Or do they disappear when they regenerate?

I know we've had episodes where the Doctors meet but I'm not sure how they do that?

Also because this is a TV show, obviously not all the Doctors can meet in reality as some of the actors have died.

Well, yes. The adventures they had are still going to happen. The easiest way is to look at time as a straight line. Nine first appears in 2005. He regenerates. Ten goes back to Jan 1st, 2005. He speaks to Rose and tells her she'll have a great year. He leaves to regenerate. A few months later, Nine then appears in 2005 and meets Rose. So yes, everything we've seen each Doctor do still happens as we saw it. However, they won't have any new adventures because for them, they've regenerated.

Regeneration occurs when the Doctor's body is near death, or dead depending on who wrote the story, so when you see the Dr regenerate for example D/10 changes into D/11 that means D/10 has died and every cell in his body has regenerated and has become D/11. That is the end of D/10, he is no more, he hasn't shuffled off to a timelord retirement home or is just knocking about in unseen adventures.

To explain episodes where 2 or more Doctors appear is simple, what are the Doctor and his people? Timelords! They travel through time and as D/6 said when you travel as much as he has your bound to run into yourself on occasion. Whenever the incumbent Doctor meets a former Doctor the incumbent is actually meeting his past self, no different from you going back in time by ten years and meeting yourself from then, the only difference with DW is of course he has different incarnations and whilst to a casual viewer it may seem like 2 different people their not really, or in the Doctors own words he is me and I am he.

Hopefully someone more articulate than I can explain it better, but that's the jist of it.

And, when a Doctor does meet themselves, it's generally the rule that this always happened; they always met themselves, we just didn't know about it until now. So when Ten meets Eleven, provided he knows Eleven is a future version of himself, he knows that one day, he will become Eleven, and he will go back and meet himself as Ten.

You can look at it from a linear progression of time, from the beginning of the Universe to its death, in which case it's like Piipp says, you get various Doctors popping up all over the place.

Or you can look at it from the Doctor's own view of his timeline, where when he regenerates the old Doctor's gone. But because he's interacted with the Universe's (our time perception) timeline, those Doctors are still there. As taliesin is saying (I think).

Blimey, it's a tricky subject! Check this out for a lovely explanation of the difference in perception where dimensions are concerned. The great Carl Sagan on the 4th dimension .
Last edited by gingerfreak : 01-05-2013 at 23:45

Carl Sagan! Yay. Message ends.

I'm going to be contradictory.

The Doctor's timeline doesn't map linearly to ours so in that sense there is no date after which you will never see a particular Doctor again.

However there's also a time lock. What that appears to mean is that even a time traveller cannot change anything that happened to those affected by the lock, or even visit them. Hence why Nine believed he shouldn't have been able to encounter more Daleks.

So I guess that is most likely meant to convey that there's an objective time progression for you and I, and another that sits on top of that for time travellers, but the former is continuous and the latter is probably discrete. Which also sort of makes fixed points work as a concept — they would be anywhere a discrete step maps onto our normal continuous scale.

It's established that the Doctor can die without regenerating but should you be able to kill Seven? No. That would negate the idea of a time lock. So there's at least one way in which Seven is gone — there's an aspect of his life that is sealed off, finished and fully determined. It's just that to you and I that bit may not yet have happened.

So, in story, as far as I can make sense of it, Doctors can effectively disappear from your subjective viewpoint because there are no further ways you can interact with them.

In production terms it's probably only accurate to say that they're not still knocking around unless the story says that they are.

Indeed, but if past doctors can, do and will meet occasionally, does that mean there are other timelords pinging around time he could meet from before the Time war time lock. Or , does the TWTL remove all TL from history full stop?
Last edited by Steven_Dunne : 02-05-2013 at 06:52

I think everyone's discussing different things!

The Doctor's own timeline is mostly linear, like a single thread - one that changes colour occasionally along its length. Space and time are like a single piece of cloth. The Doctor's thread is woven in and out of random points across the surface of the cloth - sooner or later that thread is going to cross itself, but it doesn't happen very often because the cloth is almost infinitely large.

We can take a look at a particular point on the (say) blue part of the thread and see what the (First) Doctor was doing at that point, (whether it's a missing adventure or one seen on TV), but once it's been woven in, that's it, he's done it and it's part of the pattern, even if the green (Second) part of the thread crosses it later on. Yeah, I think this metaphor has run away from me.

That is one of the great unanswered questions from Nu Who.

In theory just because someone dies on a Wednesday you could pop back and see them on a Tuesday (well obviously you need a time machine but that taken as granted).

Even if the Wednesday was in 106 BC and teh Tuesday was in 2094 the fact is that in their time line there is a time before they were dead which is still accessable.

So if the timelock just acts to lock away the Time Lords at a certain point of their timeline and forever aftr then there would indeed be a time when they were at liberty. This would be before the Time Wars in their timelines.

But it removed all they ever did at all points in time then they couldn't be found anywhere...but this would eliminate everything they had ever done. So not only would any action they had taken against the Doctor be revoked but the Universe would hardly be able to remember them and the Time War because it would never have happened.

Another oddity of such a timeline is that the Doctor's enemies wanted him locked up because of something he was going to do. But the thing is he could have already done it earlier in his timeline, teh universe just haddened noticed yet. Also if they did see him again they couldn't instantly think "He's escaped the Pandorica" because it could be "To him this must be before the pandorica".

They could shoot the Doctor Dead and then a year later their invasion could be stopped by the Doctor because in his timeline it's a week before he's shot.

Also doesn't the TARDIS make sure that The Doctor doesn't visit a time and place within close proximity to an earlier incarnation?

So what you are saying is that 11 already knows that he is going to go back in time and meet 10 because 10 would pass those memories on to 11 when he regenerates.

I don't know if I can agree with this because by the very nature of what you are saying would mean that 10 would have gone through the events of the 50th and passed the memories on to 11 so he would already know what is going to happen ???

I think, in general, there are safeguards against the Doctor crossing his own timestream like that. Not sure whether it is the TARDIS or just a guideline which the Doctor tries not to break.

I've been wondering about the consequence of the Time War on time travelling Time Lords from the start. If it just trapped the existing Time Lords at the time of the Time War but left all the other ones from the past then all the ones in the past would still have been travelling all over history (including the future).

For example, in the second episode of Nu Who, when the Doctor took Rose millions of years into the future to the point where the Earth was about to die he had been there before. He knew about that time period and had visited it on previous occasions. It stands to reason that Time Lords of the past had also done so, so you would expect Time Lords to still be ubiquitous throughout time regardless of what had happened to Gallifrey at a particular point along the time line.

So the only answer must be that, with the exception of the Doctor (and the Master), all Time Lords have been removed from the entirety of existence - past, present and future.

But then, that begs the question, what about all of the missions that the Time Lords sent the Doctor on, or the adventures in which they interfered. Did they happen now? Has time and events changed due to them not being there? Did the Doctor ever get sent to Skaro for Genesis of the Daleks?

Plus, if they were removed from existence would anyone even know about them at all? How come, in that second episode someone scanned him and was surprised to find out he was a Time Lord even though they were thought to be extinct. You wouldn't think anything was extinct if it never existed!

That's the way it usually works but we have also seen precedent for the Doctor rewriting a person's history and the memories of that rewrite only appearing after the fact. That Christmas episode with the Shark (whose name escapes me) featured just that.

Sometimes the time travel is already part of the established time line and sometimes it changes the time line. If it changes the time line then the memories associated with the change would only manifest after the change. It's probably not a good idea for the Doctor to change his own Time Line, however, so he probably tries very hard to avoid that!

Yes, that is what I'm saying. Same as the Lake Silencio ordeal; he figured out what happened and he knew it would happen because Amy, Rory, and River all witnessed it. He knew it was therefore unavoidable. Granted it appeared he swapped himself for the Tesselecta, but he didn't. It was always the Tesselecta that was attacked at that point, never the Doctor. He will know the events of the 50th, or he will have known; remember the episodes where the big sun thing ate his memories? Perhaps he has forgotten. It could, as another posted said, be similar to ACC in that he only starts to remember the events as he sees them unfolding before him. So whilst it seems a new experience, it's not, because he's there as Ten building up these memories which he then, as Eleven, remembers. There's several ways they can play this but Moffat's chucked in a few episodes here and there which have all touched upon this very subject; my feeling is that he's used these episodes to prepare us for the big event, ie the 50th, so that we don't spend the whole episode questioning how it happens because we've already learned how it happens from previous episodes. Much like the fob watch saga in S3.

I just figured because the Doctor knows where he has been and when, he just avoids going to those certain points to avoid getting in the way of his own time stream.

If you think that's confusing, try this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_His_Bootstraps
and then wonder whether Diktor is Doctor?

My head is spinning after reading that....

This is a great thread...I love it when fans get furrowed brows and in deep thought.

What puzzles me is that in the classic series regeneration was seen as renewal and not a death. this seems to have changed since 96. I don't like it because it make it more about the actor than the character. (the 10th Doctors tantrum)

Also doesn't the Doctor just forget encounters with himself? i know he had his memory wiped at the end of the five Doctors?

...actually in the five doctors rassilon returns each of them back to there timestreams. doesn't this mean that they're always existing in 4th dimension. No new adventures but loads of unseen stories.

I guess its a bit like meeting yourself at 5, 25 and 45. You're the same but different

Just a different perspective on the same thing. Each incarnation is sufficiently different from the one before that the things that make Ten inherently 'Ten' have died.


I think that's the exception, rather than the rule. I don't think the mind wiping would happen without the Time Lords doing it, however it's necessary from a storytelling point of view - you don't want a past Doctor to suddenly be aware of his future when there's been no hint in their own episodes.

If you've seen 'Time Crash', Ten went into it not knowning what was happening, but as things unfolded he slowly remembered it happening to his earlier self. He wasn't memory-wiped, it just took him a while to catch on.

Not directly related to this thread, but I've always thought it was interesting to think what exactly is the past present and future?

I mean if the three all existed, and it were possible to visit all three? Then surely the present would always be the past future and present?

It would be entirely subjective and depending on who is looking at it. Meaning what is my future is another persons past or even future....if that makes sense...

So if you look at it from a different point of view I guess this Doctor is a past Doctor as there must be a future Doctor running around out there doing stuff other wise how could the future meet the past if in fact there wasn't already a future....

Annnny way enough of my rambling.

Yes, very true. I've been wondering just what the 'present' would actually mean to the Doctor. What time period does he actually come from? When he was born on Gallifrey, what was the year on Earth? When he came to Earth in 1963 was that his present? Did he just leave Gallifrey and travel in space but not time or did he travel back millennia because he liked the idea of 1963? Or did he travel forwards for that matter?

Even if it was his present in the Hartnell era, it isn't now. He's spent hundreds of years since those days but tends to still come back to the 21st century…