Doctor Who: 9 Predictions About The Regeneration Conundrum

8. The Problem Will Not Be Solved In "Time Of The Doctor" (And We Won't Care)

Again, we're working from the aforementioned premise that Moffat's remark about Matt Smith's version as the final Doctor is a bluff here. More scintillating than this supposition, however, was a bit of dialogue from "The Time of the Doctor" leaked by Doctor Who Magazine: CLARA: "But you don't die. You change €“ you pop right back with a new face." THE DOCTOR: "Not forever. I can change 12 times. 13 versions of me. 13 silly Doctors." CLARA: "But you're number eleven, so €“" THE DOCTOR: "Are we forgetting Captain Grumpy? I didn't call myself the Doctor during the Time War, but it was still a regeneration." This would seem to blow any ideas of Smith-as-no.-13 out of the water. And it seems to imply that the question of what happens after the 13th body is expended will be one to answer another day. But who cares, so to speak? By the end of 2013, we'll have seen at least a few minutes of five Doctors in action (six if you include The Curator as a future incarnation) and three regeneration sequences, plus arguably the four key baddies of the Moffat/Smith era in the Daleks, Cybermen, Weeping Angels and the Silence. It shouldn't really be a problem to wait, should it?