10 Doctor Who Questions That Always Confused You

Who knows, eh? Who knows!

Doctor Who The Day Of The Doctor The Curator Tom Baker
BBC

Ah, Doctor Who fans. For faithful viewers of a show all about time travel and endless possibilities, their understanding can often be incredibly linear and unimaginative. It's why there's always the clamour of angry tweets and message board posts each time some new bit of lore or storytelling appears to "make no sense".

The answers are sometimes simple - bad writing, the fact that for the first twenty years no one was expected to watch all of Doctor Who in order and subsequently find troubling contradictions. The rest of the time it's usually due to Steven Moffat vastly over-estimating the intelligence of his audience.

When fans aren't scratching their heads over unanswered mysteries, they also love to try and explain the identity of enigmatic characters whilst spectacularly missing the answer that is plainly staring them in the face. "I love humans," the Eighth Doctor once observed, "always seeing patterns in things that aren't there".

So, allow this list to pick over the questions that have been confusing you over the years, in an attempt to either answer them once and for all, or to make them even more confusing.

10. What Is The Doctor's Name?

Doctor Who The Day Of The Doctor The Curator Tom Baker
BBC Studios

The oldest question. Hidden in plain sight. Doctor, who?

Steven Moffat teased us with this throughout the Matt Smith years before revealing that it's not important. What's important is the title they chose and how it reflects their actions. Because what name would even be satisfying to fans? Keith?

The question of the Doctor's birth name is something that becomes more complex the more you think about it. Gallifrey is the planet where Romanadvoratrelundar is a perfectly normal thing to call a child, for goodness sake! We know that the Doctor was nicknamed Theta Sigma in college, and only reveal their name to those they're intimate with, and that's about it.

Things have got even more complex now that we no longer have a clue where the Doctor is from. A lost child, abandoned in our universe, adopted by Tecteun. What was that child's name? And come to think of it, what was their name after they were regenerated into a child on leaving Division? Doctor Who has never seemed more appropriate a title for the show.

Probably best that we don't dwell on it and just carry on calling them The Doctor.

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Citizen of the Universe, Film Programmer, Writer, Podcaster, Doctor Who fan and a gentleman to boot. As passionate about Chinese social-realist epics as I am about dumb popcorn movies.