Doctor Who/WMG/New Series

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


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

For guesses not specific to either era, see Doctor Who

For guesses specific to series 5, see Doctor Who

For guesses specific to the currently airing series, see Doctor Who

For archived jossed speculation on Tennant's final years see Doctor Who

For all other guesses see Doctor Who


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.

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.

The Empty Child... WAS PHONE!

Well, he CAN manipulate phones and whatnot, he's the right age for a father, (later on in life) and, well...

A SKELETON POPPED OUT!!! Quick apology: This was just for the hell of it.

I'm sorry,

Hbot

The Vashta Narada's natural predator is...

... the common housefly. You know how flies will appear to be picking up small things and rubbing their little front legs together? They're eating Vashta Narada.

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

Name's the Same.

The reason the Doctor ends up exactly where and when something that requires the Time Lord's assistance is because the TARDIS already KNOWS where and when he needed 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 Doctors is going to near a 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 do gone to see Shakespeare at any point in Shakespeare's career, bur they drop off just as aliens plan to use him for some nefarious purpose. I did not know where 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.

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.

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 pass the Time Lock to set things in motion.

The Doctor had a (non-hypocritical) reason for leaving Handy with Rose in the parallel universe.

Rose knew how dangerous breaking through the walls of the universe was, but she did it anyway. Given the chance, she probably would've tried again. He left Handy with her in the hopes that he'd be an acceptable substitute.

  • Plus, the Doctor tends to run away screaming at the first mention of committment - a way out of marriage, etc. probably looked very promising indeed.
  • And perhaps the genocide hit a bit too close to home - he knew quite well he'd done the same, and probably would again, and it scared him.


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 due 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 outloud 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.

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 off.

River Song is...

  • A regenerated Jenny. That's why she knows a lot about Time Lords.
    • And therefore the Doctor married his daughter. Eww.
    • Not so much daughter, but Opposite Gender Clone. Eww.
      • Steven Moffat has made it clear that River Song isn't the Doctor's wife. The implication is intentional, but he has stated that the truth is far more complicated than that. Also, the show made it clear that The Doctor would consider Jenny his daughter. It's doubtful that they're the same person.
    • Jossed. Also, she knows a lot about the Time Lords? Since when?
  • Romana, in disguise.
    • Jossed.
  • The Rani. She wouldn't be loyal enough to stick around for the time war, she's smart enough to find a way to disguise herself as human without losing her memories (she'd need to, to escape the Daleks), and the experience of survival, loneliness and who-knows-how-many regenerations could easily mellow her out. Explains why she needs to hide "who and what" she is from the Doctor, and she's already shown to be not a 100% good person. They could even have her regenerate in the future, and explain her appearance in her introductory episodes by reminding us how female Time Lords can (apparently, see: Romana) change their looks at will following regeneration. Also explains why she said the doctor "looks so young" - she was probably remembering one of his earlier regenerations. They can probably bring her back from the Library, too - the Master's come back from worse.
    • Oh. Your. God. A chameleon-arched Rani!
    • Jossed. She was born post-Time War.
  • Lucy Saxon, the Master's wife. I don't know, it just sounds like a good idea to me. Plus, it could explain why she knows so much "Time Lord stuff".
    • I think maybe River's actually the Master himself, regenerated as a woman.
    • Jossed. And I don't recall any episode where she knows "Time Lord stuff" beyond regeneration.
  • I think River is a humanized avatar of the TARDIS. She knows a lot of the Doctor and Time Lords and history and can pilot the TARDIS pretty damn well.
    • She knows more about the TARDIS than The Doctor himself does. She knows that he's been leaving the parking break on for the past 50 years.
    • Also, there's the obvious romantic vibe between the Doctor and River, and the Doctor often calls the TARDIS pet names like one might their lover. (Plus, in the vein of The Doctor, The Master, The Meddling Monk...you've got The TARDIS.)
    • Jossed.
  • River is the next regeneration of the Doctor, as a female. He was afraid he could be a woman when he came out of the Tenth to Eleventh regeneration, so it can happen. She was separated from the TARDIS by the Doctor's dark side, the Dreamlord, who also is the next regeneration of Eleven; see, the regeneration was specially traumatic and difficult, partially because of how powerful the Dreamlord had became inside the Doctor's head, and somehow ended with two Time Lords, or two half time lords, the "normal" side of the Doctor being incarnated as a female, River, and the dark side as a male, the Dreamlord.
    • In order to take over the TARDIS, the now physical Dreamlord half chameleon-arched River, so she has confused memories of her previous regenerations and has created the illusory memory that she knew the Doctor, a separate individual, when in reality she was him, which she actually suspects but is unwilling to face.
    • She was in prison for killing the Dreamlord, who at some point, somehow, became an important political figure or some such (perhaps he publicly took credit for all the times the Doctor saved Earth in the past, after all he also IS the Doctor). Now, River suspects the Dreamlord was part of her and part of the Doctor, that is why she allowed herself to be imprisoned after killing him and is reluctant to talk about the man she killed.
    • Eleven will find out about all of this when meeting River for the first time from her perspective and it will be left to him to decide if he should do something about those events, if he should prevent that regeneration from happening, and that is why "everything changes", because never before had the doctor been given the chance to prevent his established death-regeneration before and meddle with his own timeline, denying existence to a future self he actually knows. He will know by then that his ultimate destiny, should he not change it, is to be killed by himself (River killing the Dreamlord), and be imprisoned forever in the library (what happened to River).
    • There could be two reasons, not necessarily mutually exclusive, why the Dreamlord and River don't regenerated after dying (stay with me, the Dreamlord will be killed in the future and we haven't seen it happen yet), one is that is due to them being only half time lords, or the two halfs of a time lord, and the other is that they are the 12th and 13th regenerations, even if having happened at the same time, and so the last ones the Doctor can have. (and apologies for the lengthy WMG)
    • That's more likely, her being the 13th regeneration, considering that she doesn't regenerate when she dies, and she keeps hinting that she kills the Doctor... So she could be the 13th regeneration who kills herself? But then how does she manage to screw with her own timeline if she's The Doctor?
    • If she is a regeneration of the Doctor, this would be the first time that the Doctor would go unannounced as the titular Doctor and finally choosing a name. I don't see the Doctor giving up such a prestigious title after almost a thousand years... unless it's a Stable Time Loop thing where this regeneration happens and then he/she recognizes himself as River Song from his past and aptly decides that to be his name. He would have also sentenced himself to a virtual suicide as he already knew that as the Tenth incarnation, he was able to 'save River Song by putting her into that computer. Fate Worse Than Death?
    • Jossed. She can regenerate, but we can see her prior forms, including a month after birth, in "The Impossible Astronaut"/"Day of the Moon" and "A Good Man Goes to War"/"Let's Kill Hitler".
  • From the past. That is to say, a human born pre-21st century, was exceptionally clever and was recognized (will be recognized?) as such by the Doctor (and also because she is River Song). She became a companion, learned all about space stuff from him, eventually coming close to outstripping the Doctor's knowledge and decided to take off on her own into space.
    • I've seen very little of the original series, so I'm a little shaky on this, but couldn't she be Ace, who supposedly went off to study at the Time Lord Academy or something like that?
    • Ehh, half right at least. She was BORN in the 52nd century, but was snatched by Kovarian and the Silence grew up in the 20th and 21st, as it were.
  • Alternatively, she could just be a Time Lord we haven't seen before. It explains her knowing Gallifreyan.
    • Confirmed. Well, half-Time Lord, by any means.
  • I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that River Song is actually a later incarnation of Susan, the Doctor's granddaughter from the Hartnell days. When she was written off the show, she was only married off, leaving her to her own life. Now we know River understands a lot about Gallifrey and the Doctor himself. She knows about the incarnations, how to fly the TARDIS and seems to be savvy on Doctor levels of awesome. Now as long as we assume that being a Crazy Awesome Large Ham with an odd sense of humor runs in the family, it makes more and more sense that they're related. River's never expressly stated what her relationship to the Doctor is and it's clear that they were close (how close is "close" is being left to the shippers). She could have been taught how to fly the TARDIS by the Hartnell incarnation and any other Time Lords she could have come into contact with before the Time War. She comes from the distant future because she time traveled there. Her "Hello Sweetie" greeting is either a twisted sense of humor brought on by regeneration or code whipped up by her and future!Doctor to keep her identity a secret until the knowledge was necessary. The relationship between Doctor and Susan "Foreman" was pretty complicated in a No Hugging, No Kissing way, from what I understand, based on the terms of her departure. Considering the Continuity Porn the Grand Moff Steven likes to shove in, this WMG isn't that far of a stretch.
    • You know, Carole Ann Ford's still alive. I can imagine Moff writing a story where the Doctor has an adventure with an older Susan, but something horrible happens and she's forced to regenerate—and River is the result.
    • Amy tries to weasel information out of River, and by the way River treats the Doctor and by the way she responds to Amy, guesses they are married. River and the Doctor have already stated that it's River's past and the Doctor's future. He would definitely remember teaching someone to fly the TARDIS and would also remember giving River his Sonic Screwdriver. The Doctor didn't recognize the Sonic Screwdriver that she had which points to stuff he hasn't done yet. The diary is the Doctor's, which is a culmination of everything he's done and he gives it to River so she'd recognize him later.
      • Jossed. She's not Susan, and is a partial Time Lord with human heritage. Also, "Let's Kill Hitler" shows that the TARDIS herself taught River how to pilot it. Also in that episode, the diary was given to her by the Doctor, but it was initially blank, rather than anything the Doctor logged. And "Closing Time" shows the diary logs eyewitness accounts, as well as River's personal experiences. Though I don't recall her having intimate knowledge of Gallifrey in any episode. After all, she was conceived and born after the Time Lock.
  • Tricking the Doctor into believing that they have a relationship. We know she's a criminal, and is keeping a few things from him, and when they meet in Silence In The Library it's concievable that she's already wormed her way into his life with bluffing and time manipulation.
    • Jossed. Seems pretty legit in "Day of the Moon" and "Let's Kill Hitler".
  • A disguised, time-traveling Marilyn Monroe who faked her death before setting off to find the Doctor...Hey, they are kinda sorta technically married.
    • Jossed.
  • Jack after millions of years as he starts to turn into the Face of Boe. It's still pretty early, so he looks human, but his head's getting bigger (more feminine), and his hair's growing out to prepare for those tendrils. His, ahem, junk retracted, so he figured it would be easier to live as a woman (also, there may have been people on his ass necessitating an identity change). It would explain River's great aim, her fearlessness in throwing herself out an air lock, and how she knew how to use a Time Agent wrist strap.
    • That would explain "her" extensive knowledge of all the Doctor's regenerations. "River" only met him as Ten but Jack not only had access to Torchwood files, but probably observed from afar a few other regenerations through the organization.
    • Jossed. Her knowledge of the Doctor's regeneration seems to be tied with her doctorate in archaeology and her looking at eyewitness accounts, if "Closing Time" is anything to go by.
  • The regenerated and cured Donna-Doctor. Remember Donna's lament in "Journey's End" that she was going to travel the cosmos with the Doctor "forever?" Maybe she knew that she received some regenerative capability in addition to her mental upgrade, because 10.5 certainly didn't get that aspect of Time Lord biology. At some point in the future, Donna will die, probably either of learning who she is and having her head melt, or being targeted by an old enemy. Then she will regenerate into River Song, who - though she may still be a fair bit human - will be able to hold all (most?) of the knowledge she got from the Doctor because her brain will have regenerated to adapt to that.
    • Jossed. We see River's first incarnation being born.
  • Sally Sparrow, based entirely off the non-canon Moffat story that later became "Blink," in which the Ninth Doctor said he got her homework assignment (the story itself) from "a beautiful woman...some sort of spy" who he later revealed to be Sally herself. Granted, it was a 12-year-old AU Sally.
    • Jossed. While she grew up roughly around the same time, she left Earth in 2011, when that Sally would have been in roughly in her late teens. Plus, at that point River/Melody wished to KILL the Doctor.
  • Madam de Pompadour. Perhaps something happened when she kissed him or when he read her mind; that could be how she knows his name, and it also made her a bit Time Lord-y. Alternately, if they aren't the same, they're in some way connected. The Doctor did say that she was possibly the most accomplished woman ever, she was clearly in love with him, and Moffat did write The Girl in the Fireplace.
    • Jossed. River's a partial Time Lord and all of her regenerations are accounted for.
  • Amy. Amy POND, RIVER song? It's plausible.
    • Jossed, but very much on the right track.
  • Amy's daughter.
    • Confirmed!
  • A stable time loop. When we first meet River Song, in the 51st century, she is physically killed - but her consciousness is uploaded into CAL, The Library computer. At some point in the 54th century, (which is implied to be River's "home" century), River either finds away to re-materialise out of the computer, or is pulled out by some concerned acquaintance. However, the re-materialisation is unsuccessful, and she emerges out of the teleporter with her memory almost entirely wiped, and her body reverted to a younger age. In her daze, she becomes unaware of her past, and desperately tries to reconstruct her life. Along comes the Doctor, who not only recognises the "regenerated" River, but has come to the realisation that he is responsible for her very existence. He takes it upon himself to take the "young" River under his wing to help mould her into the woman she once was and will one day become again. By the later part of her life, River starts to become aware of her origin, but does not feel she can share this with the Doctor. In addition to the tragedy of her life of knowing that every time she meets the Doctor, her soulmate, he will know her less - she is now aware that she is stuck in an inescapable loop, where she can never die, but is instead forced to relive the same intense relationships over and over again for all eternity.
    • Her home era's the 52nd, depending on interpretation you could argue it's the 20th and 21st as well. But, jossed. She was born to a human.
  • Omega
    • What, it's possible!
    • Jossed.
  • Completely unrelated to any previous characters
    • It would be like Steven Moffat to completely throw us in a loop.
    • Confirmed, depending on your interpretation of "previous" and "character". She's Amy, Rory and the TARDIS' daughter.
  • River Song, aka Melody Pond, will go back in time and become the Doctor's mother, thus bringing into canon the line 'I'm half human, on my mother's side' from the Doctor Who movie.
    • This would be particularly awesome because then the River and the Doctor would have both witnessed each other's births (okay, so the Doctor only saw River a few hours after she was born) and deaths.
      • No he didn't. He saw her a month after she was born.
  • It turns out she's a human augmented with Time Lord DNA after being conceived in the Time Vortex, and NOT any pre-existing character.

Progenitor Daleks are pre-Civil War Daleks

Smooth, retro design. Their casing comes from earlier blueprints and design, but augmented with time-war era technology. Also, few of the Daleks we have seen in recent years have been "true" Daleks.

  • Imperial Daleks are made from humans, if I recall correctly. Since Nu Who Daleks are aligned with Davros, we can assume time-war era Daleks are descended from Imperial Daleks.
  • The Dalek seen in "Dalek" is a time-war era Dalek. The Daleks with the Emperor in Bad Wolf are made from human DNA. The Emperor is a time-war era Dalek, and so was the Cult of Skaro.
  • New Dalek Empire, as seen in in Stolen Earth are made from Davros' cells.

Thus, none were true Daleks.

  • This is supported by the fact that the seems to have a colour based hierarchy and possibly specialisms, like the originals always did.

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.

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".

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 100,000, 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 kinda tilt your head to the left and squint.

  • So all he needs to do is create a time machine (the Daleks where 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, and so none of this should be a problem.

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

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.
  • It was Rose who initially brought him back to life and got him stuck in the temporal displacement predicament he's in. This is justified and closes the loop because, since she saved him and was nigh-omniscient when she did it, she made him the "fixed point in time" up to the time in his personal timeline when she knew he would die. (That is, if he exists at all in a time period, he's a fixed point of time in it. When he's there more than once - ouch.) She closed her own loop the same way (though it might not be evident). Leading on from this, maybe...

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 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 a Xanatos Gambit 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.

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 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.

  • Ten acted as if Ten(b) was the Valeyard - and Rose could fix that little problem.

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.

Lucy Saxon is pregnant.

Lucy Saxon and her husband have had marital relations, naturally, and so she is pregnant. The baby will be half human and half Time Lord. Then, because of some weird Temporal Paradox, the baby gets sent back in time to Gallifrey so it grows up in the same generation as the Master, the Rani, and so on. When he grows up, the baby becomes The Doctor, thus fulfilling the line in the Made for TV Movie which told us quite clearly that the Doctor is half human! (If you combine this one with the previous one, it gets really, really weird.)

  • Jossed by The End of Time.
  • Or his followers stole it. She could have been pregnant during the notyear, and continued in jail. And then the baby was taken... neh.

The Doctor hasn't run into Torchwood before because it was operating under the auspices of UNIT for most of the late 20th century.

This is also the reason no alien technology or evidence got to the public until just recently—Torchwood was confiscating the majority of it. The splitting point would probably be "World War Three", wherein most of UNIT's British alien research specialists were electrocuted by the Slitheen. Torchwood lost their direct line, and both evidence and technology got out—to the point where, just a few years later, the United Nations has its own flying aircraft carrier.

  • If Torchwood was running under UNIT, then surely the Doctor, who spent several years as UNIT's unpaid scientific advisor and remains on good terms with the head of UNIT UK, would be more likely to know about them?
  • Perhaps Torchwood didn't realize he was the Doctor when he was working at UNIT. Two called himself John Smith, and Three and Four continued this. Torchwood was looking for "James McCrimmon", the pseudonym Ten used with Queen Victoria—and UNIT did imprison the original Jamie McCrimmon in a hospital during The Invasion.

Torchwood is manipulating UNIT, maintaining their cover by letting UNIT do all the public work, and then sneaking in afterwards.

An organisation which, in 2007, has plans to bring back the British Empire isn't exactly going to work nicely as subordinate to the United Nations, anyway. Either this or the theory above could explain why Tosh is working for UNIT in "Aliens of London" [set in 2006] but has been at Torchwood for three years in "Greeks Bearing Gifts" [probably set in 2007]. Either working for UNIT and working for Torchwood are the same thing in 2006, or she's undercover to see what she can grab.

  • In the Torchwood series 2 finale, Tosh reminisces about covering for Owen and pretending to be a doctor, an allusion to "Aliens of London", so she was definitely already with Torchwood.
  • A variant on the above: In the serial "Time-Flight", the Doctor refers to Department C19, the government body that funds UNIT's British contingent. Several Expanded Universe novels feature the Doctor exposing senior members of C19 as stockpiling Silurian Plague and Cyberguns for the good of Britain. In hindsight, these could easily be retconned as early skirmishes between the Doctor (and UNIT) and Torchwood, even though he never learns who they are.

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.

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.

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.

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 Weeping Angels can't move when the audience can see them.

In "Blink", there's a scene where the human characters are inside the TARDIS, and the Angels are rocking it back and forth while the lights flicker. They're in an otherwise empty room, but they still can't be seen moving—they just change positions when the lights go out. So who's watching them, and preventing them from moving when the lights are on? We are.

  • Alternatively, the camera crew is the problem.
  • Or they can't move because the TARDIS can see them. It is a sentient entity, after all.
    • It's not the TARDIS. There's a scene where someone oblivious walks between an Angel and the camera, and it moves.
      • The TARDIS is phasing in and out of reality, curiously in time with the lights flickering on and off, enabling the Angels to see each other.
  • If this theory is true, then does the episode end the same way if it's running when no one is in the room? Uh-oh...
  • These two shots frames apart seem to confirm the hypothesis.
  • Backed up by the knowledge from the Season 5 episode "The Time of Angels" that anything that holds the image of an Angel becomes an Angel. Just don't blink, my fellow tropers...
  • Jossed in "Flesh and Stone" when the angels are shown moving.
    • Not necessarily. Note that the Angels are still stone during that sequence. Perhaps they're moving in between the frames, while the audience can't possibly see them.
      • And why don't they do this shit elsewhere?
    • In fact, this even backs it up. Angels are supposed to be horrifyingly fast, but we see them moving slowly. That's because they can only move in the gaps between the frames; if you think about it, there's no way that a TV could show us them moving as it only shows lots of still photos in quick succession.
      • Thank you, you just salvaged that conceit and made it even more terrifying. You're awesome!
      • Well, everything kinda goes out of the window in that episode in that the seem to be able to "control" their quantum locking through fear. Remember Amy was blind and yet pretending that she could see worked just because they were scared as hell. In fact we should all be waiting to die because if the image of an angel becomes an angel then they're just waiting to come out of our T.V.s and kill us all... be careful not to look at their eyes. oh and before I forget in this episode, radiation=time energy
      • AND the Angels in Blink had to be wary of Sally. Sally rarely stayed still and visited Wester Dumlins often. They may be fast but its prettynplain they don't move fast enough in brief darkness and when a character was blinking to get anyone from across the room without being noticed. They move about five feet TOPS in the space of a light flickering or blinking done by the characters. Then Sally took the TARDIS key, and they had to watch their step more often to get it back without sending Sally away. Those Angels didn't constantly move when the camera wasn't on them because they had to be sneaky, because neither we nor Sally, in their eyes, know what is happening... It isn't until the Doctor tells us and her what they are that things grt intense and they stop being as cautious. Watching trh episode again, you are watching Sally's timeline again, so thry are again cautious. As for the Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone ones, they didn't have to be as cautious and could move between the frames. We, and the characters, know exactly what they are now. They don't have to pretend. They aren't scared so much as gleeful and vengeful and ecstatic that things are going their way.
    • Also, as a side-theory, those Angels in Wester Drumlins are not permanently quantum locked. The estate presumably belongs to the public, and if not them, well, clearly have some form of owner, and once someone goes to rip it down to build something new like another, safer structure or a park or something..., things will fall in the basement where the Angels are. Block their vision... And the workers begin to vanish, one... by.... one.

Russell T. Davies is the Grey Guardian.

In an attempt to survive the Time Wars of the non-canonical spinoffs, the Black and White Guardians merged into a new being, the Grey Guardian. This entity compressed the timelines into a new, canonical Whoniverse, and used a new Time War he orchestrated to remake it in his image. Utilizing the Doctor as a pawn, RTD is stabilizing this universe through a combination of the Blinovitch Limitation Effect and the Observer Effect, with the humans of our world as observers.

  • Torchwood is a gambit by the Monkey Time Reapers to corral RTD into his own personal universe, so that they can cleanse the Whoniverse without his opposition. It appears to be working, but the Smoke Guardian, Steve Moffat, is moving to fill the gap.

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.

When the Doctor mentions his age, he's not considering his total lifespan, but rather the age of his current incarnation.

When the Tenth Doctor claims his age is 903, he means that, for him, 903 years have passed between now and his regeneration at the end of The Parting Of the Ways. Likewise, when the Sixth Doctor regenerates into the Seventh, it's possible that when he claims that his age is 941 (943? 94-something?), that that was the number of years he existed in his Sixth incarnation (and is probably annoyed or relieved that he has to start over)...

  • Impossible for the Eleventh Doctor. He calls himself 907 in "Flesh and Stone", which would mean that he ran the TARDIS around the Moon for that long, or that he took nine centuries to crash into Amelia's garden.

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.

Captain Jack and The Doctor are one and the same.

Because they are both Robin Williams.

The events of "Doomsday" were a Xanatos Gambit 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...

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.


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 alternate universe with zeppelins and Cybermen diverged sometime between Mickey's conception and birth.

This explains why people older than Mickey (his grandmother, Rose's parents) have doubles, why Mickey has a double with a different name, and why Rose doesn't have a double at all, without having to invoke In Spite of a Nail. (We know from "Father's Day" that Mickey is several years older than Rose.) Of course, it then becomes necessary to explain how it could have diverged enough to have zeppelins and a black President of Great Britain in only twenty-some years.

"Father's Day" is where the alternate universe diverged

In "Father's Day," The Doctor and Rose cause a time paradox, which the universe (Through the Reapers) tries to correct. The alternate universe has no Rose nor The Doctor. Coincidence? (In a WMG? Never!)

In the AU, the reapers killed the Doctor and Rose to prevent them interfering. They did this by removing Rose and The Doctor from time. Without Rose, Pete lives. Without the Doctor, we get airships and "Ricky". Apparently sometime after (in his timeline) the episode, The Doctor would alter history in such a way that we'd get our airshipless/black-presidentless Britain.

  • The Doctor is an airship-hating racist who likes to change the titles of heads of state to less interesting ones.

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 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.

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" á la the Empty Child: fallen weapon gets integrated into the severed forearm, body and limbs plus parts of the wreckage are haphazardly stitched together, and voilá: 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 Strogg's lust for Human Resources.

Rose Tyler was a slayer

Being strong-willed and good at gymnastics, Rose Tyler was one of the potential slayers activated by Willow in the last episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That would explain why she didn't explode from taking in the Vortex.

  • RTD did have Buffy in mind when designing the companions for New-Who. He wanted to make them more capable, in the same way as Joss upgraded the slutty blonde of horror fame.

Doctor Who and Buffy the Vampire Slayer share a universe.

The vampires and assorted nasties are not aliens, no. No, they have trickled through 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.
  • Rose is a slayer.
  • 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 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 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 is a Xanatos Gambit 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 Get Smart universe is the home of the ultimate authority on universes.

Rose Tyler, in "Turn Left," says she's been in contact with Control about Donna and the situation her decision made. CONTROL, hmm?

Astrid is the TARDIS

It's an anagram! Astrid wanted to explore the universe, she was turned into star dust and, thanks to a timey-wimey ball, she became a TARDIS. Probably the Doctor's TARDIS, at that. No WONDER he fell for her instantly. He's like one of those men who's more interested in their car than their girl.

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 "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. Having no qualms about tearing the universe open, he used Torchwood 1's tech to break across to the other side, and Rose Tyler informed him about the coming Darkness. 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.

The Thirteenth Doctor will outlast his actor.

With a set limit on regenerations and the rate the new series has been burning through Doctors so far, there will be a played-straight Other Darrin from the new series.

  • The limit on regenerations was optional. The Time Lords are able to casually offer the Master twelve more regenerations as a bribe to help the Doctor. If the Eighth Doctor was fighting on the front lines of the Time War, as he is implied to have been, they might have given him a fill-up just in case. (This also explains why the Master, who was long out of regenerations in the TV Movie, was able to regenerate from Yana to Saxon.) David Tennant is the Tenth Doctor sequentially, but is only the third Doctor in this "batch."

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.

The Tenth Doctor is a psychic mental patient who happened to accidentally meet the Ninth Doctor on an adventure and is imagining himself as the next regeneration.

In reality, the Ninth Doctor is still running the show. Most of the events of the series proceed similarly, but the consequences of having a somewhat smaller ego mean that the Master never took power, Harriet Jones is leading Britain's Golden Age, and the Clone (if he exists) has been allowed to stay. On the downside, he's using a prosthetic hand because he couldn't regnerate the one that was lost in the Sycorax invasion.

  • Curiously enough, the mental patient's initials are RTD.

The events of "Last of the Timelords" 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 Doctor now has nigh-unlimited regenerations because he is established as being the one who killed his own people.

Combine this with the fact that, supposedly, a Time Lord gains the regenerations of other Time Lords he has killed, and... good grief.

  • Wow. Kinda makes the Doctor sound like a marauding ghoul...

The human Dr Who from the movies as played by Peter Cushing is the Other Tenth Doctor

After "Journey's End," he adopts a human name ("Dr John Who" perhaps?) and dedicates himself to building/growing a new TARDIS so that he'll be able to travel in space and time again. He marries Rose and they have kids and then grandkids. Eventually Dr Who gets old and starts to look like Peter Cushing. Unfortunately, Rose passes away before the new TARDIS is ready, but at least Dr Who is able to show it off to his granddaughters: Barbara and Susan.

  • That's sweet AND awesome. And on his journey, he winds up travelling to OUR universe, where he meets Donna's grandfather, a policeman at the time. (We know he was in the millitary. Going from the armed forces to the police is a natural step, some would say, particularly as he has a strong desire to protect people.) This incident is what causes his obsession with aliens and his strong belief in them. It's also why he's not shocked to see Donna travelling in a flying police box...he's already seen a police-box-shaped time ship before.
    • Doesn’t explain the difference in name. Alternately, the Other Doctor doesn’t leave his universe and meets the alternate Wilfred Mott, who is named Tom Campbell. (Hey, it happened with Quinn and Logan...)


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.

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.


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.

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

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

Luke Smith is The Doctor

He's got brains, and he loves time travel! The Bane got a hold of some Timelord DNA and used human DNA to fill in the missing parts. This is why he has more trouble regenerating than other Timelords. 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 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.

The Racnoss are related to Adric

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.


Russell T. Davies have already Chekhovs Gunned themself out of the "Only thirteen regenerations"-mess

This is shamelessly stolen from the Tin Dog Podcast, but take a look on that fob-watch. It re-writes a timelord's DNA. The theory goes like this:

Once the Time Lords realized that they were forced to fight in the battlefield, they gave their soldiers in the Time War a chance to survive—a device that re-wrote their DNA. It turned them human; but, more important, when they became Time Lords again, it "rewrote their DNA so that they would have a full twelve regenerations, since they would presumably have used a lot of them if they were resorting to becoming human. Remember, this is the series that gave us "The Time Lords only resurrected me because they knew I'll be the perfect warrior for a Time War."

Rose's appearance in 'Partners in Crime' takes place after the events of 'Journey's End'

Think about it. In her appearances throughout the season, her priority is to get word to the Doctor that 'the Darkness' is coming. We know she knows who Donna is and how significant she is even before the events of 'Turn Left'; yet, in 'Partners in Crime', when Donna is standing right there, about to board the TARDIS, Rose just turns and walks away with a sad look on her face. Even if you assume that Rose doesn't know who Donna is yet, she could still leave a message at UNIT HQ or try to get in touch with Torchwood or something. Her expression suggests that she does know who Donna is and how things are going to play out for her. (Perhaps Other Ten explained what was bound to happen to Donna after they were dropped off on the alternate earth). Rose used the dimension-hopping equipment one last time before the barriers between universes came down, perhaps hoping to warn Donna, perhaps hoping to see the real Doctor one last time (perhaps hoping to apologise for kissing his double right in front of him!) - but in the end, she restricted herself to bearing silent witness to the beginning of something she'd just experienced the end of.

Rose's appearance in 'Partners in Crime' occurs between 'Turn Left' and 'The Stolen Earth'

Trying to travel to the Dalek-infested Earth, she overshoots in time by several months and ends up outside Adipose Industries. Recognising Donna, who just died on the road in front of her, she is unable (or at least unwilling) to interfere with history and sadly watches her head off towards her fate before returning to her own universe to try again.

Jenny is the Rani

Pretending to be The Doctor's Daughter is all part of an elaborate and evil plan to crush his spirit when she reveals the truth.

  • Or she is the Rani, but several regenerations before she turns evil.

River Song is Satan

Note that Satan chose the archaeologist to possess in his first appearance, and that he can see people's futures.

  • Do you mean that he possessed her, or that it's a physical thing like the Beast in the Pit?

Somehow, some way, Donna's "husband" from when she was inside CAL will track her down.

Perhaps if Donna has to sacrifice herself in some way (see above), The Doctor finds some way to take her back to the library and store her in the computer with River and her buddies, where her "husband" may appear again.

  • Except we found out at the end that he was a real person.
    • Alternatively, knowing that no hard drive ever truly deletes the data it holds. Husband-man returns to The Library and desperately tries to download whatever fragments of Donna may still exist within CAL. In doing this, husband-man tries to download other CAL-denizens to make sure he has the process right. One of his early unsuccessful attempts involves re-materialising River Song, in a younger body, with much of her memory missing. This River BECOMES the original River, that the Doctor will eventually meet for the last time at some future date.
      • Good luck with that. The Library was closed down. And what, you think the Vashtas just took the next shuttlebus to some new forests? They're still there.

CAL didn't erase the virtual version of Donna

Remember, the version of Donna we saw in the CAL environment was a copy. (It was an exact copy, but it was still a copy). Why would CAL "move" Donna out of the system rather than just copy her out? The original purpose of the system (to index books) is no longer needed now that the Vashta Nerada occupied the whole library, so it's not like there's a better use for the space. It would also help the few other people (River Song and company) we know to be stuck inside CAL: Instead of just themselves and a few computer programs, they'd have a few thousand people to hang out with.

  • CAL moved everyone out of the system because it was too full, causing her insanity. There's enough room for the few people who are stored in there, but certainly not thousands of people. The books are still in the database because CAL reads them.

The name the Doctor gave River Song...

...was Valeyard. It's something about him he wouldn't want anybody else to know, and it is technically his name. What else would be that terribly revelatory? The "only one time I could tell her" thing could refer to his being in his Valeyard regeneration at the time, or even his having turned evil...which raises a LOT of questions about River.

  • Well... Valeyard was a title, not a name. Then again, so is Doctor and Master. Plus, should the Valeyard be as much of a hopeless romantic as River describes the Doctor the previous time she saw him?
  • Alternatively, his name is "Who". It turns out he is Shazam, and also on first.

Dalek Caan's status is similar to Jonah and the Pompeiians

He went insane staring at something that should never be witnessed by a mortal, like Jonah in the Torchwood episode "Adrift." And he has visions of the future by having a connection to the Time Vortex, like the people in "The Fires of Pompeii."

  • This could give us further insight into what "time-locked" means...

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 Blimovich 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.

Other Ten is dead

Original Doctor said that human-timelords can't exist; since Other Ten was a human-timelord, he died when Donna's memory was wiped. There was no-one there to wipe his memory.

  • No, Other Ten is a Timelord-human. Doctor-Donna got the brain; Other Ten got the aging.

Other Ten survived okay because he had a downgraded timelord physique rather than an upgraded human physique.

He's running underclocked, while Donna was running massively overclocked and sure to burn out.

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.

Other Ten is the Valeyard.

It's only a matter of time before the Cybus universe gets revisited. Other Ten has already committed "genocide", demonstrating a marked ability to be Darker and Edgier than the regular Doctor. His abbreviated lifespan puts a sense of urgency to his work - he'll be wanting to steal the Doctor's remaining regenerations from him as soon as he can.

  • And perhaps "fix" Donna as well in all of this. In a way, she's a living fob watch. Couple that with the "original" Doctor all but rejecting him for being genocidal and dumping him on Rose, and he's bound to resent such implications down the line (especially because Rose can't help BUT compare him to the original). The threefold man will be looking to be make himself whole again—with the Valeyard as the dominant personality, one who TRULY believes in "no second chances".
  • If you squint a little, then the Master's statement about the Valeyard coming from somewhere betweeen the Doctor's "twelth and final" regeneration doesn't rule out Other Ten being the Valeyard's first incarnation. All it requires is for the Tenth Doctor (and by the same token, Other Ten) to have technically entered their 11th life when the averted regeneration took place (which makes Matt Smith's impending incarnation the 12th Doctor, not the 11th) and for the deleted scene where the Doctor gave Other Ten a piece of TARDIS coral to be canonical. From there, Other Ten simply needs to grow a TARDIS within his human lifespan using Donna's instructions, travel to a point in Pete's World's future where nanogenes have been invented, and then use nanogenes to purge the human DNA from his body. Then there wouldn't be anything jamming Other Ten's ability to regenerate, meaning that he should still have two regenerations remaining like the Doctor has. Although Other Ten will now have a Time Lord lifespan, he's still conscious of his limited number of regenerations and thus sets about stealing the Doctor's regenerations to extend his own life, requiring him to break through into his dimension of origin. Somewhere along the line, Rose is going to question Other Ten's descent into darkness, perhaps even being responsible for Other Ten's eventual regeneration (ala Chantho and the Master) should Other Ten become hostile toward her during the course of his Face Heel Turn. Other Ten retreats into the TARDIS upon sustaining fatal injuries, deadlocking the TARDIS closed to prevent anyone from following him, and then undergoes his first regeneration. Upon examining his new body in a mirror, he recognizes it as the familiar visage of the Valeyard and realizes that he is currently at the heart of a Stable Time Loop that will allow him to travel back in time to Gallifrey prior to the Time War without losing his mind like Dalek Caan did. Having embraced the persona of the Valeyard, Other Ten travels back in time to where the rift between universes can be breached without causing reality itself to collapse and then travels to Gallifrey shortly before the Sixth Doctor's trial, offering to help the Time Lord High Council frame the Doctor in exchange for his remaining lives. Behind the scenes, the Valeyard secretly converts his own TARDIS into a Paradox Machine so he can avert the stable time loop at the last moment without getting eaten by time monkeys. However, unbeknownst to the Valeyard, the Master (in his Ainley incarnation) has been observing his activities for some time and begins making moves of his own to undermine what he sees as a threat greater than that posed by the Doctor himself. Despite the Master's interference, the trial goes ahead as planned; the Valeyard remains poised to avert the time loop and emerge victorious. Unfortunately, the plan hits a snag; events proceed as the Valeyard remembers them in spite of the Paradox Machine, and he survives at the last moment only by using the Matrix to seize control of the Keeper. From there, the Valeyard/Other Ten's whereabouts remain unknown.

The creation of Other Ten will result in the Doctor becoming the Valeyard.

Other Ten seems a hell of a lot more rational than his progenitor. He chose to dispense with the attempts to "save" the Daleks and kill them for these reasons:

  1. He realized they could not be negotiated with.
  2. Their numbers meant that, even if their "reality bomb" was stopped, they would in and of themselves be a force of extermination to reality almost on par with thar bomb—something that the Doctor never seems to get through his head.

In other words, Other Ten represents the Doctor's rational, practical, and reasonable side, his ability to realize when things have gone past passionate pleas and warnings and when violent action is needed to get anywhere. The Doctor lost that side of himself, and with it the crucial circuit breaker to his morality that was needed to keep him from falling into Valeyard territory.

  • The Tenth Doctor has, upon inspection, a disturbingly large number of similarities with his Valeyard incarnation, suggesting that, rather than the Valeyard being a distillation of the Doctor's dark side as the Master claims, Other Ten is the distillation of the Doctor's light side. What is left of the original Doctor will eventually regenerate directly into the Valeyard in a couple of incarnations' time. In his current incarnation, the Doctor shares the Valeyard's utter lack of tolerance for necessary evils (genocide toward the Daleks and the Vervoids respectively), his banality (embarassment over being seen traveling with somebody's mother, a low that no previous incarnation has ever been seen to sink to), and his presumption of authority over the universe as a whole (compare the Doctor's speech in New Earth and his insistance that only he be allowed to have time travel technology). The most distinctive difference between the two is the Doctor's seeming envy of people with the capacity to die of old age; the Valeyard appears to have finally acknowledged the hypocrisy of his past self's words and strives to extend his lifespan before it's too late.

Donna's Victory-Guided Amnesia was just a ruse.

Oh, yes, the DoctorDonna will return. And she'll team up with Jenny, Martha, and Sarah Jane to form "The Girls From N.U.R.S.E.", a blatant Charlie's Angels spoof readily picked up by American markets due to the fact that it makes a hell of a lot more sense than Cleopatra 2525 ever did. Special guest stars include Rose for wacky parallel-universe hijinks and Joanna Lumley's 13th Doctor (from Curse of Fatal Death) for a Very Special Episode about Jenny's lack of stable parental figures.

The River Song adventures already happened, but The Doctor doesn't remember

Everyone assumes that River Song will meet the Doctor at some point in his personal future, they'll have great adventures and then split up, and then she'll accidentally contact a younger Doctor for the Forest episode. But she mentions him being able to open his TARDIS with a snap of his fingers, and he says that it's impossible. At the end, he does it. There are only two ways that can make sense:

  1. The TARDIS could always do that and he just never knew
  2. He modified the TARDIS to do that

In his past history, he went on the River Song adventures and was all snappy with the doors; but then, for some reason, his memory was wiped. (At this point in the Doctor Who continuity, picking the wrong bagel for breakfast might erase your entire memory, so this isn't too far-fetched.)

  • And he was de-aged? River is surprised at how young he looks.
    • Given the Doctor's apparent Merlin Sickness, this isn't actually all that surprising...
  • Jossed. If the kiss River and Eleven shared in "Day of the Moon" wasn't the last, then it was likely one of the last. Plus, series 6 (as of episode 12) has shown very little leeway for adventures with non-Eleven Doctors.

River Song's original Doctor was Seven.

Because no future Doctor is gonna look older than Ten. And one of Eight's defining traits is amnesia!

  • I don't really think River was referring to how young Ten looks.
  • Series 6 seems pretty firm that her first one was Eleven.

River Song is a future regeneration of the Doctor.

Either she falls in love with himself at some point, or she's just making all that up as an explanation for how she knows stuff about him. After all, who else would he give his sonic screwdriver to?

  • It's either that, or some ad hoc sonic screwdriver created for the simple fact that the Doctor knew that a screwdriver, capable of holding her ghost data, would be necessary to "save" her.
  • Jossed. She can regenerate, but we can see her prior forms, including a month after birth, in "The Impossible Astronaut"/"Day of the Moon" and "A Good Man Goes to War"/"Let's Kill Hitler".


River Song was never a companion of the real Doctor

She is future companion of Handy. Admit it, it all makes sense!

  • The Doctor was in his blue suit in this adventure, but she newer mentioned that, although apparently she was very surprised when future Doctor appeared in a new suit last time she saw him. Handy has a blue suit and assuming the Doctor doesn't have a whole wardrobe of identical suits, River couldn't have seen the real Doctor in a blue suit.
  • She said he looks younger. She might have meant it literally, because Handy can get older.
  • All the stuff about armies running away from him makes more sense since Handy wiped out all the Daleks. He really is a "no second chances" sort of a man, a quality that Ten lost over the years.
  • Handy could tell Rose whatever he said to her, Ten could not. Therefore, he could tell River his name. Ten meant that the only time he could tell anybody his name is while he is human, or at least half-human.
  • River kept insisting, that he is not her Doctor, although he wasn't even in a different regeneration. What she really meant is that her Doctor was Handy. He literally "hasn't been done yet".
  • Future Doctor had a different screwdriver. It also had remote control of the Tardis according to schematics on BBC site. We all know the Doctor will never have it, like he never will fix chameleon circuit.
  • River knew about Donna. The Doctor rarely tells his new companions about what happened to the previous ones, but since Handy is half-Donna, he might have mentioned it.
  • The Doctor gave Handy and Rose a chunk of the TARDIS in a deleted scene from DVD. RTD said we can consider it canon. River travelled in this new TARDIS occasionally. Apparently, Handy can spend only a limited amount of time in our Universe. Maybe he doesn't want to run into the Doctor.
  • Tennant is leaving after 2009 specials, none of which is being written by Steven Moffat.
  • Jossed. "Her" Doctor is Eleven.

River Song is the Doctor's future wife

  • They did, or will do, all kinds of romantic stuff together—and she's "not just anybody" to him. He could only have told her his name under a very special circumstance... like a marriage vow, perhaps?
  • Alternatively, she's NOT his future wife, and they're just trying to make us think she is.
  • Alternatively, she's a canon Expy for Expanded Universe companion Bernice Summerfield who is also
    1. a space archaeologist
    2. from the future
    3. who carries a diary with her everywhere and
    4. has shagged the Doctor.

In the spin-off media, she's his longest-serving companion.

All the planets stolen in Journey's End, except Earth, were rendered lifeless by the Daleks

The Daleks had been stealing planets all through the season. Earth was the last. Until they had the right number they couldn't kill the inhabitants using their Doomsday Device, but that wouldn't stop them using the inhabitants of the other twenty-six for target practice. So that's it for any Pyroviles, Adiposes, and Abzorbaloffs in residence at the time.

  • Alternatively, excluding those who we saw die onscreen, or were otherwise informed of the deaths of, everybody lived.
    • It should be noted that at least some of the planets were plucked out of time as well as space so it's possible all 27 worlds arrived simultaneously from the Dalek perspective and they invaded all 27 simultaneously - they're arrogant enough to fight a war on 27 fronts. Alternately, they may have invaded Earth first given old grudges.

The next Doctor will be The Watcher.

He clearly won't forget what Ten knows about Time Lord things, and forcing Four to change into Five should be easier than turning a hand into a person. And the Watcher could steer the TARDIS better than Five did. He'd have to have a hair-trigger personal perception filter to pull this off and get away clean, though....

Ten is River's Doctor

By the time we get to the Cybermen/"New Doctor" special, Ten is no longer the sad Ten we saw at the end of the last episode. So at the VERY least, an amount of time on the order of, say, a month must have gone by. We know that various doctors have had various adventures in between their televised adventures. So, what if the time between the end of Series 5 (It was 5, wasn't it?) and the special, and perhaps the time(s) between the various post-series 5 specials is actually a very long time from his perspective. At least years, possibly decades. In this time he meets River Song for the first time from her end, and have some adventures (which we don't/will not see televised). Perhaps these adventures will continue to happen at scattered times throughout the eleventh, twelfth, and what have you-dth doctor's adventures. This works because it's already been established that she's a recurring-regularly-but-not-continuously companion. Having her spend time with Ten between the season and specials explains why she recognizes the Doctor at first, and still leaves open the possibility of future adventures!

  • Series 4 - the 2010 season is series 5, and in-between are the specials.
  • Jossed, at least in broad strokes. Eleven meets River for the first time and other very early points in her timestream, even if it's plausible that Ten might have gone on unchronicled adventures.

The TARDIS door closing was a Xanatos Gambit by Handy

The Doctor is able to snap his fingers to open the TARDIS, so who's to say he can't close it as well? Since all that Handy was at the time was a hand, he could still snap his fingers.

Handy will die from the metacrisis thing

Because it would have killed Donna if she hadn't been mindwiped, and the Doctor doesn't exactly think Handy is all that and a bag of jelly babies. Why inflict someone you think is potentially genocidal on another universe if you don't want him in your own?

  • Because Ten secretly believes that Handy's pragmatic streak will be very useful in defending the alternate Earth. Or if Handy really is on the verge of death, Ten subconsciously wants a heartbroken insane cyborg Rose Tyler chasing him across dimensions.
    • In a deleted scene on the dvd extras, Ten gives 10.5 a piece of TARDIS to grow - that doesn't imply punishment to me, so much as a chance to start again.

River is the Doctor's final companion

And her personal Doctor is aware of this. Nearing the end of his last incarnation, he and River begin to collate a diary of his entire existence (though likely River doesn't realise its significance beyond wibbly wobbly convenience). Previously, though the Expanded Universe is fond of its Continuity Porn, most televised Doctors have seldom mentioned preceding adventures in all but the most passing of Continuity Nods, and River's diary seems quite at odds with this behaviour. As it happens, River is in a uniquely suited position to compile such a diary. The "one time" he could ever tell a companion his name? When he's on his final incarnation, and knows it's the choice between telling someone or taking his name's secret (whatever it may be) to the grave. Their husband-wife banter is simply a running joke between them.

  • The author feels obliged to point out this is not a theory coming from someone allergic to the Doctor having relationships (being a believer in the Doctor having a geniune granddaughter). It's simply designed as a less obvious take on the relationship between River and the Doctor than husband and wife.

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 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.

The Adipose were food.

Ms. Foster, whatever she said her real name was, was lied to. She was hired as a breeder, not a nanny. Fat is an extremely high-calorie substance that can most likely be digested by the majority of creatures in the Whoniverse, and creatures with humanlike biology at the least. Those that hired her were not the Adipose royalty, but rather a species that raised Adipose either to sustain themselves (since they might be able to synthesize the necessary vitamins and minerals to live, but not efficiently convert the necessary calories from nonbiological materials), and maybe to melt down and sell to other species. Since their farm planet was taken over, they had to find a ready source of creatures that wanted rid of some excess fat to hand out the adipose eggs to and use them either as food directly, or as a starter kit for a new farm planet once the current generation is ready to make eggs. The most likely assumption is that the Adipose are herbivores or omnivores, while the species that breed them are obligate carnivores, unless you want to go with some huge technobabble explanation or a pyramid scheme where Earth was only one target of many.

The Midnight entity is the spirit of the Beast

The Beast boasted about it could never been destroyed. Sounded like showoff, but what if it's true? The Midnight entity was powerful, hated specialy the Doctor and took delight in the Mind Rape it put him trough.

  • This would also put the Midnight entity in the realistic position to be the prophecied Four-time-knocker, who will... well... we will see.
    • Jossed. The four-time knocker was Wilfred, not the Beast or the Midnight creature.

The "Midnight" entity is Fenric.

  • A bodiless Eldritch Abomination able to possess others and has a grudge against the Doctor? Seems obvious in hindsight.

Donna is not the Rani, she is Romana.

Note: This a different take on several theories floating around that Donna is the Rani.

  • Romana figured that the end of the Time War would mean the end of the Time Lords, so she did as much as she could, then regenerated, Chameleon Arched herself, and hid on Earth as Donna. The large ring so prominently featured in shots of Donna? Her equivalent of a fob-watch. Her Donna personality didn't want to go with the Doctor at first, but then the subliminal memories caused her to seek him out. Donna can't handle the Doctor's brain because as Donna, she has a human physiology. Something in the specials will trigger the ring, and cause her to revert to Romana, just in time to make a Heroic Sacrifice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stahlman's gas is the Silurian equivalent of the Osterhagen Key.

It just takes longer to work.

  • Alternatively: Each bomb that would be detonated by the Osterhagen Key is directly over a pocket of Stahlman's Gas. That's how the Earth can be destroyed with a few comparatively small bombs.

When 10.5 dies, the grown TARDIS piece he got in the deleted scene will make its way back to its native universe.

Where Donna and the only living Doctor are. It's not got decent upkeep, and it's practically a bootleg TARDIS, so when a time lord investigates the time/space disruption caused by its return he or she thinks that another time lord died there a while back and the TARDIS wad just rotting with no one to take care of it. The investigating time lord brings it back to Gallifrey to be decommissioned, and meanwhile, a young Time Lord calling himself The Doctor has just entered the scrapyard looking for a getaway vehicle...

Martha's previous fiance was killed during the Dalek invasion.

Which is why she ended up with Mickey.

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

She got into a fight with Martha's mom.

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

Jenny will regenerate into Jenny Everywhere.

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.

Donna has a Fixed Point somewhere in the future.

That's why, even though the Earth is invaded by aliens every year, she always misses it - Because Destiny Says So. Perhaps the Fixed Point is, in fact, the point at which Donna remembers everything. Thus, she can't remember everything before that point.

The montage of dead characters in Journey's End was much longer in the Doctor's mind than in the televised version.

It actually began with the Old Mother, Antodus, and Eprim.

The scene with Martha and Mickey in The End of Time Part 2 was actually several years in the future.

It would at least explain why there was no mention of what happened to Martha's fiance.

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 you know, most of CN was taken over by...you guessed it, CN Real! Angry, Davros went on to 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:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I Cs ZE 17 M Hw A

  • 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.

Jack becomes the Time Vortex.

If he isn't the Face of Boe (either because he was messing with The Doctor or because that really was just a coincidental nickname), and thus does die, the universe would be full of Jacks that hit the end of the universe and went back in time. Eventually, Jack finds a way to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence and starts living outside of time. I chose the Time Vortex specifically because this is why it and Rose made Jack immortal: Because if he wasn't made immortal, the Vortex itself wouldn't exist. Funnily enough, this means Jack got into Rose's pants before the Doctor could, even if was only by wearing them while possessing her.

    • This is a bit like the whole Barry Allen thing they had in the DC comics Crisis On Infinite Earths, where the Flash upon death became the lightning bolt which gave him his powers in the first place. This is interetsing (and actually doesn't nessecarily undo the Face of Boe thing.)
    • And then there's the line...

Bad Wolf: I create myself.

Jack is the reason "two arms, two legs, one head, and bilateral symmetry" is the basic template for sentient life.

Related to the above guess, but it also works as a result of him having sex with any being he meets that's attracted to him (by which I meen, any being he meets that's physically capable of dancing and then some), and every so often it results in a Half-Human Hybrid. Every so often with those, it results in a fertile Half-Human Hybrid that goes on to spread his 51st-century human genes to the rest of the species' descendants. This, of course, includes the Time Lords.

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

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

The reason the Doctor told River Song his real name was...

...so she could win the trust of his younger self, closing the Stable Time Loop.

Mickey is descended from Rosita, or Jackson Lake, or both of them

We know as per Rise of the Cybermen that his dad is called Jackson Smith - could be an old family name...

The alternate timeline splits from this one after The Next Doctor

The Cybermen only turned up in Victorian London as a result of Rift activity, which is a result of the Parallel universe. It's a Stable Time Loop, caused by the Dalek's antics with the Void. In the other universe, Torchwood was founded earlier which might also explain how they're able to 'monitor the timelines', having had Cybermen technology that had crossed the void previously. There're still a few details to work out, but this seems to make sense.

  • Depending on whether you mean THE Rift, or the Canary Wharf Rift...if it's the former, it seems unlikely, given it's hundreds of miles from Cardiff.

The Doctor is sowing the instruments to his own demise

It seems like 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 ...
  • 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.

We have not seen the last of Jenny.

  • That's so certain it shouldn't even count as "wild" or "guessing".
    • It doesn't even count as guessing when you know that Jenny's big resurrection scene was demanded by Steven Moffat in order for him to be able to throw her into future episodes that he will be showrunning.
      • ...demanded? Isn't it actually that he simply suggested it to make it less depressing and then, y'know, forgot about it til the episode aired?

Jenny is Susan's mother

Susan appeared to be human. Jenny is The Doctor's human daughter. Think about it.

    • Jenny isn't human, she's Time Lord (Well, Time Lady), with two hearts. Susan is, technically, a Time Lady, except the concept, IRL, hadn't been fully developed yet.
      • Jenny is Gallifreyan, but she isn't a Timelord. She hasn't been through the Academy or been exposed to the Untempered Schism. She has no greater understanding of time and space than any other non-time-travelling sentient individual and probably does not have the ability to regenerate, (as that ability is implied to be an artificial enhancement). In short, Jenny has more in common with humans than she does with her "father".

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 exact size of Belgium" is a code set as a Shout-Out by an elder Tenth doctor, or the Eleventh or Twelfth Doctor.

The TARDIS fused at least two of herself, but the Davison Doctor and the Tennant Doctor never fused because they were separate regenerations. Ten either fused with his later incarnation, or Ten/Eleven/Twelve were out of the ship. "The exact size of Belgium" was later set as the code which means, "The exact size of 'big enough that we're ****ed'."

Chaucer says "What the Cædmon?"

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

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.

Time Lord Victorious or not, Adelaide Brookes would have still died

Fixed point in time. As the episode showed, as long as she died somehow, Mankind taking off into space would have still happened. If the Doctor hadn't of alienated her, she might have just been hit by a car, slipped on some ice, or some other random occurence. This just means that the Doctor acting the way he did only ensured that her death was Ten times as dramatic and painful as it could have been. Although this may not be all that much of a guess.


The Midnight entity is...

Irrelevant. The entity isn't the real monster of the story; humans are. That's why we never find out what, exactly, it is.

The Doctor is the father of the Nightmare Child.

The Doctor in "Fear Her" and "The Doctor's Daughter" mentions that he has been a father and suggested he isn't any longer. The Nightmare Child existed during the Time War which was X years before the "The Doctor's Daughter" in which he says he was a father "a long time ago." What proof do I have that this means that the Nightmare Child is his daughter/son? None, except it would be dramatic and this IS Doctor Who.

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 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 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 ruthlessy 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

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.

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 ..

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...

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

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

The twelfth Doctor will have facial hair.

The Doctor Wants to Become the Valeyard

At least at some level. The Doctor often seems to have a martyr complex/deathwish. He's 900 some years old 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 13 regenerations rule isn't actually a fact of Time Lord biology, but a Time Lord law.

Instead of Time Lord simply dying when they use up their thirteenth life, the Time Lords execute them as a form of population control, also because they're evil. Now that they're gone, the Doctor is no longer under the thumb of this rule and will continue to regenerate into his 14th, 15th, 16th, and so on, lives. This is why the Doctor is so reluctant to being among his own people, he discovered this and decided not to stick around. The Time Lord ruling class keep it a secret from the populace, but didn't knew that the Doctor knew about it and simply assume that he's a renegade. The reason the Master is always stealing lives from people is to so he never technically passes the threshold that would get him killed. And the Time Lord's promising people another set of regenerations is not that they change their biology to let them live longer, but they simply reprogram whatever machine it is that enacts these executions to extend their limit. How does this machine work? It doesn't kill them outright, but simply keeps the regeneration process from happening more than twelve times to any specific citizen. Why don't the people in the know on this, namely the President, make sure it doesn't happen to them? Because their underlings want them dead so they can take power, each new President resolving to not let himself die, but is always outwitted by those that want him to die.

  • There was a really good theory regarding this. It basically says that, the more a Time Lord regenerates, the less mentally stable he becomes. The limit on regenerations was eventually imposed because it was found that number 13 was the point when most Time Lords went, or had already gone, completely insane. This pretty much explains every crazy thing the Master has ever done, up to and including eating a bunch of hobos. Heck, Time Lord elders probably never even had to do anything more than point silently to a picture of the Master when asked to justify the regeneration limit.
    • We can even see this happening first-hand to the Doctor as he moves along through his regenerations. He started out as a fairly normal, if oddly free-spirited, Time Lord. Then as his lives went on he got progressively nuttier. Four was kind of weird. Five had some issues. Six... well, let's not even talk about Six. And on and on until finally, he's happily ripping apart the Timelines at the seams while screaming about being the 'Time Lord Victorious.' At this rate his Thirteenth incarnation will be a psychotic serial killer... with time powers.
      • The Valeyard kinda supports the above theory.

The Master faked his death in "The Last of the Timelords".

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 timelords 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.

Doctor Who's in the same universe as Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

In The Pandorica Opens, the Doctor finds River's message in a place that looks suspiciously similar to that movie. Also, Tweedledum and Tweedledee are actually Sontarans.

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 TE Nnant 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.

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?

When Nine regenerated into Ten, he had just recently kissed Rose and was now standing only a few feet away from her. His next incarnation ended up being young, brown-eyed, brown-haired (Rose's hair is brown under the bleach), lightly-freckled, and spoke in a London accent. His personality, too, ended up far more Rose-like than it had been previously. This would explain why he had so much trouble getting over her- she literally was a part of him!

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.
  • Nine - Unknown. Died in the Last Great Time War.
  • Ten - Rose Tyler. Explained above.
  • 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 timelords 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.

Rose and The Doctor weren't just holding hands that whole time.

They were giving eachother Vulcan kisses!

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 prevent 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.

Rose is a Time Lady is River Song

Sometime while being Bad Wolf, Rose made herself a Time Lady who could cross universe, then made herself forget about that. So, years later in the alternate-universe, she regenerates into who else but River Song. So she warps into the real universe and goes on living her life as River Song til she meets the 12th or 13th Doctor, and somehow River/Rose proves that she's Rose. And they go back on adventures. And the Doctor would already trust her enough to tell her his name... And, if you're saying "but River died at the end of Forest of the Dead!", 10 never said if he would or wouldn't regenerate after that. So River/Rose simply didn't regenerate again (alternately, 'River' was Rose's 13th incarnation (all the others regenerated due to failed attempts at crossing universes and her 13th try got it right) which is why she died permanently in Forest of the Dead).

  • Jossed. We see River Song being outright born in series 6.

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 Timelord/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 New series Valeyard will be played by Dylan Moran

Because it would be just too awesome.

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.

Vortex Manipulators allow someone to cross their own timeline.

The doctor is NOT a timelord.

As WMG has cleverly pointed out, everyone is a timelord... except the doctor.

Jenny is dead.

Not long after she set off in the rocket she got into an accident due to how naive she was and was injured in a way she couldn't recover from and died permantly. Or she starved to death in the rocket due to not being able to find a planet to land on and get food.

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.
    • Being Amy's daughter also explains the outrageously flirtatious bit.

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

Why? Rule of Funny.

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 flys by TARDIS now.


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

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.

River is the Doctor, in a weird way.

Right, we all remember the Valeyard, right? A "false Doctor" made by the Time Lords from the Doctor's darkness? Well, the Doctor doesn't just have darkness, he has light. And this light would have to go somewhere. Yes, I'm saying that River Song is the Valeyard's "twin".

Here's the thing; River's not a perfect person. This is because while the Doctor tries to do good, it often goes wrong. And when it does, well, it goes spectacularily wrong. Everybody Lives just enough times to make River stable.

While the Valeyard was pulled straight back to Six's time, River wasn't pulled back herself, but rather she got dragged along in the "wake", which is why she's going backwards in the Doctor's timeline. She gets on well with his companions because he does.

Oh, and the reason she calls him "sweetie"? The Doctor is a narcissist. Seriously, the man is in love with himself.

  • Jossed. We see River being born in series 6; she's the child of Amy Pond and Rory Williams.

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.

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.

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

When Martha helps capture a Toclefane body/shell/SealedEvilInaCan, 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 Eleventh Doctor will procure another fez

Because fez's 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.

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".

By saving Caecilius and his family, the Doctor accidentally screwed Britain and its government over.

Those who read the Cambridge Latin Course know that due to the fact Quintus's family dies, Quintus and Clemens escape to Britain. By going to Britain, Quintus meets Salvius and becomes important in his later prosecution (being one of the witnesses who testifies against him, turning the trial against Salvius's favor). If Quintus relocates with his family and survives, he'll never go to Britain, he'll never stop Salvius, Salvius will take over Britain, and will become a power-hungry dictator that royally screws up the country. Wrong family, Doctor.

  • This troper just finished Stage 1 in the course and just realized the Caecilius from the book was the Caecilius in that episode. Damn you David Tennant. (I didn't mean that... Your too sexy...)

Sometime in the next series, the Doctor will end up in Area 51.

  • Indeed. He was held captive there in Day of the Moon as a cover.

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.

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.

At the end of Love and 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.

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.

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.

The Ninth/Tenth Doctor's leitmotif is a lullaby his mother once sang.

For the purposes of this theory, this leitmotif exists in-universe as a wordless lullaby the Doctor's mother sang. As the Eighth regenerated into the Ninth following the Time War, the lullaby came back to him as a remembrance to everything he'd lost. The lullaby went on to follow him through his next two incarnations as an Ear Worm and Most Wonderful Sound; playing inside his head in many varied situations. Perhaps it is simply stuck in his head, but perhaps there's a larger reason - this tune played when the Doctor and the character implied to be his mother finally met and acknowledged each other. It's possible that, like his recurring meetings with Wilf and the heartbeat Donna heard, this was because it heralded that event. The Ood, finding the song inside the Doctor's mind, included its tune in the final song they sang to him as he regenerated. Though the Eleventh remembers the tune, it has passed from his moment-to-moment memory and back into his subconscious, and so is no longer used within the soundtrack.

Amy Pond is the TARDIS

This blog post explains it beautifully.

  • Amy is the Doctor's fortieth companion. The TARDIS is a type 40 capsule.

River is the daughter of Rory and Amy

And not only that if Amy is the Tardis, River is the child of the Tardis as well, which is why she can pilot the Tardis so well.

  • Confirmed. All of it. ALL OF IT.


Claire Bloom's character in "The End of Time" (a.k.a. the Church Lady, the Woman in White, the Woman on Wilf's TV, etc.) is...

  • ...Romana.
    • Timothy Dalton's Time Lords appear to be a fairly sinister bunch. Given their history, though, it would make sense for there to be good ones as well, and what better choice to represent them than a regenerated Romana?
    • She opposed Rassilon's plan. The Doctor taught her well. Also, Rassilon probably overthrew her after she had him resurrected.
    • The EU maintains that she had become president of the council by the time of the beginning of the Time War, so she'd most likely have kept a seat on the senate even after being removed. Plenty of opportunity, and also lots of calls to bring her back.
      • There was also (I believe) mention of a "President Romana" in one of the Annuals released way back in 2005 or 2006.
  • ...Donna.
    • After Wilf asked the Doctor who she was, the camera focused oddly on Donna.
  • ...Susan.
    • Wilf asks the Doctor who she is. The Doctor's answer is to Glance Significantly at Donna. Need I say more?
    • So the Doctor was telling Wilf "That woman you saw is to me what Donna is to you [granddaughter]?"
    • This theory also explains the Church Lady's otherwise enigmatic comment about being "lost... so long ago."
  • ...the Doctor's mother.
    • She's a Time Lady, looks pretty old, tries to help Wilf save the Doctor's life—and the Doctor's reaction when he sees her.. Sorry for not making this clearer, for people who haven't seen the episode yet. But if you have, you'll understand.
    • Word of God confirms this. The commentary for part two has RTD saying that's who she is. HOWEVER, since this wasn't confirmed in story, and with RTD no longer involved in Doctor Who, this could change.
    • It should also be remembered that RTD delights in being a lying liar who lies. He has said things more than once that were proved lies within a season.
  • ...Susan's mother. (i.e. either the Doctor's daughter or daughter-in-law.)
    • Why not?
  • ...Ace.
    • The EU is rather... confused about her eventual fate, but the original plan was that she would join the academy and become a Time Lady - and given how soon the Time War follows... This gives us a great chance to bring her back.
      • Jossed: Ace's fate was revealed on an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures.
  • ...Flavia.
    • She was actually Acting president in the Doctor's place at one point.
  • ...the Rani.
  • ...Jenny.
    • That would mean the Doctor suddenly realised that there might be an opportunity to prevent the Time War. That would be a twist.
  • ...the Master.
    • Don't tell me it wouldn't be hilarious.
  • ...the White Guardian.
    • She was dressed all in white, knew exactly what to tell Wilf to get him to do the right thing at the right time, and randomly appeared and disappeared without obvious technological help. And considering that the Rassilon and the other Time Lords where trying to destroy time (and the Doctor trying to control time in The Waters of Mars), it would be weird if she didn't show up to nudge things back in the right direction.
  • ...Rassilon.
    • The Doctor was calling her "Rassilon", not the Lord President.
  • ...the TARDIS.
    • Whenever she appears onscreen, the TARDIS's theme starts playing.
  • ...all of the above.
    • She's not Susan, Romana, Jenny, Donna, or the Doctor's Mother: She's all of them. Each woman took turns taking in that form, for reasons I still haven't quite worked out yet, but they did one goal: The above theory about setting up Ten's regeneration.
    • When Ten and Donna pretended to be brother and sister, a Roman commented on their family resemblance.
  • ...playing everyone in a massive Xanatos Gambit.
    • Expanding on previous theories, Donna can't consciously use her timelord knowledge, but she can use it unconsciously. That was how she led Wilf and the Doctor to where the Master was. She gets in contact with either, Susan, Romana, Jenny, or The Doc's Mom, and they all conspire together to save both the Time lords, and the Doctor himself. First,The time lady, as any of them besides Donna (at least the Donna of the present) guides Wilf to the Doctor at just the right moment (something the Doctor himself is starting to notice. Because it's through Wilf that he gets the message about where the Master is, and the weapon that allows him to defeat Rassilon. Now the Gun is important. Why? Because both Rassilon, and the Master had to believe that the Doctor is willing to kill one of them to save others. If he had just used his Sonic Screwdriver, the Master might not have performed his Heroic Sacrifice, and the Doctor would have been killed by Rassilon, ensuring that the Timelords really were all gone. Next while all this is going on, The Time lady gathers up other Timelords who weren't on board with Rassilon's plan (but kept their mouths shut in order to ensure they weren't caught) haul ass off the planet so that when the Doctor sends it back, they don't get caught. But wouldn't they still be pulled back when the link is broken? Nope, cause they made their own link: Wilfred. Hence another reason for the Time lady's contact with him. Whether it's permanent or not, I can't say. Finally, as many here have pointed out, Ten had a few issues. He was a good guy at heart, and he always tried to do right, but as The Waters Of Mars showed, this could go wrong. The Doctor was heading down a dark path, and as the people who loved him most, they decided that they had to save him. The problem was, Ten really liked his current form, and would likely never willingly regenerate (he might not even no how) so once again, Wilf comes on the scene, as it would clearly take a situation like saving a friend to get the Doctor to willingly put himself in a situation where regeneration was likely. As Eleven, he will hopefully learn from his previous self's actions, both good and bad, and eventually, the escaped timelords may reveal themselves to him, allowing him to move on completely. The only flaw was that one of them needed to be there to trigger the Doctor's ephiphany about how to stop Rasillon, meaning that either Susan, Roman, a future version of Jenny, a future version of Donna, or the Doctor's own mother is trapped back in the Time war, but it was a small price to pay to save their people
  • ...responsible for saving the Doctor's life.
    • The prophecy is that he would die, but as Ten himself reveals, Regeneration (to him specifically) is just like death. There were two interpretations of the prophecy. One where he dies for real, and one where just the Tenth dies and regenerates into the Eleventh. Her communicating with Wilf, convincing him to come along, and in turn bringing his service revolver, which the Doctor finally took when it seemed the Time Lords were returning was all part of a big plan to have all the right tools in place to allow the Doctor to continue living in a new form.
  • ...the former wife of the Doctor.
    • And Susan's grandmother. The First Doctor was pretty old psyhicaly (he must have been in that same regeneration for a long time), like she is.
  • A later form of the doctor
    • Why not?

Most of the population of London felt very foolish on Christmas Day, 2008.

They all left town expecting yet another alien invasion, which never happened because the Doctor was in the Victorian era instead, and were roundly mocked by pundits/comedians/etc.; as a result many or most of them stay in London over Christmas 2009.

Of course, the events of Christmas 2009 appear to be world-encompassing, so they don't provide a particularly good argument for leaving London in 2010...

  • Well the Christmas the Doctor was away for would be christmas 2009 since the who "present" has been a year ahead. However, they could of made "the next doctor" be set in 1851 so that the events of "The End of Time" are set christmas 2009 ready for when the show returns with MS as The Doctor. That way the "present" will be the year of broadcast and the new people in charge of the show don't have to worry about that.
    • The End of Time definitely takes place in 2009. And I just realized this as I was reading this WMG. Obama is referred to as President Obama. And anyone who watched his inauguration knows that it happened in January 2009. He was not president for Christmas 2008.
  • Actually, Christmas 2008 was "Voyage of the Damned" (which aired Christmas 2007).

The Doctor ended the Time War (destruction of Gallifrey and all) in his tenth incarnation.

And Eight/Nine watched it happen, knowing full well the hyperactive skinny twit with spiky hair was a future version of himself. It's yet another reason Ten doesn't want to die - the longer he lives, the longer he can put off his inevitable actions.

Addendum: This is why he wanted to be ginger. He didn't know which incarnation it was that destroyed Gallifrey, but he did notice how ginger he wasn't.

    • OK, that is just brilliant.

The Time Lords in 'The End Of Time' are Lawful Evil.

Judging by the way the Time Lord President calls 'the end of time itself' their victory, it seems to be hinting that they are falling in line with the likes of necromancers/Necrons; that they believe the only way to keep time and dimensions in order is to destroy it utterly...

  • Well, they're all wearing Prydonian colors, and the Prydonian chapter was sort of the Slytherin House of Time Lord society...
    • The Doctor's Prydonian, I think Romana was, and Borusa was fine until he went insane. Try again.
  • Word of God (Russell T. Davies) confirms this. He said "I've always known the Time Lords were evil."

Wilfred Mott is an aged, weakened and retired Thirteenth Doctor near the end of his life, likely having used the Chameleon Arch.

Besides the odd anagram that can be formed from his name ("time lord tfw"(the father who, if you belive the internet) or "time lord wtf". No,really.), it is far from coincidence the number of situations both he and Donna have been in, and the latter's strong non-romantic attachment to the Doctor. Perhaps the Doctor wanted to live out what was left of his life in relative peace (versus what regularly happens to him), and later discovered that Wilf wasn't what he appeared to be. He * had* to become him in order to preserve time, and possibly to prevent himself from becoming the Valeyard.

  • I don't buy this theory at all, but if it's an anagram, why not "time lord ftw"? "ftw" = for the win.

For the Doctor, being 'near the end of his life' could mean that he'd still have a good seventy or so years left, meaning it would be possible that he traveled to some time pre-World War II and crafted his new identity there.

The Doctor's regeneration from Ten to Eleven was so violent because of backed-up energy from his averted regeneration in Journey's End.

Also, based on how lucid Eleven seems to be (besides being slightly distracted from the whole "crashing" thing, but you would be too if you'd just changed bodies), this may well have helped removed whatever caused problems with the Doctor's regenerations in the past. Or maybe the trouble is about to begin.


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.

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!

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 fine 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 thwy went TWO seconds out of sync with everything else!


Donna became immortal or gained the ability to regenerate when she merged with Handy.

She will watch all her friends and family grow old and die while she lives on; then she will begin to wonder, Who Wants to Live Forever?? Despite having her mind wiped, she will have some small recollection of The Doctor and know that he can help her die; then she will begin to search for him. Either this will be the end for her, or she will regenerate into a full Time Lord and remain with The Doctor, possibly bearing his child, who will then go back in time at some point and become the First Doctor, handily explaining the Eighth's cryptic remark in the movie.

  • NO. We are NOT stuffing that pretzel down causality's throat. The "Team SMASK" gang at the "Doctor Who Cat Macros" Livejournal group probably has the right idea, which leads to...
    • It's biologically impossible to be your own parent. We (simplifying) are composed of half our mother's DNA and half our father's DNA. To be your own parent would mean your DNA was identical to your father only. In this particular instance it also means that the Doctor would be both half-timelord and quarter-timelord (and thus 1/16th timelord etc. etc.) since his Gallifreyan heritage is 'diluted' if he parents himself.
      • WRONG! It's improbable, not impossible. If you were your own father and the sperm that got there was ONLY composed of the genes you got from your father and, logically, the egg was only the genes you got from your mother, it would work. It's VERY improbable, but if there's one thing The Doctor specializes in, it's doing the almost-impossible but really only VERY improbable.
      • Not at all. If the Stable Time Loop says that you're already your own parent, then you'll pass on half your genes, and your other parent will pass on half of her genes, which will be identical to the other half of your genes Because Destiny Says So. This works even better when the other parent also has your DNA, as Doctor-Donna does.
  • Back on track this does make sense. If we assume that the merger and split shuffled their attributes, then none would disappear. Handy ages and can't regenerate like a human, so Doctor Donna should logically be unaging and can regenerate.

The Doctor's name is Victorious.

He said so himself--"I am the Time Lord Victorious."

  • The line is "A Time Lord, victorious." As in, he has 'defeated' time, bended the laws, etc. Still a valid theory, though.
    • To quote the exact speech (which by the way was bloody chilling): "For a long time now I thought I was just a survivor, but I'm not. I'm the winner. That's who I am. The Time Lord Victorious." In other words, the victorious Time Lord. The point of the speech was that being the last of the Time Lords wasn't a Last of His Kind deal, but instead it's going to be more like Highlander where he gets to do whatever he wants with his magical blue box of time because no one else is around to say no. Then Adelaide Brook says no.

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?

The Twelth 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.

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.

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.

The "Goodbye Tour" in the End of Time included his last encounter with River Song.

"You were wearing a new suit." His blue suit is on 10.5, his brown suit is wrecked, the only thing in his wardrobe that he knows fits is his "unlucky" tuxedo, which would appear new to new her owing to his aversion to wearing it, unless necessary.

  • He has more than one blue suit. He wore one in "The Waters of Mars," remember?
    • Bugger! Right, but the Doctor did not wear his blue suit to The (Lux) Library. So the blue suit would appear new.
      • He did wear the blue suit to The Library.
  • The 11th Doctor stated during his appearance on The Sarah Jane Adventures that the "Goodbye Tour" included every past companion he ever had, so it can safely be assumed that this theory is correct.
    • That only means he met River, not that he gave her the red settings sonic with the data ghost.
  • Ten barely knew River; not enough to pinpoint the last day of her timeline without acquiring serious spoilers for his own. It is far more likely to have been Eleven. Eleven, of course, went on his own Farewell Tour and might have done it then, but it's just as possible that this date is still in his future.

Some Time Lords escaped at the End of Time.

Gallifrey was back in the non-timelocked Universe. Not for long, but you can bet that some Time Lords like to live and jumped into their TARDISes (?) and ran. After all, they knew the Doctor survived, and on whom would you bet your money - the Doctor, or Rassillon? Thought so. The Survivors will rebuild a whole new Time Lord Society. It may be the only way to bring back the Master - or to explain the appearance of the Time Lady which Wilfried met. Timelock, remember?

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.

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.


The mystery Time Lord was the Master's father

Two people disagreed with the Lord President's plan in the end; the mystery Time Lady that was despearately trying to save the Doctor and a Time Lord whose face we never saw. This Time Lord was the Master's father. Upon learning that it was the President (and to an extent all of the other Time Lords and Ladies) who drove his son insane and was responsible for all the harm he caused, he joined forces with the mystery woman to try and stop the End of Time. Unfortunately, the Master was too preoccupied to notice him there.

The Master brainwashed himself to be obedient to the original should he ever be duplicated.

Because he's Crazy Prepared, and it would probably be as easy as looking into a mirror and saying, "I am the Master! If you ever discover yourself to NOT be the original Master, you will obey me. If I'm dead, obey the oldest clone. In case of a tie, obey any obvious hierarchies dictated by circumstance, or simply form one randomly." This, obviously, resolves the question of how the Master Race managed to function as well as it did.

A few Masters survived Rassilon's device.

Either due to coincidentally being in remote areas, having prepared for this eventuality, or having died before the device activated and regenerated, de-linking them from the template. What's more, they don't remember Redemption Equals Death-ing, so they're just as mad as ever.

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.
    • Not necessarily: that's a common and imprecise figure of speech.

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...

Rassilon was possessed or acting under the influence of the Black Guardian in The End of Time

If you assume that Claire Bloom's character was the White Guardian, then the Black Guardian is bound to be lurking around somewhere. Most likely, he (she/it) knew how desperate the Time Lords were and offered Rassilon a way to escape the time lock (which Rassilon then presented as his own plan to the unknowing High Council) in return for killing the Doctor (which was Turlough's initial goal in Mawdryn Undead while also being controlled by the Black Guardian). This would also fit in with the White Guardian's comments (the Black Guardian will be waiting for the third encounter) at then end of Enlightenment after the Doctor had defeated the Black Guardian for the second time.


Jenny will take the Doctor's place after his final incarnation (or death)

How do you continue a series, when your The Nth Doctor excuse has a limit? Replace him with a similar character which would nevertheless allow the show to move in a different direction. It's plausible that Jenny could aqquire a TARDIS, a sonic screwdriver and essentially become a female version of the Doctor. Personally I'm against her replacing the Doctor himself, but wouldn't objecty to her starring in yet another spin-off.

  • Hopefully, you are correct if the Doctor truly has a limit of twelve regenerations. Perhaps she shall gain the ability to regenerate somehow (if she doesn't have that capability already), and will regenerate into males (at least some of the time). Being a clone of the Doctor, she may start referring to herself by that name, effectively replacing the original Time Lord.

Nobody is the Valeyard and the thirteen regenerations limit can be explained away with a single line

The time war did some weird things to Gallifrey, meaning nobody can visit it before the time war happened for some reason that will never be explained. But it also meant the doctor wouldn't be able to find any of the time lords too. So how did Ainley's Master get to the Valeyard? He couldn't, unless he had some contact with someone who knew where and when and how the Valeyard would be. The Valeyard will at least never be able to go back and make trial of a time lord happen, because there's no way that he can. Something probably sorted out during the time war. He probably fought in it. Hell, he survived as the keeper, he could have CAUSED it. But thanks to all this wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff he may not even happen, as far as we know at least. Or might for a few seconds but then a companion stops it. It's unlikely though.

The original idea for the valeyard's creation was that he was in fact the doctor desperate to increase his own lifespan, which brings me to how they can just dismiss this problem. There's been a bunch of implications that William Hartnell wasn't the first doctor, meaning that matt smith could be the 56th for all we know. He can just go "Ooh, that's a surprise. Guess I'm luckier than I thought." and it can be explained down the road. Or if somebody who has a knowledge of time lord biology is on board, they can mention it and he'd say "Long story." Easy. In fact it was never mentioned if the limit was imposed by the time lords or was biological, but probably biological, Either way, there were ways of gaining more and the doctor almost certainly knows how.

  • Are we even sure that rule applies anymore? I can't recall it being mention "once" in the new series, though I do seem to recall the Doctor at one point claiming to be immortal. Are we sure the producers haven't just abandoned the thirteen doctors rule?

Further more, does the doctor still have the eye of harmony in his tardis? He c

The Doctor appearing on Bowie Base 1 was not a coincidence

The timing was way too good. Showing up the exact day the accident that killed them all took place, and seeing what really went down. Something brought him there. And then when he immeadiately realized he needed to bolt, things kept happening to keep him there until he got a little too attached. I suspect even the Doctor knew this would happen deep down, although not to the extent that it did, another reason why he wanted to get the hell out of dodge. Some force was trying to change the Doctor into a much darker person, and if not for Adelaide Brooke things would have been much worse.

Wilfred Mott is really the Meddling Monk

Turned human by a chameleon arch, just like the master. It's irony on a massive scale; first the Doctor wiped Donna's mind thinking she wouldn't be able to handle a time lord mind, but she is already part time lord. Second, he finally gets one over on the Doctor, but doesn't realize it.

  • You're forgetting Sister Wendy the Italian Renaissance scholar and King Arthur's sister Dora Winifred.

Lucy Saxon is the Rani in human form.

The Rani had a lot of tension with the Master. Because she was an exile she was turned into a human form and put as a human child on Earth in the 20th century to keep her from her experiments. She was raised by Lord Cole as a normal girl. She started to have an obession with Harold Saxon because he reminded her of someone she couldn't place. Even when she found out that he was the Master she still could not place why she seemed to know him before she met him. This also explains why she seemed to have such a bloodlust.

The true nature of the Nightmare Child

The Nightmare Child (or, feel free to substitute any of the other horrors of the Time War that the Doctor mentions in The End of Time) is not a being as we understand the term. The constant screwing with the timeline that the Time War involved eventually earned a backlash from the very foundation of physics itself in the form of a mathematical concept so horrendously complex that it not only achieved some sort of sentience, but it destroys everything in its path. (Of course, when the Doctor talks about Davros' command ship "flying into the jaws of the Nightmare Child" in The Stolen Earth, he is speaking figuratively.)

    • Or, perhaps, it was really eaten by a math equation. I've heard of stranger things.
      • You could argue that the characterization of each incarnation of the Doctor is determined by dividing the number of incarnations the Doctor has had by the first episode number of each series. The presence of a "Prisoner Zero" indicates that the episode The Eleventh Hour was Episode 0 of Series 5. Dividing the Doctor by zero may have placed the First Doctor in the Twilight Zone in the 1960s. Nowadays, dividing the Doctor by zero seems to place the Eleventh Doctor in the Twilight Saga.
    • The Nightmare Child is The Nightmare Child (KISS: Psycho Circus Video Game). Duh.
  • Here's an idea; maybe it's a sentient black hole, programmed by the Timelords. It consumes everything like a normal BH, but actually hunts things down, like Daleks.
  • My theroy is that the Nightmare Child was a sentient, psychic nebula (about the size of the largest stars). It would travel though time and space looking for planets with sentient life, then consume them. It's psychic powers would cause fear, pain and insanity, the closer you were the worse you felt, able to affect even daleks and TARDISES. It left temporal scars, where returning to a point in space where it had been, even thousands of years later, would cause you to go insane. Its name comes from :A. how it changed shape to reflect the infant forms of the creatures it was destroying, just to mess with them; and B. how, even decades before its arrival, nightmares causing fear and insanity would inflict the populace. if you were consumed by it, you would never die, you would be trapped in the never ending nightmare.

After the Doctor runs out of regenerations, the Master will become the protagonist of the show

With the drums gone, the Master will be sane, but still crazy enough to make an interesting protagonist. He will have another objective, as opposed to Doctor's "saving everyone", but eventually undergo some personality changes (like the Doctor changed since the times of egoistic First). He will also come up with a way to bring the Doctor back, because the Universe'd be pretty dull without him! This may include some "Master vs. Timelords" or "Master&Doctor vs. Timelords" dynamics, because that just would be awesome, and the show needs a Big Baddie.

  • There is a spoof of the universe collapsing because of Ten and Eleven interacting. In one of Ten's episodes, the Doctor goes to Planet One and meets the Duke of Manhattan, who looks somewhat like Eleven, and the Doctor refers to the Duke by some of the same monikers with which he refers to the Master. Eleven may be the Master as well as the Doctor.

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.

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.

Both The Brigadier and Sarah Jane Smith will have offscreen Heroic Sacrifices.

This troper cannot see either one going out any other way.

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

He's recovering from that addiction himself.

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).

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 Tenth Doctor's superhuman stamina/endurance was what enabled him to put off his Regeneration for so long.

While not Superman-powerful by any stretch, Ten would qualify as a superhuman given some of the things he endured: massive radiation (at least the kind in Smith and Jones), getting electrocuted on top of the Empire State building, arsenic, and the insane jump he made in The End of Time.

In The Stolen Earth/Journey's End, the staff of A Charitable Earth headquarters took out many Daleks with Nitro-9.

The organization's founder invented the stuff, and it is known to be effective against dalekanium.

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.

The Book about the Weeping Angels from "The Time of the Angels" was written by the Doctor himself

Listen to what River said about it: "It was written by a madman, it's barely readable." Now listen to the Doctor: "Bit slow in the middle, didn't you hate his girlfriend?" That last little bit sounds kinda like something the Doctor would say to River about River, since they were in the "Slap Slap" part of their relationship at that point (and he was really angry at River for manipulating him.) "Written by a madman" explains itself, but doesn't "slow in the middle" and "barely readable" sound like what would happen when somebody who despises The Slow Path had to write down all the info he knows about something. Maybe he learned from Sally Sparrow's example and decided to write down a warning about the Angels. He might not have even knew he wrote it.

Jack's butt is Bigger on the Inside.

Explains where he got that gun in Bad Wolf.

The Tenth Doctor thought he was going to permanently die.

It's a simpler explanation for why he was dreading his death so much, and he seems much calmer when he finds out he's regenerating. We know that Time Lords can be permanently killed even if they have regenerations left, and in "Turn Left" that happened to the Tenth Doctor himself.

  • This is distinctly possible, though the Tenth talks about Regeneration with Wilf, it would explain why he was so put out by the idea - if she were just referring to him regeneration then why didn't Carmen say "your song is changing" or something?
    • Unless of course Regeneration really DOES count as death these days, I'm not sure it was ever specifically explained. I'm more and more inclined to believe this.
    • I think Regeneration counts as death. The Doctor certainly think so; he would know, he's done it 9 times. As for Carmen saying his song is ending, well the Ood clarify this a bit: "This song is ending, but the story never ends".

The Tenth Doctor was just pissed he was regenerating so soon.

He's only got twelve regenerations and when he realized he would be regenerating again that would mean he'd have burned through three of them in less than a decade (8-to-9, 9-to-10, and 10-to-11). He's just upset because it's starting to dawn on him that he only has a few regenerations left, unlike before when he never really had to worry about it.

Void Daleks escaped with the Cybermen

Since the Christmas Special is the Cybermen coming back and Rose said that the void colapsed with the other parallel universes this is probably how they come back next series.

  • Highly likely, given as Davros also survived according to Word of God. They will meet up and yet start another season-long plan that will be revealed in the two-hour Season Finale.
  • I thought those Cybermen were Mondas Cybermen, or did I miss something?
    • You must have, dialogue clearly states them as Cybermen from the Void. The Void Daleks do not return in series 5, just a couple from the Medusa Cascade.

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 Master is attempting to bring the Time Lords back... and will succeed

Mostly because several sources are claiming it, but also because he seems very annoyed they're gone. His reaction- almost angry, then disbelieving- in tSoD, his insistence he's making a new Time Lord empire... it stands to reason that if he can come back in the last two specials, he'll pick right back up. But this time... well, maybe he'll succeed. (After all, on a more practical level: the Time Lords being gone comes across much more as a built up, RTD story arc than anything. It makes sense it'll end when RTD leaves, with actual resolution, rather than stay a background aspect of the universe.)

  • Status: Confirmed AND Jossed.

The Midnight creature left something of itself in the Doctor...

OK. So in the Children in Need preview of the End of Time, there's a point where the Doctor quotes the Master ("Funny? No? Little bit?"). This combined with his behaviour in the Waters of Mars has led some to believe that the Master is somehow controlling the Doctor on some level.

Also, at the same time we have the theory that the monster in Midnight was the Master. It came 'through the dark' (afterlife), knocked four times at one point (drums) and controlled its victims (hypnosis) while specifically wanting the Doctor.

So if we take the second as true, it could have influenced or caused the first... after all, the Midnight monster (according to this, the Master) made people repeat things...

The regeneration device didn't fix the Master.

It used him as a template. He's still dying, but now everyone else is too.


The Master's device made it okay for Donna to remember everything.

Donna can't hold the Doctor's memories in her head, because she's half human, half-Time Lord. She's not entirely human, so the device doesn't actually turn her into the Master, but it does make her human half into a Time Lord; as a full Time Lord, she can remember everything that happened without suffering from Exploding Head Syndrome.

  • Or she nicked River's TARDIS Diary so that she could write down her Time Lord knowledge, safely forget it, and then refer back to it if need be. (Exploding Head Syndrome is an occasional side effect, but she can get over it through interpersonal support).
    • Jossed. Donna's brain only went into meltdown AFTER the Immortality Gate was implemented. It's still very clear that without that safety measure, she would have died.

The Master needed a Stable Time Loop to pull off his resurrection, and the Doctor will disrupt it.

Lucy was never brainwashed, so if she says the Ancient Books of Saxon exist, they actually exist. Meaning the Master wull havenen traveled to Earth's past to start a cult worshipping him. The Doctor goes out of his way to explain to Wilf that he has to follow the Master's timeline, so he he can't prevent his resurrection. But there's nothing to stop him from stopping the Master from creating the cult that resurrected him, thereby reset-buttoning the poor guy again and foiling the Time Lords to boot.

The Pan-universal Dalek killing bomb missed those Daleks in the Void

Because the Void is not a universe.

    • When did this happen?
      • There is a slight confusion here; this did not happen at all. The Doctor clone in Journey's End wiped out the Daleks in the Crucible, but did not do this using the Reality Bomb. No Pan-Universal Dalek death.

Dalek Caan did not betray Davros and the Daleks

The Cult of Skaro were the only Daleks who were permitted to have imagination—to learn to think like their enemies so they could come up with new and crueler ways of destroying them. The actions of Caan and Sec were carefully orchestrated to convince the Doctor that Daleks can be capable of good so that they can ask him for help and betray him when he opens the TARDIS' door to them. Caan knew (thanks to his adventures in space-time) exactly what would happen in the Crucible and got Davros and the other Daleks to play along, convincing the Doctor that he (well, he and he-her) had defeated them.

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.

Dalek Caan was a lying liar who lies

Seen the end of all things Dalek have you? All things Dalek? Really? Well either his ablilites to see the future fell a little short, or more likely, he meant that he had seen the end of all Daleks created by Davros. Out with the old, in with the new. That's what they get for trusting a Dalek, especially a crazy one.

  • Dalek Cann might have been referring not to the events of Journey's End but instead a future episode, where the Doctor does destroy all Daleks for good.

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 Old 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.

Dalek Caan never truly had a Heel Face Turn.

Given how hung-up he was about keeping Dalek purity (even though he was not pure himself), his prophecy about the end of everything Dalek actually refers to the destruction of the impure, and the rant over how he could no longer stand what the Daleks stood for was a lie. This was mostly fulfilled in Journey's End, with the last dying at the hands of the pure Daleks in Victory of the Daleks.

In actuality, Caan had seen the future of a renewed, pure Dalek race without the influence of Davros when he broke the time lock, and everything was a careful Xanatos Roulette on the part of him to make this come about, even at the cost of his own life (the impure Daleks in Victory of the Daleks concede that they are inferior and let themselves be destroyed, so Caan may also think the same way). He did not change his views since Evolution of the Daleks whatsoever, but only strengthened them even further.

Also, he taunts the Doctor that "one will die" (Donna), and these were also his final words to him. Does this sound like someone who wants to truly help the Doctor?

  • It sounds like Frankie Muniz...

Theories about the creatures in the Time War.

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.

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.

The Doctor will never be ginger.

It's very simple, ginger's have no souls so the very soulful Doctor could never be one.

The "Dalek Rangers" are actually from the Peter Cushing Movie universe.

It would explain why the progenitor didn't recognize the other Daleks, and the Dalek timeline is already messed up enough as it is.

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 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?

In the "Turn Left" timeline, the Earth was saved because of the Weeping Angels

In "Turn Left", the starship Titanic crashes on the Earth as Max Capricorn planned. He was expecting it to render the planet lifeless, but all it managed was to destroy London and its surroundings.

This being the "Turn Left" timeline, the four Angels at Wester Drumlins were still at large, and a crashing starship would be meat and drink to them. They feasted on the fallout, and by the time they'd finished the destruction was a purely local phenomenon. And probably forced their way into Max Capricorn's impregnable impact chamber, too, just to show they could.

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.

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).


The cracks in time were caused because The Doctor altered fixed events in time, such as the Waters or Mars.

The reality bomb wasn't what was making the stars go out

The cracks in time were.

The Doctor telling River his real name is a stable time loop.

  • He knew his younger self would be on the suspicious side, and that the absolute only way he could trust River would be if she knew something incredibly serious that he had never told anybody. This was the most serious thing he could come up with. Thus stable time loop is created.
    • What does he mean by saying "there's only one time I could" tell you my name?
      • That would depend on what that only time was, I guesss... end of his thirteenth regeneration? When he knows there's nothing more to lose (if there is anything to lose in the first place)? Or maybe just because he knows it's a Stable Time Loop. There's no other choice but to tell her.
      • As of the Wedding of River Song, we have it confirmed that the time he tells his name is "On the Fields of Trenzalore(?), on the Fall of the Eleventh, when no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer...."
    • Or she may simply have read it off his cot.
      • Maybe he doesn't actually have a name, and whatever he told River he only knew to tell her because she had already told him. Information loop.
      • What does that even mean? They've never met before in "Silence in the Library".

Ten-point-five being sent into the alternate universe was not really meant as punishment - that was just a convenient excuse

Ater all how can a man who killed an invading alien with a satsuma possibly have any moral high ground over somebody who killed a man intended to destroy the universe? The Doctor is a bit morally stuck up, but surely he's not that blind. In a cut-scene from the final episode (one RTD says he likes to believe still happened) Doctor 10 gave 10.5 a piece of Tardis to grow into a whole one -once he messed around with the growth pattern a bit to make it happen a lot faster- the more I think about that the more convinced she is that calling it a "punishment" was all just a big excuse, if not a total assumption. Ten knew what he was like in the beginning and what Rose did for him - he wanted to give 10.5 that same chance at recovery - he's trying to "cure" his other self. (He and also provided them with a way to continue the Doctor's legacy in a universe where he didn't exist... plus, now Rose probably won't be hopping across the dimensional barriers trying to GET to him which saves us a lot of trouble in the long run...)

  • I don’t think it was ever about punishment. It was about love. Love for Rose, and love for 10.5. Think about it 10.5 is both 10’s twin and his son (being partly Donna). That would make him the only family he has (since he doesn’t know Jenny survived). So out of love he not only gives Rose exactly what she always wanted (a Doctor who will always stay with her), but also gives 10.5 the best life he could (a life w/ Rose).
  • It's not specifically about killing the Daleks. He was dangerous to leave alone. He was bred in battle. Is it REALLY that hard to interpret?

The Tenth Doctor thought he might die for good

The Doctor knew he would be able to absorb the radiation and hold it of for a while, but when the time came he didn't know if he would be able to regenerate or if it would kill him for good.

That's why he was acting so melodramatic; there was a good chance that he would not be able to regenerate. It explains why he had that angry monologue; he was surprised that an unimportant-seeming person like Wilf might bring about the final death of the last of the Time Lords. It also explains why he said goodbye to all of his companions - he knew that most of them did not get closure when they left and he wasn't sure if he'd ever have another chance to really say goodbye.

Finally, it adds a new spin on his last line - "I don't want to go." It wasn't "I don't want to regenerate." - It was "I don't want to die!". And he didn't.

If this is true, it changes his regeneration from depressing melodrama to a poignant, bittersweet triumph of sorts. It's true that the tenth incarnation wasn't jolly about regenerating, but in his last moments as he realized that he would survive, he felt at peace with it, knowing that although he would change, his story wouldn't end just yet.

    • Well, 10 considered regeneration to pretty much be the same as death, just instead of his corpse lying there it's another, brand new guy- a guy that isn't him. So I think you're right in that 10 thought he was dying, but I think he knew he would regenerate.

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 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 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…

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 link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 Midnight Entity was not inherently evil

  • Throughout the episode, even before it enters the bus and Skye's body, it imitates the passengers- for example, it knocks three times when Biff does. Going by that, and by the relatively harmless imitation of the passengers for a good 2/3 of its appearance, there is a good possibility that it simply wanted to learn and to belong, as the Doctor implied. The passengers were hostile and mistrustful to it, so it assumed this was simply how other life forms were like, and began to increase this dis-trustfulness in order to make them happy.

To play Devils Advocate, the biggest detractors from this argument are the murder of the bus drivers and the possession of Skye, while also overwriting her personality and memories, which cause the passenger's distrust of it in the first place.

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.


Amy and Rory are going to leave the Doctor so they can have children

  • They don't want to conceive a child on the TARDIS, lest what happened to River happens to her younger sibling.
  • Plus, being pregnant and having children while traveling through time and space is dangerous, even without secret organizations trying to steal your children.
  • And we know that they want children- it was part of Rory's dream in "Amy's Choice"- she was pregnant, remember?

The Doctor DID whisper his name into River's ear in "The Wedding of River Song".

He is shown to whisper "Look into my eye." This could be a literal translation of the Doctor's name from Gallifreyan to English.

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.

Jenny from the Doctor's Daughter is the Valeyard

Jenny can possibly regenerate, and she is a clone of the doctor, so maybe she becomes the Valeyard instead of the actual 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 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.

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'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 Master's current form is Prussia.

If [dead link] 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 Doctor himself caused the Silence religious order to be formed.

We know that The Silence religious order was formed to kill The Doctor and that the aliens themselves are a large part of it. When The Doctor went to the Demon's Run base to rescue Amy, who was kidnapped several episodes prior, they were in the 52nd Century. What if, in addition to The Question, they want to kill The Doctor because he caused the human race to kill any Silence on sight and drove them off Earth? They seek revenge on The Doctor for what he did to them centuries before in Day of the Moon.