- 5 minutes ago
Did we all just forget that the Doctor isn't technically the Doctor?
Category
📺
TVTranscript
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
00:10bits 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 people
00:55of Logopolis opening CVEs, essentially pathways between universes to siphon off our excess entropy
01:01that all of existence hasn't already crumbled into dust. And when the Master unknowingly stops
01:07Logopolis from carrying out its vital calculations, we see entire sections of the universe begin to
01:12fade into nothingness in an event more catastrophic than even the Flux. Thanks to an unlikely alliance
01:18with the Master and at the cost of a regeneration, the Doctor manages to open a new CVE and stave
01:23off the
01:24universe's inevitable collapse. But it's harrowing to think that the entire Doctor Who universe has
01:28always essentially been on life support. Imagine that weighing on the Doctor's mind constantly.
01:33No 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, and he's still as iconic
01:48as blue police boxes, sonic screwdrivers, and inconveniently long scarves. It's little
01:52surprised that three different Doctor Who spin-offs have featured him as a character. The
01:57failed Canine and Company pilot from 1981, the Sarah Jane adventures, and the Australian-made
02:02canine show that we never, ever, ever, ever talk about. So you'll be happy to hear that there are
02:07not one, but three different canines cutting about the galaxy simultaneously, and that's just going by
02:12the TV show. The first is the original, created by Professor Marius on a far future space station,
02:18who first travelled with the Doctor before leaving with companion Leela, when she chose to remain on
02:22Gallifrey. Then there was Canine Mark II, built by the Doctor himself, who left to accompany Romana
02:27in e-space. And finally, we have Canine Mark IV, left by the Tenth Doctor to replace Sarah Jane's
02:33Mark III, after his heroic sacrifice at the end of school reunion. Now, we usually think of Canine as
02:39being just one character, but the universe is full of them, and that's quite reassuring, really.
02:43The only question is, where do we get ourselves a canine construction kit, and are they as difficult
02:47to build as Ikea furniture?
02:49Number 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
03:20doesn't seem like the Tesselector's first rodeo. If anything, its mission is presented
03:24as reasonably mundane, which implies that they've done this many other times before.
03:29Now, if we're being honest, the Tesselector comes across as more of a plot device than
03:32anything else, providing set up for how the Doctor will eventually escape his own death.
03:36Still, it's weird to think that pretty much any historical villain you can think of, including
03:40ones the Doctor has encountered, like Genghis Khan or Napoleon, has more than likely been
03:45kidnapped 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
04:06the rest of the episode without much thought being given to its ramifications. Because when you stop
04:11to consider what it means, it can have a massive effect on how you view pretty much every other
04:16Doctor Who episode set on Earth. The titular weather-controlling moon base from 1967's The Moon
04:21Base is actually built on top of a giant egg. When Martha Jones Hospital gets teleported to the moon
04:25in Smith & Jones, she's actually meeting the Doctor on the surface of a giant egg. Neil Armstrong landing
04:30on the moon as shown in The Impossible Astronaut, that's one small step for man onto the surface
04:34of a giant egg. You get the point. It might not be the most narratively consequential of details,
04:39but we guarantee that once you really start to think about it, a lot of completely unrelated
04:44Doctor Who episodes become a whole lot stranger.
04:476. 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 it
04:55was
04:55broadcast. Peter Capaldi's epic solo performance blew everybody away, and the mind-bending story of
05:01the Doctor endlessly reliving the same events inside his confession dial for billions of years might
05:06just be Stephen Moffat's finest hour as a writer. But this story also has some interesting implications
05:11for the show, which have never been properly explored. The Original Doctor is dead. Most time-loop
05:16stories simply have everything magically reset at the end of each loop. No matter what happens to the
05:21characters, we always know that they'll be fine once whatever timey-wimey shenanigans are going
05:25on, I've put everything back in place. But that's not what happened in Heaven Sent. Here, the current
05:30version of the Doctor dies, using their body as fuel to power the teleporter so it can output
05:35another version of the Doctor. As the Doctor himself puts it, he's, quote, burning the old me to make a
05:41new one. Now, we're not looking to kick off a debate about whether or not teleporters are actually
05:45murder boxes. We'll leave that one for the Star Trek fans. But in this instance, the teleporter can't be
05:50simply rematerialising the Doctor out of the same atoms that were initially dematerialised,
05:55because we see the current Doctor dying as the new one is made. Even Moffat has sort of confirmed
06:00this theory, cheekily responding that, quote, the Doctor first teleported in the keys of Marinus.
06:05He's been a copy since then. Deal with it. In other words, the Doctor who originally stole a magic
06:10box and ran away is no more. Since Heaven Sent, we've actually been watching the adventures of the
06:14Doctor's teleporter clone number three million. Number five, Unit can destroy the Earth at any
06:20moment. Unit are well established as the heroic defenders of Earth. The long-running military
06:25organisation is our first line of defence against alien attacks, and the Doctor's first port of call
06:30whenever he needs some human assistance, or someone to sign his HMRC paperwork. It's also having a bit of
06:36a renaissance at the moment, arguably being more relevant now than at any point since John Pertwee had
06:41the keys to the TARDIS. But between their shiny new London base, Kate Stewart's friendly relationship
06:45with 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. Nothing embodies this more than the
06:55Osterhagen project. Hidden around the world are 25 nuclear warheads positioned at key locations
07:01underneath the Earth's crust, so that when detonated they will destroy the entire planet.
07:05Considered a weapon of last resort, the project is only to be activated in the event that the
07:10Earth has fallen to prevent an alien enemy fully taking control. As mentioned in the day of the
07:14Doctor, Unit also has a nuclear warhead underneath the Black Archive, which would destroy London if
07:20activated, which it very nearly was. Though the Doctor implores Martha to decommission the
07:24Osterhagen project, there's no on-screen proof that it was. And let's be honest, Unit doesn't
07:28always listen to the Doctor. It's not exactly comforting to think that the show's a sensible good
07:33geyser sitting on a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction powerful enough to literally end the
07:37world. Let's hope nobody trips and hits the detonate button by accident.
07:41Number 4. Humans have dormant psychic abilities.
07:45Though 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 Planet
08:04and the Satan Pit. There is one notable exception to this, however. Humans, in Doctor Who, are psychic.
08:10We first get an idea of this in Planet of the Spiders, when the third Doctor is running experiments
08:15on psychic abilities and claims that extrasensory capabilities are dormant in most humans.
08:20Since 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 psychic
08:28ability, as was Emma Grayling in Hyde. But besides them and a few others, humanity's latent psychic
08:34abilities have gone largely unexplored, which is surprising for a show with close to a thousand
08:39episodes.
08:40Number 3. There are Zygons living among us.
08:43Series 9's iconic Zygon two-parter deals with the repercussions of the compromise forged at the
08:49end of the day of the Doctor to allow the Zygons to stay on Earth. After Peter Capaldi delivers one
08:54of the best acted speeches in Doctor Who history and halts the Zygon rebellion, Bonnie and the rest of the
08:59Zygons agree to resume the troops and go back to living in secret. And we have to assume that the
09:05renewed peace treaty worked, because in the nine years since, there has been absolutely no mention
09:10of the continuing Zygon presence on Earth. Presumably, the remaining Zygon refugees integrated
09:15themselves into human society. But it still leaves a lot of interesting questions. Do the Zygons let
09:20themselves die out, or do they seek out other Zygons in order to keep their species alive? And is there
09:25ever a point in the future where their presence becomes public knowledge? Or are they still hiding
09:29among us as far forward as New Earth, or even Utopia? We understand why following up on these
09:34plot threads might not be the writer's top priority. But it's interesting to think that, at least for
09:39the time being, there's still a sizable population of Zygons living on Earth, posing as humans. I mean,
09:44for all we know, Ruby Sunday could be one of them. Now, wouldn't that be a twist?
09:48Number 2. All human life came from a spaceship explosion.
09:52Doctor Who has had a lot of grand revelations about the history of humanity throughout its run.
09:57But something that doesn't get quite as much attention as it should, is that the entire
10:01existence of our species hinges on the tragic and accidental end of a spaceship containing the
10:07last of another completely different species. Twice. In Douglas Adams' brilliant serial city of
10:12death, the Doctor and Romana encounter Skaroth, the last member of the Jaggeroth species. He was
10:17fractured across Earth's time stream when the spaceship he was piloting exploded on
10:22takeoff or trying to leave prehistoric Earth. While Skaroth is trying to change history to
10:26stop the tragic end of his people, the Doctor has to make sure the same events happen. It turns out
10:30that the radiation released by Skaroth's fiery end was the spark that led to the evolution of
10:35human life on Earth. And if that wasn't enough of a cosmic coincidence, then it's revealed in
10:39The Runaway Bride that Earth itself is actually formed around the last Ragnos spaceship. That's two
10:45different alien motherships meeting an untimely end before we even get as far as humans evolving.
10:50I guess, thank you?
10:52Number one, the nickname of the Doctor.
10:55The 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 what our
11:04favourite Time Lord went by before adopting the title of the Doctor. One of these that has flown
11:09under the radar is, while we might not know the Doctor's first name, we do know their college
11:14nickname. 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
11:26Seventh Doctor later confirms this as his college nickname, and since nicknames are often shorter
11:31versions of full names, is the Doctor's real name a slightly longer variation of Theta Sigma?
11:35Interestingly, the Doctor seems rather embarrassed about the name, and asked Drax to just call
11:39him the Doctor. True to his wishes, the name Theta Sigma has never been used again, so we'll
11:44likely never know why the Doctor spent his university days being addressed like he was at a frat
11:49house. There's also the weird collection of mathematical symbols that have been proposed as
11:53the Doctor's name in various non-canon sources, like Marvel Comics. Similar symbols also appeared
11:58on a pedestal in the Five Doctors, though these don't appear to have any connection to the Doctor
12:02themselves. Doctor Who? It's the one question we'll likely never know the answer to. And that
12:09concludes our list, but why not check out 10 Doctor Who episodes more important than you realised?
12:14In the meantime, I've been Ellie for Who Culture, and in the words of Riversong herself, goodbye
12:18sweeties.
Comments