Top 10 Doctor Who Facts You Always Get Wrong

These days the show plays fast and loose with both historical and scientific concepts, and doesn’t care a jot for what is and isn’t possible or what did or didn’t happen. It’s pretty much what you’d expect about a show about a time travelling alien, but things weren’t always like this. It was originally pitched to the BBC as an educational program, through which people could learn about scientific concepts and historical periods. This was actually the motivation behind the chameleon circuit and the TARDIS changing its form, though it was eventually scrapped because it was deemed too expensive for production.

After “Doctor,” “TARDIS” is probably the word heard most frequently in any given episode of “Doctor Who,” but a lot of uncertainty surrounds this legendary acronym. How it looks written down is one of the main questions, with some opting to capitalize every letter as though they stand for something and others only capitalizing the first letter as though the word stands on it’s own. Despite it being in the dictionary, there’s still plenty of room for confusion. The other problem is whether it’s “Dimension in Space” or “Dimensions in Space”, and it’s been referred to as both over the years. Even the Doctor can’t decide which one is right.

They boast one of the most iconic designs of any science-fiction monster, and have remained almost entirely unchanged since their first appearance on TV. But while they might be the Doctor’s most famous adversaries, they weren’t the first, contrary to popular belief. The Daleks didn’t show up until the second serial, aptly named “The Daleks.” The first serial was called “An Unearthly Child,” and mostly focused on an encounter between the first-ever TARDIS crew and some violent cavemen who were trying to work out how to start a fire. It’s not surprising that it’s the Daleks people remember.

Way back in the early 60s, now-famed film director Ridley Scott was working at the BBC and was assigned to design the Daleks. It makes sense that an alien creature so feared and revered should come from the same mind as “Alien” – or does it? In actuality, Scott was too busy to do the assignment, and the job was given to Raymond Cusick instead, the real man responsible for those one-eyed salt-shakers with toilet plungers stuck to them. But as ridiculous as they are, we wouldn’t change the Daleks for the world, so Ridley Scott’s schedule clash may have been a blessing in disguise.

The concept of some points in time being fixed and some points being in flux doesn’t really make sense; surely a fluctuation event will inevitably lead to a fixed point, meaning it was never fluctuating at all, or a fixed point can actually be changed on a whim. While the show does have a partial answer to this quandary in the form of the Reapers, who arrive when Rose changes a fixed point by saving her father’s life, these villains are very inconsistent. We’ve never seen them again after this point, though you’d think they’d be following the Doctor around constantly waiting for him to mess up.

As River Song proved, you don’t have to be a Gallifreyan to be a Time Lord, and there was a point in history long ago before even Gallifreyans were Time Lords themselves. Time Lords are created by exposure to the Time Vortex, it just so happens that the Gallifreyans are elitists who don’t want to share the gifts of the Time Vortex with anybody else, so they keep it all to themselves. River was able to become a Time Lord because she was conceived on the TARDIS, while Jenny proved herself to be a Time Lord capable of regeneration despite coming from a progenation machine – she never stepped foot on Gallifrey.

The TARDIS does, of course, travel through time and space, but it really isn’t a machine at all, and the Doctor probably just calls it as such because it’s easier. TARDISes were in fact grown from bits of coral back on Gallifrey over prolonged periods of time, meaning that despite its appearance and function, the TARDIS is very much a living thing and not artificial in the slightest. The Tenth Doctor explains this to Rose when he thinks his TARDIS is lost, saying that it would be impossible for him to build another one due to being grown, and Captain Jack keeps a piece of TARDIS coral on his desk.

Compared to every human and most aliens he encounters he certainly is, but his intelligence has never been what sets him aside from the other Time Lords. Villainous Time Lords the Doctor goes up against are usually much cleverer than him, including the Master, Omega, Rassilon, and especially the Rani, whose superior intelligence the Doctor is forced to admit on multiple occasions. While he does excel in some areas, like physics and thermodynamics, he’s largely a tearaway who flunked out of school, stole a TARDIS and ran off. He never even learnt how to fly it properly.

He’s been the hero of our screens for more than half a century, but does anybody actually know how old he is? The Seventh Doctor at one point gives his age as over 900, older than the ages the Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors give for themselves. If things were murky in the classic episodes, they only get more complicated after Eleven loses the Ponds and apparently passes three-hundred years in isolation. After that, it’s anyone’s guess how old the Doctor is, especially since Twelve spent over four billion years stuck inside his own confession dial. At this point, it’s unlikely that even the Doctor knows how old they are.

Every time the Doctor meets a new person, they’re asked what their name is and have to repeatedly reiterate that it’s just “the Doctor.” Oftentimes this prompts them to be asked, “Doctor who?” in reference to the show’s title. But over the years, plenty of people have mistakenly said that the Doctor’s name is “Doctor Who”, distressing any number of Whovians exhausted from having to explain this isn’t the case. As if to make things even more confusing, though, for the entirety of the Fourth Doctor’s run, Tom Baker was credited in the titles as “Doctor Who”, though this practice thankfully stopped decades ago.