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Did we all just forget that the Doctor isn't technically the Doctor?
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00:00Doctor Who has been running for so long that it's had more of its lore forgotten than most other TV
00:05shows will ever have written for them. Most of the time it's minor details, but there are some
00:11bits of lore sitting quietly in the background that when you actually stop and think about them
00:16can have big implications for the show. I'm Ellie for Who Culture here with 10 important Doctor Who
00:22details that are almost never mentioned. Number 10. The entire universe is already dying.
00:27Doctor Who is all about saving the universe. Whether it's evil aliens or temporal paradoxes
00:32that threaten to tear the fabric of reality in two, the Doctor spends most of their lives
00:37trying to prevent the untimely end of life as we know it. But in Logopolis, there's a twist.
00:42Turns out, our universe is already dying. In part 3 of Tom Baker's finale as the Force Doctor,
00:47we find out from Logopolis's monitor that, quote,
00:50the universe long ago passed the point of total collapse. It's only due to the smarty-pants
00:54people of Logopolis opening CVEs, essentially pathways between universes to siphon off our
01:01excess entropy that all of existence hasn't already crumbled into dust. And when the Master
01:06unknowingly stops Logopolis from carrying out its vital calculations, we see entire sections
01:11of the universe begin to fade into nothingness in an event more catastrophic than even the Flux.
01:16Thanks to an unlikely alliance with the Master and at the cost of a regeneration,
01:20the Doctor manages to open a new CVE and stave off the universe's inevitable collapse.
01:25But it's harrowing to think that the entire Doctor Who universe has always essentially been
01:30on life support. Imagine that weighing on the Doctor's mind constantly. No wonder 14 needed a rest.
01:36Number 9. Multiple Canines Exist At Once
01:39Everybody loves Canine. I mean, how could you not? He's a time-traveling robot dog,
01:43for crying out loud. It's been years since his last regular appearance,
01:46and he's still as iconic as blue police boxes, sonic screwdrivers, and inconveniently long scarves.
01:52It's little surprise that three different Doctor Who spinoffs have featured him as a character.
01:57The failed Canine and Company pilot from 1981, the Sarah Jane adventures,
02:01and the Australian-made canine show that we never, ever, ever, ever talk about.
02:05So you'll be happy to hear that there are not one, but three different canines cutting about the
02:10galaxy simultaneously, and that's just going by the TV show. The first is the original,
02:14created by Professor Marius on a far future space station, who first travelled with the Doctor
02:19before leaving with companion Leela, when she chose to remain on Gallifrey. Then there was
02:23Canine Mark II, built by the Doctor himself, who left to accompany Romana in e-space. And finally,
02:29we have Canine Mark IV, left by the Tenth Doctor to replace Sarah Jane's Mark III after his heroic
02:35sacrifice at the end of school reunion. Now, we usually think of Canine as being just one character,
02:40but the universe is full of them, and that's quite reassuring, really. The only question is,
02:44where do we get ourselves a canine construction kit, and are they as difficult to build as Ikea
02:48furniture? 8. History's greatest criminals are being tortured
02:53In Let's Kill Hitler, the Doctor Amy and Rory come across the Tesselector, a time-travelling
02:58android-like vehicle piloted by miniaturised people whose mission is to put history's greatest
03:03criminals on trial. They do this by kidnapping the criminals right at the end of their historically
03:07recorded lives, and torturing them for however long they deem appropriate, before eventually
03:12returning them to the original moment of their deaths, to avoid any disruption of the timeline.
03:16Despite mucking up their maths and arriving in the wrong year for Hitler's trial, this doesn't seem
03:21like the Tesselector's first rodeo. If anything, its mission is presented as reasonably mundane,
03:26which implies that they've done this many other times before. Now, if we're being honest,
03:29the Tesselector comes across as more of a plot device than anything else, providing set up for how
03:34the Doctor will eventually escape his own death. Still, it's weird to think that pretty much any
03:38historical villain you can think of, including ones the Doctor has encountered, like Genghis Khan
03:43or Napoleon, has more than likely been kidnapped and tortured by this strange machine from the future.
03:497. The Moon Has Always Been An Egg
03:51Kill the Moon has always been a hotly debated episode for various reasons, but we're bringing
03:56it up now because of something pretty straightforward. It reveals that Earth's moon has always been,
04:01and always will be, the egg of a gigantic space dragon. This detail is mostly there to justify the rest of
04:07the episode without much thought being given to its ramifications, because when you stop to consider
04:11what it means, it can have a massive effect on how you view pretty much every other Doctor Who
04:17episode set on Earth. The titular weather-controlling moon base from 1967's The Moon Base is actually
04:22built on top of a giant egg. When Martha Jones Hospital gets teleported to the moon in Smith and
04:26Jones, she's actually meeting the Doctor on the surface of a giant egg. Neil Armstrong landing on the
04:30moon as shown in The Impossible Astronaut, that's one small step for man onto the surface of a giant egg.
04:35You get the point. It might not be the most narratively consequential of details, but we
04:40guarantee that once you really start to think about it, a lot of completely unrelated Doctor
04:44Who episodes become a whole lot stranger. 6. The Original Doctor Is Actually Dead
04:49Heaven Sent earned itself a place on the list of all-time great Doctor Who episodes as soon as
04:55it was broadcast. Peter Capaldi's epic solo performance blew everybody away, and the mind-bending
05:00story of the Doctor endlessly reliving the same events inside his confession dial for billions
05:05of years might just be Stephen Moffat's finest hour as a writer. But this story also has some
05:10interesting implications for the show, which have never been properly explored. The Original Doctor
05:15is dead. Most time loop stories simply have everything magically reset at the end of each loop.
05:20No matter what happens to the characters, we always know that they'll be fine once whatever
05:24timey-wimey shenanigans are going on have put everything back in place. But that's not what happened in
05:28Heaven Sent. Here, the current version of the Doctor dies, using their body as fuel to power
05:34the teleporter so it can output another version of the Doctor. As the Doctor himself puts it,
05:39he's, quote, burning the old me to make a new one. Now, we're not looking to kick off a debate about
05:44whether or not teleporters are actually murder boxes. We'll leave that one for the Star Trek fans.
05:48But in this instance, the teleporter can't be simply rematerialising the Doctor out of the same
05:53atoms that were initially dematerialised, because we see the current Doctor dying as the new one is made.
05:58Even Moffat has sort of confirmed this theory, cheekily responding that, quote,
06:03the Doctor first teleported in the Keys of Marinus. He's been a copy since then. Deal with it.
06:08In other words, the Doctor who originally stole a magic box and ran away is no more.
06:11Since Heaven Sent, we've actually been watching the adventures of the Doctor's teleporter clone
06:15number 3 million.
06:17Number 5. UNIT can destroy the Earth at any moment.
06:21UNIT are well-established as the heroic defenders of Earth. The long-running military organisation is our
06:26first line of defence against alien attacks, and the Doctor's first port of call whenever he needs
06:31some human assistance, or someone to sign his HMRC paperwork. It's also having a bit of a
06:36renaissance at the moment, arguably being more relevant now than at any point since John Pertwee
06:41had the keys to the TARDIS. But between their shiny new London base, Kate Stewart's friendly
06:45relationship with the Doctor, and the ever-increasing list of ex-companions they have on their payroll,
06:49it's easy to forget that UNIT has a much darker side too.
06:53Nothing embodies this more than the Osterhagen Project. Hidden around the world are 25 nuclear
06:59warheads positioned at key locations underneath the Earth's crust so that when detonated they
07:04will destroy the entire planet. Considered a weapon of last resort, the project is only to be
07:08activated in the event that the Earth has fallen to prevent an alien enemy fully taking control.
07:13As mentioned in the Day of the Doctor, UNIT also has a nuclear warhead underneath the Black
07:18Archive, which would destroy London if activated, which it very nearly was. Though the Doctor implores
07:23Martha to decommission the Osterhagen Project, there's no on-screen proof that it was. And
07:27let's be honest, UNIT doesn't always listen to the Doctor. It's not exactly comforting to think
07:31that the show's a sensible good guys are sitting on a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction
07:36powerful enough to literally end the world. Let's hope nobody trips and hits the detonate button by
07:40accident.
07:414. Humans have dormant psychic abilities
07:44Though we wouldn't describe it as hard science fiction, Doctor Who does tend to err on the side
07:50of scepticism when it comes to the supernatural. Or at least it used to, before the toymaker changed
07:54the rules and we got singing goblins. Think of the Gelf not actually being ghosts in The Unquiet Dead,
08:00or our depictions of the Devil actually being based on the trapped creature from The Impossible
08:04Planet and The Satan Pit. There is one notable exception to this, however. Humans in Doctor Who are
08:09psychic. We first get an idea of this in Planet of the Spiders, when the third Doctor is running
08:14experiments on psychic abilities, and claims that extrasensory capabilities are dormant in most
08:19humans. Since then, though, references to this hidden innate power have been few and far between.
08:24Timothy Latimer, in Human Nature and the Family of Blood, was confirmed to have some level of
08:28psychic ability, as was Emma Grayling in Hyde. But besides them and a few others, humanity's latent
08:34psychic abilities have gone largely unexplored, which is surprising for a show with close to a thousand
08:39episodes. Number three, there are Zygons living among us. Series 9's iconic Zygon two-parter deals
08:46with the repercussions of the compromise forged at the end of the day of the Doctor to allow the
08:51Zygons to stay on Earth. After Peter Capaldi delivers one of the best acted speeches in Doctor
08:56Who history and halts the Zygon rebellion, Bonnie and the rest of the Zygons agree to resume the troops
09:01and go back to living in secret. And we have to assume that the renewed peace treaty worked,
09:06because in the nine years since, there has been absolutely no mention of the continuing Zygon
09:11presence on Earth. Presumably, the remaining Zygon refugees integrated themselves into human
09:16society. But it still leaves a lot of interesting questions. Do the Zygons let themselves die out,
09:21or do they seek out other Zygons in order to keep their species alive? And is there ever a point in
09:26the future where their presence becomes public knowledge? Or are they still hiding among us as far
09:30forward as New Earth, or even Utopia? We understand why following up on these plot threads might not
09:35be the writer's top priority. But it's interesting to think that, at least for the time being, there's
09:40still a sizable population of Zygons living on Earth, posing as humans. I mean, for all we know,
09:45Ruby Sunday could be one of them. Now wouldn't that be a twist?
09:48Number two, all human life came from a spaceship explosion. Doctor Who has had a lot of grand
09:54revelations about the history of humanity throughout its run. But something that doesn't get quite as
09:59much attention as it should, is that the entire existence of our species hinges on the tragic and
10:04accidental end of a spaceship containing the last of another completely different species, twice.
10:10In Douglas Adams' brilliant serial city of death, the Doctor and Romana encounter Scaroth,
10:15the last member of the Jaggeroth species. He was fractured across Earth's time stream when the
10:20spaceship he was piloting exploded on takeoff while trying to leave prehistoric Earth. While Scaroth is
10:25trying to change history to stop the tragic end of his people, the Doctor has to make sure the
10:29events happen. It turns out that the radiation released by Scaroth's fiery end was the spark
10:33that led to the evolution of human life on Earth. And if that wasn't enough of a cosmic coincidence,
10:38then it's revealed in The Runaway Bride that Earth itself is actually formed around the last
10:43Ragnos spaceship. That's two different alien motherships meeting an untimely end before we
10:48even get as far as humans evolving. I guess, thank you?
10:52Number one, the nickname of the Doctor.
10:54The question, what is the Doctor's name, is as old as Doctor Who itself. And while we'll most
10:59likely never have a definitive answer, some writers have offered their own ideas about
11:04what our favourite Time Lord went by before adopting the title of the Doctor. One of these
11:09that has flown under the radar is, while we might not know the Doctor's first name, we do know their
11:14college nickname. In the Armageddon factor, the Doctor bumps into Drax. No, not that one. A fellow
11:20alumni of the Time Lord Academy, who calls the Doctor Theta Sigma, or Thet for short. The seventh
11:26Doctor later confirms this as his college nickname, and since nicknames are often shorter versions of
11:31full names, is the Doctor's real name a slightly longer variation of Theta Sigma? Interestingly,
11:36the Doctor seems rather embarrassed about the name, and asked Drax to just call him the Doctor.
11:40True to his wishes, the name Theta Sigma has never been used again, so we'll likely never know why
11:45the Doctor spent his university days being addressed like he was at a frat house. There's also the weird
11:50collection of mathematical symbols that have been proposed as the Doctor's name in various non-canon
11:55sources, like Marvel Comics. Similar symbols also appeared on a pedestal in the Five Doctors,
12:00though these don't appear to have any connection to the Doctor themselves. Doctor Who? It's the one
12:05question we'll likely never know the answer to. And that concludes our list, but why not check out
12:1110 Doctor Who episodes more important than you realised? In the meantime, I've been Ellie for
12:15Who Culture, and in the words of Riversong herself, goodbye, sweeties.
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