FIXING CONTINUITY GLITCHES - THE DOCTOR'S AGE - PART 1

Okay, this is a big one. Possibly one of the biggest continuity glitches in the whole history of the show. Proper dating of UNIT stories is about the only thing that comes close to the magnitude of this problem. 

PART ONE - PRESENTING THE PROBLEM....

Let's start with the backstory:

TIMES WHEN THE DOCTOR HAS EXPLICITLY STATED HIS AGE

The first time the Doctor ever reveals his age is in the story Tomb of the Cybermen. He claims, much to the dismay of Jamie and Victoria, that he's somewhere around 450 years old.

The next time we get a solid admission of age is from the Fourth Doctor. Now he's putting himself at around 750. At one point, there are some slight discrepancies that Romana actually calls him out on, but we'll say he's somewhere around that age.

There is some nonsense about the Third Doctor being several thousand years old - disregard it. He's speaking figuratively. He claims to have several thousand years' worth of experience - which could easily be taken as the span of years that he's traveled through time (ie: he's gone back to the caveman era and gone so far forward in time that he's seen the Earth perish - that's thousands of years). At least, that's how I take it.

The Sixth Doctor says he's a Nine-Hundred-year old Time Lord when he's visiting the planet of Necros and re-states that in Trial of a Time Lord. He's pretty vague about it so we don't know if he means he's precisely 900 or just somewhere around that mark.

The very last time the Doctor mentions his age in the Classic Series is fresh after his sixth regeneration in Time and the Rani. He claims to be 953. You can't get more precise than that.

Things start getting wonky, now. During Day of the Doctor, we meet the War Doctor who asks the Eleventh Doctor how old he is. Doctor Eleven says he's "Twelve Hundred and Something." The War Doctor states that his eleventh incarnation is four hundred years older than him. So ... wait .... that puts the War Doctor at about 800 and something. The War Doctor is two incarnations after the Seventh. How did that happen?

It gets worse as we run into Doctor Nine, of course. He's claiming in Aliens of London that he's only 900 years old. Doctor Ten puts himself at 903 during his big speech in Voyage of the Damned and says he's 906 just before he regenerates into his eleventh form (well, technically, it's his thirteenth - but let's not go there!).

Thus far, Doctor Eleven appears to be the longest-living incarnation. The two different versions of him that we see in Impossible Astronaut show a difference of nearly two centuries. He's 909 when he receives the invitation from himself. And then 1103 when River "kills" him. As previously stated, he's twelve hundred and a bit by Day of the Doctor. Then we finally get to Trenzalore - a planet he probably defended for a good 800 years or so. This is validated when Doctor Twelve (who is really the fourteenth Incarnation - but, really, we must stop going here!) is claiming in Deep Breath to be over 2 000 years old.

AGE GAPS

Before we try to solve this conundrum of the Doctor, somehow, aging backwards - there's another issue we need to look at. Doctor Who, the TV Series, is over 50 years old. Which is a wonderful thing, of course. But within the span of those 50 years, we've seen the Doctor age a good 1500 years or so. Most fans seem to see a season of the show as representing about a year of the Doctor's life. With that logic, however, that would mean that the show should be 1500 years old.

Obviously, there are periods of the show where we aren't witnessing the Doctor's adventures and a score of years pass. Age Gaps - as I like to call them. These Age Gaps have to happen during times when the Doctor isn't travelling with companions. A Time Lord's metabolism is obviously much slower than ours. So he can age a good fifty to a hundred years and barely show it. But if such times were to occur in a human's life, we would definitely see a change in their appearance. So times when the Doctor is travelling alone would constitute the best periods for age gaps. However, times when the Doctor is travelling with a non-human could also work well. Whether it's an alien or a robot companion. An alien that he's travelling with could also have a slower aging process. So a score of years might not show on them. And, provided a robot is well-maintained, we won't see the effects of passing time on them, either.

So, with that in mind, let's see if we can find age gaps to fit the timescale we've been seeing the Doctor move through.

CLASSIC SERIES AGE GAPS

The first big gap we need to fill is 450 to 750 between Doctors Two to Four. If you subscribe to the idea of Series 6b, then we can say that the Second Doctor spent a good century or so doing secret missions for the CIA before being re-captured and sentenced to a proper exile. A good chunk of that travelling was done alone. But then he eventually decides to pick up Jamie and Victoria shortly before he's finally caught, again, by the High Council (going and getting Jamie might have been what gets him detected - perhaps the Time Lords were keeping an eye on Jamie for a bit after returning him to his Time Zone to ensure that he'd settled back into things, properly). Still, several years do get spent with Jamie and Victoria before the Doctor is called to justice by his people. Which would account for why both the Doctor and Jamie look considerably older in The Two Doctors. So, let's say a good 150 years elapse between The War Games and Spearhead From Space.

The next workable age gap would be between The Green Death and The Time Warrior. The Doctor, saddened by the loss of Jo, purposely steers clear of Earth for a bit. He spends a good half-century on his own. Or maybe he does travel with a few more companions but we never see them. It may also be possible that he does take Jo and Cliff for a honeymoon trip to Karfel. Which would get the events of Timelash to make better sense. Nonetheless, it may seem to the Brigadier and UNIT that it's only been a matter of months since last they saw their Scientific Adviser but, by the Doctor's timeline, it's been about 50 years.

Which now means that when the Fourth Doctor ponderously contemplates his age in Pyramids of Mars, it all makes sense. A good two hundred years have passed since Tomb of the Cybermen and this moment.

The next big gap we need to cover is the 200 years that pass from Fourth Doctor to the Seventh. Based on the idea of the Doctor travelling alone or with alien companions, there are multiple opportunities where this could've happened right in the Tom Baker Era. There's that gap where the Doctor is alone between Deadly Assassin and Face of Evil. Then we have the fact that he is travelling with only K9 between Season 15 and 16 and Romana between Season 16 and 17. Yes, Romana regenerates into Princess Astra's form at the beginning of Season 17, but she may have just been suddenly reminded of how pretty she was after spending a decade or two away from Atrios. Destiny of the Daleks doesn't have to happen immediately after Armageddon Factor.

But the problem with all three of these gaps is the Doctor's age gets stated explicitly several times in and around these periods. In Seeds of Doom, the Doctor says he's 749 (oddly enough, he puts himself at 756 in Brain of Morbius, but as Romana said, herself, he's losing track). As the Doctor and Romana the First are sparring in Ribos Operation, Romana points out that he's now 759. By Power of Kroll, he's saying he's 760.  So a good decade seems to passed within the framework of the first two gaps that we've mentioned. Unfortunately, we still can't add a whole lot more years between Season 16 and 17. Romana and the Doctor both mention their ages quite frequently during the season that Douglas Adams script edited. And, although information about their age seems to get a bit garbled, we're still not seeing anything near the two centuries we're hoping for. At best, it's been a handful of years. Less than a decade.

Our next big oppurtunity happens between Seasons 17 and 18. Again, it's still just the Doctor and Romana so we can gain a century or so without seeing a huge difference in external appearance. Nonetheless, there are a lot of indicators that significant years have elapsed from Horns of Nimon to Leisure Hive. The Doctor seems a bit older and more subdued. There's been some radical changes to his outfit. Even the Universe, itself, seems to have become a bit "slicker". Let's definitely say that we've had a good century-or-so go by.

Except that one bit of dialogue in Leisure Hive seems to negate this. After being aged 500 years in Tachyon Generator, the Doctor claims he must be around 1250. Which would mean he was 750 when he went into the generator. This statement, however, already contradicts his stated age in several stories from the Key to Time season. If he gained 500 years, the Doctor should be saying he's 1260. So let's just say the Doctor's either getting really foggy about his age or really modest. Between losing count and feeling daunted by the fact that he's approaching 900, he's trying to keep his age around 750. In the same way that humans will say they're "29" way after they've passed it. Even by himself, the Doctor perpetuates this lie.

So, by the time he hits his fifth incarnation, our favorite Time Lord is probably in his late 800s. We've got a period between Time Flight and Arc of Infinity where he's only travelling with Nyssa. Another decade or so may have passed during that time. He's alone with Turlough between Resurrection of the Daleks and Planet of Fire so he might have gained another decade there, too. Trakenites and people from Trion probably have both gotten advanced enough to slow their aging process down and extend their lifespans. Yes, the Doctor and Turlough are talking about Tegan and the Daleks at the beginning of Planet of Fire but who's to say that it's a reference to Resurrection? Perhaps, after several years of travelling the Universe they've gone back to Earth to help weed out Dalek duplicates and have met Tegan along the way.

So as the Doctor complains about being a 900-year-old Time Lord feeling like a boy on scrumping spree in Revelation of the Daleks, we can find adequate age gaps during the adventures of Doctors Four and Five to compensate for this claim. Is Doctor Six exactly 900? Probably not. He's probably a bit past it - but not much. Which means we need one more age gap to get his claim to be 953 in Time and the Rani to fit. Which is not difficult. After Ultimate Foe but before he meets Mel (and, subsequently, experiences the events of Terror of the Vervoids), the Doctor has a few decades' worth of unseen adventures. Like the gap between Green Death and Time Warrior, there may have been some companions with him that we never saw. Or he may just be travelling alone.

Okay, aging discrepancies during the Classic Era have been resolved. But there's still that Biggie we need to deal with - how did the Doctor age in reverse between Classic and New Series? Part Two will look into that mystery. 

Stay Tuned....