Doctor Who: 10 Times The Doctor Faced Consequences For Their Actions

Pop on your tinfoil hats, we’re going deep into butterfly effect territory for this one. It's a juicy bit of trivia though: in the moments immediately preceding and succeeding Nine’s regeneration into Ten, The Doctor sealed his tenth incarnations fate, setting into motion the events that would force him to regenerate into Eleven.

Let’s explain.

Take yourself back to The Parting of Ways. The Doctor was facing certain death at the hands of the Dalek Emperor, but Rose has just gone all Bad Wolf and deleted them from existence. In the process, she unwittingly revives a certain omnisexual time agent with a penchant for trenchcoats. Knowing that Jack is now an immortal, unnatural fixed point in time, The Doctor cheerily leaves him behind intentionally because he can’t stand to look at him. Our big hero, everyone.

Okay, now park that thought for a moment and fast forward to the next episode, The Christmas Invasion.

A freshly regenerated Ten has just triumphed over The Sycorax and murdered their leader with a satsuma - he’s that sort of a man, apparently. Defeated, The Sycorax prepare to retreat as the Doctor and Harriet Jones (prime minister - but you know who she is) watch on. Unbeknownst to the Doctor, Harriet plans to send a message to other aliens who might be getting ideas, and orders Torchwood to shoot down the Sycorax ship. Furious that Harriet would destroy a fleeing vessel, he deposes her, bringing her entire career down with six words: “Don’t you think she looks tired?”.

Now, if you will, we’ll jump forwards to series 3’s Utopia. When the TARDIS lands at the Cardiff rift, Captain Jack seizes his opportunity to find The Doctor again, physically jumping onto the TARDIS when the Doctor attempts to abandon him a second time. In its attempts to throw Jack off, the TARDIS travels to the planet Malcassairo - the very last human colony, right at the end of the universe. Here, they find The Master, hidden in human form, and unintentionally cause him to free himself. After he is freed, The Master steals the TARDIS and returns to the present day, coming up with a plan to have himself elected Prime Minister of the UK. Why is he able to do this? Because of the power vaccum left by Harriet Jones’ removal. Nice going, Doctor.

From here, The Master enslaves the planet, killing one tenth of the population in a day and many more in the year that followed. This is not the main consequence we’re looking at though, as it is undone by the Doctor becoming space Jesus.

No, the main reason we’ve included this on our list is because, thanks to the chain of events we’ve discussed, The Master is still kicking about come The End of Time. Here, thanks to the Master's extremely strange plan to turn everyone into a copy of himself, The Doctor ends up giving himself radiation poisoning via the Vinvocci glass, sacrificing himself for Wilfred Mott and leading to his regeneration.

Well, it was a wild ride, but we got to the point. As you can see, no action is without consequence in this show. Wibbly wobbly, really rough timey wimey.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Turning on your friends is generally a bad idea - especially when they happen to be an immortal time agent and the literal Prime Minister. In summary: just don’t be a self-righteous jerk.