How will or can they explain the 13th Doctor not being in The Day of the Doctor?

By David Herron

Tags: Doctor Who

The Day of the Doctor contained the first cameo presentation of Peter Capaldi's eyebrows, and the phrase that all thirteen of the Doctors were there (Doctors 1-12 plus the War Doctor). The operative phrase being "No, sir, All Thirteen". As proper geeks our question today is, why wasn't it "All Fourteen" or "All Twenty"?

Asking why the 13th Doctor (Jodi Whittaker) wasn't in this episode would be like asking why Sylvester McCoy's Doctor (#7) was not in The Five Doctors. After all if the Time Lord Council were afraid of what Rassilon was up to in the dead zone, why stop at just sending five incarnations of The Doctor? Why not send seven incarnations or twenty?

Within the context of the world shown on Doctor Who — there’s no reason that the episode shown in The Five Doctors shouldn’t have included the 7th or 9th or whatever incarnation of The Doctor. Instead the episode only included the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th Doctor’s, with a stand-in for the 1st Doctor, and a little cameo from a previously unaired episode for the 4th Doctor. In other words, it included the incarnations up to the 5th… Why? Doesn’t make logical sense.

Likewise The Day of the Doctor could have included All 24 Doctors, assuming that the Time Lords gifted The Doctor with a full cycle of regenerations.

The Eyebrows was the first we saw of Capaldi as The Doctor. The focus of the events was the 11th Doctor, the 10th Doctor and the War Doctor teaming up. Therefore it makes sense that the previous Doctors to #11 would be involved with the project of making the calculations required to push Gallifrey into a pocket/parallel universe. But then why did #12 show up?

He remembered having participated and joined in. But why wouldn't Doctor #13 or Doctor #54 also be involved?

But the reason why in both cases is that the show is filmed at the time it’s filmed. There’s no way for the people in 1983 to have brought in the 18th Doctor for a multi-Doctor episode, obviously, because in 1983 they had no idea who that Doctor would be, that person probably hadn’t been born yet, and even today we have no idea who the 18th Doctor will be.

About the Author(s)

David Herron : David Herron is a writer and software engineer focusing on the wise use of technology. He is especially interested in clean energy technologies like solar power, wind power, and electric cars. David worked for nearly 30 years in Silicon Valley on software ranging from electronic mail systems, to video streaming, to the Java programming language, and has published several books on Node.js programming and electric vehicles.