10 Changes Doctor Who Hoped You Wouldn't Notice

4. The Doctor Was Half Human... For About Thirty Minutes

Doctor Who Third Doctor Eleventh Doctor sonic screwdriver brightened
BBC Studios

It's no secret that the Doctor absolutely loves hanging around with us humans. In fact, our company is so valuable that the Doctor turns into a full-on lunatic whenever we aren't around. Poor Ten.

But in the 1996 Paul McGann-led TV movie, we found out that the Doctor's relationship with humanity was more than just a surface-level admiration.

On two separate occasions throughout that story - one mentioned by the Master, and one by the Doctor - we're told that the Doctor is actually half-human, a huge piece of information that contradicted what fans thought they knew about their beloved alien Time Lord.

This change to the Doctor's genetic makeup wasn't too well received, and by the time the 2005 revival came along, the retcon hammer was brought down hard, and it was never mentioned again.

Like us fans, the writers of the 2005 revival clearly weren't too keen on making the Doctor half-human, so they decided to sweep this nugget of information under the rug instead, hoping that fans would simply forget about the Doctor's brief biological change.

Clearly though, we didn't forget.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.