Matt Smith in The Day of the Doctor (Picture: BBC /Adrian Rogers)

Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat says: ‘I think you should go back to your DVDs and count correctly this time. There’s something you’ve all missed.’

He’s talking about regenerations and the 50th anniversary show The Day of the Doctor.

On one hand, it is obvious that Moffat lies about the show and revels in his teasing. Equally, what might Whovians have missed?

Here are some of the more interesting (ludicrous?) ideas doing the rounds in the Doctor Who forum fanverse.


We’ve been miscounting all along

There’s a whole host of theories that suggest the Doctor tally is just wrong. But for argument’s sake let’s accept that Hartnell is No. 1 (and the Brain of Morbius – a Tom Baker/4th Doctor story that suggests otherwise) is bunkum.



Two ‘miscounting’ theories have credence. Firstly, that 1-3 are different aspects of one Doctor. It’s not made clear that Hartnell and Troughton are different regenerations, rather that it’s a rejuvenation. The Time Lords force Troughton’s Doctor to change in The War Games into Pertwee. It’s not called a regeneration directly.

This feels a weak argument when all appear as different incarnations in the Three and Five Doctors.

There’s much to mull too in the McGann/Eccleston + Hurt conundrum. Could Hurt and McGann be one and the same? Could Eccleston and McGann be the same Doctor? We haven’t seen several regenerations. Could all THREE be the ‘same’ Doctor? *shrugs*

What about the spare handy hand?

It seemed so throwaway when the Sycorax chopped off David Tennant’s hand and it grew back one Christmas Day in 2005 and the off-cut spawned the metacrisis Doctor with Donna’s help in Journey’s End.

In the same episode Ten said that the new part-human Doctor could never regenerate. But, the Doctor lies. Could his be a whole new timeline with a load more regenerations?

Swallowing the whole Time Vortex rewrote the sequence

Rose saved the universe and Eccleston’s Doctor saved Rose by swallowing the whole of the time vortex and no one’s supposed to do that. Surely such a shock to the system could rewrite the Time Lord rules of regeneration?

Becoming human reset the Doctor’s regenerations

It seemed to work for the Master, aka Professor Yana (played by Derek Jacobi in Utopia), in some sense (the Master hasn’t worried about regeneration for years). So when the Doctor used the chameleon arch in Human Nature, the Doctor might have changed the rules too. But that seems too low key a get-out for the Moff.

He’s got all of River Song’s regenerations in the bag

She gave them to him as he lay dying in Let’s Kill Hitler. Are they hers to give away? And anyway. How can she regenerate at all? Spoilers?

Hurt is a future Doctor

I like this idea best. And it fits well with the Great Intelligence’s reference to the Valeyard in The Name of the Doctor in the last series. Why has the Doctor never mentioned his dark self?



It hasn’t happened yet. Smith’s Doctor met him in the swirl of his own tomb timeline on Trenzalore. Hurt could easily be future stuff and not a past one. Wibbley wobbley timey wimey.