There’s no such thing as mistakes, only happy accidents – right? Well, even the producers get it wrong from time to time. Here are some of the best Doctor Who mistakes in the Whoniverse…
“Doctor Who is required…”
The debate over the Doctor’s real name has raged since the 1960s. It’s kind of in the title. And as Doctor Who mistakes go, this one is quite big. From the very first story, it was established that the Doctor was simply called ‘the Doctor’ and nobody knew his actual name. “Who is he?” says his new companion Ian. “Doctor who?”
However, when new producers and new writers joined the show, not everyone got the memo. This caused problems from time to time, most noticeably in the 1966 story ‘The War Machines‘ where the crazed WOTAN declared: “Doctor Who is required. Bring him here.”
Now, WOTAN was supposed to know everything – more than the collective wisdom of all humanity. So how did he come to call the Doctor “Doctor Who”? It’s one of those glaring errors that’s tough to reconcile with the show’s lore. It’s not his name.
Or is it? Because, unlike some of the other Doctor Who mistakes, there is some wiggle room, as Steven Moffat proved in ‘World Enough and Time’ when Missy outright stated that the Time Lord’s proper name was, indeed, Doctor Who. But this was Missy, of course; she wasn’t known for her truthfulness.
Still, it would go some way to explaining the names of other classic stories ‘The Death of Doctor Who,’ ‘Doctor Who and the Savages‘ and ‘Doctor Who and the Silurians.’ Perhaps there was more going on than simple production confusion…
“A Time Lord has 13 lives…”
The next of our Doctor Who mistakes has the potential to destroy canon. (Although given the continuity bombshell that was ‘The Timeless Children,’ it might not matter so much.)
When the TV movie went into production in the mid 90s, the new team comprised of people from the BBC and Fox, in the United States. There were a lot of cooks, so to speak, and not all of them were as au fait with Doctor Who lore as they might have been. The potential for Doctor Who mistakes was high.
And one of these plot details concerned the Doctor’s regenerations – a key element, in fact, as the story revolved around the Master trying to steal them. In the opening monologue, the Doctor says that “a Time Lord has 13 lives,” which is true. But he later told his friend Grace that he only has 12 lives. So which is it?
Well, fact fans, we all know that the Doctor has 13 lives, as established by Robert Holmes in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ and re-affirmed by Steven Moffat in ‘The Time of the Doctor.’ So the Doctor was correct in the TV movie’s monologue.
So was he wrong when he told Grace that he only had 12? Is this one of the greatest Doctor Who mistakes in history? Well, it depends on your interpretation. 13 lives means 12 regenerations, right? So this may well have been what the Doctor meant; he had 12 chances to come back to life again.
We’re clutching at straws, I know…
“Change of plan, we don’t need the bomb!”
This is one of those Doctor Who mistakes that you might have missed, if you weren’t paying attention. In ‘The Doctor Dances,’ the Doctor saves everyone by reuniting the ‘mutated’ boy with his mother. The matching DNA tricks the nanogenes into putting him right again. (It’ll make sense when you see it, trust me.)
What doesn’t make sense, though, is why Captain Jack Harkness appears moments later sitting astride a massive bomb, floating in mid air. The Doctor turns to him and says, “Change of plan, we don’t need the bomb!”
What plan? What bomb? Did the Doctor have a plan to blow something up, possibly in one of the earlier drafts of the script?
Yes, apparently. This was one of those Doctor Who mistakes that the writer Steven Moffat actually owned up to. He mentioned it in his episode intro in the 2006 book Doctor Who: The Shooting Scripts. It turns out that the line about needing the bomb should have been removed, but they simply forgot. And there’s a good chance that nobody would have ever noticed this error had he not pointed it out.
So what was the Doctor’s original plan? Leave your theories in the comments below.
The Twelfth Doctor’s title sequence
If you ever watch a run of Twelfth Doctor episodes, there’s a good chance you’ll never get the same title sequence twice. And this is perhaps one of the funniest and most infuriating Doctor Who mistakes on this list and, intriguingly, it was one that was never properly addressed throughout the entirety of the Capaldi era.
It’s a tiny detail, but when you spot it, it’s hard to un-see. The Twelfth Doctor’s opening titles are never in-synch with the theme tune; the alignment changes from episode to episode. Apparently, nobody could agree on what the cue point for the music should be, so the various directors who worked on Capaldi’s episodes simply made their best guess.
Now, you would think that this could be fixed with a quick meeting, or a memo, or even a definitive cue point in the visuals, but alas this never happened. Although one could argue that the title sequence does, indeed, have a cue point: when the cogs light up. If you’re a fan of consistency, this is not one of those Doctor Who mistakes that you want to dwell on.
However, when all is said and done, the question is: does it really matter? And the answer, of course, is yes. Of course it matters! Why aren’t the opening titles in synch? Why are the windows the wrong shape? Why is Harry Sullivan an imbecile?
And now that we’ve got that off our chest, tell us: what is your favourite of the Doctor Who mistakes? And which ones would you add to this list? Let us know in the comments below.
In the first episode of Doctor Who, “A Unearthly Child,” Ian refers to the Doctor as Doctor Foreman, as Susan’s last name was Foreman. The junkyard where the Tardis was located was owned by an I. M. Foreman. The Doctor’s response was, “Doctor Who?” Maybe that’s where it came from?
But I’m sure this is listed online somewhere else because I know I’m not the first person to catch that!