Doctor Who: What is the Doctor’s Real Name? Here is What We Know
Doctor Who is a British science fiction series that has been broadcast on the BBC since 1963. In almost sixty years of television history, its protagonist called the Doctor, still remains a mysterious character: we know very little about his youth and often his feelings and his mind are indecipherable. One of the most fascinating mysteries about this character is certainly his real name. Please be warned that this article may contain the story SPOILERS for the entire Doctor Who series.
Doctor Who: What is the Doctor’s Real Name?
So what is the Doctor’s real name? Over the years, the character has given various names, both to his companions and to his enemies, and as many have been attributed to him, from Basil to Theta Sigma, passing through δ³Σx². Basil, for example, is the name that the Doctor gives in 2017 in the episode The Zygon Inversion and we know very well that he never lies, except when he lies, which is quite often. These suppositions are also accompanied by the names given by his bitter enemies, such as The Destroyer of Worlds, an attribute given to him by Davros in the fourth season finale, The Beast, The Dalek Predator, and The Great Exterminator.
What Do We Know About the Doctor’s Name?
What we certainly know is that the Doctor does not want his name to be known. In the episode, The Shadows Killers which marks the first meeting, on the timeline of the Doctor, with River Song, the Tenth Doctor does not trust at all the woman who claims to know him. River, then whispers her real name in his ear leaving the Doctor baffled and horrified by this revelation. This is probably because, with the revelation of the name by River Song, the Doctor understands that she will be his future wife. The complicated wedding ceremony of the Time Lords, in fact, involves the revelation of the real name.
Other characters will speculate about the Doctor’s name: for example, Lilith, the carbonite alien that the Doctor meets in one of his travels, claims that the real name of the protagonist of the series is hidden in desperation. Similar conclusions are reached by the young Roman Sibyl whom Donna and the Tenth Doctor meet in the fourth season episode The Flames of Pompeii. She too will say that her name is hidden even from her talents as a seer.
Over the seasons and, above all, with the advent of Steven Moffat as showrunner, the title of the series almost becomes a real riddle: Doctor Who? By adding the question mark we are faced with a question to which it is not legitimate to provide an answer. The reason is quite simple, as the revelation of the Doctor’s name could give rise to unexpected consequences. For example, the Great Intelligence covets information regarding the Doctor’s name; on the other hand, however, Il Silenzio, which is a sort of cult founded precisely on the Doctor’s name, fights to keep this information secret.
When the Eleventh Doctor begins his regeneration, we learn that his name is even a spatiotemporal call for the Time Lords to start an endless war, until Clara, the so-called “impossible girl”, does not intervene. She herself knows the Doctor’s name, having read it in a book entitled The History of the Time War, but she will forget it due to the memory loss that occurred during the series (of which we don’t want to tell you too much), asserting that the true The Doctor’s name is The Doctor, and everything else counts for nothing.
The Doctor the Man of a Thousand Faces and Names
Clara, in the matter revolving around the Doctor’s real name, is the central character. She claims that the real name is, indeed, the Doctor, but she says it knowingly. In fact, it is the Doctor himself who reveals to the impossible girl that the name The Doctor is a sort of promise he made to himself, the warning to never be cruel to anyone and to instill mercy in everyone, even his most formidable enemies. Indeed, we see it in the great human pity he shows towards Davros when he discovers that he survived the Time War and wants to save him from the burning Dalek crucible. During the Time War, the Doctor, ashamed of his uncharitable deeds, decided he was no longer worthy of bearing that name and thus set it aside.
According to what the Great Intelligence will reveal to the Eleventh Doctor, another name by which it will be called will be Valeyard. We know that the latter was a central character in the stories concerning the Sixth Doctor, appearing as a prosecutor in the trial that sees our protagonist accused of conduct unbecoming a Time Lord and of having transgressed the first law of time. The Valeyard is something of a compendium of everything the Doctor is not but could be, as defined by The Master, effectively being a part of the future Doctor.
The most common alias the Doctor uses when on earth is John Smith. The Third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee, will use this alias for as long as he is confined to Earth to serve his sentence. It will also be used very often by the Tenth Doctor, both when he pretends to be the physics substitute in the episode An Old Friend (which marks the reunion with Sarah Jane Smith in the new series) and when, assuming a human identity, he will be relegated to Earth at the beginning of the Short Century.
Another interesting theory is the one that takes us back to when the Doctor was a young student at the Time Lords Academy on Gallifrey. During his fourth incarnation, the Doctor meets his colleague from the Academy, a certain Drax, who reveals that the Doctor’s nickname during his years of study was Theta Sigma (ΘΣ). This theory, however, did not gain much traction until it was almost canonized in the first official guide dedicated to the Doctor Who series and published in 1972, entitled The Making of Doctor Who. Here editor and screenwriter Terrance Dicks and regular screenwriter Malcolm Hulke state that the Doctor’s real name is δ³Σx², therefore Theta Sigma would have, as a nickname, a relevant connection with its real name.
Doctor Who?
According to some, the Doctor’s name is Doctor Who. To support this theory there would be several clues, such as in the story The War Machines of 1966 when the Computer Wotan says
Doctor Who needs to be brought here.
If this could be defined as an unrelated episode, an unintended mistake, the following year, during the Second Doctor era, in an episode in which he played a German, he used the name Doctor Von Wer signing with the abbreviation Dr. W. Let us also not forget that Dorium Maldovar, a fixer beheaded by the Monks, whom we find in the era of the Eleventh Doctor, reveals that the question relating to the Doctor’s true identity is:
The first question. The question that never has to be answered, hidden in plain sight. The question you’ve been chasing all your life. Doctor Who (Who)?
And what’s more hidden in plain sight than the show’s title itself. To confirm or deny all this, depending on how we want to read the clues, come the words of the latest incarnation of the Master in the role of Missy who reveals to us:
It’s his real name. I grew up with him and his real name is Doctor Who. He chose it himself, you know, trying to sound mysterious. And then he dropped the chip.
Ultimately, Doctor Who would seem to be the real name of the Doctor, and the numerous scripts of the classic series also let us guess it, such as for example the one relating to Marco Polo, when the Italian traveler says “Doctor Who (go) to the West” calling it Doctor Who. Obviously, these are only conjectures, as we have no confirmation of what the Doctor’s real name is, and, in all likelihood, this mystery will never be revealed, until the end of time.
