’t waste ANY regenerations in “Destiny of the Daleks”

We already know from the new series that the regenerative process lasts a while and grants extraordinary healing powers during that time. We also know from “The War Games” that if the regeneration occurs when a Time Lord is NOT on the brink of death, they can choose their new appearance. With those things in mind, since Romana actively chose to regenerate, all those different forms she tested were before the regeneration energy dissipated and stabilized her into the copy of Princess Astra she wanted in the first place. Sort of like forming a sculpture out of wet cement in that you can make it into any shape you want before it sets, it’s just permanent afterward.

• She was still in the first 15 hours (heck, the first one hour) of her regeneration cycle. If the Tenth Doctor can generate replacement mass out of nothing, surely Romana — who by all occasions is better at Time Lord stuff than the Doctor is — can reconfigure her features repeatedly.
• Alternately, she didn't actually regenerate more than once, into her Astra form. When the Doctor didn't approve of her new appearance, Romana left the room, slipped on a full-body holographic shell, and returned to the room a few times in different guises designed to be rejected by him. Once she'd trolled him enough with how much worse her choice could have been, she switched off the shell and surprised him with her (unchanged) Astra form, confident that he'd grudgingly settle for that rather than the alternatives on offer.

When the Eighth Doctor said he was half human, he was talking about 10b.

The Eighth Doctor claimed to be half human on his mum's side. Given that Donna is the one to touch Ten's hand, it ould be argued that she is 10b's mother. And given that fact that she's human... THE DOCTOR IS HALF HUMAN!

• He was talking about someone who he doesn't know even exists. Due to the wibbly wobbly nature of the Time War, maybe he doesn't at all then.

Susan's grandmother is The Master.

I'm surprised this isn't already here (And yes, I did check.) We know from the New Series episode "The Doctor's Wife" that time lords can change gender, and it's nowhere near a stretch that The Doctor loved The Master that way before he turned evil. The Master was a woman in one of his/her regenerations, and she and the First Doctor had one or more children. One the children was Susan's mother or father.

The Doctor was lying when he said he was half human...

...to hide the fact that he'd had surgery (and possibly genemods) done to his eyes to let him work on the Eye. He'd probably see it as necessary, so he can keep ALL parts of the TARDIS in working order without going home for repairs, but doesn't want to admit it, because either such genemods are illegal or he has too much of an ego to admit he's had any work done.

• Since the Doctor frequently has human traveling companions, he might well have reset the Eye of Harmony's lock to correspond to human DNA. After all, who does the Doctor most need to defend the Eye from? The Master. Who doesn't have human eyes. The "half-human" claim is part of a gambit against the Master that doesn't pay off.

The reason the Master in The Keeper of Traken is played by a different actor to The Deadly Assassin in due to another attempt to regenerate

The Master, along with being played by a different actor, has a different bodily appearance in the 2 stories. In The Deadly Assassin his face looks like a rotting corpse, in The Keeper of Traken he looks very badly burnt, but not as bad. So perhaps he tried to regenerate in an unseen way, his appearance was changed and he was partially healed, but that was it.

The reason Commander Maxil and the 6th Doctor look so similar is that this is a common appearance for all Time Lords

This could be it.

• Section Creator still here. Maybe it was subliminal, the Sixth Doctor manifested himself aggressively, so became someone who he thought of as aggressive, or who had nearly killed him.

At least one of Clifford and Jo's grandchildren will develop an obsession with overpopulation...

...and go down in history as The Butcher.

Every melodramatic cliffhanger in the classic series was ordained by the Black Guardian for the lulz, and then quickly resolved by the White Guardian

It makes sense if you consider the two guardians' near-godlike powers, and how random some cliffhangers were (and how randomly resolved some of them were as well). The lack of easily resolved cliffhangers in the new series could be due to the two being sealed within the Time War, assuming they were involved.

Chris Parsons, Clara Knightley, and Professor Chronotis became friends with the Chestertons at some point.

"Excuse me; I couldn't help overhearing part of your conversation, and heard you speak of the Doctor and the TARDIS..."

Planet Mondas is in fact an alternate/time copy Earth.

While its similarities are somewhat explained by being Earth's "twin planet", Mondas and its former inhabitants are frankly too similar to us to simply be coincidence. Hell, look at it and Mondas' continents are pretty much the same as Earth's. Mondas is probably an alternate Earth. As to how it came about, there are one of two possibilities-the first is that, as travel to parallel universes would be feasible until the Time War, that someone brought the parallel Earth to the Whoniverse. The second is that the Time Lords experimented with Earth by creating a temporal duplicate. If the latter is the case, that would explain the original Cybermen's absence as of late.

Skaro was invaded by the Moroks

Not my theory but http://www.historyvortex.org/Dalek3.html.

Movellans were influenced by the Time Lords

After the Doctor failed the Time Lords tried to create a race to destroy the Daleks. Either that or they caused the Movellans to attack the Daleks or finally gave the Movellans the virus to destroy the Daleks.

Romana regenerated due to being tortured by the Shadow

• This idea was put forward in Doctor Who The Legend Continues. She could have had internal damage that was gradually killing her and regenerated in response to this.

As a consequence of the Time War, the Classic Series is completely unreachable by post-Time War Time Lords or Daleks.

While the Doctor can't go back and save his family during the Time War, there's nothing saying that he can't go back in time to pre-Time War days and save some Time Lords there. The same goes for why the surviving Daleks(especially the Cult of Skaro) don't just get some pre-Time War Daleks. The reason why? An extension of the "Time Lock not allowing alterations to history." Since changing anything of the combatant before the war would logically affect the war in the long run, the Time Lock ensured that you can't even interact with personal history, no matter what. The Doctor, Daleks or any other survivor and their descendants can never make any sort of contact with their pre-Time War past without an overwhelming amount of power, which has proven to either cause of Time Crash or expose their mind and soul to all creation. Alternatively you can visit your past before the Time War, but the nature of the Time War means that, no matter what, it can't change their fate in the Time War-even if the Doctor were to, say, get Romana pre-Time War and she lived happily for the rest of her regenerations and died peacefully, she'd still appear in the Time War completely unaffected.

The end of The War Games really was the end of the Second Doctor

• My headcanon is that this shows the conclusion of Season 6B. At the start of the 'regeneration' scene, the Doctor is told the time has begun for him to begin his exile. This would make more sense if the Doctor was being told this wasn't just another mission, this time his regeneration and exile really is happening. There is a comic, The Night Walkers, where the Time Lords animate Scarecrows to cause the regeneration, but why would the Time Lords go to the trouble of that?

The Time Lords mentally manipulated the Doctor at the end of Season 6B

• Hence why 6 didn't remember The Two Doctors and 3 didn't remember Omega, though 2 did in The Five Doctors. You could say Timey-Wimey Ball, but doesn't it make more sense the Time Lords erased his memory to prevent a paradox? In The Empire of Glass it is claimed the Time Lords removed 1's memory of these events. The reason so little of Season 6B is seen is because the Time Lords made sure the Doctor forgot a lot of what he had done. Like what happened to Captain Jack. Perhaps he had performed actions the Time Lords weren't supposed to do, like trapping the Planet of the Fendahl in a Time Loop. The final scene of The War Games may be regeneration (my theory above), but the reason there doesn't seem room for 6B here is because the Doctor had his memory altered of the trial, in a way that meant he didn't realise this had happened. The Time Lords also made sure 3 would find it easier to accept authority than 2. Doesn't all this sound in character for the Time Lords?

The Gods of Ragnarok are the parents of Fenric

• Fenric is based on Fenris, the Wolf in Norse Mythology who would break free at Ragnarok. His parents are Loki and the Giantess Angrboda, his full siblings are the venomous serpent Jörmungandr and the death Goddess Hel. The Gods of Ragnarok appear as a father, mother, and daughter. Perhaps they are Loki and Angrboda, and their daughter is Hel, Fenric is Fenris, and Ingiger is Jörmungandr.

Chicki from The Macra Terror is Romana going incognita.

She's trying to make sure a lunatic who's found the Doctor in this time frame doesn't kill him. The Macra caught her partway through, and she regenerated.

One of the animated episodes of The Moonbase will have a throwaway New Series reference in the background.

Like how Episode 1 of The Invasion has Bad Wolf scrawled on Isobel's wall.

The First Doctor's 4th Wall Breaking Moment in "The Feast of Steven"

When he said "all you folks at home", he was sending a message to Gallifrey.

The Fourth Doctor and Romana II were briefly married

While it's been awhile since I read about it, my understanding of Tom Baker and Lalla Ward's brief marriage is that they spent so much time portraying their characters they convinced themselves they were in love. Which would therefore mean their characters were in love. Another possibility is that technically they still are, as while both recognise the marriage is over, The Doctor has spent too much time leaving her in E-Space, saving planets, locking Gallifrey in Stasis Cubes and ignoring his duties as Lord President to sign the Divorce Papers, much like h never resigned from UNIT. It's also possible that Romana's spent too much time being president and then being ousted in the middle of a war to sign them either

Ace spent most of her life in the TARDIS

For one, she is still travelling with The Doctor at the moment, following Hex's death, and according to Big Finish could also have spent long periods travelling with Benny and Raine, as well as just with the Doctor. We also know that the 7th Doctor had actually aged by the time he died (meaning he probably lived a couple of centuries), there's plenty of window for the Doctor to have travelled with her her whole life (more if she became a Time Lord)

One of the core tenets of the colony on Vulcan was that "History ... is bunk."

That's how they forgot about two Dalek invasions.

Susan was a student at the Academy, but had not completed her studies, and was actually at least 300 when we first met her

There's been some suggestion that Susan was in fact far older than her apparent age (and we know Time Lord aging is slow. And given she was older than 8 she was either at the academy or just a Gallifreyan, and I just think Time Lord seems more likely. The Doctor stole the TARDIS when he was 200-236 according to various TV sources (possibly using different year lengths), but also regenerated at 'about 450' (it was a while after but still). Given the First Doctor spent most of his TV life travelling with humans who would've aged somewhat (while aging may have slowed down in the future, I doubt Vicki, Steven or Sara were far enough in the future for it to be notable) he can only have spent a few years from An Unearthly Child through to The Tenth Planet. Meaning Him and Susan actually had 200 years of adventures on their own. Of course this does make me wonder when the Doctor had children, unless he had them whilst in the Academy

The First Doctor's one heart is a birth defect.

No other Time Lord has mentioned having one heart in their first incarnation. Also William Hartnell's Doctor aged worse than future incarnations: he appeared to merely be in his 400s when becoming an old man, yet 4 was aged half a millennium from a 40-year old actor and looked like a regular old man afterwards. Plus the fact 1 often dealt with his body being weak. There have been rare cases of people being born with only one kidney/lung/other organ of a pair, so who's to say a Time Lord can't suffer this? Being born with only one heart made the First Doctor age horribly, and was the contributing figure to his death. Later incarnations had two hearts because his first regeneration repaired the initial genetic defect that preventing his initial embryo from developing a proper binary heart system, and gave him a new heart. This may go to why later Doctors like 11 and 12 commented on having new body parts-they have a history of not being born healthy.

The outfit the Master wears in The Movie belongs to Time Lord Victorious.

Think about it - why would that outfit be lying around the TARDIS? Why would the TARDIS have an outfit suitable for a villain? Unless... it wasn't for the Master. No, that outfit was for the day that the Doctor gets Drunk on the Dark Side and turns into Time Lord Victorious for realises.

I.M. Foreman, the name of the scrapyard in which the first Doctor parked the Tardis, is a play on words

Watching the first series, it struck me that I.M. Foreman could either mean 'I'm for man', meaning the Doctor is our champion (and we all know how much he loves humans) Or it could mean 'I'm fore man', meaning the Doctor is the first man and the father of us all. There have been lots of hints to his messianic status, both amongst the Time Lords and the humans. It could even mean both.

When the Doctor says he's "half-human on his mother's side", it's because...

... his mother was a Chameleon Arched Time Lady. She was human at his conception, but not for his birth. The change back while pregnant was difficult, but not impossible. So when Ten says there are no half-human Time Lords, he's entirely correct, but Eight is also correct.

The real reason One had to regenerate in "The Tenth Planet":

One was, in fact, born with two hearts, but one of them had begun to fail as early as "The Daleks". Suffering radiation poisoning in that serial took a toll on him. When Ian says that the Doctor's heart seems okay, he had no way of knowing that the Doctor had two hearts. The second time that one of his hearts began to fail was in "The Edge of Destruction", as again, Ian notes only hearing one heart. He recovers, but notice that One begins to rely on his companions more. It may have been the reason he was dead set on leaving Susan behindin "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" — he may have been seeing himself beginning to decline, and either didn't want her to worry, or was too proud to let her see him get sicker with each passing day. By "The Tenth Planet" One knows he can no longer stave off the inevitable - hence his comment to Polly about "this old body of mine is wearing a bit thin."

• Perhaps this was causing him to age quicker then normal, considering he was about 450 when regenerating. Though perhaps the Time Destructor, having his life force drained in "The Savages" and the energy drain from Mondas finished him off.

Fenric caused 6's death

• Because he knew the Doctor would meet him soon and he wanted to weaken him by making him a fool.

Arthur's World is the Middle-Earth of Peter Jackson

• Which might explain Merlin.

The Celestial Toymaker is a Q.

He might (or might not) be that Q, but he does a) love dressing up in Earth period clothes; b) playing games with people; c) is immortal; d) can create things and places with his mind.

The reason the Fourth Doctor uses Insistent Terminology in "The Seeds of Doom"

Normally, the Doctor is all for Admiring the Abomination, until it proves itself evil. In this episode, The Doctor insists on calling the infected man a "Kyrnoid" or "an alien" because he's seen first-hand what the Krynoid can do to an entire world. It may have even been the Doctor's hesitation in killing that caused a whole world to die.

"Remembrance of the Daleks" begins the opening salvo in the Time War.

It's no accident the Daleks show up in story almost a month after the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan left in the TARDIS. And that they are looking for the hand of Omega. The Doctor possessing this is probably the reason he and Susan flee Gallifrey — he was escaping the Time Lords, and left before the Daleks had a chance to find him. The Daleks are in I.M. Foreman's scrapyard and at Coal Hill School, after all!

The reason "Dimensions in Time" is so disjointed...

It's because the Celestial Intervention Agency has redacted information on this incident. Which explains why the Brigadier knows the 6th Doctor despite never meeting him in canon. The two obviously shared an adventure (or more!) before the Big Finish adventures.

If there is a Season 6b, there is also a Season 23b.

After the sham "Trial of a Time Lord", the 6th Doctor was once again recruited by the Celestial Intervention Agency to find out how the Valeyard had manipulated the Matrix on Gallifrey. More than likely the Doctor was even less willing to work with them than before, so they decided to round up some former companions, such as the Brigadier, and current companion, Mel. The Doctor, after their adventures are over, is even more disgusted by the Time Lords, and vows to leave Gallifrey for good. After taking the Brigadier back to his correct time, the Doctor and Mel are on their way for a much needed vacation, when they are attacked by the Rani's ship, and the Doctor is mortally injured.

Delta used either pheromones or some kind of mind control on Billy.

That's the only explanation I can think of why he would leave adorable Wrench Wench Ray for the bland and dried-out looking Delta. It also explains why he didn't run out of the room when he saw Delta cradling a spinach-fish baby. It also may explain why the Bannermen were so intent on wiping out her species.

• Or maybe Billy simply didn't want a sentient species to die out if he could do anything to prevent it.

Queen Thalira is Jo Grant's daughter.

• Point 1. Thalira looks awfully similar to Jo.
• Point 2. Jo and King Peladon seemed a bit flirty with each other, and, considering the New Series theme of "dancing", it's not that far-fetched to imagine something happened between them at some point when they weren't on-screen.
• And, I know what you're thinking, "Shouldn't Jo have given birth to her on Earth?" but, considering Peladon is an alien, it's altogether possible that he carried Thalira to term and gave birth to her.
  • Although 50 years has passed and Thalira looks much younger then that.
    • It's possible peladonians age differently to humans

The extant print of The Crusade Episode 3 was returned sometime after Whose Doctor Who was filmed.

Otherwise, Joanna's bawling-out of King Richard would have been included after the clip of the Drahvins. "On the other hand, here is a scene with a more sympathetic strong female character."

The Xerons and the Moroks in "The Space Museum" are really the same species...

...well, at least the Moroks on the planet, with the exceptions of the governor, the scientist who was going to embalm the Doctor and that one guy who whacked Ian in the head. The rest of the "Moroks" are the parents of the Xerons who been brainwashed into thinking like the Moroks...except that the brainwashing isn't very good. They really don't want to be soldiers as it goes against their pacifistic beliefs. And they don't do a lot to oppress the Xerons, other than giving them a brusque "Get away from that" when they attempt to touch the TARDIS, and basically letting them wander where ever they want. Only when the governor and that evil scientist are around, do they do their jobs, and do them as reluctantly and ineffectually as possible. Which is why the governor complains he has amateurs and not trained soldiers. Fridge Horror sets in when you realize Vicki is helping the Xerons become self made orphans...

The Macra Terror takes place on Terra Alpha.

Helen A simply sought to get the universal happiness without the Macra.

The main effect of "Genesis of the Daleks" was to erase the Thals from later history.

After "Genesis of the Daleks" the Thals never appear again in a TV story, and the Seventh Doctor doesn't seem to have any concern about them when he nukes Skaro in "Remembrance of the Daleks". This has some grim implications when we consider the plot of "Genesis" in more detail. The one and only thing in the plot that can be pinned down as definitely happening solely because of the Doctor's actions is Davros's decision to betray the Kaled government and help the Thals to wipe his own people out. We can assume that in the original timeline the Thal-Kaled war ended with the Daleks appearing and destroying both cultures. In the revised timeline, however, the Thals themselves are responsible for genocide of the Kaleds. Their guilt over this causes them to abandon their culture, as in the ending of 21st-century Battlestar Galactica, and try to start a new civilisation from scratch with the Mutos, but they all die out due to the rigours of Skaro's post-apocalyptic climate.

Yellow Kang Brainquarters was on the same floor as Tilda and Tabby's apartment.

That's why they died out when the Blues and Reds did not.

In "The Time Monster", the Master didn't just attempt to call up and control Kronos to use the creature as a weapon.

He'd learned that Kronos was a living entity native to the Time Vortex, and suspected that capturing it might provide a clue to where the drumming in his head was coming from.

In "The War Machines" WOTAN got the wrong guy.

WOTAN says several times "Doctor Who is required." Everybody thinks that this is a continuity error since the main character of the series is just "the Doctor;" but really WOTAN wanted Dr. Who. WOTAN committed Mistaken Identity.

Originally, Davros didn't create the Daleks.

Well not directly. Before Genesis of the Daleks, there was little to suggest one man created the Daleks and it seemed that the Kaleds simply degenerated into them. Before Genesis of the Daleks altered things, Davros' initial plan for his people never went anywhere in life, but after his time so much of the Kaled population had become pathetic mutant abominations they ended up using Davros' ideas to turn themselves into Daleks. Thanks to the Fourth Doctor, Davros' initial plan to replace the Kaleds with the original Dalek model succeeded and he averted his own death.

The Osirians are gods.

No, not advanced enough to seem like gods or god-like in power, actual genuine deities. Sutekh, pretty much by his lonesome threatened to not only lay waste to Earth, but is heavily implied to do so to the Time Lords; scratch that, he's high enough on the food chain to see them as an annoyance. Keep in mind that even before the Time War, the Time Lords were pretty much masters of the universe. While his people are hinted to only have a fraction of his power, that's still one enormous fraction. Enough to break the series if they wanted to. Frankly, if someone of that level isn't a deity, then I'm afraid to imagine what is. On the bright side, Sutekh's genocide of his own people helped make them a signficantly smaller(but still enormous) threat than they could've been.

• The Guardians seem to be the closest thing in the Whoniverse to Gods, considering they are higher then the Eternals, who consider Time Lords limited because they are lords of time. The Expanded Universe has made the Osirians less God-like.

Kathleen Dudman died not long after she got to London.

Ace doesn't show any recognition of Kathleen's name, so Kathleen can't be the woman Ace remembers as her 'Nan'. One possible timeline: Kathleen arrived at Streatham and was given shelter by the baffled young couple that lived there. She promptly succumbed to pneumonia or perhaps died in a bombing raid, with little time to tell her hosts anything except Baby Audrey's first name. Audrey was adopted by the couple Ace thought of as her grandparents, and grew up with their surname.

After the deception of Operation Golden Age was exposed, Nigel Castle's subsequent novels were extremely cynical in tone.

The Matrix has software updates.

Which is why its rules change every time it appears: it's a new version.

Nyssa never had a mother and wasn't born the "normal" way

Nyssa has a father and a stepmother and we presume her biological mother died, but what if that was not the case? Maybe Nyssa never had a mother, and Tremas was always a single dad. He had not met Kassia yet at the time, but he had been appointed as Consul of Traken and he needed an heir(ess) to continue the line but did not have romantic interest to anyone. So he went to a Keeper statue in a ceremony-type thing, praying for a child. Despite the appearances, Traken is actually a quite advanced civilization with biotech like Gallifrey's. So, Tremas inserted some of his "biodata" as well as other stuff (fruits, flowers, biotech jewels...) in the Keeper's "mouth" or in some semi-equivalent of the "Looms". The biodata stuff fermented, and one Trakenite day later, it had formed into a baby (or equivalent of some months to 1 years old...) who was then known as Nyssa. Yes. Trakenite elité often uses these biodata loom things to secure heirs. Considering the Fifth Doctor was the first person to become the Keeper of Traken, they may even be evolutionary descendants of the Looms. Propably the lower-class Trakenites (those not related to Keepers and Consuls) are the only ones to have kids the normal way.

Tavius died rescuing people from the Great Fire...

...and was eventually made the patron saint of firefighters, moral dilemmas, and stewards.

Barbara Wright and Polly Wright are cousins\siblings or somehow related

Why not?

King Richard was one of the time-splintered aspects of Scaroth/Scarlioni.

As they are both played by Julian Glover, there is a resemblance. The real reason he fought in the Crusades was to acquire the wealth of Jerusalem to finance Count Scarlioni's time experiments in the 20th century.

A TARDIS and a SIDRAT

The reason why Time Lords sometimes use the word TARDIS (an English term) to refer to a TARDIS is because they're actually saying the Galifreyan name for a TARDIS which is translated into English for the viewer (as TARDIS, since that's the only English word for them). In "The War Games" when SIDRA Ts were referred to, the reason why this was TARDIS backwards was because the War Chief had jokingly named them after the Galifreyean word for TARDIS spelled backwards and so, since there was no English word for SIDRAT (with no human having known what they were before now) the TARDIS picked up on this and spelled the English version of TARDIS backwards as its best approximation.

Peladon's "natives" are descended from yet another crashed human vessel.

Doctor Who isn't like Star Trek, where anything vaguely bipedal can breed with one another, yet King Peladon's mother was from Earth. The fact that his father could breed with a human suggests that his distant ancestors were also Earth humans, probably from the ever-popular 51st century when spaceships were capable of emergency time-jumps. The ancestors of the Peladonians crashed there after such a time-jump, and their stranded descendants developed a medieval-level culture. Their chief distinguishing feature, their funky hair-stripes, are a "founder effect" because one or more of the surviving castaways had that genetic quirk.

All the Doctors had a shared memory in The Five Doctors

The Second Doctor knowing about the mindwipe and his companions is one of the biggest factors to suggest a Season 6B. However I propose an alternate theory. The Third Doctor is clearly taken from a time before he repaired his Tardis, since he is driving Bessie (or perhaps after loosing Joe but before acquiring Sarah, point is he hasn't officially met her yet otherwise she'd be travelling with him and wouldn't have to get captured separately) yet he greets Sarah Jane as if he knows her, and he seems to know about the Forth Doctor too calling him all teeth and curls. This is further supported by the fact that he said it was nice meeting her right before they leave. She's confused and he says he'll explain later. He also greets the Brigadier as if he hasn't seen him in a while. Given this I think it's clear during this story at least, the Doctors are taken out of their time but their connected minds and timeywimey instability mean they all have the memories of the most recent Doctor but the physical body and personalities of the respective incarnations. The only thing to suggest against this is the fact that the first Doctor doesn't seem to recognise the Master (or the other companions) which might mean they only have vague recollections of their future memories. Or perhaps regardless of when they were stolen from time, their minds by default go to the most recent version of that incarnation ie they get the memories they had just as they were about to regenerate.

The Supreme Dalek in Resurrection of the Daleks is a young Dalek Sec

The main strategy the Renegade Daleks are using in this serial is taking a human child and utilizing her creativity to come up with better battle plans. This is very close to what the Cult of Skaro's whole concept is. Additionally, aside from physically resembling Sec by being a black Dalek, the Supreme Dalek's death is very trippy and cuts away before we see any damage. All we see is the ash left at the end. We've seen other Daleks explode before so it's possible the Supreme Dalek merely used an early version the Emergency Temporal Shift. Due to some kinks still being worked out in the technology it left some ash from his casing behind.

Edward and Anne Travers are related to Victoria

By the way, since Edward Travers is played by Deborah Watling's father, and there's also a resemblance between Anne and Victoria too, I wonder if Victoria would be related to them, through Victoria's mother whose maiden name would be Travers. And wasn't Victoria's father also called Edward? I know it's a common name but, well, I already headcanon Polly being Pollard Wright and being Charley's niece.

Let's pretend Edward Travers was about 44 years old when we saw him, because Jack Watling was. This would make him be born in 1891, and let's say Lyndon Travers had Edward at about 36 years old making him born in 1855, 11 years before Victoria was taken in by the Doctor. So that means that at the time she was taken by the Doctor, Victoria had an 11-year-old cousin named Lyndon on her mother's side, who grew up and then had a kid named after Edward Waterfield.

Or maybe Victoria herself is Edward Travers' mother.

Susan's advanced psychic potential was because of a genetic quirk also possessed by The Master.

They're the only two Time Lords shown to have (or the potential for) potent, usable at command psychic powers. The early cracks in The Doctor and The Master's friendship was The Master becoming a bad influence towards Susan, though not enough for The Doctor to consider him more than a jackanape before encountering him again on earth.

The Doctor was lying to Ian and Barbara about not being able to return them to Foreman Junkyard

In future episodes, we are seen that the Doctor can land in the same location in the same time zone where the TARDIS left. So, that means that the Doctor was lying to Ian and Barbara about not being able to return them home - in an effort to save them from the Daleks who will appear in Revelation of the Daleks. Remember that the Doctor cannot change fixed points in time, but he is able to prevent more casualties from happening. Ian and Barbara could have been a part of the deceased list during the Dalek attack in Revelation of the Daleks.

• Its unlikely if the events of "The Revelation of the Daleks" had happened/would happen yet from the POV of the First Doctor. The civil war between the Daleks, which spilled over into 1963, was the culmination of years of developments in Dalek history, which the Doctor was responsible for. Since the Doctor hadn't yet encountered the Daleks when he picked up Ian and Barbara, the Dalek civil war in 1963 most likely wouldn't have happened in the 'original' timeline.

The Sixth Doctor's persona is similar to what the First Doctor's was like as a young man

The First Doctor was a somewhat cranky old man who could be rude to people, a bit arrogant, and had a hidden dark side that emerged on occasion (remember when he tried to kill a caveman slowing him and his companions down?). The Sixth Doctor is, in many ways, a younger more overtly obnoxious version of him. So it makes sense that ol' Sixie is what the Doctor was like in his youth. An arrogant rebel who tended to behave rudely and obnoxiously and also the kind of person who could be friends with the Time Lord who would eventually become the Master.Its only towards the end of his life, and after some time traveling with his granddaughter and his first human companions, that the First Doctor gradually mellowed down and his more altruistic side came to the forefront. This Character Development was reflected in his first four regenerations. But the regeneration from the Fifth to the Sixth Doctor was so traumatic that it caused the Doctor to 'relapse' back to the younger days of his first life.

Sarah's dress from Pyramids Of Mars did indeed belong to Vicki Pallister.

It doesn't look like Victorian\19th century dresses, but instead looks somewhat modern-ish and streamlined, and about as 20th century as Sarah's usual outfits. By the time of the First Great Human Empire (which started the year after Vicki's birth) Earth's contact with other Human Alien species would've made it so that fashion comprised (and mix-and-matched) fashion from various planets... as well as various centuries of the same planet. And the 20th century was one of Vicki's favorite centuries so she likely had a lot of clothing based on that time period.

The Eternals destroyed their home universe/reality.

Rassilon's plan was to use the Ultimate Sanction to destroy time, allowing the Time Lords to ascend to a state outside of cause and effect. The Eternals are beings that exist outside of time, cause and effect. Coincidence?

About the Master's post-Delgado incarnations.

The reason for the undead looking Pratt/Beavers Master is an indication on why there are only 13 regenerations. Technically it is possible to regenerate a thirteenth time without a new cycle, it's just that things...go poorly. The decaying form of the Master is what happens when a Time Lord tries to regenerate but instead of using the normal energy, they use their own biological reserves. It's enough to save their life, but causes rapid aging and degradation to keep themselves alive. As for the Anthony Ainley incarnation, it's likely that the Master did some genetic modification to Tremas' body be more like a Time Lord. That's why he never seems to lack Time Lord traits in future stories who's absence might hinder his plans. A lot of him is still Trakenite though, which is why he never regenerates until he gets an actual Time Lord body in the new series. That, or since Trakenites naturally had zero regenerations and he had zero left in his old body, the Master just needed to be given them.

Season 6A

Note: After reading above, I realise this theory is similar to the WMG "The Time Lords mentally manipulated the Doctor at the end of Season 6B".

The theory is simple enough, basically it's a variant of Season 6B. The major difference is that this takes place during Season 6, not after it. To make them forget him, Jamie and Zoe were "returned to a time just before they went away with" the Doctor. I'd suggest that it's not necessary for episodes like "The Five Doctors" to be set, from The Second Doctor's perspective, after "The War Games". It makes more sense to me that, given this is a show about time travel, we accept the possibility that before the ending of "The War Games" (possibly during the final scene when Jamie and Zoe were already sent off) The Doctor was "originally" sentenced to truly die, but was able to negotiate a deal with The Time Lords to work for them in exchange for a reduced sentence.

He served them for a while. He travelled around for a while without his companions, explaining why (even though Time Lords presumably age slower than humans) he appeared to have aged as much as they had. He was then eventually able to get them back. He may even have retrieved different companions at different points while he had the chance (hence explaining why Victoria was mentioned in "The Two Doctors"). In the end, once he was done with his duties with the Time Lords, they sent him back and, in doing so, returned him to a time before they'd started sending him on these missions (explaining why Six didn't remember Two having access to some of the things he did).

Basically, he'd be back at the start of the point in the trial before he'd made the deal with no memory of anything having happened. He was then able to finish off his trial, but this time the Time Lords weren't going to kill him. When the Time Lords decided to send him to Earth, he had no idea that it was secretly part of the agreement he'd made with them as part of his service. Letting it be decided "in the trial" was a handy way for them of hiding the fact that it was a result of a backroom deal. Then the end of "The War Games" really was The Doctor being made to regenerate just as it originally seemed. There's simply a massive long scene which is missing.

Naturally, one has to assume that returning someone to an earlier point either naturally reverts their age, or the Time Lords would have done that deliberately.

The Western town seen in The Gunfighters is in actuality a miniscope

This would explain the obvious set look of the whole thing and also the historical inaccuracies. Being presumably made in the future, some details were lost or less accessible.

Ace wasn't the first companion the Doctor considered for the Time-Lord Academy.

During his time with Jo Grant, the Doctor observed something in her. She may have seemed dim, but he could tell she was smarter than she let on, and she had a fierce spirit that reminded him of himself. After the Time-Lords returned the use of his TARDIS to him, the Doctor started thinking about submitting her for the Academy, but these plans were cut short when Jo got married, thus him looking so broken up after. He soon, however, found another potential candidate in Sarah Jane, who had a similarly fierce spirit, and was more open about her intelligence. After what happened with Jo, though, the Doctor was on the fence for a long time about whether to submit Sarah, and, when finally forced to make a decision, the Doctor decided not to, hence him telling her humans weren't allowed on Gallifrey.

Ramón Salamander was a Star Wars fan.

And "The Moon doesn't fall out of the sky" was a New Jedi Order reference, as he was trying to get Fedorin's guard down.

The Brigadier never received a peerage, on orders from the palace.

Nicholas Courtney thought that the Brig should have been elevated to the peerage for commanding UNIT and saving the planet. But the Queen would have known her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria's opinion of the Doctor. Either the monarch or her staff would have decided that the Brig, a great friend of that dangerous Doc, would just have to stay a Knight. (This works as a fictional story, or a daft conspiracy theory involving the real BBC and monarchy.)

• Given the nature of UNIT's work and the Brig's no-doubt classified contributions, it's possible he would have had to refuse anyway.

Whizz Kid got extreme Jade-Colored Glasses on passing into the hereafter.

He'd just been betrayed by Captain Cook and the Psychic Circus staff, his greatest idols.

Davros had never heard of rice pudding before the Doctor mentioned it.

However, the Translator Microbes indicated it was a food dish.

The Valeyard is lying/being purposefully vague about his origins.

If the Doctor finds out what led to the Valeyard's creation whether it be his evil taking form or himself turning to evil, he'll do whatever it takes to stop it. Maybe that's what causes the Valeyard in the first place, but there's just as much a chance it will Ret-Gone the Valeyard away. Obviously an evil future Doctor would be Genre Savvy and make sure the past Doctor can't try to stop his existence until it's too late and/or he's able to exist independently of him. Out of universe, this is probably how they'd justify the Multiple-Choice Past and the various paradoxes involved.

WOTAN thought "Doctor Who" was the Doctor's name because Kitty misunderstood Major Green's questions

When WOTAN wanted to take control of Dodo it forced Major Green to call "The Inferno Club". Kitty answered and, after talking to Major Green for a few moments, she went and got Dodo. We only actually heard her half of the conversation.What she said was basically (adding elipses for pauses):"Hello, Inferno...What?...Who?...Speak up!...Oh, right, yes. I'll get her...Dodo, it's for you."

Noting that it was loud and she couldn't hear well, what if the conversation went like this:

Kitty: Hello, Inferno

Major Green: I want to talk Dodo, secretary to Doctor whatever his name is.

Kitty: What?...Who?

Major Green: Oh, his name's Doctor Who, is it?

Kitty: Speak up!

Major Green: I want to talk to Dodo!

Kitty: Oh, right, yes. I'll get her...Dodo, it's for you.

This was before the first time WOTAN called the Doctor "Doctor Who". Naturally, WOTAN overhearing the conversation just assumed that was his name.

The Great Offscreen War in "Paradise Towers" employed Child Soldiers.

Or male Child Soldiers at any rate. Judging by the fact the Kangs are mysteriously all female, and (ignoring the possibility of Dawson Casting) don't seem much different in age from Pex, the Miles Gloriosus army deserter, presumably in the late teens or early twenties. It seems they've been stuck there for years. Either we can assume that the boys managed to get themselves killed off fairly quickly treating their games as Serious Business, as opposed to the more sensible girls, or they were called up pretty quickly. Of course, it's not like we see many male elderly residents either, and the war seems to have ended in annihilation so it might be desparate enough that any surplus male not needed to guard the home front (i.e. the Caretakers) who could hold a gun was signed up and sent off.

• Which, come to think of it, might show Pex in a somewhat more sympathetic light- not so much preening coward as just a scared young lad running from a war he's not old and mentally equipped enough to fight in, but acting all heroic to disguise the fact and/or in a misguided attempt to impress the girls.

The 2nd Doctor's regeneration doesn't actually use up one.

The Time Lords said they were going to change his face. Regeneration is supposed to be a means of the body healing itself, either from trauma or natural causes. If it's used to alter the personality and appearance instead, that may not use up regeneration energy(or a lot less of it). It's the reverse of how "Journey's End" gives 10 a get-out in changing his face, but he still suffers physical trauma so it uses up regeneration energy. This would allow a potential "2 and a half" Doctor as some proponents of the Season 6b theory suggest to exist, possibly the "Ruth" Doctor. Alternatively it does use up regeneration energy, but only part of the amount needed to regenerate. Which fits the above theory that the trial caused the Doctor's regenerations to be unstable then on. Maybe it used up half a regeneration and the Meta-Crisis Doctor used up half as well. Might explain how explosive 10's regeneration was; his body was finally normalized.

• Alternatively, the Time Lords gave him multiple temporary regenerations during his "6B" days, each intended for limited use (one per mission?). I think we see Romana demonstrate quick, "disposable" regenerations on one occasion- it was a joke then, but it does seem to hint such a thing is possible. In the end, however many he went through between Two and Three, the Time Lords only counted it as one life.
  • Bonus, this could fit in Ruth, Rowan Atkinson, and all the other "secondary" Doctors we've seen in other media.

The Kaleds and Thals are the same species.

While this may be contradicted outside the show, we never get concrete proof beyond the Kaleds/Daleks and Thals saying so. Having fought for a thousand years, not even remembering why the war started and the original motives, a lot of history was lost. Originally Kaled and Thal was the name of their nations, and they were different races of the same Skarosian inhabitants. In other words, the war wasn't Fantastic Racism, but literal racism. Even for a series that overuses the Human Aliens trope, being distinguished by hair color alone seems too little a difference for even species that evolved on a different planet. And unless some interbreeding/minor mutations are to blame, "The Magician' Apprentice" have more physically diverse Kaleds show up in the scene with young Davros, so it might just be certain ethnicities are more common for Kaleds and Thals. Or worse; eugenics and/or straight up ethnic cleansing during the long war are to blame. That racism is why they continue to consider each other separate species, and any scientist who says otherwise is indulging in little more than scientific racism. The Daleks may have figured this out or are in denial, but already mutating into a species other than the Kaleds and regarding them as extermination-worthy anyway means they don't care and want them dead for Absolute Xenophobe and "our Kaled progenitors hated them anyway" reasons.

"Genesis of the Daleks" explains the Early-Installment Weirdness of the Daleks.

When introduced in "The Daleks", the Daleks were still Nazi allegories but not to the flanderized Absolute Xenophobe we see; they more acted as paranoid and fearful, and it'd be some time before it was clear Daleks were programmed to be Always Chaotic Evil. However"Genesis of the Daleks" has them already be as evil as the Daleks we know now, even exterminating the remaining Kaleds they were descended from. They even had the current design. The 4th Doctor delayed their emergence by about a thousand years, which already changes history, but there were probably other ripple effects. The reason Davros is never mentioned in-universe is because originally, his plan failed. He never was able to commit Genocide from the Inside, or maybe realized he made a mistake and shut down the Daleks. However with Skaro a radioactive wasteland, the Kaleds continued to mutate and used his blueprints and designs in order to survive, thus becoming the Daleks. Davros was insane, but he was right in the Kaleds needing to adapt and become Daleks to survive. The problem was that he wanted to speed up the physical and moral decay of his people, and didn't take kindly to his fellow Kaleds disagreeing with him. The initial vitriol of the Daleks before this change is more Jumping Off the Slippery Slope than anything. Unfortunately this probably means that had the 4th Doctor violated Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act it'd be All for Nothing. It also means that he made thing worse since the more vicious early Daleks decided to cut out the middle man and wipe out the Kaleds/their humanity centuries before Skaro did the job for them. Unsurprisingly, they were absolutely livid to learn the Time Lords tampered with their history in such a way, and the Time War eventually broke out.

"Key to Time" is a game which the Guardians play.

Every so often, two deity-level beings sit down to play a game called "Key to Time." One takes the form of the White Guardian; the other, Black. The White Guardian finds a Hero somewhere in time and space and sends him on a quest for the Key to Time. The Black Guardian, meanwhile, has control of obstacles (monsters, traps, that one guard, etc.), and the White Guardian resolves things. The ultimate goal is to see what the Hero does when the key is completed. If he returns the key to the White Guardian, so much the better. If he decides to use the power of the key, the White Guardian strips it of its power and gives the Hero some kind of bad juju to follow him around for a while. In the case of the Doctor, the Black Guardian's either 1) adding a Secret Test of Character to spice it up a little or 2) going off-script, just to see what would happen. The Doctor was the first Hero to neither return nor use the Key, instead opting for the "Detente, comrade!" option.

The Trojan survivors (and Vicki) did, in fact, join up with proto-Italic peoples in the Urnfield cultural complex.

Which way they went (the Balkan peninsula or the eastern Mediterranean Sea) will only be determined if and when archaeologists discover precisely when the early Italic tribes (in particular the early Latīnoi) migrated from what is now Austria and/or Hungary to what is now Italy.

Steven's family.

Morton Dill, shortly after we see him in "The Chase", has an one night stand on a dare with a girl from Preston named Elise Taylor. They end up having a son together, Robert Taylor.

Eventually, one of Robert's descendants, Michael Taylor, marries one of Peter Purves' descendants, Laura Purves. They settle somewhere near New Longton in a new type of housing called an Hiveblock, then in 2336 Valerie Taylor is born, followed in 2339 by her little brother Steven!

• None of the characters would be related to the actors who play them, because they won't exist as separate people. (And one of Ace's Blue Peter badges was for heroic achievement...)

If anything, the Whoniverse versions of John Noakes and Valerie Singleton\Lesley Judd were presenting BP as a duo.

Steven and Vicki are endgame.

This is why they were Diomede and Cressida.

The Evil of the Daleks is an early battle of the Time War.

Genesis and Remembrance are the old serials that usually get described as the beginning of the conflict between the Daleks and the Time Lords, but after watching the animated reconstruction of Evil I’m surprised it isn’t mentioned along side those two. The whole conflict of that story revolves around the Daleks plotting to rewrite time to change humans from having defeated them in various space wars to being Dalek Factor infused slaves. This could very well be the incident that motivated the Time Lords to send Four on his mission in Genesis.

The buildings and roads in Eye of Orion are there naturally and are alive.

They're somewhere between crystal and organic, close to a sponge. Or to Lytton with a Kroton's head.

Tegan suffers from Survivor Guilt following the events of "Earthshock".

Part 4 of "Earthshock" has the Cyber Leader tell the Doctor that, while Tegan will be allowed to go back to the TARDIS, Adric must stay on the freighter. The Doctor says he wants both Tegan and Adric to accompany him, but the Cyber Leader refuses to budge and says Tegan will be killed if the Doctor doesn't co-operate. Adric then tells the Doctor to leave with Tegan, and promises that he will catch up with them later, only to be killed when the freighter crashes into the prehistoric Earth and explodes. It's likely that this makes Tegan feel like she is alive at Adric's expense, which explains why she is so visibly grief-stricken and may also explain why she is so desperate to rescue him in the following story, at least until the Doctor makes it clear to her and Nyssa that doing so would violate the Laws of Time. As for her later request that Turlough move into Adric's old quarters, it's because she wants to get rid of painful reminders of Adric, and having a new male companion in the TARDIS provides her with an excuse to dispose of Adric's belongings, or at least have them put away. And there are a couple of lines in "The Power of the Doctor" that make it clear that she is still haunted by what happened to Adric, even though (from her perspective) around four decades have passed.

"Full Circle" is about the Doctor's second visit to Alzarius.

A later incarnation also fell through the void into E-Space and ended up on Alzarius a few years before the Fourth Doctor's visit. While there, this later incarnation met a young boy and promised to take him on some adventures when he was older. But the Doctor then learned that the boy was Adric and tried to wipe his memory in an attempt to change his fate, only the memory wipe wasn't as thorough as it could have been and left Adric with a few vague recollections. This explains why Adric somehow knows that he will be leaving Alzarius, but not on the Starliner, and also explains why, when he sees the TARDIS for what is supposedly the first time, he looks at it as though he recognises it. Anyone who's familiar with this period in the show's history will know what subsequently happens to him.

Mollie Dawson was lied to about the other employees quitting the mansion.

During The Evil of the Daleks there’s a moment where the small size of the cast is handwaved away with a statement from Mollie, the maid, that everyone not in the episode cast has quit because of signs the house is haunted, when the reality of the situation is that Maxtible has actually been sheltering the Daleks and helping them with their experiments. Given the callousness that Maxtible shows towards everyone besides himself during the serial and how the Daleks only become active in the house when the Doctor and Jamie arrived, I think it’s plausible that the staff members were murdered instead: Either killed by Daleks they had stumbled across or handed over by Maxtible to the Daleks for a more surgical attempt at turning humans into Daleks.

The Delgado Master uses Nestene technology for his Latex Perfection masks

The Master’s disguises during the UNIT years seem remarkably effective for what seem like latex masks. Perhaps after his dealings with the Nestene he save a little of their technology that he could use to create near-foolproof masks for his many disguises. This could also explain how he is at times able to obtain or create such masks at what seems like incredibly short notice.