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Think you know everything about the Doctor? This video explores 10 moments throughout the show's history that carry a much deeper meaning than you first thought, including the tragic story behind 'Father's Day' and the secret origin of the young Doctor.
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00:00Fittingly, for a show about time travel, there's some stuff in Doctor Who that can only be truly understood in
00:06hindsight.
00:07Whether it's through new information coming to light, or the show going off in new, unexpected directions,
00:13some moments end up having far greater significance than is first apparent.
00:17Think you know everything that was going on in the 14th Doctor's head?
00:20Think stuff like Jackie Tyler's birthday and the child Doctor in Listen didn't have any sort of deeper significance?
00:26Well, think again.
00:28I'm Ellie for Who Culture here with 10 Doctor Who moments more important than you realised.
00:33Number 10. Christopher Eccleston's own father's day.
00:37As he's reiterated many times, Christopher Eccleston didn't have the happiest time shooting Series 1.
00:43But beyond his own struggles and his deteriorating relationship with the higher-ups,
00:48there was something else he had to contend with.
00:50His seriously ill father, Ronnie, which forced Eccleston to leave Doctor Who for three weeks to go and care for
00:57him.
00:57And it just so happened that Eccleston's three-week break and subsequent return coincided with the episode Father's Day.
01:04For obvious reasons, there was an added resonance when it came to Eccleston filming his scenes for this episode.
01:10At New York Comic Con in 2019, he described Father's Day as one of his favourite episodes to shoot, saying,
01:27Though the Doctor's role in the story is quite small, there was an emergency alternate script prepared in case Eccleston
01:34needed more time off.
01:35This would have taken the Doctor out of the action sooner, reducing his role to that of a disembodied voice.
01:41Father's Day is astonishing in its own right, but this real-life parallel makes it even more special.
01:47And Eccleston often cites it as his favourite story, so the connection clearly isn't lost on him either.
01:53Number 9. The Young Doctor's Lookalike.
01:56For the most part, the Doctor's childhood has always remained a mystery, and many would argue rightly so.
02:02During RTD1, a spin-off following the exploits of a young Doctor at the Time Lord Academy was vetoed,
02:09on the basis that it would have reduced the character's intrigue.
02:12But in the years since, we have caught odd glimpses of a younger Doctor.
02:15One of the most significant came in Listen, where the final scene takes us back to Gallifrey,
02:21to the barn where the Doctor grew up, requiring someone to briefly play his younger self,
02:25a gig that ultimately went to Michael Jones.
02:28But Jones wasn't just picked at random, he was specifically cast because he looked like a young
02:33version of First Doctor, William Hartnell, with the costume team even giving him a Hartnell-esque
02:39hairstyle to match. However, in order to preserve that all-important sense of mystery,
02:44we never actually see Jones' face in the episode, so we'll just have to take their word for it.
02:48It's still a cool touch though. After all, if you're going to delve into the Doctor's origins,
02:52the least you can do is honour the man who started it all.
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03:53Number 8. The Meddling Trailblazer
03:56Most Time Lords we've met, other than the Doctor, have turned out to be bad eggs. Granted,
04:01the Doctor can also be a bad egg at times, but you get the point. The most well-known example,
04:06of course, is the Master, the Moriarty to the Doctor's Sherlock Holmes. Over the years,
04:11the show has built a massive rogues' gallery of Time Lords who also deserve a few hours on the
04:16Naughty Step, from Omega and Borusa to Rassilon, the Rani and Tectayun. But there's one that
04:22predates them all, the Meddling Monk. Encountered by the first Doctor in 1965's The Time Meddler and
04:29three installments of the Dalek's Master Plan, the Monk is a rebel Time Lord who likes to disrupt
04:34history purely for the lulls. He was also the first villain to have a rematch with the Doctor,
04:40and the first Time Lord other than the Doctor and Susan to appear in the show. So quite a trailblazer.
04:45Yet he never really gets the credit for any of these things, because he wasn't actually denoted
04:50as a Time Lord at the time. That concept wasn't introduced for another four years. But without
04:56the Monk, we may not have seen as many of the other Renegade Time Lords that followed. And while we're
05:00here, bring back the Monk! The Master's returned enough times already. It can't be any worse than
05:06what they did to Omega, can it? Number 7. The real reason Jackie Tyler turned 40.
05:12It was the Cybermen that featured in Doctor Who's 25th anniversary special, Silver Nemesis.
05:18And by the time they returned in the 2005 revival in Rise of the Cybermen and the Age of Steel,
05:24another anniversary was hiding in plain sight. The big reveal of the redesigned Cybers models
05:30comes at the Tyler Mansion, where the Jackie of Pete's world is holding her 40th, or as she'd
05:36have you believe, 39th, birthday party. You might assume that this number was picked at random,
05:41or on the basis that Camille Kajuri had, at the time of recording, just celebrated her own big 4-0.
05:47But no. As Russell T. Davis has since confirmed, it was actually a nod to the fact that the 10th
05:52Planet, the story that first introduced the Cybermen and saw the first Doctor regenerate,
05:57was turning 40 that year. So yes, Jackie turning 40 was a nod to the fact that the Cybermen were
06:03also
06:0340. Rather fitting, given that she ends up getting turned into one. Given that 2026 marks the 60th
06:09birthday of the Cybermen, might they feature in the upcoming Christmas special in some way?
06:14Will we get to see Jackie Tyler's 60th birthday party? Never mind Billy Piper,
06:19these are the questions we should really be asking, folks.
06:22Number 6. Wilf's War Stories
06:25Bernard Cribbins had quite a journey with Doctor Who. Having played companion Tom Campbell in the
06:30second 1960s Peter Cushing Dalek movie, he made his proper television Who debut as a newspaper seller
06:37in Voyage of the Damned, a character later retooled into Donna's granddad, Wilf.
06:42Then, for the 10th Doctor's final story, Wilf became a companion in his own right. To flesh the
06:47character out a bit more, Russell T. Davis drew on Cribbins' own experience of serving in the
06:52British Army's parachute regiment, hence why he has that all-important revolver.
06:57In The End of Time Part 2, when Wilf's looking down at Earth and telling the Doctor about being caught
07:02in a blizzard of bullets on a rooftop in Palestine, he's basically remembering it for real.
07:07These lines were added specifically based on Cribbins' own real-life experiences.
07:13And then there's Wilf's iconic hat. For many of his previous appearances,
07:17even as far back as Voyage of the Damned, Cribbins had worn his own regimental badge on his beanie.
07:22Which means that every time Wilf wears that beanie, there's a genuine piece of history right
07:26there on screen, hidden in plain sight. Extraordinary.
07:30Still, the award for Wilf's most iconic piece of headwear has to go to the reindeer antlers.
07:35But we don't make the rules.
07:37Number 5. Pertwee Era Precursors
07:40When John Pertwee took over as the Doctor in 1917, much had changed. In addition to being in colour
07:46rather than black and white, the show was now set on present-day Earth and followed the Doctor's
07:51adventures alongside Unit. But the origins for this change in the show's format were actually
07:55planted two years earlier during Patrick Troughton's time as the Doctor.
07:59Unbeknownst to viewers at the time, the show was seeding a shift away from space set stories with
08:04bases staffed by futuristic crews to those set on contemporary Earth, where monsters were fought
08:10by traditional soldiers. Things really got going in 1968's The Web of Fear, which brought yetis to
08:16the London Underground and introduced Unit Boss the Brigadier, initially just a colonel and working
08:21for the regular army. The great work continued in that same year's The Invasion, which promoted
08:26Lethbridge Stewart to Brigadier and introduced Unit proper. A few stories later, the Doctor was
08:31forcibly regenerated and exiled to Earth, and the rest is history. It's common for some elements of
08:37one Doctor's era to carry over to the next, to ease the transition. But this is taking things to the
08:42next level. Has one era ever set up another so stealthily? Without the Invasion and The Web of Fear,
08:47the Pertwee era and the course of Doctor Who history would have looked radically different.
08:53Number 4. The Canon of the Doctor
08:56One of the many things that fans loved about The Night of the Doctor was the way that it didn't
09:01ignore existing 8th Doctor continuity. Right before he regenerates, Paul McGann's Doctor name drops all
09:07the companions that he'd travelled with up to that point in big Finnish audio dramas, including Charlie
09:13Pollard, Lucy Miller, and Molly O'Sullivan. Beyond putting a neat bow on the 8th Doctor's era, this line
09:19had bigger implications, because it was the first time televised Doctor Who had directly acknowledged
09:25Big Finnish. And extrapolating this further, you could argue that this single line effectively canonised
09:31all Big Finnish, before and since. Which would mean that the 6th Doctors met Jackie Tyler, the Masters
09:36being played by Neil's dad from The Inbetweeners, and River Song, the best character, has met every
09:42classic Doctor. Obviously, Big Finnish's audios had always been licensed by the BBC, and before the
09:482005 revival, they were the closest thing to new Doctor Who that fans had. But acknowledging Big
09:53Finish on screen gave it a legitimacy it hadn't had before, while simultaneously giving new fans an
09:59excuse to check it out. Number 3. The truth behind 14's anger
10:04One of the things that made the 14th Doctor different to the 10th is the fact that he was so
10:09much older,
10:10carrying the weight of everything that had happened to 11, 12, and 13. We see evidence of this in all
10:16three of his television adventures, but most notably in Wild Blue Yonder, when the not-thing
10:21Donna taunts him about the timeless child and the flux. Directly after this, we see the Doctor crash
10:26out in a corridor, having just been tricked into opening up by an alien pretending to be his best
10:31friend. Yep, that'll certainly do it. But according to the script for Wild Blue Yonder,
10:35it also goes much deeper than that. In this moment, the Doctor's actually thinking about
10:39everything that's happened to him since he last had this face, including all the people
10:43he's lost. And one person in particular? Clara. The script notes, quote,
10:49The Doctor runs, but he's ragged, wild-eyed, desperate. Everything the Donna 2 said to him
10:54rising and rising. The flux, his losses, Clara, 15 years, everything. So David Tennant wasn't just
11:01doing some generic angry acting in this moment. He'd been told to think about the person who
11:06arguably had the single biggest impact on the Doctor in those intervening years, something that
11:11as a fan himself, he'd have absolutely understood. They might not always be obvious, but it's touches
11:17like these that make Fourteen's character arc truly special.
11:21Number 2. The significance of the info stamp. 2008 Christmas special The Next Doctor tried to
11:28trick us into thinking that David Morrissey was the TARDIS's next occupant. Until we learned that
11:33he's actually just a human dude called Jackson Lake, who accidentally absorbed information about
11:38the Doctor from a Cyberman info stamp. We're then treated to a good old Doctor Who clip show of all
11:43the previous incarnations, from Billy Hartnell through to Davey T. With the amount of clip shows
11:48we've seen in the show over the last 20 years, or hell, even in the last two years, you'd be
11:53forgiven
11:53for thinking that they've always been as common as hot dinners. But amazingly, this next Doctor
11:58clip show was the first time footage of classic Doctors had featured in New Who. Yes, really!
12:04King of flashbacks, Russell T. Davis, waited till he was almost out the door to do his first
12:09classic highlight reel. This was a time when Doctor flashbacks were actively avoided for fear of
12:15alienating the audience, and as a result, there were some people who, three years into the revival,
12:20still weren't sure whether the classic series was properly canon. So this particular clip show was
12:25important for that reason too. Of course, in the years since, we've had plenty more sequences
12:30showcasing all the Doctors, with memorable examples in The Eleventh Hour and The Name of the Doctor.
12:35And these days, it feels like we get one every other week. Imagine how effective it would be if
12:40we'd had to wait another four years for the next one. Just saying.
12:45And number one, Master of Disguise.
12:47The Timeless Children gave us a pretty comprehensive account of the Doctor's early life as the
12:53Timeless Child. But there are still some things we don't know. Things like, who was the boy who
12:58tries to steal the child's toy spaceship on the clifftop, inadvertently causing them to fall and
13:03regenerate? Sure, it could have just been some random kid, but for a long time, fans have suspected
13:08he was the Master. After all, stealing one of the Doctor's toys out of jealousy is exactly the kind
13:13of thing you can imagine the younger Master doing. And it would be rather fitting for him to have
13:17been inadvertently responsible for the Doctor's first regeneration. It doesn't feel like it would
13:21quite work timeline-wise, given that we also see a child Master after the formation of Gallifrey in
13:27The Sound of Drums, but it's a bloody cool idea nonetheless. The question has since been put to
13:32Chris Chibnall, who confirmed that this character was indeed a deliberate parallel to the Master,
13:37saying, quote,
13:38It's not canon, but I agree. If this boy really was the Master, it means he's been messing with
13:43the Doctor for much longer than we thought, since before the Doctor was actually the Doctor,
13:47in fact, which is kind of twisted, but also kind of fitting for their relationship.
13:52And that concludes our list. Well, we've looked at the important moments,
13:56so why not look at the opposite and check out 10 huge Doctor Who moments that didn't matter at all?
14:01In the meantime, I've been Ellie for WhoCulture, and in the words of Riversong herself,
14:05goodbye, sweeties.
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