10 Huge Doctor Who Plot Holes Everyone Overlooks

2. Lying About Your Age

Doctor Who Journey's End Rose Tyler Metacrisis Doctor
BBC Studios

If the Doctor travels through time, zipping from point to point with reckless abandon, how do they even begin to work out how old they are?

How many candles do they put on their cake? How many bumps do they get? How do they know whether or not they're having a midlife crisis?

Clearly they don't bother too much with this, because the character's age moves up and down more than the TARDIS' central console.

In Classic Who, the Seventh Doctor said that he was 953 years old. Fast forward to NuWho, and Nine tells Rose that he's a nice round 900.

As far as we're aware, travelling backwards in time doesn't make you age backwards. So either one of the Doctors was wrong, or the writers don't really care about that pesky continuity.

The Doctor's age has been mentioned a few more times since, and is usually anywhere between 1500 and 2000 years old.

This isn't a huge plot hole - the Doctor could've just lost track over the years, or forgotten their age during regeneration - but it's enough of an inconsistency to set off the diehards.

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Jacob Simmons has a great many passions, including rock music, giving acclaimed films three-and-a-half stars, watching random clips from The Simpsons on YouTube at 3am, and writing about himself in the third person.