He orders Handles to remind him that he needs to patch it back into the console unit, eventually growing exhausted of Handles' inability to grasp figurative language. The ship's telephone device has been incorrectly fed to the dummy handset on the outer shell of the police box. The TARDIS phone begins to ring, but the Doctor cannot answer the call from the inside. Handles, who as a robot interprets everything literally, replies he didn't specify a preference for transport. After avoiding a near disaster, the Doctor removes his cape and scolds Handles for sending him to a Dalek ship while he was "holding a broken bit of Dalek". Unfortunately, the ship belongs to Daleks, who fire at him until he teleports back to the TARDIS, where a severed Cyberman head that he calls " Handles" is plugged into the console. He demands them to identify themselves by species and planet of origin. Shrouded in a cape the Doctor visits a ship while holding a Dalek eyestalk to show his bravery, and that he comes in peace. The Doctor is among thousands of ships orbiting a planet after hearing a message being broadcast from it, a three-toned message that no-one can understand. Rescuing Clara from a family Christmas dinner, the Time Lord and his companion must learn what this enigmatic signal means for his own fate and that of the universe. Orbiting a quiet backwater planet, the massed forces of the universe's deadliest species gather, drawn to a mysterious message that echoes out to the stars - among them, the Eleventh Doctor. It's not a matter of counting the regenerations, but of counting the faces of the Time Lord that calls himself the Doctor." Nevertheless, writer Steven Moffat said in DWM 467 that the BBC marketing was also narratively correct: "I've been really, really quite careful about the numbering of the Doctors.
This made the "Eleventh Doctor" the thirteenth life.
Time, however, incremented the number again, explicitly stating, as mentioned above, that the aborted regeneration shown at the conclusion of The Stolen Earthand the beginning of Journey's End "counted". This had already been the case once The Night of the Doctor definitively showed the Eighth Doctor regenerating into the War Doctor. From one perspective, getting the Eleventh Doctor to the magic number thirteen meant that no BBC Wales incarnation could technically be the number under which they were marketed. The only way to do this, however, was to change some other continuity. Time was the first episode of Doctor Who produced by BBC Wales to choose a side, confirming that a "regeneration cycle" indeed consisted of just thirteen incarnations. But other stories, starting with The Deadly Assassin, set the limit to thirteen lives. Even Matt Smith's Doctor seemed to hint at this possibility in an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Some early episodes of the show had suggested the Doctor's lifespan was practically infinite. The necessity for this had previously been unclear. This is not only the first time that a new regeneration cycle has been given on screen but the depiction of a new regeneration cycle ensured that the programme would be able to continue and keep casting new actors in the role for potentially decades. However, the Doctor is granted a brand new regeneration cycle at the end of the story, drastically altering his fate. This episode confirmed that the Tenth Doctor's aborted regeneration in Journey's End did indeed use up a whole regeneration, and with the retroactive introduction of the War Doctor in between their Eighth and Ninth incarnations this meant that the Doctor had no more regenerations left, leaving the Eleventh Doctor as the thirteenth and final incarnation in his regeneration cycle.
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It also significantly aged the Doctor, establishing that the Eleventh Doctor had lived much longer than any other incarnation.īut it was especially important to the history of the programme because it addressed an issue that hadn't been talked about in the series since its return in 2005: the limited amount of regenerations in a Time Lord's regeneration cycle. As such, it was a unique attempt at narrative conclusion for storylines running through the entirety of a particular incarnation's tenure. It especially tried to give final relevance to the Silence, the cracks in time, Trenzalore and the salvation of Gallifrey. The show's 800th episode - and the last produced by Marcus Wilson - it served as a conclusion to the entirety of the Smith era. It was Matt Smith's final regular appearance as the series lead, but unusually it did not formally introduce his successor, since Peter Capaldi's Twelfth Doctor had already been seen in the previous episode.
The Time of the Doctor was the 2013 Christmas Special of Doctor Who.