10 Times Doctor Who Lied To Your Face
Rule one of being a Doctor Who fan? The showrunner lies.
River Song once said that rule one of travelling with the Doctor is that he lies. However, the Doctor is in the nursery compared to Doctor Who's showrunners when it comes to fibbing to the audience.
Lies and misdirection in Doctor Who shouldn't be that surprising, given that the show's title is a literal question. For decades, showrunners and actors have had to lie in the press to protect big secrets from leaking out, or to get some more eyes on screens.
For example, back in the 1980s, John Nathan-Turner teased that the TARDIS would no longer be a police box to promote Attack of the Cybermen. It wasn't a total lie, as the TARDIS did briefly change into a rather fetching floral cabinet, but it quickly reverted back to the shape that we all know and love.
Years later, Russell T Davies told Doctor Who Confidential that he had no interest in bringing back the Master, while simultaneously working on Doctor Who Series 3, which famously brought back the Master.
All of which makes you wonder if RTD is protesting too much when it comes to the apparent "retirement" of the Fourteenth Doctor. But until that's proved to be a lie, let's talk about some actual porkies...
10. "One Of Them Will Die"
Nobody stays dead in Steven Moffat's Doctor Who – just ask Rory Williams or Clara Oswald. However, this knowledge doesn't stop the show from teasing big deaths as a way to coax audiences toward their TV screens on a Saturday night.
The boldest attempt to bait audiences with a major death came ahead of Series 6, which was set to open with a cinematic two-part adventure set in America on the eve of the Moon landing.
In 2011, Doctor Who Magazine #433 promoted this opener with four different covers, one each for the Eleventh Doctor, Amy, Rory, and River Song. Each of these covers was emblazoned with the text "MARKED FOR DEATH?" and promised that "One of them WILL die in the amazing season opener!"
Technically, that's true based on the information given to the viewer in The Impossible Astronaut. Everyone sees the Doctor gunned down by an astronaut, and then his corpse is placed on a funeral pyre.
However, as we later discover, the Doctor wasn't the Doctor at all, but the Teselecta robot, meaning that the DWM cover should really have read "One of them WILL suffer catastrophic damage to their robot shell."