Fun with math! Sort of.
Throughout the history of Doctor Who, the Time Lord has been known to hand out his age willy-nilly, almost as though he enjoys answering such a typically delicate question. But what is the true number? Can it really be calculated, or must it always be a lie? Who wants to play a numbers game?
Note: For the sake of keeping the record as clean as possible (which is basically impossible), only the television show will be considered for canonical references to age. Some suggestions from the audio plays, books, and comics might be considered for filling in knowledge gaps, but not taken as “gospel.”
During the tenure of Classic Who, there was a definite attempt to keep the Doctor’s age roughly consistent in the canon. He entered the Time Lord Academy around the age of eight, finished primary school at 45, and saw the Medusa Cascade when he was “just a kid” at age 90. Question is—when did he nab his TARDIS and start touring the universe?
According to Romana (who one would assume to be right about such things, though Rassilon knows how she manages it), the Fourth Doctor had been traveling in the TARDIS for 523 years when he was 759. If that’s the case, some quick subtraction tells us that the Doctor stole the TARDIS at the tender age of 236-ish. Does this stack up with everything else the show tells us?
So far, so good. The First Doctor regenerated at about 450 years old, which is supported again by the Second Doctor when he gives his age to companion Victoria in “The Tomb of the Cybermen.” The Third Doctor was known to be a bit deceitful about his age (he almost claims to have been a scientist for several thousand years to the Master’s assistant, Professor Kettering), but it’s said in “Planet of the Spiders” that he regenerated at the age of 748.
This goes on to be supported by the Fourth Doctor, who claimed to be around 750 while he was traveling with Sarah Jane and Leela. He then claimed to be 756 when he met Romana, but she corrected him to 759. (We might assume that the Doctor had a bit of a crush and knocked off those three years to seem younger…) By the time he regenerated into the Fifth Doctor, the age was bumped up to 813, suggesting that the Doctor traveled with Romana for a fair amount of time before taking on Adric, then Nyssa and Tegan.
Okay, this is where it will start to get more confusing for New-Who-only fans. The Sixth Doctor claimed to be 900 years old during his travels with Peri. The Seventh Doctor tells Melanie Bush that he’s the same age as the Rani, his old classmate—953—on his first outing. Then the timeline gets fuzzy. According to the 1996 film, the Seventh Doctor was nearing regeneration (due to old age) before getting shot and regenerating into the Eighth Doctor. We know that the Eighth Doctor aged somewhat before regenerating into the War Doctor, who also aged in that body—his reflection following the Eighth Doctor’s transformation is considerably younger than the man we see in “The Day of the Doctor.”
The Ninth Doctor arrives on the scene. When he first mentions his age to Rose, it’s in context of a rude awakening from Jackie Tyler: “900 years of time and space and I’ve never been slapped by someone’s mother.” Now, by this wording, one could assume that the Doctor means that he’s been traveling in the TARDIS for 900 years, which would make him over 1100. Rose clarifies that he’s 900 years old, which he agrees with, but that might be a deliberate mislead—since Rose seems to agree that 900 years is a big age gap, as her mother suggested, it makes sense that the Doctor wouldn’t then want to correct her with “Well, it’s actually more like 1123…”
The place where the numbers get well and truly borked is during Ten’s grandiose “Voyage of the Damned” speech. He Clint-Eastwoods it up in epic fashion—I’m the Doctor. I’m a Time Lord. I’m from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous. I’m 903 years old, and I’m the man who’s gonna save your lives, and all six billion people on the planet below. You got a problem with that?
903. We could have glossed over it, just said it worked, that the Ninth Doctor really did mean 900 years aboard the TARDIS, but then the Tenth Doctor says the magic number—903—and the show pushes on from there. He’s 904 in “The Day of the Doctor,” 906 before regenerating in “The End of Time.” The Eleventh Doctor claims to be 907 during his early adventures with Amy, then goes on a 200-year-long farewell tour when he believes he’s going to die during the Impossible Astronaut plot line. By the time we hit “A Town Called Mercy,” he says he’s 1200.
In the Eleventh Doctor’s final episode, “The Time of the Doctor,” he tells Clara that he has been defending the people on Trenzalore for 300 years, making him at least 1500 years old. And then the Twelfth Doctor tells Clara that he’s over 2000 in at the end of “Deep Breath.”
It doesn’t add up even slightly, but here is a quote that Steven Moffat gave SFX in 2010 that might make sense of it all:
The thing I keep banging on about is that he doesn’t know what age he is. He’s lying. How could he know, unless he’s marking it on a wall? He could be 8,000 years old, he could be a million. He has no clue. The calendar will give him no clues.
While I’m a big fan of continuity porn, this really does make the most sense. Even with internal “Time Lord senses” that help him out with these sorts of things, knowing his own personal count of days would be impossibly hard to keep track of. There seem to be plenty of stretches where the Doctor travels on his own—how could he know then? When Clara asks him how long he’s been traveling alone in “Listen,” does he neglect to answer because he’s ashamed to say? Or that in combination with the fact that he simply can’t tell her for sure?
And if that’s the case… how old might he be?
To be clear, this is a completely arbitrary guessing game from this point on. It’s a fun exercise to point out just how old the Doctor could be, if all of these lives were given their due. Let’s say—for argument’s sake—that pretty much everything is correct through the end of the classic series. (This seems fair to do since his age is corroborated by Romana, another of his species.) If the Seventh Doctor goes from middle age to elderly in that body, one would assume that he’d occupied it for a least a couple hundred years, since the First Doctor’s body lasted 450 altogether before dying of old age. So the Seventh Doctor swapped out for the Eighth at around 1150. The Eighth Doctor ages, though not by much, so it seems likely that he could have been around for a century or so. That makes him 1250-ish when the War Doctor steps in. He appears to have aged quite a bit in that persona, so let’s say the poor guy is fighting that Time War for about 200 years. (Not a happy thing to suggest, but he seems weary enough.) We reach 1450, give or take.
The Ninth Doctor doesn’t get much time, as far as we know. His wounds seem too fresh and raw to have been around very long, and we know he doesn’t get too many days during his tenure with Rose and Jack (though it was likely longer than a year because it is time travel we’re talking about here). I’d give him 5-10 years max. Likewise with the Tenth Doctor, who burned out far too quickly. Maybe his little goodbye tour took longer than he believed and we can stretch his time to 15 years. So the Doctor is getting closer to 1500 at this point.
The Eleventh Doctor lives out his entire “life” in that body, which would probably give him a solid 400 years at least. If he got as much time as Moffat suggests, then he lived more like 600 years in that body, taking him to 2000+. Which is exactly where Twelve places himself, funny enough. So either way, the story seems to pan out. Just not with the numbers as and when they’re given.
Of course, the Doctor could be making it all up. Most of those numbers could be diminished or inflated at will. He might have accidentally started counting weeks as days at a certain point. Or counting seconds as minutes. Or maybe he means Gallifreyan years sometimes and those are only half as long as Earth years. Either way, it’s clear that one good reason for having a companion is to remind him to consider time a bit more carefully. And who knows?—he really might be 8000, for all that we can tell.
Emmet Asher-Perrin just really wishes that the Ninth and Tenth Doctors had been allowed a little more time. You can bug her on Twitter and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
A question: does time spent in the TARDIS? If it doesn’t, The Doctor could be truly old.
It wouldn’t patch up all these holes, but would make them smaller, if 9,10,and 11 discounted years lived as the War Doctor but 12 counts them…
… what’s a year, again? ;)
You missed something in “The Time of the Doctor”. He defends Trenzalore for 300 years, tells Clara that it’s been 300 years, and sends her home again. He then continues on for centuries more, as the warring factions thin out, before Clara returns again finding him even more aged than when she last saw him. One of the tie-in eBooks gives the final count at 900 years for the total time on Trenzalore, but I don’t think a final number is given in the episode itself. Regardless, it’s a lot more than 300.
In a scene inside the TARDIS, I’m sure I heard the current doctor say he’s been alive for thousands of years. It bothered me at the time because for some reason I’d assumed he was 900 (no idea why though).
@3 has the real question, what we call a year is the time it takes for the Earth to rotate around the Sun.
But the Doctor isn’t human, and didn’t grow up on Earth*, so who knows what constitues a year to him?
* Although he might have speant more time here than anywhere else perhaps?
I didn’t think this all the way through, but what if everytime he mentions his age, he’s giving the “years old” of his current incarnation?
Let’s not forget that in Day of the Doctor, a big deal was made that Eleven was 400 years older, and that’s before Trenzalore.
At the end of the day, I suspect the real answer is that he doesn’t know, we don’t know, but he’s certainly got a lot of years under his belt.
As a classic Who fan, I was always bugged by the “I’m 900 years old” thing that 7 said to Rose. I just assumed he was lying. That was why I found his statement in Day of the Doctor very telling. “I have lied about my age so often I don’t remember anymore.” (paraphrase there) That was the line that cemented it for me and I am glad that he said it. Now when he complains about how old he feels, boy does he mean it.
@8: In that same prison-cell scene in TDotD, we get this exchange:
War Doctor: “How old are you now?”
Eleventh Doctor: “Ah, I don’t know. I lose track. Twelve hundred and something, I think — unless I’m lying. I can’t remember if I’m lying about my age, that’s how old I am.”
The problem with the Doctor going from 450 in “Tomb of the Cybermen” to 748 in “Planet of the Spiders” is that there’s not really any room for him to pack on an extra three centuries, since he was associating almost continuously with human companions for that entire time. The Second Doctor was traveling with Jamie McCrimmon from “The Highlanders” through “The War Games,” and the Third was hanging around with UNIT or traveling with Jo Grant or Sarah Jane Smith. So the total duration of those incarnations couldn’t have been more than a few years each, or his human companions would’ve aged far more.
The only real gap there is the hypothetical “Season 6B” that’s often speculated to exist between “The War Games” and “Spearhead from Space” — the idea being that instead of regenerating at the end of TWG and immediately being exiled to Earth in SfS, the Doctor spent some time working for the Celestial Intervention Agency on secret missions. This theory was concocted because it’s the only way to make sense of “The Two Doctors,” wherein the Second Doctor is on a mission for the Time Lords even though he was on the run from his people up until TWG, and wherein Jamie is inexplicably twenty years older than when we last saw him. But even accepting the Season 6B theory, it’s awfully difficult to accept that the Doctor was on missions for the Time Lords for nearly three centuries.
The 4-to-5 age bump can be explained by assuming he spent over a century with Romana, granted. But the 5-to-6 age bump is harder to explain, because the Fifth Doctor was also traveling pretty constantly with young human (or humanlike alien) companions. Is it possible that Trakenites are a very long-lived species, and that the Doctor and Nyssa traveled together for decades between “Time Flight” and “Arc of Infinity”?
But, yeah, it pretty much becomes impossible to reconcile once you get to the new series. Whatever point he’s counting from in his Ninth and subsequent incarnations, it’s not the same one he went by in his previous lives.
Then again, the Time War totally screwed up history, didn’t it? It rewrote the history of the universe over and over again, expunging whole civilizations and major events from the timeline, and incidentally accounting for the inconsistencies between the original show’s continuity (itself quite a mess) and the new one. Maybe it left his own personal history ambiguous or unreliable in some way, and so he decided to start counting his age from when the Time War first broke out from his perspective, which would’ve been sometime in his eighth incarnation.
Has it ever been established that the doctor speaks english? I thought the TARDIS translated for everyone. If so, aren’t all of the doctor’s answers filtered through the TARDIS? And given the TARDIS has feelings for/about the doctor, one should also consider whether the TARDIS is lying about his age too. I know this would clear up why his answer is in years; it would be the way an english speaker expects “how old are you?” to be answered. But it also opens up quite the can of worms too.
In The Day Of The Doctor, the Doctor asks him(them?)selves how old they are, and they give answers. Why would they lie to themselves? Even 11 honestly answers that he’s not sure he really is 1200 years old.
And given how many times he tells Amy he’ll be back in five minutes . . .
My personal thought is that the Doctor is at least several thousand years old, if not several tens of thousands or millions of years old. He just lies all the time and we also have no frame of reference for what he or Romana mean by “a year.” It probably isn’t an Earth year.
As far the Tardis, my head cannon is that when the Tardis talks about their time traveling together, she really just means their time traveling together. When he exits the Tardis they certainly aren’t traveling together anymore — the Tardis stays behind. Up for debate is whether the Tardis only means time spent in the Vortex actually going somewhere or all time spent in the Tardis.
To me this makes the most sense when you consider just how insanely large the Universe is and how familiar the Doctor seems to be with it.
@14: As I said, the problem with all these inflated ages for the Doctor is that they’re hard to reconcile with the amount of time he spends in the continuous company of mortal humans. There was never a time between the end of the series’s first episode and the end of the Second Doctor’s tenure in which the Doctor was not continuously in the company of human companions, who never visibly aged more than a couple of years in his presence — not to mention that most of the stories back then led directly into one another with cliffhanger endings, with no room for further adventures to be interpolated (though many novels and audios have cheated on that count). So if anything, given the continuous storytelling, the amount of time the Doctor spent with those companions was probably less than the six years that elapsed in real life. If anything, it seems that the Second Doctor had a very short life, unless we assume that “Season 6B” happened and covered an enormous span of time.
Similarly, as I’ve shown, there are few gaps in the later Doctors’ lives when they weren’t in the continuous company of humans, so it seems unlikely that the Third or Fifth Doctor’s life was very long. They both only made it a few years apiece before regenerating, as did the Ninth (maybe even less for him) and apparently the Tenth. True, this is astonishingly short for a Time Lord, given that he managed to make it 450 years before his first regeneration — but then, the Doctor started leading a very perilous life once he fled Gallifrey, so it’s not surprising that he’d burn through incarnations rather quickly. Which is one reason I have a hard time taking the increasingly inflated claims he makes about his age very seriously, or the really huge jumps in age that Eleven went through under Moffat. It’s hard to believe the Doctor could truly manage to go as much as ten years without getting himself killed, let alone centuries in the middle of an endless war.
The Doctor doesn’t need to make tally marks on the wall to count days, the Tardis should keep an exact count for him, except for a few occasions, like “Blink”, when he time travelled by other means.
But you would expect a “Timelord” to have an innate sense of duration as well.
Of course, the confusion is because it’s something that the writers only cared about intermittently and just used whatever they felt made sense for that episode without trying to reconcile the previous numbers.
Seems like #12 is about 2000 going forward.
In “The Night of the Doctor,” Eight mentions various of his Big Finish companions, including Lucie. That implies that the 600-year time skip from “Orbis” needs to be incorporated: when Lucie rejoins Eight, it’s 600 years (from his point of view) since they parted. Presumably Orbis years; we don’t know how those relate to Tellurian or Gallifreyan years.
@17: Not necessarily. Incorporating characters from a tie-in doesn’t require incorporating the specific events of that tie-in’s stories. Batman comics adopted Harley Quinn and Renee Montoya from Batman: The Animated Series, but were still a separate universe from that show. And Superman comics in the ’40s incorporated Perry White and Jimmy Olsen from the radio show while still being a separate reality from the show (e.g. Superman acted publicly in the comics while keeping his existence secret in the pre-WWII radio series).
After watching all the Classic Who, and keeping track of each time his age was mentioned, I always suspected that that the Doctor was much older than the 900+ that the 9th, 10th and 11th Doctor’s mentioned. I like the estimates the EMILY ASHER-PERRIN lists above, although I think the 10th Doctor was around a lot more than 15 years, I believe he hinted at spending a lot of time off screen traveling without any his companions.
2000+ years old sounds like a good minimum age for the Doctor.
Rule 1: The Doctor lies.
As for the Doctor not having any “gaps” in his time line in which to fit extra adventures: he’s a time traveler, and one who seems almost allergic to staying in one place and time for very long. See: The Power of Three in Matt Smith’s 3rd season (season 7 of the relaunch.) If you turn your back on him for more than five minutes, he could slip into the TARDIS, vworp-vworp (as close as I can come to the TARDIS “wheezing” sound) off to someplace else for a moment (maybe because he just remembered he had something to do there and absent-mindedly forgot his companions) only to come back a few seconds after leaving.
Now granted, given Eleven and Twelve’s tendencies to pop out for five minutes and come back weeks, months, or years later this works better for earlier Doctors.
Another possible explanation for the inconsistencies is in The Name of the Doctor. The Great Intelligence, Clara, and the Doctor himself jumped into the Doctor’s time line. That had to turn the Doctor’s life inside out, upside down, and backwards. After that tangled mess, it’s not surprising that a few errors/inconsistencies/changes would slip back into earlier regenerations’ existences.
I think we are all over looking something. As a time traveler, with traveling back & forth thru time and occassionaly sideways thru alternate time lines… How do you measure your own personal passage of time?
Except that doesn’t work for the early Doctors, because they couldn’t control the TARDIS. For the First and Second Doctors, the TARDIS’s journeys were completely random. He’d just dematerialize and it was a complete toss-up where they’d land. If he left someone behind, he’d probably never see them again. Remember, the first time a companion left, it was his granddaughter, and he told her in as many words, “I shall come back.” But he never did, because he simply didn’t know how.
It’s only in the Doctor’s third incarnation that he begins to treat the TARDIS as something whose navigation he can control (which makes sense — the years he spent tinkering with it to try to circumvent the Time Lords’ block on its controls probably taught him a lot about it systems), but the majority of the time he didn’t end up where he wanted to go. His control got gradually better over his fourth and fifth incarnations, but it wasn’t until his sixth or seventh life that he was really able to reliably control the TARDIS.
Mind you, there has been a hypothesis in the past about the Fourth Doctor doing more or less what you suggest. Terrance Dicks suggested in his novelization of “The Face of Evil” that shortly after his regeneration (early in “Robot”), the Fourth Doctor had snuck into the TARDIS, gone off on a jaunt during which he reprogrammed the computer Xoanon, then made his way back to the same place and time he’d left. Dicks posited this, I presume, because Xoanon had adopted the Fourth Doctor’s face and voice there was no other point in that incarnation’s journeys up to that time when such an adventure could’ve happened — since they were still transitioning pretty continuously from one serial to the next.
Christopher, sure with the FIRST Doctor you are the most limited. Though we again get caught up in what Time Lords mean when they talk about “years”. This might get especially tricky in a Binary Star System. A year might be something far longer than even just one orbit if you want both Stars in the same relative position. It all depends on what a completely different society means by the term, and for a planet with a completely unknown orbit.
With the second Doctor, you can add as much time as you want if the Time Lords send him on missions (some might have companions and some might not).
With the Third and above the Doctor has a measure of control, so he could zip out and come back. Or perhaps the Time Lords have him do some stuff for them here and there. A lack of reliability just means he might have to try many times (with many adventures) before he gets back.
But I’d also state that the earlier incarnations of the Doctor seem much, much younger. They know a lot less about random galactic facts or places for instance. By the time you get to the 10th/11th Doctor, you have someone that is often surprised if they aren’t familiar with a random part of the Universe or fact. That, imho, requires a pretty immense age. I’d see no reason for the Doctor to be honest about his age either. Say you are 900 or even 2000 years old and people can sort of comprehend that. Tell them you are 30,000 or a million years old and that’s just beyond our ability to really grasp (as an age of a sentient being) — it would make it harder to make friends, imho.
Sure some stuff is continuous from one serial to the next. But the series itself often plays a bit fast and loose with such things. In any case, you only need ONE hole for the Doctor to have immensely long adventures before returning. You get that for just about every Doctor for what it is worth.
@21 That’s easy. You just carry a watch with you. It’ll measure the passage of your relative time. But I’m sure the Time Lords have many ways to measure the personal age of a being — we just don’t know a lot about stuff like that.
In my head-canon, the Eighth Doctor was somewhere in the 1,500 to 2,000 year old range when the Time War broke out and then spent several thousand years fighting (as 8 and as the War Doctor). Being public enemy #1 to the daleks he would have been a major target, with attacks on his very existence throughout his timeline. These wiped out hundreds of years of his past, including some stories we saw on TV as well as in other media.
When the Ninth Doctor claimed to be 900 years old, he wasn’t counting his actions as the War Doctor, but was otherwise being honest. Centuries of his life had been erased from history or stitched around. From there, Ten generally lies about his age, Eleven is fairly honest about the number of years passing by, although he loses count during his hermit years, and Twelve decides on a nice round number because he doesn’t really care either way.
I’ve always wondered (and especially wonder now in light of both Trenzalore and the aging of the War Doctor) if there’s an effect of the TARDIS’s “Temporal Grace” effect where a Time Lord’s physical aging is retarded while inside it but not while outside (although they would still be far longer lived and hardier than a human, even barring regenerations). As such, not only does the Doctor have to consider that he’s bouncing between different chronologies and traveling through time, but that his own “relative time” is starting and stopping (or at least moving at a nearly infinitesimal or controllable rate) within the TARDIS’s internal dimension. That Two and Eleven are both seen with centuries-long ‘diaries’ at different points is probably an attempt to keep track of at least part of their relative time scale.
The curious thing about this is how then the Doctor’s aging compares to a near-contemporary like the Master or someone “the same age” (a.k.a. born in the Gallifreyan year) like the Rani, provided either or both have survived. I can’t begin to determine what “age” a surving Romana in N-Space (if the “President Romana” material isn’t canon — or even if it is, given the time she was away) would be…
To be honest, he probaly doesn’t know how old he is and if he really wanted to know, I’m sure he could always ask the TARDIS but he doesn’t care about his age and makes up a number on the spot which is most often towards short lived species such as humans. So 900, 1200 and 2000 sound like a very long life span to us but for a Timelord, most would live longer than that per regeneration as a regeneration can last around 10,000 without ‘accidents’ but the Doctor does have accidents such as getting shot, falling and being onboard a crashing ship so his regenerations are bound to not last that long however, with the knowledge he has and eveything being his ‘backyard’ I believe that he must be considerably older than 2000.
I’d say the Doctor is near 3000 years old.
First off, I leave the classic series alone and take it at it’s word. Doctor #6 regenerates into #7 at 953; we take that as true.
Next, we gage a Time Lord’s lifespan by the Eleventh Doctor, since he actually lived a full life and regenerated (with help) out of old age.
As the youngest Doctor to date, he regenerated into his “twenties”, and aged from there; lasting for (at my count) 700 – 800 years, regenerating in his “nineties” or “100s”.
So it seems, mathematically, a Time Lord ages 10 times slower than a human being; and a Time Lord’s incarnation lifespan is affected greatly by the “age” he first regenerates into.
A Doctor starting out in his “forties” would naturally last about 500 years before regenerating.
Peter Capauldi’s Doctor, I’m affraid, would only last 350 years.
Eleven starts off his incarnation in his “twenties”, at the age (he says) of 907. After his tour of the universe, he states that he’s 1103; he’s aged 200 years, and is now in his “forties”. He looks a bit older than he used to; Amy even comments on it a couple of times.
After Amy and Rory depart, he spends roughly 100 additional years in solitude, initially in 19th century London then in the 13th century. By the time he meets his other selves in “The Day of the Doctor”, he’s 1200-and-something. He’s now aged into his “fifties”. He then spends 300 years on Trenzilore. When Clara shows up again, he’s 1500 years old, and aged into his “eighties”. He’s a young-looking eighty, but not by much.
Clara shows up again 100 or 200 years later (they don’t really specify), making the Doctor (by his count) 1600-1700 years old, with this incarnation now aged “ninety” or “100” in human terms.
But this doesn’t track with the classic series . . .
So now, we have to put the War Doctor into the mix.
When Eleven says he’s “thwelve-hundred-and-something”, the War Doctor exclaims “four hundred years older than me?”.
So the War Doctor says he’s 800 years old. (The first thing that strikes you about that is that the Ninth Doctor’s incarnation must have lasted 100 years.)
Anyway, if the Eleventh Doctor lasted 700 or 800 years before regenerating from old age, the same would be true of the War Doctor. He probably started out in a 30-something body at the end of “The Night of the Doctor”, then proceeded to fight the Time War for 800 years, to the ripe old age of approx 110 human years. That’s a slightly extended lifetime, but then again, he was artificially created to last as long as necessary to end the Time War.
So, if the War Doctor claimed to be 800 years old, and it seems that a Time Lord incarnation lasts approximately that long, then the War Doctor started out at AGE ZERO !
Which makes sense. ” DOCTOR NO MORE.”
When he started out in the Time War, the War Doctor disavowed his name AND started his age over at zero.
So, the Doctor’s age?
Applying the 10 years = 100 to Time Lord aging, Doctor Seven regenerated after 9 years real time, so he was 953 + 90 = 1043.
Doctor Eight lasted 17 years real time; 1043 + 170 = 1213.
War Doctor lasted 800 years; 1213 + 800 = 2013.
Eleventh Doctor; 2013 + 400 (stated difference) + 500 (Trenzalore) = 2913 years.
@28: I’m not sure I’d agree that a Time Lord’s external appearance upon regeneration corresponds to his physical age. Look at the evidence of the past season: The Twelfth Doctor looks like a man of 55, but he’s incredibly spry and physical, running and jumping across rooftops and swimming across the Thames and so forth. And he hinted that he subconsciously chose that face for some particular reason, suggesting that its apparent age is arbitrary and unconnected to the physical condition of his body.
Not to mention that this is the start of a whole new cycle of regenerations. Essentially he’s been reset to the condition of a Time Lord starting his second life (i.e. after his first regeneration). So he’s also quite “young” in that sense. The irony is that we went from an extremely old Doctor with a very youthful face to an extremely youthful Doctor with a relatively old face.
It was my initial reaction to the Eleventh Doctor living for 700 – 800 years. Although no regenerative longevity has ever been hinted at throughout the series, eight centuries just seemed awfully long.
When I rationalized it out, I figured the youngest regeneration would naturally last the longest. Every regeneration lasting 800 years would make a typical Time Lord’s lifespan 10,400 years long, meening our Doctor had wasted most of his lifespan. Paring that down by basing a regeneration’s duration on initial “age” would have given MOST of the Doctor’s incarnations roughly a 400 – 500 year duration. Since the Doctor usually expired from unnatural causes, the 4th Doctor regenerating at 800 instead of 1600 ( 4 full lifetimes) doesn’t seem as bad. It’s arbitrary, but it works for me.
@31: Sure, the Doctor’s lifespan is shorter than typical for a Time Lord, but as I said before, I’ve always figured that was because he lived a far more dangerous life and was repeatedly “killed” by violence. Although that is hard to reconcile with the fact that his longest lifetimes seemed to be during the Time War and the Siege of Trenzalore.
Come to think of it, I suppose it’s possible that the time energy leaking through the crack to Gallifrey’s pocket dimension could’ve slowed the Doctor’s aging on Trenzalore and let him live longer.
Per the article, the Seventh Doctor was nearing the end of his incarnation and about to regenerate due to old age, presumable because the voice over says that he was “nearing the end of his seventh life”.
This is not true. The Doctor didn’t look THAT old, and the voice-over, narrated by the Eighth Doctor, benefitted from hindsight. The Eighth Doctor, doing the narration, knew he was about to regenerate from a gunshot wound (okay, from the batched attempt at fixing his two hearts), not from old age.
@14. To bolster your position about the TARDIS and the Doctor not counting the times they weren’t traveling together, The Eleventh Doctor spent 300 years on Trenzalor, yet to the Tardis (and Clara), it was only a few minutes. Likewise, I would bet that the War Doctor fought in the trenches of the Time War mostly WITHOUT the TARDIS. So that’s 800 years, approximately, that the TARDIS doesn’t count. Not only were they not traveling together for most of it, the TARDIS may very well have skipped over those centuries to arrive near the end of the Time War shortly after it began. If you were the Doctor, would you want your TARDIS anywhere near the TIME WAR, where whole civilizations were being wiped out and rewritten, etc?
So, if the Doctor ripped off the TARDIS when he was 250-ish, they would have traveled together roughly (1213-250 =) 963 years before Doctor Eight’s regeneration into the War Doctor. Add to that the 108 (speculative) years she spent with the Ninth/Tenth/Eleventh Doctor up until “The Doctor’s Wife”, and you have 1071 years. And maybe there were a couple centuries somewhere previously when they were seperated, too.
@34: Where do you get the idea that he fought in the Time War without the TARDIS? We saw that he had it with him at the Fall of Arcadia, even using it as a weapon against the Daleks. And it looked pretty battered, suggesting it had seen a lot of action.
Besides, I don’t think the Time War is the sort of conflict that would have “trenches,” and it’s certainly not a conflict that could be waged without access to time travel. I mean, it was a Time War. A war waged by forces traveling through time, trying to pre-emptively alter each other’s history, constantly rewriting history to try to win battles they’d previously lost. There were references to history being in constant flux, to people dying over and over again as their histories were changed, to whole civilizations being erased from existence. This wasn’t trench warfare. It wasn’t people crawling through the dirt and shooting guns at each other, at least not primarily. It was a war of time travelers battling over the shape of history itself. The Doctor could not have participated meaningfully without the TARDIS.
@34. this is all speculation on my part, trying to find additional centuries where the Doctor and the TARDIS would be seperated, or, even, where the TARDIS would have passed over those centuries to meet the Doctor on the other side.
In answer to your points:
The TARDIS looked battered at the end of the Time War, but no more battered than the Eighth Doctor’s TARDIS in “The Night of the Doctor” (indeed, it was the same prop), suggesting that it got battered while the Eighth Doctor was trying to avoid the Time War, not during the war itself.
“In the trenches” meens on the front lines with the troops, which the Doctor admitted he was. Besides, they did mention “sky trenches” in “The Day of the Doctor”.
And yes, the Time War was waged with time technology. But I don’t think the Doctor would go off to fight a war filled with time machines using his own beloved TARDIS any more than I’d take my own car to fight in the middle east.
He would have fought the Time War using equipment supplied by the Time Lords, leaving his own TARDIS safely (or as safe as could be in an all-consuming Time War) out of the fight. He would have rejoined the TARDIS in the final days of the war, when his desires and those of his Time Lord superiors diverged (he deserted). He used his TARDIS for the final defense of Arcadia because he was actually there to steal the Moment and use it to annialate both sides to end the war. Can’t use government issued (and possible bugged/tracked) equipment for that.
@36: I just can’t believe the Doctor would be satisfied using any TARDIS except “Sexy.” This is a guy who threw the TARDIS manual into a supernova because he disagreed with it. He wouldn’t trust a shiny new Time Lord-approved TT capsule over his beloved, custom-rebuilt, endlessly-tinkered-with Type 40. And he’s never been reluctant to take her into danger before or since (or her to take him, rather).
And I just don’t see any need to separate them just to get a few numbers to match up. As I’ve said, it’s easy enough to rationalize inconsistent date references by assuming they’re using different calendars, or that time travelers don’t necessarily keep good track of time anyway. Idris/TARDIS couldn’t even tell past from future, so how good a timekeeper would she be? What does “700 years” mean to a being for whom all events are simultaneous?
@37.
True, it really doesn’t make any real difference. I just like tidying up the numbers that way.
@30.
As for the Doctor feeling the age of his newly-regenerated body, the tenth Doctor commented in “Timecrash” that he felt younger when he regenerated into the fifth Doctor’s body. “And then I was you . . .”
@39: No, that’s not what he said.
It was his earlier, “old and grumpy” selves (presumably Hartnell and Pertwee in particular) that he characterized as young — because, of course, they were younger than his later selves. It was when he got older — old enough that he didn’t feel the need to be self-conscious about proving his maturity — that he relaxed and had fun (as Davison, though presumably as Tom Baker as well).
In “Heaven Sent” he lived billions of years.
@41
Sort of. You might also recall he died at the end of each loop, and was recreated. So yes, he went into the prison and came out billions of years later, but his body and memories do not cover all of that time.
Only God knows and He isn’t talking.
@19,
Who is this “Emily” of which you write?
—-
In any case, when Dr Who isn’t traveling with human companions, even for a few seconds in their viewpoint, he could be having adventures with companions from any of the other interesting races of the multiverse. Just because he’s missing from Amy’s life for a few weeks, doesn’t mean he hasn’t been gadding about for a few millennia in his reference frame.
Please note that this article was published in 2014, so older (pre-2020) comments might refer to the previous byline; it has since been updated to Emmet Asher-Perrin.
Didn’t the first Doctor have his life force drained as well?