Doctor Who: 10 Huge Plot Holes The Writers Hoped We Forgot

8. The Immortality Of The Time Lords

A Time Lord's life is thirteen incarnations long: that's a fact that's always stood, apart from that one time that Russell T Davies penned a tongue-in-cheek line in The Sarah Jane Adventures, claiming the Doctor could actually change face 507 times. And, apart from the time when the Second Doctor claimed the Time Lords could live forever, "barring accidents". There's no excuse to get this one wrong, is there? The First Doctor died of old age. The Time Lords obviously can't live forever, they can just live until their thirteen bodies wear out. If it wasn't such a culturally-recognised fact that Time Lords have thirteen lives, Steven Moffat might have totally ignored it when it came to introducing Peter Capaldi's incarnation; Neil Gaiman suggested he should, claiming the limit of thirteen should be more like a "speed limit" than a set amount. In retrospect, that might have been a preferable idea to run with: we're only going to go through the same plot every thirteen lives aren't we?