The Time of the Doctor

Hmm. A little too short for all of the information it needed to cram in, I felt, but not bad. And the final few minutes really made it for me, especially seeing Amy again. 'Very Good'.

tony ingram wrote:Hmm. A little too short for all of the information it needed to cram in, I felt, but not bad. And the final few minutes really made it for me, especially seeing Amy again. 'Very Good'.

I agree. I thought it would have been better at half again or twice the length, especially as much as they were tying off. I also loved seeing Amy again, surprising as it was. I thought it was better done as he just got old, and there wasn't so much a violent end. Too much of that so far. I don't want to wait until the fall for it, but I'm looking forward to 12.

There are rumours that Capaldi's first episode might be transmitted earlier, possibly as an Easter special.

So, The Doctor was in his 11th incarnation for a pretty long time, wasn't he? Does anyone know just how long? Like, was he 11 longer than he was 1?

Sam_Vimes wrote:So, The Doctor was in his 11th incarnation for a pretty long time, wasn't he? Does anyone know just how long? Like, was he 11 longer than he was 1?

The second Doctor claimed to be about 450 in Tomb of the Cybermen, meaning the first Doctor was 450 or younger when he regenerated. The eleventh Doctor aged around 200 years between meeting his companions in the diner at Lake Silencio and his death a few minutes earlier (!) and subsequently spent at least three hundred years, and more likely considerably more than that, on Trenzalore. So yes, he must have lived longer than the first. He may well be the longest lived incarnation, although the eighth could probably give him a run for his money having spent a century stuck on Earth in the novels and then at least six hundred years on Orbis in the BF audio.

Well, all right! I knew I could count on you to know, Tony.

So...8, the least-tenured screen Doctor, might actually be the LONGEST-tenured canonical Doctor? I like that so much that they should probably just make that official. You know, to specifically please me.

Sam_Vimes wrote:Well, all right! I knew I could count on you to know, Tony.

So...8, the least-tenured screen Doctor, might actually be the LONGEST-tenured canonical Doctor? I like that so much that they should probably just make that official. You know, to specifically please me.

It would also please me!

Looking at the various Doctors' tenures, the ninth, fifth and second were almost certainly the shortest lived, with the ninth lasting less than a year and the others about as long as their on-screen lives or just a few years longer, since they were all accompanied more or less constantly by human companions who would noticeably age. The third would fall into the same ctaegory, but there are several gaps between stories later in his run where he could have been off doing his own thing for extended periods of time before going back to work, and the novelisation of Planet of the Spiders suggests that he was drifting in the TARDIS dying of radiation poisoning for ten years before the ship brought him home! The first Doctor, of course, must have lived for centuries before meeting Ian and Barbara and the fourth travelled for an unspecified time alone between losing Sarah and meeting Leela, and then for who knows how long with Romana, who would have ageed as slowly as him. The sixth Doctor spenbt an unspecified amount of time travelling alone or with various non TV companions between Trial of a Time Lord and meeting Mel for the "first" time at some point before Time and the Rani, and the seventh, eighth, tenth and eleventh could all have had centuries of time between the TV stories.

I would say that either the eighth or eleventh were the longest lived, followed by the fourth, seventh and first, and then possibly the tenth.

I feel like I need to make a chart.

Sam_Vimes wrote:I feel like I need to make a chart.

The thing is, the Doctor's personal timeline is fairly simple up until the end of the classic series: he states he's about 450 in Tomb, has reached 758 by the mid point of the fourth Doctor's run, is 900 by the time the sixth Doctor is travelling with Mel, and is definitively stated as being 953 in Time & the Rani. And it's not hard to reconcile those dates, by speculating on the times between stories as I've done. But then, even if you ignore the books and audio stories (which I personally do not and see no reason to), it all falls apart the first time the ninth Doctor claims to be 900, and is made even worse by the tenth Doctor subsequently adding one year for each year in "real" time. Even if we ignore the seventh Doctor passing the 1000 mark in the books and the eighth living for centuries in books and audios, there is simply no way that the ninth Doctor in 2005 can be at least 53 years younger than the seventh was in 1987. Particularly since we now know that there was an interim incarnation between eight and nine who, judging by the appearance of the young John Hurt in Night of the Doctor and his aged appearance in Day of the Doctor, clearly lived a very long time fighting the Time War. The only explanation seems to be that the post Time War Doctors have either lost count and started again from an arbitrary number (900) or are actively lying. Either way, Peter Capaldi has mentioned in an interview that the Doctor is now about 2, 000 years old, and I personally would put him at closer to 2, 500 at least. There's just no way he can be any younger than that.

It seems odd that no one working on the show would have checked how old The Doctor was supposed to be before typing it into the script. I mean, the internet existed and everything!

As it is, I think I'll just be chalking the discrepancy up to some kind of vanity on The Doctor's part. It'd certainly fit 10, at least.

You could say the same about most continuity errors in comics, too. A year or two back, a Marvel writer used Skull the slayer in X-Men, but Jim Scully was inexplicably now Mike Skully. For some people, a five minute Google search is too much hassle.