WMG / Doctor Who – New Series

Beware of unmarked spoilers - WMG pages are always Spoilers Off

For guesses specific to the Classic Series, see Doctor Who – Classic Series.

For guesses not specific to either era, see Doctor Who

For guesses specific to series 5, see Doctor Who Series 5

For guesses specific to the currently airing series, see Doctor Who (with spoilers)

For archived confirmed/jossed speculation on Tennant's final years see Doctor Who Series 4

For all other guesses see Doctor Who – Whole Series

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The Doctor

The Tenth Doctor is The Tenth Doctor.

As most commercials explain, Nine out of Ten Doctors Agree that the product they're selling is best. The tenth doctor doesn't, because he's too busy fighting Daleks and saving the universe.

• Alternatively, the Doctor himself is, and has always been, this Tenth Doctor. Which would make this his 20th incarnation (or more).
• Yet another possibility is that The Doctor is all ten of these doctors. Which means one of them is in constant disagreement with the others... could it be one of them is secretly the Valeyard?
  • This is doubtful. You'd be hard pressed to find anything that nine of them agree on.
    • Daleks are evil? Cardiff is an awesome place to hang out? Humans aren't that bad? I know at least the first one.
    • Valeyard, One, One.
    • That's the brilliance! There are twelve doctors (counting the Valeyard). Two through Eleven, excluding Nine, could be the ones agreeing, whereas One, Nine, and the Valeyard could all be the tenth doctor!
• Or maybe it's the first 8 doctors and 9-12 who like the product,and the War Doctor is the one who doesn't like it because he sees using human made products under him and uses time lord materials only.
• Or maybe it's only Nine who agrees, out of the first ten Doctors, and the commercial is just taking advantage of the name.

The Tenth Doctor is not The Tenth Doctor

He regenerated several times during the Time War, making the Tenth (onscreen) Doctor, the Thirteenth Doctor. He did not think that he could regenerate again, and that is why he was so scared of dying during The End of Time.

• Jossed by Word of God and the show itself- in School Reunion, Ten explicitly tells Sarah Jane that he has "regenerated half a dozen times since we last met," which was when he was the Fourth Doctor.
  • And no, the Fifth Doctor doesn't count' Everyone knows that the companions memories gets erased after the MultiDoctor Adventures.
    • Now that we know about the War Doctor, it seems he was including her meeting the Fifth Doctor after all!
  • Not necessarily: that's a common and imprecise figure of speech.
• The basis of this theory is confirmed, in a way. The Tenth Doctor had regenerated one more than he claimed, and for good reason-he wasn't the Doctor then.

The Doctor heard the Drums.

The Drums were intended for the young Master, but the young Doctor heard them too. However, they didn't control him, instead inspiring him to fight evil, which he realized was their source. This is because one of the beats was missing when the Doctor heard them. Dun dun-dun, dun dun-dun, dun dun-dun, dun dun-dun...

• So the Doctor created the show's tune?

The Doctor's Real Name

• Eyjafjallajökull
• Muriel. There's no great mystery, he's just too embarrassed to admit it.
• A very LONG sequence of random numbers, letters, and symbols. Which is why it's unpronoucable to humans, it's so long and convoluded we're bound to get it wrong. The name he told River was the only part of it that humans can make out easily:Who.
• Sweety, or the Gallifreyan version of it.
• Guys. Supposedly unpronounceable by humans? So named by Davros as the Destroyer of Worlds? The Doctor's name is Cthulhu.
• Unpronounceable to humans, you say? xkcd
• 42
• The Other
• Theo Stephen (Anglicised from Θεοκριτος Στεφανος)
• Basil. He told Osgood the truth.
• Asclepius. We do have at least one other Time Lord based off an Ancient Greek concept. And Asclepius was the god of physicians among other things (physician being a fancy word for "Doctor"). The Ancient Greeks based the god off him.
• Zagreus.

The Doctor gets more than 12 regenerations

Because River gave the rest of her regenerations to the Doctor, he gets 10 more because she has only used 2.

• Confirmed that he gets more But River wasn't the cause; her energy got used up reviving him from a poison regeneration usually can't cure. He got new regenerations from the Time Lords, at Clara's urging.

The Doctor's regenerations are becoming more and more explosive because he is going closer and closer to his final regeneration

It's a countdown to the end. Thus, Eleven's regeneration will do even more damage to the surrounding area than Ten's.

• Partially confirmed: Eleven blows up a Dalek fleet and most of a village when he finally regenerates. However, we don't know why - maybe the regenerations aren't becoming more destructive due to the limit; maybe the Time Lords set the limit because the regenerations would become ever more destructive.
• Possibly further confirmed by Twelve regenerating into Thirteen — the TARDIS was so badly damaged the Time Rotor itself exploded, and the TARDIS had to eject her to save her from it.

The Doctor lies about his age so he's not accused of being a pedophile.

The Wikipedia page points out that the Doctor claims to be only 900 years in the new series, while he's claimed to be older in the original series and the Expanded Universe. Also in the new series, the Doctor starts having relationships with humans who seem to be around 20ish. Maybe because of some Galactic/Time Lord law, a thousand year old man can't be doing it with someone that young, but a 900 year old one can. Alternatively, he could just be trying to delude himself, since he thinks a couple hundred years is less squicky.

• Thanks to the Time War, this becomes just a bit more complicated. Firstly, being a Time War, it's inevitable (and sometimes stated) that timelines all over the universe would become messed up, especially for those "on the front lines," which the Doctor was. Therefore, it doesn't beggar too much belief that a year here or a decade there for an individual would simply cease to exist, which would also explain both the Ninth and Tenth Doctor's manic personlaities; large chunks of their memories are gone. Secondly, as mentioned in San Dimas Time, Time Lords and TARDISes are based around Gallifreyan time, but with Gallifrey destroyed, the implications for the Doctor's timeline would have been significant.
• Accused by who? All his people are DEAD.
  • If it's Ten, accused by anyone. He even cares about what Davros thinks of him. If it's Nine - there are still a few ancient beings out there that he respects.
• Nah, it's nothing so squicky. Let's see: being vague about one's age, chasing after much younger women, a sudden fondness for leather jackets; there's a term for ''that'' sort of behaviour.

The Doctor's age doesn't include his time on Gallifrey.

Due to the timey-wimeyness of the Time War, the Doctor no longer counts any of his time on Gallifrey as part of his age. All the time from when he gave his age as 953 to when he says his age as 900~ in the new series adds up to 400 of the years before he left Gallifrey. This fits with him saying that he's spent 900 years travelling in the TARDIS as well as that being his age: because it is now.

The number of years that pass for a particular incarnation is proportionate to the number of years that incarnation was the "incumbent" Doctor on television.

The incarnation might live 100 years per season, give or take, allowing for continuity gaps between seasons or while the Doctor is between companions on his own.

By this logic, the First Doctor could have had several centuries' worth of off-screen time, while Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor would have been exceptionally long-lived. The Sixth Doctor had a year or two worth of hiatus to make up for lost time in the above example. If we include Expanded Universe time while the series was off the air, both the Seventh and Eighth Doctors would have been the longest-lived of the incarnations. Using the above example of the Seventh using his time as the Sixth as his age, it's possible that the Ninth Doctor, freshly regenerated for maybe a matter of weeks or months, still settling into his new incarnation, would have given Rose an age of 900 years, which would have been his total tenure in previous self (1996-2005 = Nine Expanded Universe "seasons" = 900 years)...

• ...The formula doesn't quite fit when the Tenth Doctor claims an age of 903 in Voyage of the Damned, and since that episode follows right at the end of Series 3, the only real companionless gap would have been at the end of Series 2. Which is a bit of a stretch, considering that over 900 years would have had to pass between seasons. However, given that the writers have milked the Doctor and Rose's quasi-romantic angst for every drip it's worth, it's not totally out of the question that only after 900 years is the Doctor even willing to allow for the possibility of another female companion. That doesn't exclude the possibility of centuries' worth of adventures with tin dogs or companions in a totally platonic relationship.
  • My personal opinion is that the Doctor views the idea of his age being counted in objective 'years' as kinda meaningless, and thus, when asked, just gives a number that sounds about right. The Doctor's life is one in which his personal timeline is being constantly adjusted, so rather than his age having a solid numerical value, it's more of a range, with an margin of error of up to a few hundred years. As with all this timey wimey stuff, especially the stuff that makes absolutely no sense, I find it best to just assume the Doctor knows what he's talking about, and that even a relatively simple question like, "how old are you", is so complex a question that a human mind couldn't even comprehend the answer.

The Variations in the Doctor's Age are due to the Regenerations

The Regenerations screw with the Doctor's memory quite severely. It's possible that he doesn't know his own age and has to reconstruct his age from the TARDIS's logs, his diaries (we see him keep them in several episodes) and any other clues he can find.

One wonders if he can remember his own name either; it's not as if he's told many other people or written it down.

The actor of the next Doctor will have some link to the 'number' of their Doctor.

'Eccleston' is nine letters long. He played the Ninth Doctor. David TENnant played the Tenth Doctor. Matt Smith is the eleventh Matt Smith listed on IMDB. He plays Eleven. Therefore Twelve and Thirteen's actors will have relevance to their respective Doctor's regeneration.

• P-E-T-E-R C-A-P-A-L-D-I: twelve letters!
• Seemingly averted with Thirteen
  • Or perhaps technically not averted. The ‘I’ and ‘E’ in Jodie can be twisted to be 13.

When a Time Lord regenerates, he borrows DNA from whatever life form happens to be nearby.

Well, think about it. DNA is incredibly complex and it would take a lot of work to rewrite an entire genome in the few seconds regeneration takes. Wouldn't it be easier to just borrow bits and pieces from whatever beings you find around you?

And later, when the Master regenerated in the Doctor's TARDIS, he ended up looking, sounding, and acting like Ten. This would presumably be because the control room is littered with shed skin, hairs, and other things due to the Doctor spending so much of his time in there. The Master didn't regenerate into a Martha or Jack look-a-like because his regenerative powers latched on to the closest thing to Time Lord DNA they could find... which was other Time Lord DNA.

As for the Time Lords who have been shown to be able to control their regenerations (like Romana) they had the benefit of not having to regenerate under extreme stress like the Doctor always does. Romana, for example, spent quite a bit of time and even tried out different bodies before regenerating, something she wouldn't have had the luxury of doing if she had been stabbed in the gut with only seconds to live or something equally dire. (And even then, she eventually settles on becoming an exact duplicate of someone else! No new DNA-writing required.) Since the Doctor almost always regenerates after having been nearly killed, he never bothers trying to come up with an original genome and just borrows from those around him.

List of regenerations and who they might have nicked DNA from:

• One - His parents (he was born in this body.)
• Two - Ben Jackson and Polly Wright (took the looks from Ben, and the quirky personality from Polly.)
• Three - N/A (the Time Lords decided for him, since he refused to choose his new face.)
• Four - Sarah Jane Smith (took her general looks, hair colour, and personality. Then promptly turned the nuttiness up to 11.)
• Five - Had the choice between Adric, Tegan, and Nyssa. Though it looks like he mostly chose Nyssa. (Blue eyes, and her kind and gentle personality.)
• Six - Peri Brown (Though since he died of a powerful poison, any DNA he might have borrowed likely got a bit scrambled, leading to this incarnation's general... er.. uniqueness.)
• Seven - Melanie Bush (her super-genius intelligence, leading Seven to become the most manipulative and strategy-loving of the regenerations.)
• Eight - Grace Holloway (complicated by the anesthesia in his system, though he did end up looking like a girl. (Zing.))
  • Given how much he's wanted to be ginger, though, he should have picked that up from her.
• War - Mix of Cass (determined enough to die for her beliefs) and Ohila (truly believed that the Doctor had to intervene at that point).
• Nine - Last person War saw other than himself was Clara, a dark-haired thrill-seeker to the point of near self-destructiveness.
• Ten - Rose Tyler.
• Eleven - Ten. He regenerated in his own TARDIS, and pretty much ended up looking and acting like a funhouse-mirror version of his previous self.

So anyway we can now see that, clearly, if the Doctor ever really wants to be ginger, he's going to have to go to Ireland, surround himself with a crowd of redheads, and then die/regenerate. ... Who's up for a St. Paddy's Day special!?

• Perhaps that's why he picked Amy Pond for a companion? There's not actually that many redheads in Ireland anyway.
• Wait...So does this mean Handy and Rose are related? Eeeeeewwwwwwwww...

• This is an excellent theory. It totally makes sense as maybe all Time Lords borrow DNA as it completely works for River Song/Melody Pond who has regenerated twice, once being around a homeless man picking up looks from him and again around The Doctor and her parents, picking up traits and looks from them.

The Thirteenth Doctor's final story will end with a Really Dead Montage...

...starting with footage from An Unearthly Child and going through every season of Classic and New, including the TV Movie. And it will be heart-wrenching.

... However, the Really Dead Montage will be subverted.

For all that it's gone to some truly heart-wrenching places at times, Doctor Who on balance is a fundamentally optimistic and life-affirming show, more generally inclined to ultimately leave matters on a positive note — that life will continue, that good will ultimately triumph, that the Doctor ultimately has something under up his sleeve to get him out of his latest jam and save the day. Furthermore, one of the strengths of Doctor Who is that the mechanics of the show mean that the narrative can theoretically run forever in some way, shape or form, and killing off the hero for good is contrary to that; take it off TV, it'll run as a series of novels somewhere, or audio plays, or any number of different formats. If nothing else, the fans will be falling over themselves to undo it at the first possible opportunity. The Thirteenth Doctor may die, and we may be tricked momentarily into thinking that this is the end, but it's almost assured that the Fourteenth Doctor will somehow rise to take his place in some way, shape or form.

(Besides which, if there's anyone truly believes at this stage that anyone at the BBC's going to end the show for good and Kill Off The Doctor For Real and end the story for good solely because a single piece of canon from 1976 orders them to, then I have a very desirable bridge property in Brooklyn for sale for them at a very generous price...)

The next Doctor will be Stephen Merchant.

Because why not?

The last incarnation of the Doctor will be ginger

And his Berserk Button will be anyone who messes with his long sought after red hair.

• Or, he will never be ginger, which will turn him into the Valeyard, and prompt him to try and steal his past selves' regenerations. Yes, his insistence on having a certain hair color for once in his lives will turn him evil.
  • Seems to have already happened. Is Amy Pond not the Twelfth Doctor?
  • No.

The Doctor's name will be The Unreveal

When the time comes for the Doctor to answer the first question, it will be revealed that, at some point, he had his name legally changed to "The Doctor".

The Thirteenth Doctor will be a woman.

Steven Moffat seems to be bringing the show toward this direction, as much as I dislike it. If it does happen, however, the Twelfth Doctor's last words will be, "I am not a good man; I am a good...woman!"

• Gender confirmed, last lines jossed.
  • Technically the fourteenth incarnation, but close enough.

The Doctor has never regenerated.

He fakes his death with advanced technology and passes on the role. Furthermore, all Time Lords do this, to pass themselves off as being an offshoot of a long-dead species that we've never seen, which I will call the True Gallifreyans, who actually regenerate thirteen times, live more consistent life-spans, and who were the first to invent time travel. The Time Lords we've seen are actually a mutant race of humans who live to some random age between eighty and a thousand, and age erratically over the course of their lifespans. The Doctor is a succession of at least thirteen individuals by now, none of whom actually know that much about the others.

An Untitled Theory About Regeneration

By his former selves. The reason for the call backs to the previous Doctors is because they'll all help, if only off screen for some, create a device to give him more regenerations. Perhaps the Master will try to use it and 9, 10, 11 and maybe 12 (and previous ones, if they can get them) will work together to stop perhaps the Simm Master and a new one. As for how Rose won't be with 9, it could take place after he left but before he came back and picked her up. 10 could be between companions.

• Jossed? In one episode of the Sarah Jane Adventures, the Doctor says he can change 507 times. Then again, he lies.
  • Probably jossed. Supposedly, if a Time Lord killed another Time Lord, they would get the dead Time Lord's regenerations. The Doctor killed a whole bunch of Time Lords and has their regenerations. Or, since the regeneration limit was artificial and enforced by Rassilon, with the Time Lords gone the limit on regenerations is nonexistent.
  • Also, supporting the 507 thing, we have to remember that the Time War led to huge changes in Time Lord society, to the point of literally reviving their King in the Mountain. It's quite possible that the increase in regenerations has to do with this. Either removing all limits to support the war effort, or artificially supercharging everyone's ability.
  • I doubt the 13 Lives was a legal limit considering the lengths the Master went to in getting a new body. He hardly seems like the sort of Time Lord who would obey this rule.
• Alternately, we'll learn that the thirteen lives cap is a physical limit ... on ordinary Time Lords. During the Seven/Davros confrontation in Remembrance of the Daleks, there's a couple lines cut ^note  see the deleted scenes on the DVD :
  Doctor: Every time our paths have crossed, I have defeated you.
  Davros: laughs You flatter yourself, Doctor. In the end, you are merely another Time Lord.
  Doctor: Oh, Davros, I am far more than just another Time Lord.

So, whatever the Doctor was referring to here includes not being subject to the normal regeneration cap.

• Jossed by "The Time of the Doctor". The Doctor has only 12 regenerations but Time Lords can get another regeneration cycle.

The Doctor will eventually die.

The Doctor will die either because he runs out of regenerations, or he becomes too world-weary to carry on. When that happens, the TARDIS will lock onto the only other Time Lord in existence: Jenny. She will succeed her father as the Saviour of the Universe, in a sort of pseudo-Spinoff.

The Doctor can't speak horse or baby.

He's just weird enough that he thinks he can. Whatever they might be "telling" him, it's all in his head.

• Jossed by the baby in Ashildr's village giving him critical information he had no other way of knowing.

The Doctor has been counting his age from regeneration no. 8.

The War Doctor decided he wasn't worthy of his past selves, so started counting his age from 0. After lasting just over eight hundred years, he'd forgotten what his age was before. This explains how he got the 400 number from Eleven saying 1200. Since Ten apparently only lasted five years, it can be deduced that Nine lasted about 90 years.

The Doctor's inaccurate age refers to his age as "The Doctor".

"The Name of the Doctor" shows that the Doctor doesn't acknowledge incarnations that don't act like a "doctor." We don't know when the First Doctor decided to become "the Doctor", so he could also discount that time. The reason why the New Series Doctor has an age younger than the Seventh Doctor(7 said he's 953, 9 says he's 900) is that after the Time War he's only counting his tenure as The Doctor. The reason why he does this now is because War disgusted him so much that his regenerations refuse to acknowledge any time when they weren't the Doctor.

The Doctor's name is *literally* "Who" or some variant spelling of it.

• That explains WOTAN calling the doctor "doctor who" in the war machines. WOTAN knew his name the whole time being the computer with all the knowledge that it is!

The Thirteenth Doctor will spend most of his life on Gallifrey.

The Twelfth Doctor will spend his entire life searching for Gallifrey. When he finds Gallifrey, he will regenerate into the Thirteenth Doctor. While The Doctor has wanted to have adventures away from Gallifrey in the past, the Thirteenth Doctor will embrace having a long stay on Gallifrey after losing it and finding it. His stay on Gallifrey would mirror the Third Doctor's stay on Earth; while The Doctor will be grounded for the most part, he will have offworld missions whenever he needs to.

The Thirteenth Doctor may even consider becoming Lord President. While The Doctor has neglected his duties as Lord President in the past, this incarnation will want to take such responsibilities. With Gallifrey back, he may run a campaign against Rassilon if he returns. Maybe even a new incarnation of The Master would be thrown into the mix, provoking references to The Master's actions as a Prime Minister. The Doctor's opponents' slander would be replete with references to times during which The Doctor stayed away from Gallifrey. Somehow, The Doctor would win the election. The Thirteenth Doctor would turn out to be a great Lord President.

He may, however, regenerate into the Fourteenth Doctor, who may be erratic and unpredictable, thus mirroring the Fourth Doctor in a way. He would commit actions that would put his leadership skills into question. He would either get impeached or resign. Afterward, he would leave Gallifrey once he was sure that Gallifrey was in the hands of a good president. Though he would leave off to more adventures in time and space, he would visit Gallifrey every now and then, perhaps once per series.

• Looking jossed as she hasn't so much as mentioned what her species is actually called to her companions yet, let alone where she's from.

The Doctor is NOT a Time Lord.

As WMG has cleverly pointed out, everyone is a Time Lord... except the Doctor.

The Ninth Doctor has a Lancashire accent because The War Doctor liked Clara

What accent did she speak with? A Lancashire one. He imprinted on her the same way Ten's Estuary accent is based off Rose's accent

• By the same logic, Twelve could have a Scottish accent because Eleven was thinking about Amy when he regenerated.
  • That makes perfect sense. Who would 12 emulate? Well, likely the next companion or another one after that, I guess. Or the first woman President of The United States of America, at some point where they got rid of that "you gotta be born here" crap.
• Whose accent was Eleven's based on? Rose? Ood Sigma? Matt's accent is somewhere between RP and Estuary.
  • Maybe a mishmash of everyone Ten went back and said goodbye to in his last moments, plus a few life-flashed-before-your-eyes memories of Joan Redfern and Jenny.

The Doctor is now on his twelfth incarnation

He might not have changed looks, but he still spent one regeneration creating Other Ten and Doctor-Donna. That means his next regeneration could be the final, and the Valeyard approaches...

• The doctor should be on his NINTH incarnation - the one forced from him by the Time Lords probably doesn't really count against him. He was asked to choose a face, but one had been chosen for him for starters, but also take into account that he didn't NEED to regenerate, nor is it implied that he did so.
• It would be hard to imply that, given that the term "regeneration" hadn't been invented yet. First into Second was called a "renewal", which led DWM to spend years insisting it hadn't been a real regeneration either...
• I had always asumed his regeneration from 2>3 was supposed to be a punishment, rather than inprison or execute the Doctor they made literarly loose roughly 500 years of his life. And that's terrible.
• You were on to something. Though David Tennant is the Tenth "Doctor", he was the 11th version of The Hero [[Unperson because he didn't count the one who ended the Time War. The regeneration in Journey's End does count, so you're right From a Certain Point of View.]]

The Tenth Doctor is in the process of becoming the Valeyard.

As the Doctor has gradually used up his remaining regenerations, he's becoming far more grim and emotionally distant in persona. Despite showing an aversion to killing, the Tenth Doctor has described himself as giving "no second chances", and passionlessly metes out a Fate Worse than Death to the Family of Blood after defeating them, as well as to the millions of Daleks and Cybermen whom he "sentences" to eternal entrapment in the Void. Of course, he has a couple of regenerations left until the Valeyard is "supposed" to appear, but it may be a long-term process, or it may just be that the tragedies of the Time War sped it up.

The Doctor is trying to become the Valeyard

Or an equivalent. This ties in with the theory about the Doctor committing a slow form of suicide, but with a twist - he's not trying to die, just reach the point of his final regeneration when the Valeyard will be created and travel back to the time of "The Trial of a Time Lord". As far as he knows, this is his only way into Gallifrey's time-locked past (due to a combination of predestination and other timey wimey things). The plan to either create a different potential entity who can go back and change things or to follow the Valeyard through when he goes and avert the Time War that way.

The Tenth Doctor had to die because he kept BREAKING TOO MUCH STUFF

First off, I like Ten, lots of us do, so don't mistake this for some kind of bitter grudge. That being said, we know he was responsible for a lot of bad things (* cough* harriet Jones! * cough* ) only now have I started thinking of one particular thing he did that has led to many, many deaths. The time lords implanted the sound of the Drums in the Masters head, which lead to every horrible thing he ever did. But why did he do these things? Because they wanted to escape the Time war before the Doctor wiped them out. In other words, The Doctor is responsible for the existence of the Master, which makes he statement about the Master being his responsibility in The Last Of The Time Lords especially ironic. Now technically he wasn't Ten yet when he did this, but the Universe is a vindictive being, and decided to still take it it out on him.

The Tenth Doctor trying to spare the Master and Davros wasn't as crazy as it seemed

It WAS crazy mind you, but not that crazy. Why would it be a good idea to spare these genocidal nutbars when he's so ruthlessly dispatched other dangerous enemies? Because they keep coming back. And he knows it will happen. So the Doctor figures, rather than seemingly killing them, and then being surprised when they return and start wrecking shit, it's better to keep them alive and watch them himself, like he had intended to do to the Master at the end of series 3 (you know, the guy who got shot, and came Back from the Dead). This is especially prudent with the Master, because the Doctor has seen the lengths his old Frenemy will go to survive (Eric Roberts...My God!!) and realizes it's better to not give him a chance to start fresh. It doesn't really justify everything, but it's a possible ideas about what he was thinking

• He could also want to use them in order to help out the universe. While Davros is pretty much impossible to even try not being completely and absolutely evil, he's still a genius inventor who the Doctor could force to make a bunch of technology to help the universe-for example, get him to make a bunch of Dalek casings and use them as peace officer robots. I can imagine the Doctor would actively try to redeem the Master(which is somewhat feasible, considering their close relationship, the Master's Freudian Excuse and friendly tendencies), and even if he can't the Master means too much for him to just execute(and that's not even mentioning the metric tons of Ho Yay they have).

Twelve regenerations means precisely that, not twelve new different forms.

This means that the Doctor actually did use up one at the beginning of "Journey's End", even though his body didn't change. There will never be a thirteenth Doctor, and the next regeneration and form (of which both would be his twelfth) will be his last. Otherwise, as long as he'd be able to "divert the regeneration energy" into something he could (in theory) keep coming back from death an unlimited number of times.

In "Mawdryn Undead" of Classic Who it was explained that each regeneration uses "energy pockets" he was in his Fifth form and mentioned having 8 left. So the creation of Hand!Doctor should mean that he only has the ability to regenerate one more time. However the point is moot since they'll probably just say he got more regenerations in the Time War or some other Hand Wave to write around that previous limitation.

The Doctor's mother IS human but she's a human similar to River Song.

She was conceived in a place exposed to the Time Vortex (possibly the Cardiff Rift). She met the Doctor's father and was eventually accepted into Time Lord society, possibly becoming the Woman in White.

The Doctor is sowing the instruments to his own demise

It seems like the Doctor is leaving a steady trail of Chekhov's Guns that are surely going to shoot him in the ass someday. He's left a sonic screwdriver in a bin and a diary of his exploits in The Library. He got Martha to get rid of Earth's Self-Destruct system... though that self-destruct system was a lose-lose situation.

• The diary comes with another sonic screwdriver. Hopefully, his future self is going to show up to collect it as soon as the episode ends; if not, then it's going to be trouble.
  • The sonic screwdriver and diary are in the Library, and the Library is sealed and infested by hordes of Vashta Nerada which will skin alive any living creature that enters their domain after their amnesty with the Doctor expires. Furthermore, the diary is one book in a collection of billions of other books. Good luck finding it that quickly under those circumstances.
    • Didn't he leave the diary in a room flooded with sunlight, practically a balcony? The room is barred to the Vashta Nerada fully half the time. Anyone who knows it's there could retrieve it, and if Jack could find the Doctor's hand ...
    • That last is confirmed, Nardole retrieved River's diary from the Library at her behest.
• Jenny could be an instrument of his demise...or his future self's salvation. Any trouble caused by carelessly dropped artifacts should be negated by the appearance of an adventuresome daughter - but, if she has too much Ten or even Five in her....
• There are several potentially trouble-causing Chekhov's Guns assoicated with the Eleventh Doctor, but unless you count the Time Cracks, he doesn't drop them in places; they are present in his TARDIS. In "Eleventh Hour" and "Vincent and the Doctor", it is shown that there are certain devices in the TARDIS that Eleven is afraid of using or viewing. This may have been what caused the TARDIS to explode (or nearly explode). It also explains why Eleven disagreed with his TARDIS manual.

The Doctor Wants to Become the Valeyard

At least at some level. The Doctor often seems to have a martyr complex/deathwish. He's 2000 some years old (possibly several billion mentally) and has burned through a few regenerations since the time war in a scant few years (and would have died even more had other people not stopped him from time to time). Not only is the Doctor riddled with Survivor's guilt, he knows that if he becomes the Valeyard he will be able to cross the time-lock and return to Gallifrey and even if it's as an asshole, he'll be able to see his home and people one last time.

The Tenth Doctor was going through the Stages of Grief

How do most people react when they are told they are going to die? They go through 5-7 different stages. It's hard to tell when he was specifically doing what, but when first told of the prophecy by Ood Sigma, he is surprised, and this happens again when Carmen says the same thing in Planet of the Dead. He seems to be trying to avoid thinking about it in Waters of Mars for most of the series, and his attempt to break time like a twig could be both anger (at the thought of dying), and a form of bargaining, only he's trying to set the terms. It's not "if I do this for you, you'll let me live," it's "I'm gonna do this, and you have no choice but to let me live!" And it worked like clock.... err... Moving on. Now we come to the End of Time, and when you actually look at it, you realize that he's at the final step: Acceptance. He went into this adventure knowing he would die (something that had never happened before, at least as early as it did) and up until the Hope Spot, he's clearly come to terms with it. It can't be stopped, which is why Wilf knocking 4 times was even more devestating. No only had he been given hope of surviving the knocking man prophecy, but said prophecy was brought about by his friend, who was only their because he had wanted to prevent the death of the Doctor. Doesn't totally banish the Wangst, but it makes it a little more understandable. You'd be pissed too if after accepting the fact you were dying, suddenly you had you chain jerked like that. I would.

The Twelfth Doctor will be the Valeyard, or regenerate into the Valeyard at some point.

• In the Valeyard's first appearance, it's mentioned that he's a regeneration somewhere between his 12th and final regenerations.
• "The Day of the Doctor" introduces John Hurt as the Doctor between 8 and 9, TECHNICALLY making 12 the 13th incarnation of the Doctor. This regeneration and every next one has a chance of being the Valeyard.

The Eleventh Doctor was in denial over his looming death

The Eleventh Doctor's traits and actions are reflective of a person who is trying to experience as much as possible before his death. Also, the Doctor was very insistent that he was the eleventh incarnation, despite the fact that he had two other regenerations (the War Doctor and the Meta-Crisis). It wasn't until "The Time of the Doctor" when he acknowledged that he was in fact the final Doctor and had no more regenerations.

The reason why? His shame and disgust over the War Doctor's actions and the constant reminders of his inevitable death thrust him into denial, constantly running away and delaying the inevitable. It wasn't until the War Doctor was vindicated in "The Day of the Doctor" when he could finally accept his death on Trenzalore.

The Doctor will soon have to answer for wrecking the time line.

Seriously, with at least three to four major disruptions to the time line under his belt, the Doctor is sooner or later going to face criminal charges- if or when the Time Lords return. So, will Ten face charges, or will Eleven have to endure the results of his predecessor's stupidity? We can but guess. Thoughts?

• And if it's Ten, wil he get in trouble for the events of Father's Day?
  • Maybe. That was Rose's fault, and the Time Lords at the height of their power were reportedly capable of effortlessly crossing dimensions: so, unless these alternative realities are truly locked away, Rose is going to court.
  • Also, the Family of Blood will be released in return for providing evidence against the Doctor, and hopefully, they might be able to explain why he didn't just kill them instead of torturing them for all eternity as punishment for bombing some forgotten village into dust.
• The Waters of Mars seems to confirm this.
• And it looks like Eleven's going to get Ten's punishement... if it happens at all. Goddammit.
• It has now become evident that Eleven has done plenty of time-wrecking of his own. However, being The Woobie, he ended up ruining time completely by accident, due to neglecting certain functions of the TARDIS. In other words, no external force is overriding the controls. Eleven is piloting it wrong.

When they meet each other, new series Doctors will argue as much as the old series Doctors, but it will be Played for Drama.

For example, Eleven will blame Ten for River's death, while Ten (at some point between "Journey's End" and "Last of the Time Lords"), will be angry that Eleven is travelling with companions again.

• Jossed. In "The Day of the Doctor", Ten and Eleven do argue somewhat, but for the most part they get along fine.

All incarnations of the Doctor whose numbers are multiples of 6 will be played by actors who have not only appeared on the show before, but share part of their name with one of their predecessors.

This is to keep up the pattern established by Six (Colin Baker) and Twelve (Peter Capaldi), both of whom were Recast as a Regular and are also the only actors in the role to have a first or last name in common with one of their predecessors. It might be a coincidence... or maybe it isn't...

The TARDIS, Time Lords and Timey-Wimey Stuff

The reason the Doctor ends up exactly where and when something that requires assistance is because the TARDIS already KNOWS where and when he needs to be there.

In the heart of the TARDIS lies the Time Vortex, which allowed Rose Tyler to see and know everything that is, was and will be. Thus, whenever the Doctor is going where and when something happens that he is require to solve, it redirects him because it already KNOWS that he was there and then to save the day. This is why there are quite a few instances of the Doctor and his current companion ending up off course from their original destination. Think about it: they could have gone to see Shakespeare at any point in Shakespeare's career, but they drop off just as aliens plan to use him for some nefarious purpose. I did not know whether it belonged in Fridge Brilliance or here so I am placing it in both.

• And that's... confirmed, pretty much, in "The Doctor's Wife".

The Time Vortex is a two-way mirror

When Rose absorbed the energy from the Time Vortex in The Parting of the Ways, she was able to see not just the Vortex itself, but events. All events, in all times, across all space. At the age of 8, on Gallifrey The Master did the same. When he stared into the Untempered Schism, he saw her—'course being 8 and a Time Lord novice to boot he wouldn't think much of it. But given a Time Lord's propensity for densely-packed memory, he held onto it. That's how he knew to mention her in The Sound of Drums.

• Secondarily, it might explain why Dalek Caan went nuts doing the samesuch staring in the expanse between Evolution of the Daleks and Journey's End. Sort of an 'Abyss Looks Also' type thing. Both Ninth and Tenth Doctors menntion that you're not supposed to stare at the raw power of time—or at least that if you do, it's bad new bears for your functioning brain. If normal time-travel gives your average schmo a headache (try NOT to think about the Timey-Wimey Ball for the episode Blink for instance), imagine what viewing all times and all things does—to any sentient. Including Rose, Donna, and even the Master (well, except for that whole rat-tat-tat-tat business).
  • He didn't look into the vortex, he was torn apart by entering the time lock. The Daleks have emergency temporal shifted before with no ill effects.
  • It was said though, that he fell through the vortex and saw everything there was and will be. That's how he learnt to bypass the Time Lock to set things in motion.

Time Lord Technology isn't: it's Magic.

The Sonic Screwdriver in the new series behaves more like a magic wand than a piece of technology. Magic exists in the Doctor Who universe, as evidenced by "The Shakespeare Code", and the Doctor can impose his will directly on the universe without any mechanical device - for instance, opening the TARDIS door with one snap of his fingers. Time Lords are wizards, possibly from the same race as Gandalf and the Istarii, who have a similar ability to regenerate.

• This goes hand in hand with the theory that the wizards of the Potterverse are descended from the Time Lords. Combine an Undetectable Extension charm with whatever makes Time Turners and Apparition work, and you have...
• The Seventh Doctor episode "Battlefield" states that a future regeneration of The Doctor will be Merlin.
• River makes a comment in one episode that she hates good wizards in fairy tales because they always turn out to be the Doctor.
  • Lest we forget Clarke's Third Law...

The loss of Gallifrey as a "focal point" for the TARDIS has resulted in the Doctor being less aware of time changes.

In the new series, The Doctor makes epic changes to the world and then seems either surprised when this results in a different timeline later or unaware that it was his changing things that allowed it to happen; for instance, his removing Harriet Jones as Prime Minister or taking down the Jagrafess and thinking the timeline would just "Snap Back." Both cases leave "holes" that let his enemies get into positions of power.

• This is because Gallifrey handled stability of the time-space continuum. Just like how dimensional travel is now far more difficult and Flying Killer Time Monkeys will attack Paradox, the universe is now inclined towards for-want-of-a-nail instead of In Spite of a Nail. Also, Gallifrey acted as a cosmic "lighthouse" for the TARDIS, given the Doctor a point of reference to compare things to. For all his rebelling against his species, he's honestly at a loss without them; and he's only partially aware of it.

The time-lock is not the same as time crystallization

Crossing over timelines is A Bad Thing, as "Father's Day" showed. However, it's possible ("Father's Day" again, "Smith and Jones"); it's supposed to be dangerous, not out of the question. This has always been explained as being a question of crystallization of time (or the Blinovich Limitation Effect); once a time traveler reaches certain events, they are part of those events and cannot withdraw from them. But the Time War is not said to be crystallized; it is said to be outright locked. The term used is time-lock, which can be broken (at great cost — in the case of Dalek Caan, his sanity). This would contradict previous explanations - unless the "time lock" is something different entirely.

So, what is the time lock? Who put it there? Well, that's another pair of hands entirely.

• It's probably something similar to (although far more advanced than) the "time lock" program Tosh developed for Torchwood — a technological method of preventing time travel to a certain time and place.

The Doctor is wrong about Time being alterable

At least partially. Think about it, whenever something happens in a certain timeline that was not supposed to happen, The Doctor himself prevents any significant changes. Minor changes can be made i.e. the explosion in "The Doctor Dances", or the survival of Mia and Yuri in "The Waters of Mars", but in the long run everything happens the way history recorded it, often even in spite of the Doctor's attempt to do otherwise (again "The Waters of Mars", and also "Cold Blood" where the Silurian/Human alliance is a no go). So the Doctor is * Gasp* wrong! All time is fixed, and at best only minor changes can be made.

The Doctor can cross his own timeline.

It's the TARDIS that can't. Notice how when the Doctor crosses his timeline in "Father's Day", he does so with the use of the TARDIS, and this is indirectly responsible for the Clock Roaches (Rose saves her father). However, at the end of Season 31, when Eleven crosses his own timeline with a Vortex Manipulator, there are no side-effects whatsoever. That, or it's just because his timeline technically didn't exist at the moment, due to the TARDIS exploding. Alternatively...

• Alternatively, all the problem with the Clock Roaches were caused by Rose presence (remember all that problem with Donna and the timelines? Rose doesn't become a part-Time Lord, she becomes Bad Wolf). Which also would explain why they didn't appear when Amy met her younger self at the end of Season 5.
  • Keep in mind that time itself was unravelling then.

Vortex Manipulators allow someone to cross their own timeline.

Time Lords still exist, and they are hiding from the Doctor.

Okay, this one may sound crazy, BUT it can be explained.

The Doctor isn't good. The Doctor is a very powerful being despite what most people think. Time Lords do not necessarily share our concept of morality. And He Who Fights Monsters becomes a monster. After all these years battling Cybermen, Daleks, and the Master, the Doctor is becoming like them.

The Doctor: I watched it happen. I MADE it happen!

The Doctor decided that he would not only destroy the Daleks, but also the Time Lords.

There are many characters who point out that the Doctor is just as bad as the Daleks. Ironically, many of them ARE Daleks! The lone Dalek pointed out that he "would make a good Dalek". The Dalek Emperor said, "All Hail the Doctor! THE GREAT EXTERMINATOR!". And the Doctor even said "Exterminate" just before torturing a harmless Dalek. What was scary was the look on his face. The Ninth Doctor enjoyed it. Ten and his whole "Time Lord Victorious" is no better: he clearly declared himself a god then.

It's clear that the Doctor caused the destruction of the Daleks and the Time Lords. However, the Time Lords aren't gone. They are hiding somewhere (sometime?).

• They know he might find them if they go one second out of sync with everything else. So they went TWO seconds out of sync with everything else!

Humanity is the oldest race in the universe. Sort of.

It's known that in the future, "ordinary" humanity develops the technology to time travel, although in "Utopia", Professor Yana mentions that this technology was lost. He was wrong — it was used. Project Utopia and the Toclafane are just a sad sidebar to the real plan to escape the collapse of the universe: evacuating from the end of time to the beginning of time. The reason that apparently contemporary planets like Traken or Trion are inhabited by basically human "aliens" is that the "aliens" are descendants of the wraparound colonists. This theory gets interesting when you consider that the Time Lords are supposedly one of the oldest races in the universe, and slightly headache-inducing if you think about it too much.

• There's also a theory that this is grabbing the wrong end of the stick. The Time Lords are the oldest civilization in the universe, and as such set most of the default rules of it, including the idea that best template for sentient life is to be an upright biped.
  • That's why it's headache-inducing. Humanity would have done a lot of evolving before reaching the end of the universe. The ones we saw in "Utopia" may have looked the same as we do now, but so does the Doctor. Like him, they could have been very different under the skin. Maybe the Time Lords are what humans (or a branch of them) evolve into. In other words, humans look human because their descendants look human. If that wasn't strange enough, consider that humans wouldn't have survived that long, or possibly have even existed in the first place, if it wasn't for the Doctor. Basically, you've got the mother of all stable time loops.
• This may explain why Earth is such a Weirdness Magnet and why the Time Lords let The Doctor break their laws to protect it; the universe is trying to kill the paradox, and the Time Lords know how important it really is.
• Given some of the Doctor's behaviour, it's possible that he's a bit of a throw-back.
  • His mother is also a throwback, explaining his remark in the movie that he's human on his mother's side.
• So let's get this straight: you're saying the last humans in the universe created Utopia to go back to the beginning of the universe and became the Time Lords themselves? Yes!
  • As a bit of icing on that cake, a roleplaying game called Time Lords, originally released in the 1980's, posited that the only race in the entire history of the universe (who eventually became known as a Guardians) to completely master the science of time travel were also the LAST race to come into existence in the universe. Coming into their own at the far end of history, they were forced to make the most out of limited resources, which led to a number of unique innovations, like being able to cram a warehouse full of electronics into something the side of a 20-sided die. Once they perfected the time travel technology, they used it to shift their entire civilization back to the very beginning of time, where the massive abundance of resources and their incredible technology (as compared to the younger races only just coming into being) led to their becoming decadent and corrupt, until they were ultimately destroyed by one of their own creations. With very few changes, that scenario fits the "humans become Time Lords" theory quite nicely. It also explains why no one saw a problem with Leela and Andred hooking up, why the Doctor and Donna were compatible in the first place, and how the proposed storyline where Ace is accepted into the Time Lord academy would have been possible - the two races are genetically different points on a long timeline, but still interrelated.

Gallifrey itself is a TARDIS.

Because the way it fades in during the climax of The End of Time is very reminiscent of one. The reason we can't hear the sound effect is because there's no sound in space. Alternately, the reason we can hear the Doctor's TARDIS materialising in space, but we can't hear Gallifrey, is because the sound of the TARDIS materialising is heard or sensed by the Doctor and the materialisation of Gallifrey is not.

• Since "The Time of the Angels" establishes that the sound is The Doctor leaving the parking break on, we can assume that Gallifrey has a better driver than the blue box does.
• This would go to explain why Time Lords are so time-sensitive. Regular TARDISes may have started as some sort of organism that grows from the structure of Gallifrey itself(like a sort of organic crystal).
  • TARDISes being grown was confirmed in a deleted scene where Ten gives Rose and Handy a piece of the TARDIS, and Doctor!Donna gives them a way to make it mature within their lifetimes.

Companions

Rose Tyler is really the Master

She pretended to love the Doctor to keep a close watch over everything he did, deliberately screwing up at random points while at others being quite capable to fend for herself. It's why she was so upset that the Doctor dumped her into an alternate universe with a fake Doctor and all of the original Rose's loved ones. It's also why The Master compared Martha to Rose — saying that she wasn't good enough — in the series 3 finale.The Master killed the real Rose, probably around the time the real one tried to save her dad. That paradox is the crack that kept showing up to haunt Amy.

Jack became two people when his head got cut off

He can regenerate his body from one single bone and so his regenerating process was confused so his head became Boe and his body became another Jack :)

Jack Harkness becomes The Face of Boe because of an alien STD

If anyone has a more plausible explanation, let me know.

• Jack becomes the Face of Boe as a side-effect of the cure for immortality?
  • We're still looking for plausiblity in a show where aliens helped wipe out Pompeii, fat can turn into cute little aliens and a man can superimpose his DNA pattern onto every human being on the planet?
  • Before Jack went on his way, he was pondering out loud to the Doctor and Rose on what he'd look like in a million years. He was waiting to see the Doctor since the 1800's, having overshot by two centuries, and while waiting, noticed he was also STILL aging, albeit at an extremely slow pace. One would imagine that given enough time, he may have evolved to be more efficient. Screw having a body and just evolve into a giant head. If that's the case, he may have inadvertently undone the immortality Rose gave him but still kept near-infinite Hit Points. He only died because he was powering a city and gave it his all. Also, the only thing the Doctor knows is that the Face of Boe is extremely old and up until the reveal of Jack being from the Boeshane Peninsula, only knows rumors surrounding the origins of Boe.
• More likely The Face of Boe is what you become when you catch every STD in the universe. If anyone can manage to do that, it's Jack.
  • Nah, episode 3 of Torchwood: Miracle Day shows he cares about immortal men not receiving STDs and prefers protection.
    • But he was mortal then.

Jack is River and Eleven's son

This is why when Rose brought Jack back, she brought him back forever. It's not that he dies and come back, it's that he's trapped with an infinite series of regenerations. And the two years of memories that are missing, weren't taken by the Time Agency: they were reprogrammed by the Silence in a second attempt to kill the Doctor before the Fall of the Eleventh at the Field's of Trenzalore.

The Face of Boe (Jack) is a head because Jack was beheaded by monks

As we all know, Captain is immortal, and pretends to be a Time Agent. He wears a vortex manipulator. Dorium Maldovar sold River a vortex manipulator “fresh off the wrist of a handsome Time Agent," as said somewhere in the fifth and sixth seasons. Dorium Maldovar works with the Headless Monks from time to time, and the Headless Monks decapitate people. The Face of Boe is a head with no body. Coincidence? I think not.

• Jack got blown to itty bitty bits. He reformed his entire body. So, no.
  • People beheaded by the Monks still have living heads, so it's not a stretch to say that it would work differently than a human-made bomb. Maybe his body did regrow a head, but since the monks make living heads, that head went on living. Doesn't explain why it was so big, though.
    • Remember in The Long Game, the TV said that the Face of Boe was pregnant, again. So maybe Jack had surgeries like Cassandra, to implant a birthing system.
    • The pregnant thing seemed more like tabloid news.

Jack became the Face of Boe when he breathed in the fumes from Gridlock

In the episode Gridlock, the cat-man Thomas Kincade Brannigan tells the Doctor about an incident he purportedly witnessed, where a woman breathed in the exhaust fumes for 20 minutes, causing her head to balloon up to 50 Feet. His wife Valerie thinks he's making it up, but he seems to genuinely believe it. In the same episode we find out that the Face of Boe is on this planet.

Therefore I put it to you that at some point in the past Jack Harkness either spent some time in that area, or else was just exposed to a similar set of fumes, and that this caused his head to balloon up like that woman's did, however unlike her he was immortal and thus survived the experience, leaving him as the face of boe. This may have left him dependent on the fumes, explaining why there is always smoke inside his tank.

The Face of Boe founded a support group for recovering sex addicts.

He's recovering from that addiction himself.

Jack creates Fixed Points wherever he goes via his mere existence.

Jack is the ultimate impossible thing. He's like a straight line in the middle of all the timey wimey wibbly lines of the universe. In fact, this troper suspects that the only reason the universe accepts his existence at all is because it eventually finds a way to circumvent the whole Immortal thing so Jack can finally die, possibly as the Face of Boe or not, depending on your leaning. It's possible that his presence somehow influences his environment, resulting in his creating circumstances which cannot be changed.

The reason why Jack Harkness cannot die is that he's a Fixed Point in time.

Specifically, he is the Face of Boe, and the fixed point is his reveal to The Doctor that you are not alone. It is impossible for Jack to die beforehand since the fixed point ensures that The Reveal must take place. Once the reveal has taken place, he immediately dies, having lost the protection of the Laws of Time - he can't actually survive as a big floating head at all, and his predestination was the only thing keeping him alive.

• Oh, hey - there's an almost identical guess right up the top there. Sigh.
  • True, but that one is merged into another guess, that Jack is a fixed point is not nessecarily BECAUSE of that scene. It could be something else.

Captain Jack is missing a hand. And a vortex manipulator.

In "The Pandorica Opens," where does River get her vortex manipulator? "Fresh off the wrist of a handsome young Time Agent."

• Jack didn't have a vortex manipulator. It could be Captain John Hart's hand, though.
  • Well, perhaps she either took it from him in his Time Agent days, took it from him after Children of Earth and got a future Doctor to fix it, or perhaps the WMG about her being his daughter is true, and she just asked for it. Knowing Jack, something like genetics wouldn't stop him, and any child of his would be similar. Besides, it would be funny, her calling him young. Hell, if the last one is true, he most likely would raise her to want to fuck the Doctor (or it's genetic).

The Time Agency is an offshoot of Torchwood with Jack Harkness as its director.

Torchwood was all but destroyed in the battle of Canary Wharf. Jack rebuilt it in honour of the Doctor to keep the Earth safe. We know Torchwood is famous enough that the name lasts for 200,000 years at least and becomes known throughout the galaxy; it's mentioned in "Bad Wolf" and "The Satan Pit". Jack Harkness is semi-immortal, and lives for approximately 5 billion years (if the theory below is correct). As a child, he may have been the first person recruited for the Time Agency — possibly by the older version of himself?

• Not just an offshoot of Torchwood—it's Torchwood and UNIT merged into one organization.
• And the older version of Jack erased the younger version's memory in order to close the Stable Time Loop.
  • Or maybe, like with Time Lords, Jack can't remember any time spent with an older version of himself! He was partners with an older version for a couple of years, then when they parted ways he couldn't recall any of the time spent together.

Jack created the Cardiff Rift.

After "The Parting of the Ways", Jack tries to return to the Doctor through his Vortex Manipulator, but ends up in 1869 instead. It's never explained why he ends up then, or why for that matter the Cardiff Rift exists beyond some timey-wimey thing. The first time we see the rift chronologically, however? 1869, where "The Unquiet Dead" sees the rift open enough for the Gelth. And on Christmas Eve. Either a glitch in the Vortex Manipulator had Jack sent to this notable spike in timey-wimeyness. Or maybe he's why it exists. As a fixed point created by the Time Vortex, Jack's arrival in 1869 created the Cardiff Rift, which later that year was used by the Gelth. Or maybe it has existed since 27 CE because that's when he will eventually be Buried Alive, and having two Jacks in Cardiff was enough to open it for the Gelth.

River is Jack's Daughter

She's outrageously flirtatious, drawn to The Doctor, and she says "that's when everything changes."

• She also has his gun. And, not that it really matters, him being immortal and all, but they're from the same century.
• Jossed. She's Amy and Rory's Kid from the Future.
  • Being Amy's daughter also explains the outrageously flirtatious bit.

River is Susan's grandmother.

River was said to have travelled and met many of the previous Doctors. While it was said she did not like the First Doctor, she could have still tried to have sex with him, and wound up being pregnant. This child would then grow up to have Susan.

• Jossed. In "Silence in the Library," she tells the Tenth Doctor, "You're younger than I've ever seen you." If she was referring to physical appearance, it would not make sense since the Eleventh looks younger, so she must be referring to him just being younger in age. And, of course, we know what happens after this meeting.
  • How could Susan be on Gallifrey in the Doctor's past then?

River Song is the thirteenth regeneration of Jenny

Everyone assumes that their future relationship will be romantic, but the actual facts could just as easily support a father/daughter relationship. And if she's on her last regeneration, then her being a Time Lady doesn't affect the ending of "Forest of the Dead."

• Jossed. She's Amy and Rory's daughter.

River Song's diary is bigger on the inside

Would one small book really cover all the adventures a companion has with the Doctor? And River seems to know the Doctor better than most, probably meaning she's spent more time and had more adventures with him than the average companion. Her diary is a bit of Time Lord technology, allowing her to catalog all her adventures with the Doctor without running out of room.

• semi-Jossed, in that River says in "The Husbands of River Song" that her diary is almost full. It could still hold more than a book that size should, but it does have a limit, possibly preset by the Doctor himself.

Clara Oswin Oswald is the "perfect" companion.

Somehow the Doctor has created Clara as the ideal companion - beautiful, brilliant, wonderfully unique - but in doing so, he's created something horrible: though he gets to travel with Clara for the rest of his days, she will always die. Why? Because that's just what happens to the Doctor's companions. Whatever has created Clara has designed her to be as authentic a companion as it can, right down to the inevitable death.

Jack Harkness can only die due to old age/natural causes.

Which is how he's the Face Of Boe. Jack still ages, after all. And when something should kill him, he's usually dead temporarily. Eventually he becomes so ancient and decrepit that his body can't logically sustain itself without life support. You turn off the Face of Boe's life support and he'll stay dead until he's plugged back in because he's simply too old for the revival to do anything on its own. By the year 5 billion he's become too old even for the life support to sustain him indefinitely. As for why he's a head? The humanoid Doctor, when aged to actually look 900 years, had a large head and a little body. Lady Cassandra was, due to age, reduced to nothing but a Brain in a Jar and skin. That might simply be the consequence of humanoid figures aging beyond reason.

Missy manipulated Clara’s timeline to ensure she’d be the “perfect” companion

She didn’t just find a control freak and place them in Eleven’s path. She engineered one for maximum chaos. And she had a lot of time to cook this one up given her work with the Nethersphere.

Enemies

How the Weeping Angels don't freeze permanently in their normal position

Whenever a weeping angel is in the normal position (i.e., hands in front of face), they split into two in a way similar to a single-celled organism. The two fight at light speed and the "stronger" one is the one left standing, and moves so when the characters turn their heads, the Angel looks as if it has moved to another spot. The reason why they haven't sent everybody back in time already is that it takes enough energy to fight.

The Weeping Angels don't have eyelids

I've only seen "Blink" and the two-parter in season 5, but the Angels always cover their eyes - they never simply close them.

The Weeping Angels are so eager to wipe out all life because they are put in a And I Must Scream status anytime something living observes them

• If I turned into a statue everytime something looked at me, I'd be eager to kill off everything with eyes too.
  • Of course, since Blink initially establishes that they can't even look at each other (though The Time of Angels later glosses over this by having an entire army of angels storm around without bothering to cover their eyes), killing all other life would hardly solve their problem.
    • The Angels are trying to kill each other as well, they're just getting rid of everything else first because intelligent life keeps taking pictures of them and creating more Angels, meaning there's more of them to get rid of.
    • In "The Angels take Manhattan" not only did it explain that Weeping Angels have the power to turn normal statues into Angels "Doctor: They've converted all the statues in Manhattan" but when chasing the heroes in the hallway they were directly across from each other with Doctor, River, Amy and Rory in between them. (Though if they had frozen because of that it explained how the Ponds got out so easily) What I'm saying is that making more of them, and putting themselves in these situations didn't seem to bother them in that episode.

There is a defense against the Weeping Angels.

• Mirrored sunglasses. That way, even if you blink, the Angel is still caught by its own reflection.

Weeping Angels halve the distance between you and them every time you look away

This is my theory as to why, despite their supposed incredible speed, they don't move all that fast. Every time you look away, and subsequently look back, the Weeping Angel has halved the distance between you. The distance seems relatively accurate in the episodes I've seen. Eventually, they are close enough to simply reach out and grab you.

• According to Zeno's paradox, if you always halve the distance towards your destination, you will never reach it. So, by your WMG, we're all safe from the Angels in our posters and TV screens because they can never reach us mathematically.

The Weeping Angels have an even scarier predator.

Their ability to be quantum locked is a defense mechanism, meaning there's something that hunts them. Angels send people back in time, are extremely fast and freeze in place when someone sees them. What could require that sort of defense mechanism? The Weeping Angel predator is a creature with the greatest eye-sight in the universe. It has 360 degree sight, stone-like eyes that never need to blink, able to see clearly from miles away and in all light spectrum. Weeping Angels are indestructible normally, but they're only as durable as stone when you're not looking at them and this predator eats stone. It is ageless(rendering send it back in time useless) and while sluggish, far tougher and more durable. The proto-Weeping Angels evolved speed to get away from the monster, but the monster evolved a counter-a sort of natural glue that is sprays in the area, so they are slowed down and it can eat them. So they developed the defense mechanism, hoping that the predator would get bored and leave so it doesn't get hungry waiting.

The Master is Koschei the Deathless

The Master dedicated most of his mental prowess towards cheating death. The Master can time travel, and the Master is evil. Surely, he could have inspired legends about an immortal evil being.

The Master will return... as a companion.

He'll decide that maybe the Doctor had the right idea.

• Interestingly in the (now non-canonical) Scream of the Shalka, the Master did become the companion to an alternate Ninth Doctor... albeit an unwilling one, given that he was in an android body that was incapable of exiting the TARDIS. Sadly, Shalka was nixed by the new series before that particular plot thread went anywhere...
• This is basically what happens over the course of Season 10 with Missy!

The Master will return... with proper facial hair.

And be a companion, because a non evil goatee would be a proper Moffat mindscrew.

• Confirmed, although separately.

When/if the Master returns, he will do so as an Anti-Hero.

• Jossed. She's just as evil as ever.
• And then Confirmed, or at least she was trying.

The Master wrote the Westminster Chimes.

Ding-dong-ding-dong... ding-dong-ding-dong... the people of London have been hearing the Drums for years!

The New Series Master is a result of canonized Draco in Leather Pants.

While Russel T Davies may simply have given the Master a Freudian Excuse for a "more realistic" villain, it's just as possible that Davies considers the Master less evil than he actually is. His reasons for giving the Master leather pants is primarily the same as the shippers-bountiful Ho Yay. Naturally, Russel T Davies likes gay subtext, and the incredibly blatant subtext between the Doctor and the Master was probably an attempt to make the pairing canon. Why is the Master still just as much of a psycho? Davies knows making him an Anti-Villain off the bat would be an outrage, and isn't so obsessed with the Master that he'd forget he was a villain. Or maybe he just likes the psycho aspect in the pairing: the fans sure did.

The "Saxon" Master was trying to avenge Gallifrey and save the Universe from the Daleks and the Valeyard.

The Doctor snapped sometime during the Time War and became a Fallen Hero, destroying the Time Lords. When the Master learned what had become of the Time Lords, he, outraged at the Doctor's destruction of their people, decided to avenge Gallifrey. He took over the Doctor's precious planet Earth, which the Master surmised the Doctor turned into the disturbingly amoral, but very useful, Toclafane. He gloated in his victory—being a really nasty dictator toward the planet he blames for the Doctor's earlier Face–Heel Turn and slide toward the Valeyard was just a bonus. Luckily, he decided to keep Torchwood around because he realized that the Doctor had made the Earth a Weirdness Magnet. He accurately surmised it was the Daleks and prepared all the weaponry shown in Last of the Time Lords specifically to wipe them out. He kept knowledge of this from the Doctor because he suspected the Doctor would either oppose, halt, or avenge any attempts to destroy them, or, worse, destroy the Earth to get at them.

Dhawan!Master is younger than the last two.

• Three main reasons: First, we've only seen him regenerate on-screen ONCE in the entire series, meaning the others could be in any order. ^note Although Missy is likely after Simm. Just not necessarily the next one. Second, he doesn't seem to view humans as food. Just as targets. Missy would happily have you for lunch, a notion picked up in the (apparently) previous incarnation. Third, he's using a weapon (the TCE) that hasn't been seen since the classic series.

Caan, Jast, Thay, and Sec are letters in the Kaled alphabet.

• That makes a lot of sense. Each of the Cult of Skaro's names are only a single syllable, much like all letters^note Except W, or greek letters like Omega. Also, their name tags are basically the same except with what's inside the "box." Its possible that these letters are considered vowels.

The Valeyard technically isn't the Thirteenth Doctor

He is the result of the final regeneration, but Twelve's death was caused by something that caused a double regeneration - therefore creating a proper Thirteen but also spawning the Valeyard. As to what might cause it... Some kind of alien radiation? I haven't gotten that far yet.

• Biological metacrisis again, but with the Master filling in Donna's spot? He'd be a full Time Lord, presumably (and pick up the Master's evilness like Handy picked up some of Donna's characteristics) but who knows whether he could regenerate? Although if there was a metacrisis, presumably it'd have to occur in a different way so that the Doctor still went from Twelve to Thirteen...

Regardless of whether Time Lords can change sex on regeneration, The Master / Missy didn't.

Everyone assumes s/he did, but it's never actually been confirmed. Indeed, Missy is suspiciously evasive about the whole question - even to her former self. Possibilities:

• What this troper has always taken to be the case: The Master didn't regenerate into a female body, he stole it. After all, that's something we know The Master does.
• Alternatively, Missy isn't in a female body at all - he's simply in disguise. Also known to be a standard modus operandi for The Master.
• Or The Master changed sex the same way people do - through surgery. If you want to become female, it's probably a more controllable way of doing it than entrusting it to the regeneration process.

Series 1

The bomb the Doctor uses in "Rose" was made by Ace

She left it behind on the TARDIS.Of course it was made by Ace. Have you SEEN her explosives? She carried them around in her backpack and used alarm clocks and timers with physical noise-makers in them(as opposed to digital)! She could make them with the contents of an average middle- or hich-school's chemistry classroom's unlocked chemical cabinets! They also had the tendency to be highly unstable. Hence the "Nice to meet you Rose. Now run." Also that bomb was almost identical to several Ace used. Probably only stuck a new timer on there and started it. Ace's Nitro-9 was powerful enough to destroy a Cyber-shuttle and clear a landing space for a ship.

The Ninth Doctor was long-sighted.

It would explain why he seemed to only notice his face for the first time in "Rose"; he never had the chance to look at himself in other mirrors because he couldn't hold them at the right distance. Any time he read words close to his eyes can be attributed to TARDIS psychic translation making it easier for him.

The 9th Doctor was planning to stop JFK's assassination.

Only problem was that he was distracted. Being fresh off the Time War, the 9th Doctor would be in the right mindset to go "Screw causality!" and try to stop the Time War instead. During this year, there were two pre-Time War version of himself to get help from-his first incarnation and the very first episode of the series, and his Magnificent Bastard of a seventh incarnation. Through telling and explaining the Time War, the 9th Doctor had a vain hope that it may prevent the Hell that was the Last Great Time War. Unfortunately the Doctor's other selves forgot as they normally do in multi-Doctor stories, and the 9th Doctor wasted his time trying to use the Timey-Wimey Ball to make sure they remember. Either the 9th Doctor either missing the opportunity due to not thinking straight as a result of warning his past selves, or more likely giving up with the plan anyway.

The Doctor Hunter in episode 1 of the revived series faked all of his evidence but two pictures.

The picture with Rose, and a single picture where The Doctor was facing the camera. And he did it poorly, too, since he (unlike the prop makers) was unable to take a bunch of photos of Cristopher Eccleston or the Ninth Doctor facing different directions from different distances or knowledge of scaling negatives.

The 9th Doctor had adventures when he dematerialised without Rose near the end of Rose

• He could have met Winston Churchill that time and they went to the court of Emperor Tiberius, as mentioned in the Brilliant Book 2011. There is no mention of Rose there.
  • This is made canon in E-Short The Beast of Babylon.

Adam's fate (kicked out of the TARDIS with a device in his head) was retconned

Dalek happened a few years in the future, in a world where it was plausible that someone could have a Dalek in his base for many years without having ever heard of Daleks. When the Daleks invaded Earth in the various new series season endings, they changed history; it's no longer possible that someone from the time of Dalek could not know what a Dalek is.

Also, the Dalek in Dalek had been around for years without any other Daleks around for it to contact; but in the new history, it would have been able to contact Daleks during those invasions.

• Those invasions where the Daleks were utterly wiped out or time-shifted years before? And I don't think that the Progenitors would have wanted to do anything with the part-human Dalek.

Therefore, Dalek was wiped out of history, and Adam never came on board the TARDIS in the first place.

Adam is Davros.

Adam, a character introduced in the episode "Dalek", is an expert in alien technology and meets a lone Dalek survivor of the Time War. The Doctor then takes him to the year 200,000, where he learns a lot about future technology and receives a data port in his forehead. Since he and the Doctor part company on bad terms (The Doctor takes him home and throws him out for trying to profit from knowledge of the future), this will turn him from a short-sighted but basically okay sap into a raving megalomaniac. He will dedicate the rest of his life to defeating the Doctor by recreating the Daleks, whom he knows are the Time Lord's greatest enemy. And that data port in his forehead looks kinda like a third eye if you tilt your head to the left and squint.

• So all he needs to do is create a time machine (the Daleks were first created at least 1000 years in our past), a trans-mat, and a trans-species mutator to turn him into a Kaled. A Fountain of Youth to return him to an infant age, or at least a younger one, so he has time to learn all the highly advanced technology he would need to know to make the Daleks would also help. This is the Whoniverse, so none of this should be a problem.

The Fourth Great Human Empire shown in "The Long Game" is an alternate history created by the repeated invasions of Earth.

According to the Doctor, the Fourth Great Human Empire should have had aliens in it. However, the empire he knew came from a history where none of the early 21st-century invasions of Earth occured. The result of this was an Earth that had a negative view of aliens that weren't the Doctor - and had quite a bit of alien technology scavanged from the wreckage of its attackers.

After a few more invasions, the humans finally had had enough. They reverse-engineered the alien technology, built warships, and did what the Master was planning to do - declare war on the rest of the universe. This would have gone rather badly for Earth, except the aliens that had invaded Earth included Daleks. The humans had Dalek technology and could work it. (Hey, if Ian and Barbara could run a Dalek TARDIS even once...) They went after their neighbors first, as well as targeting a few races that had attacked Earth. This created the First Great Human Empire. A coalition of alien races succeeded in bringing down this empire, but they failed to subjugate Earth. The humans made a comeback, and expanded even further.

The cycle repeated a couple more times, with the Fourth Great Human Empire the largest. The Fourth Great Human Empire broke up after the Dalek Emperor sterilized Earth in "The Parting Of The Ways", putting an end to the days of Earth as a single belligerant empire. However, Rose Tyler's annihilation of the Daleks also marked the destruction of the last race in the galaxy - or possibly the universe - capable of posing a threat to humanity. Through resourcefulness, cunning, and a tendency to destroy any new possible threats, humanity survived until the end of the universe.

• This does go to explain why humanity was so accepting of using the Ood as slaves, Halpen propaganda aside(you'd still wonder why they'd be so eager to use the Ood without questioning why they're so servile). Its possible that, as a result of the Dalek Invasion of the Fourth Human Empire, humanity decided to be peaceful with other races instead of warring, considering how utterly screwed belligerency got them with the Daleks.

After the events of "Father's Day", The Doctor read up on the Clock Roaches and now knows how to stop them.

The Ninth Doctor says that the Time Lords would have stopped the Reapers from appearing, meaning that there is a way to stop them. The Doctor wasn't prepared at the time of "Father's Day", so couldn't do anything. Since then, he's learned all he could from Time Lord documents on the subject and can now control the Reapers so they never appear (which is why they haven't appeared since, even though time-altering events like that one have occurred).

The Doctor has met Wilf when he was the Ninth Doctor, but he doesn't even know it, and Wilf likewise

In "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances", Nancy was "in charge" of the neighborhood children that night during the attacks, Wilf would be right around that age to be one of the older children. This would also fit with The Doctor and Wilf always running into each other and destiny "pulling them together".

The Doctor's "Sometimes you let one go" speech in Boom Town was directed at Jimmy Savile by someone who knew but could not prove, in order to cause a Heel Realization.

Jack's butt is Bigger on the Inside.

Explains where he got that gun in Bad Wolf.

• Gee, I wonder why...

Jack has a cybernetically implanted secret compartment inside one of his buttocks

That's where he kept the laser pistol (and the TARDIS key, because he didn't lose it when his clothes got disintegrated).

"Bad Wolf" is the origin of the word bad.

Because no-one knows where "bad" came from etymologically (though there are many different theories), and we have seen the Doctor's influence shape language throughout the cosmos. Given the phrase "Bad Wolf" was littered throughout time and space, it makes sense for a couple of languages to pick the word up - especially English, given it's the official and native language of a country where the Doctor spends a lot of his time, hence the "Bad Wolfs" may be concentrated there. It's possible that the word is common to multiple unrelated languages throughout the universe, and no-one quite knows where it came from, causing much distress to Intergallactic Linguists of the Future.

The Dalek emperor from Doctor Who S27 E13 "The Parting of the Ways" was the same Dalek Emperor from Doctor Who S4 E3 "The Power of the Daleks".

Captain Jack wasn't the only person brought back to life.

There were many more people who died on the Gamestation. Given the amount of power that Rose/Bad Wolf was wielding, there's no reason she couldn't have brought them all back; Jack was just the only one we saw. And if they got brought back the same way as Jack, they probably also share Jack's "condition", which would mean that somewhere in the future there's a large number of immortal humans running around.

• Does this mean that Rose is somehow responsible for the Immortals in Highlander?
  • If it is, then Jack can be killed. He just needs to be beheaded. Admittedly, that may just make it possible for him to die, given that Face of Boe jazz.
    • Maybe that's how "The Face of Boe" got started. Captain Jack got his head cut off and had his body separated from it.
  • The Face of Boe was stated to be part of a race of Boekind. So either Jack is so altered as the Face of Boe he's capable of spawning a new species (which fits) or they're the Society of Immortals created by Rose restoring the life of those on the Game Station.

The Doctor got a new regeneration cycle at the end of “The Parting of the Ways”

We already know from “The Five Doctors” that regeneration cycles could be granted by the Time Lords (like they were offering to the Master in his stolen Trakenite body), and from “The Deadly Assassin” that time energy is required to do so, so it’s realistic that in absorbing the Bad Wolf energy from Rose Tyler’s body he reset his regeneration count back down to zero (while keeping the second heart). This caused a regeneration into the Tenth Doctor (a particularly violent regeneration). The only question in my mind about this is whether Ten is the new ‘one’ or the new ‘two’ making his ultimate number of regenerations (including the previous nine) either twenty-one or twenty-two.This, of course, is always assuming that the overload of time energy didn’t just break the cycle of regenerations leading to functional immortality…

At the time Rose was conceived, Pete and Jackie lived in Watkins' old apartment.

And the addition of "Bad Wolf" to Isobel's message wall in the animated version of episode 1 of The Invasion was Rose's doing in The Parting of the Ways.

Because of the TARDIS's effect on Rose in "The Parting of the Ways"...

...that's why the Doctor seems to have a stronger obsession with Rose as opposed to other companions. It's the residue of the TARDIS in Rose.

Reapers are the temporal equivalent of white blood cells.

They appear in "wounds" of time to sterilize it, and have a habit of being indiscriminate. Destroying humanity was the equivalent of having an allergic reaction, and the Time Lords served as an innoculation when they were around.

Rose inspired The Big Bad Wolf trope in the first place.

"Bad Wolf" was spread across space and time, and translated to fit the languages of where it was sent such as "Schlecter Wolf" on the German bomb in "The Doctor Dances". The Brother's Grimm took ideas from it, and even earlier others like Fenrir were influenced by it.

The 9th Doctor's presence in the famous pictures was to check on history.

He had just come out of a war that wasn't just horrific by the toll on life and sanity, but on the fabric of time and space itself. Checking out historical events he would know about already and may already have been part of was to see if they events were still intact and not changed/removed by the Last Great Time War. The Who Shot JFK? trope could be the war shifting the events around.

Every major character on The Slow Path in 2005 checks Clive's "Doctor Who?" website from "Rose" to find, or at least keep tabs on, the Doctor.

This includes:

• As of Series 3: Jack Harkness.
• As of Series 10: Nardole, who's making sure they are all past Doctors and not Twelve, who's supposed to be guarding the Vault.
• As of Series 12: The Master.
• As of Series 13: the TARDIS (and yes, I am proposing that the TARDIS has access to the Internet and isn't just tracking the Doctor by seeing all of time and space.)

Series 2

The events of "Tooth and Claw" gave rise to three alternate timelines

At the end of T&C, the Doctor wasn't entirely sure whether Queen Victoria had avoided infection by the werewolves. In the standard Whoniverse (that is, the timeline in which most of the series takes place), the Doctor's friendly relations with the current Queen (see "Silver Nemesis" and "Voyage of the Damned") indicate that the Royal Family was not infected.

In another timeline, the Royals did become werewolves. They tried to keep it secret until they could build up a great enough force of werewolves to dominate the human race, but they were found out. The resulting revolution deposed (and probably exterminated) the Royals and turned Britain into a successful republic. However, before being deposed, they accelerated the world's technology and imprinted a sort-of Victorian Steam Punk-y style of design. This, in case you haven't guessed, is Pete Tyler's world.

In the third timeline, the revolution turned bad, as revolutions have a habit of doing. The Royals managed to co-opt the leaders of the revolution, turn them into werewolves, and remain the secret rulers of the new, supposedly-freed, Britain. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The brave new world quickly turned very nasty and Orwellian, at least from the point of view of the ordinary, non-werewolf populace. And thus was born the alternate timeline the Third Doctor visited in "Inferno".

Note that the Brigade Leader (the eyepatched alternate Brigadier), being highly placed in the post-revolution armed forces, was probably a werewolf. This means there's a good chance he survived that bullet and maybe even the eruption...

• Alternately, the royalty/werewolves/revolutionaries managed to infect much of the populace with a degraded form of werewolfism (perhaps through vaccines) as a way of controlling the population. (Why bother with show trials for your opponenents when you can trigger them to "wolf out" and then kill them with no repercussions?) The green goop brought up by the Inferno project could have triggered the werewolfism, since there doesn't seem to be any logical connection between the Earth's core and dodgy-looking wolf-men.

The Doctor's name has already been given.

In The Girl in the Fireplace, the Doctor says that he invented the banana daiquiri a couple of centuries early. Daiquiri—>Da query—>The question. Answering the question invents delicious frozen beverages.

Pete Tyler's Vitex product failed because of a name similar to an anaphrodisiac herb

• In Pete's World, where the Cybermen of Cybus Industries were constructed, the health drink Vitex was invented and became extremely successful. However, in the standard timeline, it did not. Perhaps this is because of the name Vitex sounding like a species called Vitex agnus-castus - known as the Monk's Pepper - used for its supposed ability to induce intentional Asexuality in various Catholic religious orders, a desirable effect for said monks, but the general population would likely not want to ingest a literal Fetish Retardant - which Vitex (the fictional 'health' drink) may sound like.
• Well, dying twenty years early might have had something to do with it, eh?

The Doctor didn't drain the TARDIS power cell which he used to kill the Cybermen in "Rise of the Cybermen"

It's too plot-convenient for such a powerful weapon to run out with one shot but later power the TARDIS home with no problem. More likely, the Doctor lied when he said it was dead. Remember, he was in a van full of armed men who'd likely want the weapon for themselves, and he had to prevent them from getting it. He didn't use it to avoid being taken prisoner later because it's an absolute last-resort weapon that he used only when there was no other way to survive.

• Did he say it was permanently dead? He said its energy was used up and it would take a few hours to recharge, which was why he couldn't use it again right then.
• It was on some sort of sleep cycle? It was busy recharging throughout Rise of the Cybermen, right?

The Beast is the Doctor

In The Name of the Doctor, the Great Intelligence names him Storm, The Beast, The Valeyard. The first and third are very old references (see "the Oncoming Storm"). The second one never appeared before.

The creature imprisoned in Krop Tor in The Impossible Planet was literally referred to as the Beast. It also fits a theme we have seen before - the Doctor being described as the most dangerous, most evil creature in existence, and imprisoned in an unbreakable tomb (the Pandorica) to protect the universe.

Now that the Doctor has broken the rules of regeneration in The Time of the Doctor (having retroactively added both the War Doctor and the Meta-Crisis Doctor to his thirteen lives, and then regenerating a thirteenth time), who knows what could happen further on. The Time Lords probably had their reasons to restrict regeneration...

The Beast is not dead

• He is only biding his time until he crawls forth from the shifting shadows. For power was given unto him to bring terror into the hearts of man until the end. Power over the earth, the sky and beyond the stars. Oh, who can stand before The Beast, and who can wage war against it. He is the Final Enemy, and only God himself could ever hope to beat him for good.
  • That's assuming the Beast is actually the Devil, and the universe of Doctor Who actually has a god.

The Beast and Sutekh are the same individual.

Think about it-they're both impossibly old, seem to defy the Doctor's knowledge, and have immense psychic powers along with a contempt for all life. Plus they're both voiced by Gabriel Woolf. Sutekh, in order to escape his Sealed Evil in a Can status after "The Pyramids of Mars", had his consciousness freed. After potential millennia of trying to find a new body, Sutekh hijacked a Time Lord and went back to the previous universe, hoping to ensure that no live but him will ever exist. This failed, and the eons of being locked up has weakened his psychic abilities and likely driven him made, with the delusion that he's the genuine Satan. As a result, the Beast hardly resembles his Osirian origin.

• Suppose Sutekh has no actual appearance, his form is simply your mind trying to perceive something beyond comprehension. When he claimed to be an Egyptian deity he appeared with the appropriate symbolism. When he claimed to be the ultimate evil it changed again. What the Doctor was seeing and what the audience was seeing was two different things. We saw Satan, he saw the Time Lord equivalent of an evil god.

At the end of "Love & Monsters", Ursula actually died forever

Elton is an Unreliable Narrator: just look at the Scooby-Doo race! Losing all his friends made him so upset that he started imagining things and developed a mental disorder.

• Or maybe the Doctor tampered with Elton's brains to make him believe Ursula's face had been saved.
  • Better yet, the Doctor added an hallucination to a block of concrete. He's still guilty about tricking Elton's mind.

The events of "Doomsday" were a plan by Peter Tyler.

How else did he know to teleport to exactly the right place in time?

• Of all the characters, he's the only one to get exactly what he wants.
• His catchphrase is "Trust me on this." Obviously you can't trust him. In fact...

Pete Tyler is The Master.

Somehow, in the events of Doomsday, Pete Tyler manages to go from being an annoying, ineffectual nuisance in an alternate reality to manipulating every other character into doing exactly what he wants (see the previous WMG). What's more, he antagonizes The Doctor while winning his respect (a definite Master quality), and even in this reality, is able to deduce more about the workings of time travel than even Shakespeare could. And, let us be honest: we are talking about a man who is important enough to have the ear of the President, due to the success of his "health drink business". This is the equivalent of a Coca-Cola executive being invited to Cabinet meetings, then conveniently being in the exact right place to lead the New World Order after a massive upheaval — who but The Master could pull it off?

• Wait... that means Rose is... oh dear.

Pete Tyler is The Alternate Universe Master.

Basically the above epileptic tree, explained further.

Turns out Pete Tyler DID die in the alternate universe, but The Master of that universe regenerated into his body double, which explains all of the clever things he was able to do, and also why they were never able to conceive children. Also, this Master is a good guy, making him the Evil Twin of the main universe Master.

• This implies that The Doctor of the AU would be a Goatee'd evil man. Or the AU Doctor that becomes the Valeyard in an above WMG.
  • Or that, as is somewhat typical for alternate reality storylines, it was the death of the Doctor as a young man that eventually inspired the Master to become good. Depending on when the breakpoint took place, it's possible that a previously evil Master has reformed to "honor the Doctor's sacrifice", maybe even going so far as to try and protect that backward little planet the Doctor used to like so much. Even farther back, and perhaps the only reason the Master is on Earth at all is because he decided to hide the Hand of Omega there years ago after he stole it from Gallifrey...
    • Also, keep in mind that, in a universe without the Doctor, the Time War would have ended differently, which means no need for the beacon, which means no "sound of drums", which means the Master would be far more sane...

There is, or at least was a Doctor in Pete's World.

Given how important the Doctor is to the timeline, why wouldn't there be one in the Alternate Universe? But how come we never hear of him? The fact Rose does't exist in this timeline may be why. Without her and the Bad Wolf entity, the Doctor died in one of the adventures we've seen or in some alternate adventure created because of the ripple effect. There is a Torchwood Institute in Pete's World; perhaps they were formed in response to a Heroic Sacrifice on the alternate Doctor's part. If so the alternate TARDIS might be in storage by them or a possible alternate UNIT, which would give the Meta-Crisis Doctor one.

The TARDIS triggered the HADS in "The Impossible Planet/Satan Pit"

It's mentioned that it's a Contrived Coincidence that the Doctor found the TARDIS just in time to escape, but what if it isn't. Mentioned a few times the Hostile Action Displacement System has the TARDIS automatically relocate in the event that it comes under risk. Given that "The Doctor's Wife" reveals that it takes the Doctor where they need to be, it's entirely possible that the TARDIS triggered the HADS when the area it was in collapsed, and it purposely chose to land where the Doctor would end up later. Alternatively it just did this without using the HADS, given everything it wouldn't surpise me if the TARDIS could fly itself and just humored people who used it's "controls".

Series 3

The reason Ten gave a Fate Worse than Death to the Family of Blood:

Humans are disgusting. He likes hanging out with them, but he could never have imagined being one of them (sort of again), Eight's erratic behavior notwithstanding. He could have just killed them; any difficulty would have just been an excuse. He could even have just let them die (they had only a few months left in their personal timelines when they went after him and his). But they forced him to be human, and that really made him mad. Thay had to pay.

• So Humans Are Special and Humans Are Bastards, with a sideorder of What the Hell, Hero?? Yes!

Kathy Nightingale's daughter Sally and Billy Shipton's wife Sally are the same person

A friend of mine came up with this when we were rewatching Blink. If Kathy got married a few years after landing in 1920, her daughter, the youngest of her children, was probably born somewhere in the 1930's. That would put Sally in her 30's when Billy was transported to 1969.

Sally Sparrow and Larry Nightingale from Blink somehow are Amy and Rory.

How? Timey Wimey.

The Weeping Angels from "Blink" came from the images given to the Doctor.

The Doctor didn't find out about the "image of an Angel" rule until he's in his eleventh regeneration, so maybe the images that Sally gave him came to life in Wester Drumlins, and then those Angels were the four Angels from the episode.

The Doctor gets sent back to 1969 shortly after the "four things and a lizard" incident.

Sally gave the Doctor the info in the nick of time. Maybe the "four things" were the Angels...

• There were four Angels frozen in the basement...

The events of "Blink" were an Evil Plan on the part of the Angels.

Now that we know that anything that holds the image of an Angel becomes and Angel, it would seem the Angels in Blink succeeded in getting into the TARDIS after all. How? Those pictures Sally Sparrow took of them, then gave to the Doctor. Now they're sitting in the depths of the TARDIS somewhere, forgotten and waiting for the perfect time to attack. Assuming that during Blink they still had the problem of the Angels dying in the Maze of the Dead, they had this plan: because they don't know how to fly the TARDIS, the Angels from the pictures and the Angel from the Byzantium plotted to bring the Doctor to them. Then while he's running around trying to climb up to the ship, they take control and use the TARDIS energy to feed their army. Then they have two sources of energy instead of one, doubling their chances of success.

• No, that's not it. The Angels in Blink are also part of the time loop. Sally Sparrow gives the Doctor the pictures. He takes them. The angels get out. He and Martha get zapped back in time, defeat the angels, get the pictures... I'm not entirely sure that works, but I think there's a way to do it so that the Doctor and Martha are not part of the time loop.

Jack Harkness is the Face of Boe

This is suggested in Canon, but it's just as likely that Jack got his childhood nickname of "the Face of Boe" as a jokey reference to the real FoB. It is also possible that he got the nickname as described, and, after aging so much that he was nothing more than a giant face with tentacles, he chose to use it as an alias again. But now we're heading into Stable Time Loop territory.

• When the Doctor is aged 1000 years in "Last Of The Time Lords", his head becomes much bigger than the rest of his body, and he lives in a cage. Coincidence, or hinting that the same thing would happen to Jack?
  • If it does, it'll take longer. Jack is already over 2000 chronologically by now, but a high percentage of that was spent cycling through lives. It can't happen to him until he goes for a thousand years or so without any intervening deaths.
• We have no evidence that The Face of Boe was famous in his time; the earliest time the Face is known to be famous in is about the year 200,000. Jack is from the 51st century, but he could easily live to see 200,000 C.E. again even if he takes "the slow path."
• Perhaps five billion years is enough time for Jack to change enough for his fixed-point effect to come loose.
  • Maybe he's not really totally immortal at all. He's connected directly to the Vortex, and the Doctor can feel the entire timeline in his head: maybe the act of sensing the vortex directly through Jack is blocking out everything, and the Doctor is only assuming Jack is immortal because all he can see when he looks at Jack is the vortex, and the vortex feels timeless.

Jack was kidding about being the Face of Boe

In "Utopia", Martha mentioned the Face of Boe to the Doctor, but Jack was in the room... so obviously he heard her say it. Jack probably thought it would be funny to mess with the Doctor and Martha.

Jack calls himself "The Face of Boe" in his old age as a self-deprecating joke.

When he first starts turning into a giant head, he's actually rather bitter about losing his good looks (and possibly the ability to screw). One day, he's talking to some friends or followers or whatever he has at that point, and he reminisces about being the "Face of Boe" as a young man - that dashing fashion model of a Time Agent - and it sticks. Because now that face is all he has left.

Jack is not a fixed point in time

Jack informing the Doctor that another Time Lord has survived is, meaning he cannot die permanently until he does. This could explain why he was able to die as the Face Of Boe.

• Somewhat Jossed by Children of Earth; though it takes place after the Doctor Who series 4 finale, long after Jack has had his most recent interaction with the Doctor, he is shown to die and revive. The broad theory hasn't been proven false, but the details have. Perhaps the Face of Boe's sacrifice is the fixed point?
• Who's to say that the Face of Boe didn't revive after that death?
• I thought the Doctor was more freaked out that Jack was a "fact" as in immortal which is just too weird, even for the Doctor.

The Futurekind from Utopia are at least part Weeping Angel. Maybe it's made of many horrors from across the stars.

You look at their facial structure, their teeth, and they are distinctly Angelesque, especially that of the one that smuggled into the Silo. They seem to be carnivoires, but not cannibals. They appear to be race puritans, like Daleks and Cybermen, and it's implied they a not a natural race. It's said that the Futurekind are what awaits the human race, they are converted into them like vampires and werewolves. The tattoos on some of their faces are like the markings from Impossible Planet. It's possible they were a science experiment to try and preserve the human race, by taking the strongest races that never die and emulating features of theirs, without acknowledging their danger, and instead creating monsters. Or instead, the were an experiment done by someone like the Master to destroy the human race.

The Toclafane from the End of the Universe travel back in time and become Daleks

When Martha helps capture a Toclafane body/shell/Sealed Evil Ina Can, they appear to me as primitive Daleks. It's been canon that Daleks came from Kaleds... but maybe they weren't created so to speak. The Daleks pulled a trick with the fake human that "invented the Ironsides". Everyone assumed that Bracewell invented them, but the Doctor recognized them. The Doctor may learn that humans eventually pull the same trick just to survive. After all, Human's found out about the situation. The story of it could have been passed down until the end of the Universe where they decide that's their only way to truly survive.

The Archangel Network was based on Traken Union technology.

In "The Keeper of Traken", the Keeper rules over the worlds of the Traken Union, using a machine called the Source to influence the minds of all the citizens so they'd be terribly nice to each other. The Master very briefly had access to the Keeper's powers, and is one of the two or three people left with knowledge of that technology. He used it to build the Archangel Network, but couldn't get it to accept him as a proper Keeper. At the climax of "Last of the Time Lords", the Doctor could, and was able to use the resulting powers to arrange matters to his liking.

The Valiant is the Master's TARDIS

Think it through: during the Time War, the Master is resurrected to fight; instead, he flees all the way to the end of time itself. To do so (and to Chameleon Arch himself successfully), he would need a TARDIS of his own, which remains in that time period once he steals the Doctor's TARDIS and returns to the 21st Century. But when he goes back and forth to find and transport the Toclafane, one would imagine he'd rig a way of getting his own TARDIS back with him as a backup. We also know that the Master was involved in the design of the Valiant "down to the very last detail." What better place to hide a TARDIS than in plain sight?

Why didn't he use his TARDIS to go elsewhere? He wanted to lay a trap for the Doctor and find out what the hell happened in the Time War.

Added bonus to this idea: it explains his willingness to use the Doctor's TARDIS as a Paradox Machine. He has a spare!

• Jossed. He doesn't willingly go back to the 21st century, the Doctor locked his own TARDIS' controls, plus UNIT humans are perfectly able to command it in "The Poison Sky" and "The Stolen Earth".

The Master never actually hit Lucy, despite what people think.

She got into a fight with Martha's mom.

The Master faked his death in "Last of the Time Lords".

Lucy didn't seem too surprised that the Master wasn't squealing in agony over being shot in the heart. The Master had planned his "final" encounter with the Doctor in advance. Lucy would shoot him in his heart, so he could stress out the Doctor, who, having so much else on his mind, would forget that Time Lords have two hearts. Then, just before he was "burned" by the doctor, he called his TARDIS and left. The way Steven Moffat's mind works, the actual (not a reincarnated version, like in "The End of Time") Master is bound to return.

• Doubtful. Given the heavily implied Domestic Abuse, Lucy genuinely shot the Master to kill (though the Master probably expected a betrayal.)

The series 3 ender was what jump-started 10's superiority complex.

5.5 billion people calling your name, nay, begging for your help, their only hope, on a psychic feed directly into your skull can do that- especially when you then become a god amongst even Time Lords, if only briefly. Most evidenced in Voyage of the Damned where The Doctor shouts "I CAN DO' ANYTHING!" when told that he can't retrieve data that doesn't exist from a system that couldn't bring it back anyway, though the mouthful of bitter humble pie he gets shortly afterward gets him to sit down and shut up until the next few times he tries to get uppity at the laws of time and physics. The Time Lord victorious was the logical conclusion of this run, though we don't actually know if he's going to cut back as Eleven or get even worse.
He had already been a bit... as he was, but that's addressed on the main WMG page (ctrl+ f "last words"). This is only about why he had it so strongly later on.

The events of "Last of the Time Lords" are essentially true.

They are just happening in a modified form. Obviously, it would take more than one year to build up enough faith amongst the people to destroy the Master's psychic field; it has taken over 30 years. Martha was forced to travel back in time and whispered the tale of the Doctor to one Sydney Newman, who then carried it onto Terry Nation and Verity Lambert who then carried it on throughout the generations. All the stories in Doctor Who are true enough, any continuity lapses are due to faulty memory and a sort of chinese whispers.

The Master never really died

The Master could travel between the 21st century and the year 100 trillion, and he did so to fetch the Toclafane. While he was doing this, one of him in the future stopped himself from going into the past so there would be two of him. Normally, the universe would correct this paradox; but his past self had turned the TARDIS into a Paradox Machine, so he got away with it. Once Jack destroyed the Paradox Machine, everything reset, and the Toclafane were sent back to the future. Then Lucy shot the Master on his orders so he could refuse to regenerate so, when the paradox was corrected, he wouldn't be stuck with the Doctor. Rather, he is in the year 100 trillion fixing a time-duplicate Tardis. Lucy saved his signet ring from the pyre as a memento.

This plan has the benefits of sticking it to the Doctor, giving the Doctor a false sense of security, and getting a TARDIS out of the whole deal. It also provides another parallel to the Doctor. The Doctor has a half-human meta-crisis duplicate, and the Master has a dead Time Travel duplicate.

• Supported by his turning up again. And again and again.
  • Also supported by Joker Immunity.

The Toclafane are just one form of future humanity.

It's 100 trillion years into the future. If humanity survived all that time, there's probably plenty of corners out there who met the end in their way.

The Master survived the Time War because of Loophole Abuse.

The Time War is unreachable because of a time lock, which is supposed to prevent people from changing events. The Master managed to get out without a Void Ship, but this wasn't just Joker Immunity; he realized that the lock may prevent going back in time, but not forwards since it doesn't change history. This is also how Daleks "fell through time" in the first place; they were somehow transported to the future.

The Master has unlimited regenerations.

Not that it'd matter much to him, but he was revived to fight in the Last Great Time War. The Time Lords threw out the rule book in the War, so if they need a soldier why don't they give him way more regenerations than is normally allowed? Potentially this could mean there are loads of incarnations who fought in the Time War, and loads of incarnations between the new series Masters we don't see a clear cut between.

Classic Series Crossovers

At some point while Carole Ann Ford is still alive, Susan will show up to regenerate.

The three Time Ladies (Romana/Susan/Rani) are still out there.

Okay, well, you all remember that Romana stayed behind in E-Space, right? E-Space is a different universe, for all intents and purposes. So, there is a chance, however small, that the Time War never got E-Space, so Romana may never have been called to fight.

When Susan was seen in The Five Doctors, she did not appear to have any ties to Gallifrey. We did not find out where she'd been, what she'd been doing, or what happened to her between leaving the TARDIS and appearing in the above episode. Afterwards, she disappears again. The "no ties to Gallifrey" is the important bit. If she has no real ties to Gallifrey, or if she's in a regeneration that's more devious then her grandfather normally is, then she may not have had to fight in the War, and may be alive.

Finally, the Rani. She ruled a planet, and may have been allowed to stay on the basis that she needed to protect her subjects (which is probably just an excuse to avoid the War, but hey). If something happened to her subjects/planet, then she could have escaped, Chameleon-Arch style. She may even be River, as has been suggested. If her planet was okay, then she might be too.

So, does this affect NuWho at all? Does it, hell!

a) If Romana is still in E-Space, then the Doctor could end up there again, or she might escape. Either way, she's gonna want to know what the hell happened, and that could be an interesting set up.

b) If Susan is still around, then there are a crapload of possibilities. For example, what happens if she meets her Auntie Jenny? Will she have been waiting for something? Was she the weird woman who was never fucking explained from T Eo T?

c) If the Rani's still around, then hooray! A Classic Who villain returns! If she's River, then holy shit, things are gonna get INTERESTING...

• This doesn't seem unlikely for the Rani, since she was an exiled criminal who, otherwise then the Master, had no combat experience, she most likely wasn't called back to Gallifrey to aid the war, since she seemed to despise her kind almost as much as any other creature, she wouldn't have voluntarily helped them out either and as she was depicted as a master of Tardis control/manipulation, hiding/acting and chemistry it shouldn't be much of a problem for her to make both her Tardis and her body signature vanish during the war and continue her experiments.

• This troper always assumed that, whether they were called in to fight or not, the psychic "shockwave" of sorts caused so many Gallifreyans exploding all at once killed off everyone else of their kind in the universe. They are telepathic beings, after all, and seem to be able to sense each other no matter where in time or space they are. It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to think that when a Time Lord dies, everyone can feel it. And when a million Time Lords die all at once, the others not only feel it, but die as well. The Doctor was spared because he has terrible telepathy (come on, the Master can **remotely hypnotize people**, and all the Doc can do is sort-of kind-of read minds and get migraine whenever an Ood is nearby?) and was never really connected properly in the first place. And his TARDIS survived because she was old and crap, while all the sleek newer and better-maintained models blew up/stopped working when their power source (the Eye of Harmony) was destroyed.

They start having crossovers with "Classic Doctors"

But of course, they'll hire exact lookalikes (Except for McGann and (maybe) McCoy doesn't look "that" different enough that he could still pull it off) I know it's beyond blasphemous to hire "fakes" but they did it before in "The Five Doctors" after Hartnell died. I personally feel, I would rather watch exact lookalikes join in crossovers than never see those Doctors on screen ever again. Maybe Tom Baker has an IdenticalGrandson?

The New series Valeyard will be played by Dylan Moran

Because it would be just too awesome.

Crossover Theories

The Nightmare Child is The Nightmare Child (from the KISS: Psycho Circus video game).

Same names.

Lucy Saxon was the Doctor Who's universe version of Lucy Pevensie from the Narnia series

In this reality it was Lucy and not Susan who turned her back on Narnia, the reason being that when she grew up she met the Master, who married her and took her to the end of the universe where she witnessed mankind fed into furnaces and screaming at the dark. She realized then that there was no hope, no point to anything.

• ...Fuck. Is anything in childhood safe?

Captain Jack is Captain Jack

Captain Jack Sparrow eventually finds and drinks from the fountain of youth, but loses his memories as he is de-aged. This goes on for a while; Jack slips through the centuries, careful after a few mishaps (the Jack of the movies has already messed this up at least once) not to drink away the location and nature of the fountain as he scours the globe for a more practical means of remaining immortal. As the world marches on without him and the bulldozers come through to pave over the fountain, he bottles roughly a lifespan's worth (in his eternally scheming appreciation that a bottle of youth might be extremely useful one day) and decides to grow old and die already. The world had lost its luster for him.

Unfortunately, his prolonged use of the fountain left him with a much longer than average lifespan. He lives to see the twenty-first century, when "everything changes"; but the technology on earth still doesn't facilitate space piracy, and he's now a decrepit old man and no match for the Somali pirates. So he hunts down a Time Agent from the future who's doing whatever Time Agents do and barters a lift to around 5000 AD. Here, he drains his last bottle of Youth, keeping only his most fundamental characteristics (including his womanizing nature, his taste for adventure, his insistence on being called "Captain", and his tastefully dated fashion sense) and gets re-brought up by the Harkness family.

GlaDOS was one of the Cybermen in "The Next Doctor".

Oh, come on. "That was designated: a lie".

• What on... when did GLaDOS ever use the phrase "the cake is a lie" herself?
  • She didn't. She does often talk about lying, though.
    GLaDOS: Have I lied to you? ... I mean, in this room?

All of the mysteriously missing parents of characters from various fandoms were all swallowed by the Cracks

Do you have a better suggestion? Because really, there's far too many missing parents of fictional characters for it to be coincidence.

John Simm is the Master.

No, he just doesn't play the Master. He is the Master.

• Look, his name even anagrams into... um... J.S.? No! It's Ms.!
  • In the same vein, David Tennant is the Tenth Doctor. He chose that surname for a reason.
  • Well, Sam Tyler is 'masterly,' and Mister Saxon is revealed to be Master No. Six (that we see on screen). So...

The Master is Sam Tyler from Life On Mars.

The Master dies in 2009... and wakes up in 1973. In turn, he is somehow related to Rose, and uses her to keep tabs on the Doctor.

• Sam Tyler was Pete Tyler's brother, and Life On Mars was a secret Doctor Who spinoff all along.
• Of course.◊
• Sam Tyler is 'masterly'.

Lucy Saxon is in the Sky with Diamonds.

The Master specifically chose a woman named Lucy as a way of drawing in and taunting the Doctor, who is, ever since his first incarnation, a fan of The Beatles, and in fact, both Time Lords are fan of pop music. Why would he taunt the Doctor in such a roundabout way? Because "the skies are made of diamonds!" The surreal landscape described in the song also fits that of Gallifrey as described by the Doctor.

• A number of people suspect that the Lucy and "skies are made of diamonds" were both an intentional Beatles gag by Russell T Davies. This doesn't invalidate the theory.

Captain Jack and the Doctor are one and the same.

Because they are both Robin Williams.

• Here you go.

The Strogg of Quake II and Quake IV are a product of Nanogenes gone haywire

Another Chula medical ship crashed somewhere where the human Marines were waging war. The nanogenes were released, and they came across a messed-up corpse of a soldier inside a destroyed vehicle. Commence "healing" ala the Empty Child: fallen weapon gets integrated into the severed forearm, body and limbs plus parts of the wreckage are haphazardly stitched together, and voila¡: a Strogg am I.

Because the soldier's brain was damaged beyond remembering anything except his mission (destroying the enemy), the resulting Biological Mash-Up is out to kill everyone; if the conflict was between two human factions, then it would naturally go after untouched humans. This explains the Stroggss lust for Human Resources.

"The Wire" from "The Idiot's Lantern" is Koh the Face Stealer from Avatar: The Last Airbender

Both Koh and the Wire suck off peoples faces. Maybe Koh found a way out of the spirit world into the signals from the television and made up the "alien" story from the memories it sucked from Rose. Oh, and maybe Mr Magpie was not vaporized, but sucked into the spirit world.

Doctor Who and Buffy the Vampire Slayer share a universe.

The vampires and assorted nasties are not aliens, no. No, they have trickled in all through history, but when the Carrionites tear holes in time and space in "The Shakespeare Code", they create a semi-dormant link to Quor-Toth, an alternate earth from a history where the Carrionites destroyed the Eternals instead of the Eternals banishing them. The Powers That Be are agents of the White Guardian, The Eternals, or both. The Master is... The Master, probably from either when he was stuck in his last body or in a body he stole after "Survival" but before the movie.

• This theory is killed by Andrew telling Spike that he's "seen every single episode of Doctor Who." Of course, it might have been some other fictional series called Doctor Who. Many 'real' Doctor Who episodes have been missing since the seventies, making Andrew's claim outright impossible.

  • It wouldn't be the first time shows that share a universe made this kind of mistake. For instance, Seinfeld shares a universe with Mad About You, but features an episode where George watches Mad About You.

  • Andrew had access to Jonathan. Jonathan knew magic. He could have magicked them up for them.
  • In Remembrance of the Daleks, we hear a TV in the background get most of the way through introducing Doctor Who before being cut off. Maybe all the episodes of "Doctor Who" exist intact in the Whoniverse.
  • How about this: after the Time War, the Doctor didn't want to be forgotten, so he arranged for the BBC to get its hands on a bunch of archival records from the TARDIS and release them as fiction. This is Old Who. Buffy predates New Who, so we don't need to explain it.
• It makes sense that there'd be Doctor Who fiction in the Whoniverse; in one (new series) episode, he even has a fan club based entirely off information on the internet about him and the various alien invaders he'd fought.
• There was an arc in Old Who about a godlike entity, the Black Guardian, trying to get control of the Key to Time - the final part of which turned out to have been transformed into a teenage girl called Astra. Good thing the Guardian didn't notice what Glory was up to on Earth, or she might have had competition for Dawn.
• A couple of Buffy characters cameo in the Doctor Who novels, although they also refer to Buffy as being a TV show in the Doctor Who universe. One book had both a cameo from a Buffy character and a reference to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
• This has been confirmed. A Buffy Season 8 Comic (which is Canon for "Buffy") featured the Tenth Doctor and Rose ambling merrily along on the street. It is only a background detail, but it is Canon, nonetheless.
  • A red telephone box is behind them. Good enough for government work. It sounds like a form the TARDIS would have become mode-locked to in an alternate universe; therefore, Buffy the Vampire Slayer takes place in Pete's World.
    • Or, ya know, one of the millions of other alternate universes. This means that someone needs to write The Slayer Organization into the Series 4 ending.
    • The tech level of Buffy's world supports the claim. We see the Trio making stuff almost as wicked as Lumic's Cybermen. Though there is a question of zeppelins... As for the red telephone box, it's quite standard variety. It's probably native, and the TARDIS is somewhere around the corner. Whether that is so or not, that box is a very nice piece of WMG Fuel.
• Old Who did include vampires ("State of Decay") and werewolves ("Inferno", "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy"). "The Curse of Fenric" had a variant on vampires. The Expanded Universe has both re-confirmed the existence of vampires and established the existence of werewolves in the Whoniverse.
  • However, the vampires and werewolves work in different ways, and (according to the Expanded Universe) the Time Lords would have erased anywhere with as many vampires as Sunnydale from history. No, Doctor Who and Buffy are merely in the same multiverse - with the season 8 comic recording one of the Doctor's rare but not unprecedented transdimensional trips. The entire Marvel Universe is in the same multiverse, according to various BBC authorised Marvel comics, as well as the Transformers and G.I. Joe.
• The Powers That Be are also responsible for the Doctor showing up on Earth every time there's an alien invasion. He is an unwitting Champion.
  • Or, in the case of the Seventh Doctor, a witting one.
• The Doctor almost never visits modern-day America because he and the Slayer Organization have an agreement that they patrol the US. He only visits briefly or in the past, where it doesn't apply. Torchwood was the space equivalent to the Watchers. The vampire races all come from different Old Ones blood, as implied by the recent comics. That allows each race to operate. The Scoobies and Angel Investigations only operate in the area controlled by the dusty bumpy vampires. Other vampire breeds are handled by other groups, an ancient treaty between numerous ancient vampire hunter groups. When Torchwood formed they discovered Space Vampires and the Weevils and so were brought into the fold as the expert there. The Slayer Organization took over The Watchers' duty and campaigns with them to all work together on all threats. UNIT and The Doctor don't work with the vampire hunters, and step on everyone's toes, but the Slayers like them and work with them.

The Master is The Master.

Dressing in black. Plans for world domination. Hypnotic abilities. Somewhat melodramatic. Those two could be brothers... or the same person. In one of his many desperate attempts to stave off death, the Time Lord gave vampirism a go, keeping under the radar as not to attract the Doctor's attention. Unfortunately, this eventually attracted the Slayer's attention. Although his body was killed (and then, eventually, bashed into dust), anyone who watches Doctor Who knows that the Master can't be done away with quite that easily.

The Doctor is the Avatar.

Season 3 finale: he goes all glowy and flies. Since Aang also does this in the Avatar State, the logical conclusion is that the Doctor is the Avatar, albeit either an alternate universe one or a different incarnation.

• One of the previous theories would make him an earlier Avatar than Aang.

Marcie in Dark Season is a future incarnation of the Doctor

The series was written by RTD, you never see Marcie's family, and she acts awfully adult and intelligent. This screams "Doctor" in a way that just isn't true of most series where this kind of speculation is done.

Christina de Souza from Planet of the Dead is Ms. Frizzle

What else are you going to do with a flying bus?

Jenny is the Spirit of the 61st Century.

Like Jenny Sparks and Jenny Quantum before her, teammates of a different Doctor, Generated "Jenny" Anomaly will have a very interesting future and look young for at least a hundred years.

The Madame de Pompadour is a Supreme Alliance ship.

We know the Supreme Alliance is not especially concerned with ethical matters or the Three Laws of Robotics.

11 shot JFK in an 11/9 (or 13/9) crossover to Make Wrong What Once Went Right.

As of the time that the picture was taken, Nine was still unsure as to whether Eleven was a disguised Valeyard or not. If the shot coming from the hill rather than the records library could dangerously change the future of the past, it might not be possible to fix it if "Eleven" really was the Valeyard.Corrolary: this explains why Sam Beckett was going loony in "Lee Harvey Oswald". He was Leaping into a Time Lord!

The Valeyard shot JFK in an 11/9 (or 13/9) crossover to Make Wrong What Once Went Right.

Same as above, but Nine's unheeded suspicions were correct. Eleven or 13 (after using Retroactive Preparation by way of the Write Back to the Future method or setting up an Exposition Beam) erased Nine's and/or (if Eleven) his own memories of the event so the Valeyard wouldn't remember what happened and Nine through Whichever could live without the guilt.

Jenny will regenerate into Jenny Everywhere.

The Reality Bomb doesn't destroy Reality, it destroys Reality TV.

After Davros was rescued, he created the new Daleks, right? WRONG!

Davros, a kid at heart, went to watch Cartoon Network on his portable TV. But as youknow, most of CN was taken over by...you guessed it, CN Real! Angry, Davros went onto make plans for a "Reality TV Bomb" which was evventually shortened to Reality Bomb. The Doctor and co. either misunderstood him or liked CN Real. Caan manipulated Davros because he still wanted to watch Survivor:Skaro Edition.

Since his attempt failed,a depressed Davros and Caan (now sane and given a proper Mark III travel machine) went on to take over the Royal Albert Hall. Caan's the Dalek seen chasing the conductor.

Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICsZE17MHwA

• So...if the Bomb was meant to destroy Reality TV, how did it manage to wipe out those people? Then again, in order for there to be Reality TV, there must be people, so that's why the bomb wiped them out, to prevent more reality tv shows from being made.
  • Those were the candidates for Survivor.

The Time War was related to Neon Genesis Evangelion in some way

Because one of the soulless Rei clones could quite easily fit the description of Nighmare Child, Cruciform just means cross-shaped (and Eva LOVES the christian imagery), and yet another Nth Impact would be a pretty good candidate for killing off the Time Lords/Daleks. Also, Eva is pretty much the only thing that can stand up to the level of horror and mind screw said to have taken place during the Time War.

• Supporting this is the Time Lords' easy regeneration and mild psychic powers, which could imply they're a kind of Angel descended from Adam, and the Daleks' technical focus possibly meaning they're a form of Lilim. The Time Lords' intelligence is similar to that of Rei and Kaworu, except evolved over time without Lilim competition, not created.

The Doctor is a grown-up version of Peter Pan.

Because the two characters are so similar. Peter did away with Captain Hook when he was a child, so he's found a new archenemy: the Daleks. And when he would go back to London, he'd always take companions on wonderful adventures, but be forever barred from having a normal life. The only difference is that he found a different way to fly. Rather than fly by happy thoughts, he flies by TARDIS now.

The Tenth Doctor's body is from Barty Crouch Jr's shell.

Um, duh.

The Doctor is using Jedi mind tricks on Rory.

Rory: Umm, we are not her boys.

• Doctor: Yeah we are.
  • Rory: Yeah we are.

Doctor: I think I will leave the kissing to the brand new Mr. Pond!

• Rory: Um, no, that's not how it works.
• Doctor: Yeah, it is.
• Rory: ...Yeah, it is.

The Weeping Angels are an aspect or servitors of Nyarlathotep.

One of Nyarlathotep's masks, the Faceless God, appears as a faceless sphinx with the ability to send its followers back through time. The angels hide their faces so that they don't see each other and freeze (and you certainly don't want to look at their faces), so they could be said to be "faceless" From a Certain Point of View, and they do indeed send their victims into the past.

Donna Noble moves to the United States after getting her mind wiped.

The interviewee for the new management position on The Office played by Catherine Tate (season 8, episode 25) certainly seems like Donna would have acted prior to meeting The Doctor and trying to fake being good enough for a management position. The timeline works out for her to have moved to America in search of an easier-to-get better job, possibly at Wilfred's suggestion.

• So long as she doesn't meet Chang Lee or Grace, she should be fine.

The Ood are descendants of the Mind Flayers

Think about it. They're both somewhat humanoid creatures with tentacles in their faces. Both have a telepathic bond to each other and a larger brain that acts as the main part of the Hive Mind. And they both reproduce by turning Humans into one of them (though Mr Halpen might've been a special case).

What proably happened is that, one day, the Illithids, being the intelligent beings they are, figured out that slavery, brainsucking, and Evil in general is bad for their karma (kinda like Dalek Sec did in Evolution of the Daleks). They decided to evolve into kinder creatures that spend their time singing with each other via telepathic link (don't ask where the hindbrain comes from).

Ironically, the Ood, whose ancestors had lots of mentally manipulated slaves working for them, got turned into slaves themselves.

In case you were wondering how they arrived in the Whoniverse, a Time Lord did it

• Or the Illithids themselves did it. They are established to be lords of the universe far in the future, and so they time travelled back from there. Perhaps another group chose to travel to another universe rather than the past of their own.

The Master's current form is Prussia.

If these are anything to go by, there's an eerie resemblance between the current Master and the nation once known as Prussia. Considering he's a Time Lord, it's not out of the question that he's either using his Gilbert-persona to screw around with the other Nations or had taken up a dead Prussia's identity to further hide himself in plain sight.

• Prussia is seen to be alive in recent stuff though, so he can't be dead. Also, if the Master realised that nations were running around as people, he would be targetting them in his plans. Unless this IS part of the Master's plan. In which case, we should probably be scared.

The Vastha Nerada have many names.

One of which? A Grue.

The Great and Bountiful Human Empire is the Imperium of Man if the Emperor were around to lead it

The Great and Bountiful Human Empire is described as including a million worlds and alien races, all based around Earth. It could be that the Great and Bountiful Empire exists in an alternate time line where the Horus Heresy never took place, and the Emperor were able to bring humanity the golden age it was about to get before Horus decided to screw everything up. A hundred and sixty thousand years of peace and prosperity could easily be enough to explain the decrease in Imperial looking architecture.

• Often have I had a very similar theory. According to canon there have been many Great and Bountiful Human empires, and yet for some reason the Doctor has avoided Earth during the year 40,000. Probably because he would be immediately identified as Xenos filth and his transparent attempt at psychic paper wouldn't work on a librarian. I assume that far in the future all that trouble with Chaos was dealt with.

Solomon from Evolution of the Daleks didn't die!

Solomon was actually immortal! He didn't die from that blast. He had to fake it to not freak out everyone and would move out when buried. Later, he'll end up dying in NYC for real when [[Franchise/Highlander the Kurgan kills him.]]

10 is a Sorrowful Man

• Because he says "I am so sorry."

River Song is Mel Brooks.

Mel is short for Melody and brook is another word for river. At some point in her life, she regenerated into a man and decided he wanted to be a director for a while.

The parallel Cyberman universe is the same universe as depicted in Terry Pratchett's Nation.

Daphne would be both willing to demolish the monarchy, and as queen herself, be in the perfect position to do so.

The Master is posing as Barack Obama

Taking for granted that he's not dead and/or permanently timelocked.

• He's running a gambit exactly like the Saxon trick of Series 3, but in America this time, and instead of beginning world domination immediately, he's lulling us into a false sense of security. It's not actually my idea, though. I kind of stole it from a post onthe Doonesbury website:

  "The birthers ought to take it a step further. Is there any real proof that Obama was ever born? I mean, he may have been delivered to Earth by galactic terrorists who see this presidency as the first step to subjugating the human race."

• Clearly, the long-form birth certificate recently released was a piece of psychic paper.

The Timeless Child was originally the Childlike Empress from The Never Ending Story.

While the official version has Fantasia being saved by Bastian Bux, maybe that isn't what "really" happened. If Fantasia truly was destroyed by the Nothing, then the Childlike Empress could have used the Auryn to wish for an escape. This would have come in the form of a portal to another dimension (the one we see the Timeless Child standing under). She would have no memory of her previous life since that is the cost of using the Auryn. Her seemingly endless ability to regenerate would explain the Empress' longevity.

Real Life and Meta

There Will Be a Google Doodle for the Day of the 50th Anniversary

Google displayed a Douglas Adams tribute today. If they're that nerdy, there's no doubt they'll commemorate one of the most beloved TV series of all time. I know it's a pointless WMG, but... called it!

• They did one for Star Trek's 46th anniversary, so they've just got to do one for Who's 50th.
  • Confirmed!

Everyone's a Time Lord, and Christopher Eccleston quit because he's The Doctor.

• Earth was destroyed in 1963, the day JFK was assassinated. After that, Johnson was so upset that he declared nuclear war, rendering the planet inhospitable to human life for the next several thousand years. After the Time War, The Doctor couldn't bring himself to destroy his species, so he created a giant Chameleon Arch, and made everyone human instead. He put them on Earth several million years AFTER 1963, once it was hospitable again. He created the show (pretending that it was created by Sidney Newman) so that nobody would expect any of it was real. See, there's a TV show about it. The guy we see as 1 was actually 9. The show was succesful enough that he didn't need to do any more shows himself, and let the writers go free. After someone found out the truth, he recreated the new show. He'd had to regenerate into Christopher Eccleston by that time, though. That's why he only did one season, because he didn't want people suspecting he really was The Doctor. He put the fob watch in the new show so Doctor Who fans who wanted to be Time Lords would go around opening fob watches, when the real key to de-chameleonizing looks completely different.

David Tennant will be a surprise torchbearer for the Real Life Olympics.

Because the entire UK would love the reference, even if it confuses the hell out of the rest of the planet.

• Jossed.

Every writer who dreams their stories is a Time Lord that used the Chameleon Arch

Over the millennia, they all had their own reasons to become human, but they never rediscovered their true selves and lived and died human. Which means you could be a Time Lord and never know it.

The writers of "The Shakespeare Code" received an advanced copy of the 7th book and wrote Shakespeare's Moment of Awesome based on how Harry killed Voldemort.

As the recap page of "The Shakespeare Code" indicated, banishing evil spirits wasn't exactly the function of the Expelliarmus spell. In the Whoverse, Martha just said it because she felt her experience with the witches was "A bit Harry Potter." However, in the real world, you don't need to be a Time Lord to find out about how book 7 ended at the time the episode was written. The writers, with their connections to the publishing companies or even with Rowling (if she's a fan of the show), somehow got an advanced copy of Book 7 and thought "Hey! Let's base a scene off the big fight between Harry and Voldemort!" It's totally plausible.

Rusty and the Moff have personal contests between themselves.

This is evident in series four, where the challenge was for each writer to write in the style of the other. It explains why the Library two-parter is more romantic than Blink, Fireplace (only just), or Empty Child, and why the last four episodes of series four are Nightmare Fuel trips more than Rusty's usual fare.

Jossed

The oft-mentioned Time War was the cause of the 8th Doctor regenerating into the 9th.

Yeah, the world, his wife, their dog and their dog's dog has proposed this, and it's more or less universally accepted in fanon. But it still needs writing down.

• Series 4 spoiler: Tenth implies that Human Ten was "born in battle like Ninth was". The general theory seems confirmed.
• Possibly the Time Lords forced the regeneration to turn the Doctor into a more reliable asset. Notice how enamored the 9th and 10th incarnations seem of Gallifrey, as opposed to the classic, renegade character.
  • If you were the last remmant of a lost civilization, wouldn't you care for the ones gone, even if you really didn't like them in the first place?
• This does seem to be pretty much accepted as canon now. Even the Doctor Who comics are referencing it as such now, even though they're about as canon as the novels. The fifth issue of Doctor Who: The Forgotten features an Eighth Doctor adventure where he's imprisoned for over a month in order to execute in order to steal the Key of Rassilon to use as a final gambit (locking away 'the Medusa Cascade' forever, the Doctor notes). This does suggest that the Eighth took part in said Time War, at the very least.
  • No specific mention is made of the Time War, but the Eighth declares 'the skies turn to blood as starships explode and thousands die,' and the Tenth would later recall after this story occurred, 'The Time War happened. I saw Arcadia destroyed. I laughed at the face of the Nightmare Child. And I saw Gallifrey sacrificed, burned when the Cruciform fell. I turned the key in the lock. I doomed them all.' So yeah, just about canon... or so we hope.
• Perhaps 8 committed suicide after destroying Gallifrey, feeling he couldn't take the burden.
• Jossed, in the online prequel to the 50th anniversary special, which features 8 regenerating into John Hurt's incarnation.

The Doctor ended the Time War by staring into the Time Vortex to destroy all the Daleks, sacrificing one of his lives in the process.

Because some Time Lord needed to. He looked into the heart of his TARDIS, became temporarily omnipotent, and removed the Daleks from all of spacetime... but couldn't control the process, and ended up destroying Gallifrey and his people as well. And since this was the Eighth Doctor - the one who never completely recovered from his amnesia - he forgot a few Daleks.

• It didn't get out of control. He cognitively chose to kill the Time Lords as well, lest they destroy reality.

• Makes total sense in continuity. He seemed to know exactly what would happen when Rose did it.
• There's even more than that. The Doctor tells Jack, "If a Time Lord [looked into the vortex] he'd become God". The Master comments about the end of the Time War, "You must have felt like God". Hmm.

The Twelfth Doctor will find Gallifrey at the end of Capaldi's tenure.

It looks like the search for Gallifrey will be the main story arc for the Twelfth Doctor, just as the crack in time and space was the main story arc for the Eleventh Doctor. At the end of Capaldi's tenure, The Doctor will return to the events of "The Day of the Doctor" and find Gallifrey. The reason that we do not see his entire face is that he has a facial disfigurement that will result in his regeneration into the Thirteenth Doctor. The Thirteenth Doctor will arrive on Gallifrey.

• Jossed.

Rose will return at least once more, serving as the harbinger of the apocalypse

There will be plots wherein the fabric of reality is threatened. When Rose shows up, the Doctor will know that things are bad. If this becomes a recurring thing, the Doctor will actually be scared of Rose.

• Considering Steven Moffatt considers Rose the Clingy girlfiend that never leaves. And was one of the few that nixed the idea of Handy Ten and Rose getting their own personal TARDIS to zoom about in. While he's in charge the odds of us seeing Rose Tyler again is in the long odds box ..
• Possibly confirmed, with news of Billie Piper returning for the 50th anniversary. Said anniversary likely deals with the Question, which when answered is implied to be what caused the creation-negating time cracks of Season 5(or something ever worse, depending on whether the Silence were behind the time cracks or not). Given Moffat's views on Rose and respect for his predecessors' work, one wonders how it'll go down.

The twelfth Doctor will have facial hair.

Jossed.

River will show up in a "The [X] Doctors"-style special.

Self-explanatory, since David Tennant isn't a regular any more.

The Master and Jenny will return in the same two-part special.

It will be explained by a single quote:

Jenny: Really, Dad, if they're not breathing and there's no pulse, you always assume they're dead!

• Jossed.

The Twelfth Doctor's going to cut off and retain all his limbs in his first full episode.

It'll be soon enough after his regeneration to regrow them and so he'll have enough bio-matching receptacles to doge another four regenerations. Considering Ten's last thoughts were about not going, this probably carried over and is at the forefront of Eleven's mind but he got distarcted or detered from doing this, so he will atempt it later.

• Wouldn't that be a bit dark for a kid's show? Also, what does he cut off the final limb with, his tongue?
  • I get the feeling that he doesn't like making things too easy for himself. It's likely that he could carry around a ton more useful tech than the Screwdriver(such as the TARDIS power cells which he uses to blast through dozens of Cybermen in Age of Steel) but doesn't because it would make life less fun.
• Jossed.

The first thing Twelve will do post-regeneration will be absolutely killing the bow tie

Why? Rule of Funny.

Twelve will be female.

The Doctor's Wife confirmed that Time Lords and Time Ladies can change sex during regeneration. Eleven had a scare regarding this. The Doctor will go through such a change between Eleven and Twelve. And will still not be ginger!

• There are mass guesses below which offer Zooey Deschanel and Emma Watson as suggestions to play her. And neither are ginger!.
• Jossed.

The first thing the Twelfth Doctor will do is...

Rip off the bow-tie. And bow-tie sales will decrease dramatically in the real world.

• Jossed, it's the last thing the Eleventh Doctor does.

Sometime during his tenure, the Eleventh Doctor will meet Geronimo.

A time-traveler who has a historical figure as a catchphrase. How are they going to avoid it?

• This being the Docter we're talking about, he will of course inspire the name's current usage.
• Jossed.

The primary reason Moffat would bring back Rose in the 50th Anniversary is to have her fight over the Doctor with River

Well, they both are extremely clingy to the Doctor and they both hate people getting in on "their" Doctor, especially Rose. River, being a touch Mary Sue and a creation of Moffat's, would win that argument. Rose has no true reason to return alongside Ten, as her story is totally finished.

• Considering Moffat's policy on the shippers, I don't think that's the main reason-the main reason is probably because she's experienced in reality-endangering crises. They'll probably interact similar to "School Reunion", where they'll bitch a bit over the Doctor before joking about how they're being so clingy.
  • Jossed. River doesn't appear, and Rose isn't actually Rose.

The Time Lock was initiated primarily to prevent the Daleks from getting out.

While designing a lock to prevent the war's history is a good idea, what Time Lord in their right mind would design a way to prevent themselves from getting out? Even back at the beginning of the War, before it turned to Hell, you'd think the Time Lords would design some method of bailing out. Before initiated the Time Lock, the Time Lords realised that if they lost, the entire universe would be at the complete mercy of the Daleks. To ensure this would never happened, they made sure there was no physical method of escape. If the Time Lords won, they'd be spatially trapped, but still able to observe the universe like before. If the Time Lords lost, the Daleks would be stuck in the wasteland. The Daleks didn't think the Time Lords had the balls to pull it off, so they fell for the trap. The Void Ship was likely a Time Lord invention to try and Take a Third Option, but failed because a)The Cult of Skaro stole it and b)It could only fit four Daleks.

The Doctor's name is silence.

The Arc Words during the Silence arc are, "Silence will/ must fall when the question is asked." The question is, " Doctor who?" The most logical reasoning is that the Doctor's name is a period of time during which whoever is saying it says nothing. Silence. It is unpronouncable because there is nothing to pronounce.

The Silence will hire the Master to kill the Doctor.

Through some convoluted method, the Master Race had one survivor. The Silence will find him and give him the power to take down the Doctor. The reason he agrees to do this is because he thinks the ultimate victory over the Doctor would be to make the Time Lords extinct. His episodes will reveal a sort of Death Seeker characteristic in him.

• Jossed.

Each of the Eleventh's Companions will have a specific classical element associated with them

From what we've seen of Clara Oswald, it's clear to see that she is associated with the element of water/ice. On her first appearance she appeared on an planet covered in snow, then she appeared in a very specifically snow related Christmas special. This is then later followed by an episode where she and The Doctor encounter an Ice Warrior. Compare this to Amy Pond, who, despite her aquatic name, could be said is connected to the element of fire. Though Amy's first appearance wasn't fire-related, what was her actress's first appearance? The Fires of Pompeii. She also has the fiery red hair. By this theory, The Eleventh should have 2 more companions displaying earth and wind. Although, perhaps Rory accounts for one of these. I could also give a case for Amy representing Earth due to her myriad encounters with the stone-like weeping angels. But this could also be a result of Rory's elemental influence.

• The Eleventh Hour had the Atraxi threaten to incinerate the earth. So there's the fire. However, the theory as a whole is jossed unless River, Craig, Canton, or a member of the Paternoster gang count.

The Eleventh Doctor will encounter the Master again

Nearly every single incarnation of the Doctor has encountered some incarnation of the Master. The only one who hadn't was the first and second Doctors, but the Master character hadn't been invented yet. While he may have died in "End of Time", there is no reason why the writers couldn't cheat and have the Eleventh Doctor travel into the distant past to encounter a younger version of the Master. Perhaps this younger version that hadn't yet become evil, and then inadvertently help him to the Dark Path? If the younger Master recognizes who the Doctor is then perhaps that would be the original reason why their antagonism exists.

• Most likely, he will be the jackanapes that Three described him as in Terror of the Autons.

The Daleks will be the ones to ask the Question.

The Doctor will go to Trenzalore expecting to meet River Song and tell her his name, since she has to learn it some time. However, he will find instead/as well the Daleks are there, and they will ask the Question. Owsin's Moment of Awesome will turn out to be a disaster, and the Daleks will gain terrible knowledge from the answer.

Jossed.

---

The Doctor's name is the key to unlocking the Time War

That is why the Silence are determined to make sure that the question "Doctor who?" is never answered. They know about the Time War and the circumstances of how it was brought to an end.

• Sort-of confirmed? When the crack in space-time reappeared in Time of the Doctor, it was implied that the pocket universe Time War Time Lords were trying to contact the Doctor through the crack and waiting for him to answer their question: "Doctor who?". Whether the Time War Time Lords could have returned through the crack is unanswered, but the Silence were certainly afraid of it happening.

• If they can send a new regeneration cycle, and seemingly create planet sized cracks in time and space, it seems that they can, and would've come back. However doing this would've created a new Time-War, which is what the Silence was afraid of.

Luke Smith is The Doctor

He's got brains, and he loves time travel! The Bane got a hold of some Time Lord DNA and used human DNA to fill in the missing parts. This is why he has more trouble regenerating than other Time Lords. When the 8th Doctor claims he's "half-human on his mother's side," he is referring to Sarah Jane. He is able to travel back in time to the Gallifrey of long ago by means of something which has not yet been revealed.

• It would explain why all versions of the Doctor who have met Sarah Jane love her.

The Doctor has lied about the outcome of The Great Time War.

Theory here.

• Big, fat, unsarcastic O. M. G. That's freaking brilliant.
• I could almost see that happening... I mean, season 4 even further helps this what with guys like Davros making it out of the Time War in one piece. If biggies like that were able to escape, it's almost certain that the Time Lords didn't burn like the Doctor claims.
• The End of Time revealed that there is at least some truth to this, although exactly what happened is still not 100% clear.
• Gallifrey, however, is most definitely Time Locked, and the Time Lords, at least the Counsil under Rassilon, are vengeful for this.
• Semi-confirmed. He didn't deliberately lie about it, however he did forget about the outcome being changed and his role in it due to multiple incarnations from his past and future also being involved.

Chaucer says "What the Cædmon?"

Cædmon says "What the Plautus?" and Plautus says "What the Homer?"

• Or what the Aristophanes! Maybe what the Virgil could pop up somewhere?

Except for Sarah Jane Smith (and her son), none of the people the Tenth Doctor said goodbye to will ever appear again in the series.

It was a send-off to all of them, and to hand the reins over to Steven Moffat. To be symbolic, the last companion he visited was Rose (who was the first in Series 1), and to nail it in further many traces of RTD are being removed one by one in the new season (all the recent Dalek invasions and The Next Doctor are now Ret-Gone, and the last RTD-era Daleks were killed off). This means (sadly) that there will be no more adventures with Wilfred Mott or any possible chance that Donna Noble will ever recover, outside of Fanon.

• This seems to be the case, although this troper wishes Eleven would pop in on Wilf to let him know he was alright. Poor guy must have a massive case of Survivor's Guilt. But then again, Eleven is a different person, just like Ten said he would be, so it might not help.
• Partly Jossed by real life: Sarah Jane's actress died April 2011 and didn't appear in any episodes between The End of Time and then.

All 13 Doctors will unite in the eventual Grand Finale.

Because it will be awesome.

• It would be a complete Time Paradox, rip time and space asunder, and decimate everything. The resulting universe made from this new "Big Bang" will eventually become the boring, "adventureless" one we inhabit now.
  • We've already seen and read team-ups between various combinations of the first six Doctors. And Five and Ten.
• By the time this show finally wraps up, we'll all be watching TV in the form of a Holodeck, and they'll be able to simulate all of the deceased actors perfectly. William Hartnell will smell like peppermint.
• Partly confirmed: It isn't the Grand Finale, but the 50th anniversary has Doctors 1-12 and War trick out time to save Gallifrey.

The Eleventh Doctor will procure another fez

Because fezzes are cool.

• The trailer for the next series shows him sitting at what appears to be the President of the United States's desk trying to order people around. He demands a fez, but it's not shown if he gets it or not.
• Confirmed - but only briefly, when he gatecrashes a Laurel and Hardy film, as well as while on holiday with Kazran and Abigail.

Amy and Rory's relationship is a parallel to the Doctor and the Master's

(This assumes the Doctor and the Master had a little more than friendship going on back in the day)Okay, so Amy ran off to go on adventures without Rory, and Rory just wanted to stay home and have a normal life. Perhaps the Doctor stole the TARDIS to see the universe, but the Master didn't want to leave Gallifrey like all the rest of the Time Lords. The difference is that Rory didn't have any way to get his fiance back (and so he had to wait for the Doctor to show up again), but the Master DID have ways to leave his planet when he realized he might leave the Doctor for good. The threat Rory faced was that Amy would leave him for the promise of an exciting life with the Doctor, and the threat the Master faced was that the Doctor would simply leave him for this new, exciting life (so it's basically the same as with Amy, but without the possible new love interest).

• This also explains why the Doctor pushed them so hard to stay together and get married. He lost his chance with the Master, so he either didn't want them to end up like he and the Master did or he's trying to make them live out the life he should have had with the Master, travelling about and seeing the universe together.
• Just accept "The Curse Of Fatal Death" as canon, and you're there!

The Master's resurrection ring survived the explosion.

It was never explicitly stated that it didn't. And Steven Moffat may have said that he won't be bringing back any of the old series villains, but then we saw a Dalek in the S31 Trailer...

• Probably a Void Dalek (from Doomsday), since if the Cybermen escaped there then it's guaranteed that at least some of them did too. As for The Master, death has never stopped him before so why should it now?
  • It was a Void Dalek, but they then brought in a new generation of Pure Daleks (though, they look different, biologically, they are the originals). The Dreamlord is almost certainly the Valeyard and The Mondas Cybermen were the ones seen, according to Word of God. The reason they looked like Earth-2 Cybermen is because they couldn't afford to remake them for it. So, he lied.

Within the next ten years — possibly within the Eleventh Doctor's era — there's going to be a plot involving the Doctor having to save the lives of Zoë's parents.

She'll probably going to have to be born within the next decade and has to be around to save the Earth from the Cybermen in the mid-seventies (The Invasion) by giving UNIT the correct calculations to destroy the wave of Cybermen missiles with a limited number of UNIT missiles. Thereby the Earth avoids a death by paradox.

The "time girl" is the Nightmare Child

In a Time War, what worse thing (for the Doctor at least) could there be than a child, representing a whole new generation of potentially evil Time Lords? As for why she's appearing—and apparently was created—after the War ended, well, wibbly wobbly you know the rest.

The Doctor is disgusted with his past companions

The Tenth Doctor hates violence, sacrifice and death. (Although the Ninth seemed perfectly fine with sacrifice) It has been mentioned that he doesn't want anymore companions so that nobody else gets hurt because of him, but there are clues that hint more than that. In the final episode, he looks at many of his companions with various looks of horror, disgust and indignation when they try their extremism. Martha threatens to blow up the earth, Jack and Sarah Jane threaten to blow up the crucible, Handy kills all of the Daleks and Rose, Mickey and Jackie show up with big gun. He shakes them all off without any resistance. He's even ready to get rid of Rose. The only companion it looks like he doesn't want to get rid of is Donna. She did absolutely nothing to harm the Daleks or self-sacrifice. All she did was give Davros a taste of his own medicine and disable everything. She tried to stop Handy from genocide.

The look on his face when he says "They've all got someone else. Still, I'm fine." seems more like a self-rationalization, as to why he wants them gone.

• No, no; the reason he's disgusted with them is because none of them tried to torture the Daleks or have them imprisoned for all eternity. Yes, it's a double standard, but Ten's very good at double standards.
  • And of course, they never tried to prevent humans from beating death (Despite life after death being you, aware and alone in never ending darkness, with an evil from beyond the dawn of time for company in the Who-Niverse)save the life of a callous mass murderer or two OR nearly let the universe die with their inaction
• I don't think he's disgusted with his companions, as much as he is with himself. Ten says it himself in a talk with Wilf during "End of the World (Part 2)", "It's not like I'm an innocent, I've taken lives. But I got worse, I got clever, I manipulated people into taking their own. Sometimes I think the Time Lord lives too long." He isn't disgusted with his companions, it's just that when he looks at them he sees what they were before he met them, and what he made them become, and that disgusts him. We also saw in "Amy's Choice" just what the Doctor thinks of himself, and it isn't pretty.

The more silly Doctor Who episodes never happened; they are "traveller's tales" told by the Doctor to impress his companions

There's a suggestion that the Doctor tells his companions a lot of stories about his quests; several episodes begin with him ending a bizarre-sounding tale ("Turns out, it wasn't the robot king after all! Fortunately, I was able to re-attach the head..."). The episodes with flying sharks and skyscraper-sized steampunk cybermen never actually took place; note that in these episodes, the Doctor's companions are not present at all. The Doctor is not known for telling the truth, so is it unlikely that he exaggerates or outright makes up his stories?

Doctor/Amy/Rory is meant to parallel Mickey/Rose/Doctor.

The main difference is Amy sticks with Rory where Rose was undeniably horrible to Mickey and left him for the Doctor. The Doctor sometimes seems to fancy Amy over River, who seems to almost alarm him with how forward and over sexualized she tends to be, but knows he can't get Amy because he is well aware that Rory is a better man than he.

The Doctor likes Earth so much specifically because it reminds him of Gallifrey.

This explains why Time Lords and humans are so similar.

The Silence are actually all one person.

The doctor can't go to a place and time he's already been, because he would cross over his own time stream. It's the reason why he can't go back in time and team up with himself in some way, except for that one time. And that other time. Whatever. Anyway, the point is, if one person crosses over their own time stream, they could do it again and again, making many of themselves. Maybe even an army. This, however, could deform them. Make them ugly. Stretch them out. Crossing the streams is bad, and if they were to cross the streams so many times, they would become monstrous. The punishment for doing such damage to the time stream is that you don't exist in people's memories once their eyes leave you. The Silence exist in space normally, but they don't exist normally in time as everything else does.Now, who could do this? Who has a time machine, a taste for suites, the ability to shoot lightning from their hands, and such a devotion to defeating the Doctor that they would go through endless pain to do so?The master.

Donna will eventually return, but will be played by a different actress.

Donna and 10.5 are half-human-half-Time-Lords. 10.5 has Time Lord brain, but can't regenerate. Therefore, it is possible that Donna, who has human brain, can regenerate. Donna as we know her will grow old, and on her death-bed, she will regenerate and grow a second heart, thus becoming a full Time Lord. At the same time, she will regain her memories of the Doctor. At some point during his travels, the Doctor will land in the second half of the 21st century, where new Donna will recognise the TARDIS. After having a few adventures with her, the Doctor will eventually leave her with a piece of the TARDIS so she can grow her own.

• Apparently Jossed, Donna passed the metacrisis to her daughter.

The Time Cracks were the same phenomenon the Doctor used to end the Time War.

As revealed in the Season 5 finale, the Time Cracks originated from the Doctor's exploding TARDIS. Said time cracks were erasing the cosmos. One wonders why an out-of-date TARDIS, or any TARDIS for that matter would be such a doomsday weapon. It's possible, though, that the Doctor himself created this back in the Time War. In order to stop the Time War, the Doctor used a modified(as in "direct, and doesn't require the TARDIS exploding") Time Crack to create a timey-wimey Ret-Gone wave that doesn't stop. Thanks to the Time Lock preventing anything from getting out, it didn't erase the universe-only what was inside of the Time Lock(this did not include the TARDIS, as it was the epicentre of the blast). The reason why the Master/Cult of Skaro/Time War survivors still existed was both the sheer Logic Bomb of the event and the Time Lock preventing Time War history for being altered, meaning the blast could only Ret-Gone the present and (probably unending) future of the War, at least by the perspective of the Doctor. The reason for so much "falling through time" was similar to stuff falling through the cracks in time, albeit far less got out(the Dalek Emperor, likely the next appearance of the Master etc).

When the Doctor refers to meeting fictional characters he is referring to adventures in the Land of Fiction

A companion will die and stay dead.

Because this show needs real drama and no companion has died and stayed dead since 1982.

The Valeyard will be a merge between the Dream Lord and the Meta-Crisis Doctor.

Just like how The Watcher merged with the Fourth Doctor to create the Fifth Doctor, the Dream Lord will merge with the Meta-Crisis Doctor to become The Valeyard.

• BONUS: Rose will die. Finally.
  • As much as I would love that, the Cult of Skarose would be up in arms.

Paul McGann will play the Thirteenth Doctor.

If The Curator is a future incarnation of The Doctor who could reuse old faces, then maybe the face of the Eighth Doctor will be reused.

• Jossed. It's Jodie Whittaker.

The 60th anniversary special will be a multi-doctor episode.

In 2023, the show may be following the adventures of the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Doctor. The Thirteenth Doctor will be included. Peter Capaldi will return as the Twelfth Doctor. Matt Smith will return as the Eleventh Doctor, and if he has aged visibly, it can be explained that he arrived from the end of his first decade on Trenzalore. Maybe David Tennant will return as the Tenth Doctor. If he has visibly aged, it can be explained that it is a result of a paradox collision like in "Time Crash." I am not sure if Christopher Eccleston would want to return as the Ninth Doctor.

• Near-certain. Matt said he'd be back for the 60th.
• Every X0th anniversary is a multi-doctor episode, it would be strange if this wasn't the case

The Twelfth Doctor will create another Biological Meta-Crisis.

The new Meta-Crisis doctor will then be deposited in Pompeii, under the alias of Caecilius. Furthermore, he purchased the Tardis not because he thought it was a work of art, but because he knew that his previous self would look for it and find it in his house, and would then save the world from the Pyrovals.

• If that is true, much as I hate the Meta-Crisis, I think Caecilius had his memory erased.
• Alternately, the Twelfth Doctor will one day have to jump into Clara's timestream to save her many, many duplicates, and be split into thousands of copies including the previous characters Peter Capaldi has played on Doctor Who and Torchwood.
• ... and The Thick of It, The Lair of the White Worm, World War Z...

Capaldi's Doctor will be called Thirteen.

As of The Day of The Doctor, the Doctor considers the War Doctor to be worthy of being called Doctor again (kind of an awkward sentence there). Because of this, "Twelve" will address himself as his actual incarnation number.

• Except the Doctor doesn't seem to refer to any of his incarnations by numbers, but by snarky nicknames like "Captain Grumpy".

The Twelfth Doctor will revisit Queen Victoria

But this time, he and Clara will act like sophisticated gentlepeople. In which The Queen will be approve. But of course, she has no idea he and ten are the same person. Twelve will lampshade that to Clara.

Twelve: She banished my Tenth incarnation. Do you see him around anywhere?

Concerning Magpie Electricals

It was inherited by a relative of Mr. Magpie from "The Idiot's Lantern" who kept it going, and eventually it became a large, extremely successful business. Because this is the most plausible reason why a small electronics shop from an otherwise standalone episode set in 1952 should keep popping up in episodes set in later times like "The Sound of Drums"^note via Freeze-Frame Bonus, "The Beast Below" and "Before the Flood". There's even another Magpie Electricals shop appearing in a Series 10 episode somehow!

The cult of Skaro (and the genesis ark) in series 2 and 3 are from Pete's universe

The Fourteenth Doctor will be played by...

• Daniel Radcliffe?
• John Boyega?
• Rosabell Laurenti Sellers?
  • All Jossed, it's… David Tennant?! While Fifteen will be portrayed by Ncuti Gatwa.

A crossover with Andy's Prehistoric Adventures

• The Doc checks in on Andy to make sure he is using his time machine responsibly. Andy is constantly using it to find last minute fixes for problems with his museum's displays (and to gape at dinosaurs). The Doctor agrees this is an entirely appropriate use of a time machine and goes on her way.

A future New Year's special...

Will show the planet Clara mentioned in "Under the Lake" where it's perpetually New Year's Eve and she lost her sunglasses and most of her dignity.

Riley’s surname is Vashtee because of the Vashta Nerada.

Either himself or one of his parents\grandparents got orphaned by the Vashta Nerada and the surname came from that.

Next companion will be from the future.

And we will see the Steven Taylor Spaceship Fleet and Vicki Pallister Veterinarian Clinic referenced.

There will be parallel between the next Doctors and the first regen cycle

During a chain of events involving a lot of the universe getting destroyed. Surrounded by various characters\Companions from different planets\species each: an older human of non-British origin, and a few younger aliens, cut off from their worlds by said planet destroying events. At least one of them with connections to the villain and who starts out as a side character, not initially joining the doctor but simply reappearing.

16 is young, calm, and heavily themed after a specific sport, and travelling with a bunch of younger aliens who are like kids to them. One of the aliens dies tragically, the other two start a relationship on Earth.

17 is more brash, wears bright colors, and travels with an actractive companion of non-British origin (and\or whose actor is putting an accent) who is trying to get away from abusive (step)family members.

18 is more manipulative and has an young, rebellious Companion.

19 is a bit forgetful and each of their story arcs features various sets of Companions each. The usual Companion is from a bit in the past than the release date, and is an young rebel who tends to have a somewhat vintage aestethic (even for the time said companion is from) and falls in love with the Doctor.

20 is traumatized, but cool, and dresses more modern. He picks up a present day Earth Companion and hangs out with their family.

21's era is mostly a continuation of 20's, with present day Earth Companions and romantic drama with them.

22's era instead does all new. Clumsy, young Doctor, and his Companions are a couple from present day Earth. Companions end up having a kid who ends up being plot important, and the Doctor gets married to a side character.

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