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10 Doctor Who Questions That Always Confused You
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00:00Ah, Doctor Who fans.
00:01For faithful viewers of a show all about time travel and endless possibilities,
00:07their understanding can very often be linear and unimaginative.
00:12Which is why there is always a clamour of angry tweets or message board posts
00:17each time a new bit of lore or storytelling appears to make no sense.
00:22The answers are sometimes simple, bad writing.
00:25The fact that for the first 20 years no one was expected to watch all of Doctor Who in order
00:31and subsequently find troubling contradictions.
00:35The rest of the time it's usually due to Steven Moffat vastly overestimating the intelligence of his audience.
00:41So, allow this list to pick over the questions that have been confusing you for years
00:48in an attempt to either answer them once and for all or make them even more confusing.
00:54With that in mind, I'm Ellie with Who Culture and this is 10 Doctor Who questions that always confused you.
01:01Number 10. What is the Doctor's name?
01:04The oldest question. Hidden in plain sight.
01:08Steven Moffat teased us with this throughout Matt Smith's years before revealing that it's not important.
01:14What's important is the title they chose and how it reflects their actions.
01:18Because what name would even be satisfying for fans?
01:22Keith?
01:23The question of the Doctor's birth name is something that becomes more complex the more you think about it.
01:29Gallifrey is the planet where Ramanad Viratrolunda is a perfectly normal thing to call a child for goodness sake.
01:35We know that the Doctor was nicknamed Theta Sigma in college and only reveal their name to those they're intimate
01:41with.
01:41And that's about it.
01:42Things have got even more complex now that we no longer have a clue where the Doctor is from.
01:48A lost child, abandoned in our universe, adopted by Tectae Eun.
01:52What was that child's name?
01:53And come to think of it, what was their name after they were regenerated into a child on leaving Division?
01:59Doctor Who has never seemed like a more appropriate title for the show.
02:04Probably best we don't dwell on it and just carry on calling them the Doctor.
02:08Number 9.
02:09Where does Joe Martin fit into the line-up?
02:11When Ruth was first introduced to be an unknown incarnation of the Doctor, various speculative theories were churned out by
02:19fansites.
02:20Were they between Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee in a fresh spin on the long-held belief in the Season
02:266 B Theory?
02:27This theory posits that the second Doctor was a Time Lord agent, spawned from the fact that an older Patrick
02:33Troughton didn't dye his hair black when he returned to the role.
02:37Whilst their story is confusingly related through the prism of a cosy Sunday night TV show about an Irish policeman,
02:44the Timeless Children makes it clear that Ruth is pre-Hartnell.
02:47Their memories were wiped and they eventually became the first Doctor we all know, which still confuses and outrages some
02:54corners of the fandom.
02:56The more militant fans believe that the very idea of Doctors existing prior to the first Doctor is tantamount to
03:03heresy.
03:04Doctor Who fans are boringly linear.
03:06Hartnell will always be the first Doctor that we as an audience encounter.
03:10The fact that the character has a whole mysterious life beforehand doesn't desecrate Hartnell's legacy.
03:16It ensures its longevity as the show approaches its sixth decade.
03:21Number 8.
03:22Wait, why can't he go back and save Amy and Rory?
03:25The ending of The Angels Take Manhattan, in which the Doctor states that he cannot return to New York to
03:31save Amy and Rory,
03:32led to a lot of confusion and couldn't they just meet up in another city on social media.
03:38So much so that Steven Moffat wrote a lengthy response in Doctor Who magazine.
03:43There is so much scar tissue and the number of paradoxes that have already been inflicted on that nexus of
03:49timelines that it will rip apart if you try to do one more thing.
03:54He has to leave it alone.
03:55There's also a more simple emotional explanation too.
03:59The whole of Series 7A is about Amy and Rory trying to balance normal married life with adventures in time
04:05and space.
04:06Increasingly aware that one day they'll have to stop travelling in the TARDIS.
04:10That decision is eventually taken out of their hands when a weeping angel zaps Rory back in time and Amy
04:17decides to willingly sacrifice herself to be reunited with her husband.
04:21The Doctor can't go back because he knows that Amy doesn't want him to.
04:25She wants a life with Rory.
04:27It's the perfect ending.
04:29Sadly, Doctor Who fans are so focused on the intricacies of time paradoxes that they often miss out on the
04:37simple things like human emotion.
04:39Number 7.
04:41What is the Valiard?
04:42In the final stages of the trial of a Time Lord, it is revealed that the Doctor's prosecutor, the Valiard,
04:49is actually an evil version of the Doctor himself.
04:52A distillation of the Doctor's darker impulses from somewhere between the Doctor's 12th and 13th lives.
04:59But what does that actually mean?
05:01The Master's description of the Valiard is more of a metaphorical concept, so how did it gain a physical form?
05:08No answers are forthcoming in the trial's notoriously troubled Final Two episode, which descends into a chase across the Matrix.
05:16A chase or the writers Pip and Jane Baker running away full pelt from trying to explain the concept teed
05:23up by Valiard creator Robert Holmes.
05:25Fans have tried to answer this question through spin-off novels, short stories and audio adventures, yet these muddy the
05:31waters even more.
05:33One story states that he's a villainous version of the Doctor plucked from the multiverse.
05:38One audio suggests the Valiard was a by-product of an experiment by the Doctor to break the 12th regeneration
05:44limit.
05:45Awkwardly, this was released just a week before the 11th Doctor was granted a new regeneration cycle.
05:52All of this confusion could have been avoided if it had just turned out that the Valiard was the master
05:57in disguise.
05:58After all, aren't they really the Dark Doctor?
06:01Number 6. Has Davros had his eyes closed the whole time?
06:04Who'd have thought that a pair of eyes would be the most controversial moment in an episode once haploid described
06:10as Peter Capaldi's 12th Doctor ponders whether to murder a child.
06:14In The Witch's Familiar, the Doctor and Davros sit down and have a chat about morality, ageing and legacy.
06:21Two bitter enemies coming to an understanding.
06:23Except that it's all a ruse by the Dalek creator to steal the Doctor's regeneration energy.
06:28It's this that the Doctor siphons off to allow Davros to see one more Scarrow sunrise.
06:33In a moment that isn't quite as moving as it should be, Davros opens his eyes.
06:38The eyes that have been obscured by scar tissue for the 40 years prior to this, meaning that he's had
06:43to rely on the glowing blue eye mounted in his forehead.
06:46Peering through the black makeup, Julian Bleach does his best to sell the emotion of the scene.
06:52A moment that was intended to humanise the Dalek's creator instead led to perplexed fans joking about Davros' peepers on
07:00social media.
07:01And yet, the answer is staring you right in the face.
07:05That small burst of the Doctor's regeneration energy restored Davros his eyes.
07:105. What was the Grand Serpent up to?
07:13Those fans who were confused by the Grand Serpent scheme in the closing two episodes of Doctor Who Flux clearly
07:20weren't paying attention to the news during the pandemic.
07:23When the Flux ravages the universe, he sought the perfect opportunity to dominate the Earth and reign over the shattered
07:30remnants of the universe.
07:32To do this, he had to meddle with units past in order to manoeuvre himself into a position where he
07:38could control the planet's defence systems.
07:40Then he's sold the planet out to the highest bidder, the Sontarans.
07:43He's basically a dodgy intergalactic PPE provider.
07:46It seems that the Doctor Who fans were too busy being outraged by the alternative unit chronology and demotion of
07:54Lethris Stewart
07:55to actually pay attention to what the Serpent's aims were.
07:58Kate Stewart literally spells it out to the audience before she goes into hiding.
08:02In The Grand Serpent, Chris Chibnall is taking aim at the opportunistic chances who seek to profit from tragedy, even
08:10the end of the universe itself.
08:12It's his greatest bit of satire since unit was defunded just as a rogue Dalek is let loose.
08:19Which, it turns out, was all part of the Grand Serpent's plan.
08:224. When do the unit stories take place?
08:26The unit's dating controversy is a running debate in the Doctor Who fandom.
08:31Were the unit stories of Troughton and Pertwee's eras taking place in the present day or in the future?
08:37If in the future, then how has the Brigadier resigned to teach maths in 1976 in Mordren Undead?
08:44Unit's debut story, The Invasion, is set in about 1979.
08:49So how can a man retire from an organisation that won't exist for another three years?
08:54If that wasn't bad enough, Sarah Jane Smith states that she's from 1980 in Pyramids of Mars.
09:00So in what year do stories like Invasion of the Dinosaurs or Robot take place?
09:05It's a question that has flummoxed fans for decades, with attempts to resolve it in all various novels, audios and
09:12even DVD special features.
09:14The real answer is probably the simplest.
09:16The Brigadier wasn't supposed to be in Mordren Undead.
09:19William Russell, who was originally due to return as Ian Chesterton, dropped out.
09:24Writer Peter Grimwade hastily rewrote the serial by slotting Lethbridge Stewart in, adding some lines about Unit, Axon and Daleks,
09:32etc.
09:32But he forgot to adjust the dates accordingly.
09:35More simply, time is always being rewritten and reshaped in Doctor Who.
09:39So it's probably for the best that Chris Chibnall upturned the apple cart, with the Grand Serpent's meddling with Unit's
09:46chronology in flux.
09:48Number 3. Who is the woman?
09:50The mysterious woman in white, who appears to Wilf in the end of time, inspired many different theories on her
09:57possible identity.
09:58Was she Romana? Susan?
10:00The dialogue makes no clear distinction on who exactly the woman is, which fed into the endless speculation.
10:08Russell T Davies has stated exactly who she is, though, in his marvellous book The Writer's Tale.
10:13It's the Doctor's mother, and this was obviously made clear to both David Tennant and Claire Bloom and comes across
10:20in their performances.
10:21By 2020, it was accepted that this was indeed the Doctor's mother.
10:25And then the timeless children came along.
10:27Presumably, the woman is the adoptive mother of the Doctor after the Ruth Doctor had their memories wiped.
10:33Or is it Tectaeun?
10:35We saw in the brain of Morbius that the Doctor does have repressed memories of their previous pre-Hartnall cells.
10:41Could that go for Tectaeun too?
10:43It's so confusing, right?
10:44Except it's not.
10:45Not really.
10:46The woman is the Doctor's mother.
10:48It doesn't matter that she's clearly not his birth mother.
10:51It doesn't even matter if she's a version of Tectaeun.
10:54She is the woman who raised him as he remembers.
10:57And that is all that matters in that moment.
11:012.
11:02What is the hybrid?
11:04The supposed big bad of Series 9 kept fans guessing and then predictably left them angry and confused.
11:10Because, as with all ominous prophecies,
11:13the answer is never as satisfying as the one you concoct in your fan brain.
11:18The hybrid is not some terrible combination of Viking and Murr or Dalek and Time Lord or Zygon and Human.
11:27It's a metaphor, an allegory.
11:29That's what most prophecies are.
11:31They're stories.
11:32They're not to be taken literally.
11:34We learned all that from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, right?
11:36The hybrid is a metaphor for the Doctor and Clara's relationship.
11:40That's what it always was.
11:42And the various red herrings scattered throughout the series feel half-hearted.
11:46It's a far more satisfying conclusion than if the hybrid had been revealed to be Maisie Williams' me.
11:52The hybrid is Time Lord and Human.
11:54More specifically, the Doctor and his unwavering devotion and loyalty to Clara.
11:59Look at what he does to save her life.
12:01He returns to his home planet as a villain and a tyrant.
12:04Regeneration or not, he kills someone.
12:06The big bad of Series 9 is the Doctor himself.
12:09And it's a gripping, devastating performance by Peter Capaldi.
12:13Can you honestly say that a Dalek Time Lord hybrid would have been better?
12:17You've seen the Cyber Lords, right?
12:20Number 1.
12:20Who is the Curator?
12:22Whilst you may not have been able to hear the dialogue between the Curator and the Eleventh Doctor
12:26over the joyous cheers and applause at the return of Tom Baker,
12:31there have been plenty of opportunities since the day of the Doctor aired to go back and listen.
12:36So the raft of Who is the Curator? think pieces and tweet threads in the months after
12:42seemed like a willful ignorance of the written dialogue.
12:46I can only tell you what I would do if I were you.
12:48Oh, if I were you.
12:50Oh, perhaps I was you, of course.
12:52Or perhaps you are me.
12:53He's very plainly a future, retired version of the Doctor
12:57who's chosen the aged face of his fourth incarnation.
13:01It's an allusion to Douglas Adams' sharder.
13:04And yet, people were still in doubt.
13:06It's taken Steven Moffat's novelisation of Day of the Doctor
13:10and several big finished box sets to further assert the identity of this future incarnation.
13:16And yet, did we really need all of this to explain a sweet, lovely, not at all ambiguous nod to
13:24the show's past and future to confused fans?
13:27Who knows, eh?
13:28Who knows?
13:30And that concludes our list.
13:32If there are some Doctor Who moments that confused you that weren't mentioned in this list, then comment them below.
13:37And while you're there, like and subscribe, and tap that notification bell.
13:41I've been Ellie with Who Culture, and in the words of Riversong herself, goodbye, sweeties.
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