10 Important Doctor Who Details That Are Almost Never Mentioned
Did we all just forget that the Doctor isn't technically the Doctor?
Doctor Who has been running for so long – and has had so many different writers, showrunners, and producers at its helm – that it's had more of its lore forgotten than most other TV shows will ever have written for them.
Even the most hardcore Whovian can't always recall what Character X said 42 minutes into an old Troughton serial from the 1960s, even if that dialogue is actually super important.
Most of the time it's minor details – things that were never meant to have much of an impact and disappeared almost as soon as they arrived. But there are some bits of lore sitting quietly in the background that, when you actually stop and think about them, have huge implications for the show.
From oft-forgotten details about the Whoniverse at large to a disturbing tidbit about the Doctor themselves, these are some of the fairly major Doctor Who details that most people seem to have completely forgotten about.
10. The Entire Universe Is Already Dying
Doctor Who is all about saving the universe. Whether it's evil aliens or temporal paradoxes that threaten to tear the fabric of reality in two, the Doctor spends most of their lives trying to prevent the untimely end of life as we know it.
But in Logopolis, there's a twist: it turns out our universe it already dying.
In Part Three of Tom Baker’s finale as the Fourth Doctor, we find out from Logopolis’s Monitor that “the universe long ago passed the point of total collapse.” It’s only due to the smarty-pants people of Logopolis opening CVEs (essentially pathways between universes) to siphon off our excess entropy that all of existence hasn’t already crumbled into dust.
And when the Master unknowingly stops Logopolis from carrying out its vital calculations, we see entire sections of the universe begin to fade into nothingness in an event more catastrophic than even the Flux.
Thanks to an unlikely alliance with the Master and at the cost of a regeneration, the Doctor manages to open a new CVE and stave off the universe’s inevitable collapse. But it’s harrowing to think that the entire Doctor Who universe has always essentially been on life support.
Imagine that weighing on the Doctor's mind constantly. No wonder Fourteen needed a rest!