10 Doctor Who Moments More Important Than You Realised

Fittingly, for a show about time travel, there's some stuff in Doctor Who that can only be truly understood in hindsight

Whether it's through new information coming to light, or the show going off in new, unexpected directions

some moments end up having far greater significance than is first apparent

Think you know everything that was going on in the 14th Doctor's head? Think stuff like Jackie Tyler's birthday and the child Doctor in Listen didn't have any sort of deeper significance

Well, think again. I'm Ellie for Who Culture here with 10 Doctor Who moments more important than you realised

10. Christopher Eccleston's own father's day As he's reiterated many times, Christopher Eccleston didn't have the happiest time shooting Series 1

But beyond his own struggles and his deteriorating relationship with the higher-ups

there was something else he had to contend with. His seriously ill father, Ronnie, which forced Eccleston to leave Doctor Who for three weeks to go and care for him

And it just so happened that Eccleston's three-week break and subsequent return coincided with the episode Father's Day

For obvious reasons, there was an added resonance when it came to Eccleston filming his scenes for this episode

At New York Comic Con in 2019, he described Father's Day as one of his favourite episodes to shoot, saying, quote

To come back and to be shooting Father's Day, which was all about Rose's desire to meet her father, was very emotional

I enjoyed that one. It resonated with me. It's an issue that I've come back to, fathers and sons

Though the Doctor's role in the story is quite small, there was an emergency alternate script prepared in case Eccleston needed more time off

This would have taken the Doctor out of the action sooner, reducing his role to that of a disembodied voice

Father's Day is astonishing in its own right, but this real-life parallel makes it even more special

and Eccleston often cites it as his favourite story. So the connection clearly isn't lost on him either

9. The Young Doctor's Lookalike For the most part, the Doctor's childhood has always remained a mystery, and many would argue rightly so

During RTD1, a spin-off following the exploits of a young Doctor at the Time Lord Academy was vetoed

on the basis that it would have reduced the character's intrigue. But in the years since, we have caught odd glimpses of a younger Doctor

One of the most significant came in Listen, where the final scene takes us back to Gallifrey

to the barn where the doctor grew up, requiring someone to briefly play his younger self

a gig that ultimately went to Michael Jones. But Jones wasn't just picked at random

He was specifically cast because he looked like a young version of First Doctor William Hartnell

with the costume team even giving him a Hartnell-esque hairstyle to match

However, in order to preserve that all-important sense of mystery, we never actually see Jones's face in the episode

so we'll just have to take their word for it. It's still a cool touch, though. After all, if you're going to delve into the Doctor's origins, the least you can do is honour the man who started it all

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really go wrong. And this is why we love VPNs. 8. The Meddling Trailblazer

Most Time Lords we've met, other than the Doctor, have turned out to be bad eggs

Granted, the Doctor can also be a bad egg at times, but you get the point

The most well-known example, of course, is the Master, the Moriarty to the Doctor's Sherlock Holmes

Over the years, the show has built a massive rogues' gallery of Time Lords who also deserve a few hours on the naughty step

from Omega and Borusa to Rassilon, the Rani and Tek-Tay-Un. But there's one that predates them all, the Meddling Monk

Encountered by the first Doctor in 1965's The Time Meddler and three instalments of the Dalek's master plan

the Monk is a rebel Time Lord who likes to disrupt history purely for the Lulz

He was also the first villain to have a rematch with the Doctor and the first Time Lord other than the Doctor and Susan to appear in the show

So quite a trailblazer. Yet he never really gets the credit for any of these things

because he wasn't actually denoted as a Time Lord at the time

That concept wasn't introduced for another four years, but without the monk, we may not have seen as many of the other renegade time lords that followed

And while we're here, bring back the monk! The masters returned enough times already. It can't be any worse than what they did to Omega, can it

7. The Real Reason Jackie Tyler Turned 40 It was the Cybermen that featured in Doctor Who's 25th anniversary special, Silver Nemesis

and by the time they returned in the 2005 revival in Rise of the Cybermen and the Age of Steel

another anniversary was hiding in plain sight. The big reveal of the redesigned Cybers models comes at the Tyler Mansion

where the Jackie of Pete's World is holding her 40th, or as she'd have you believe 39th, birthday party

You might assume that this number was picked at random, or on the basis that Camille Kajuri had, at the time of recording, just celebrated her own big 4-0

But no. As Russell T. Davis has since confirmed, it was actually a nod to the fact that the 10th

planet, the story that first introduced the Cybermen and saw the first Doctor regenerate

was turning 40 that year. So yes, Jackie turning 40 was a nod to the fact that the Cybermen were

also 40. Rather fitting, given that she ends up getting turned into one. Given that 2026 marks

the 60th birthday of the Cybermen, might they feature in the upcoming Christmas special in some

way? Will we get to see Jackie Tyler's 60th birthday party? Never mind Billy Piper, these

are the questions we should really be asking, folks. 6. Wilf's War Stories

Bernard Cribbins had quite a journey with Doctor Who. Having played companion Tom Campbell in the

second 1960s Peter Cushing Dalek movie, he made his proper television Who debut as a newspaper

seller in Voyage of the Damned, a character later retooled into Donna's granddad, Wilf

Then, for the Tenth Doctor's final story, Wilf became a companion in his own right

To flesh the character out a bit more, Russell T. Davis drew on Cribbin's own experience of

serving in the British Army's Parachute Regiment, hence why he has that all-important revolver

In The End of Time Part 2 when Wilf looking down at Earth and telling the Doctor about being caught in a blizzard of bullets on a rooftop in Palestine he basically remembering it for real These lines were added specifically based on Cribbins own real experiences

And then there's Wilf's iconic hat. For many of his previous appearances, even as far back as Voyage of the Damned

Cribbins had worn his own regimental badge on his beanie. Which means that every time Wilf wears that beanie

there's a genuine piece of history right there on screen, hidden in plain sight

extraordinary. Still, the award for Wolf's most iconic piece of headwear has to go to the reindeer

antlers, but we don't make the rules. Number 5. Pertwee Era Precursors

When John Pertwee took over as the Doctor in 1917, much had changed. In addition to being in colour

rather than black and white, the show was now set on present-day Earth and followed the Doctor's

adventures alongside Unit. But the origins for this change in the show's format were actually

planted two years earlier during Patrick Troughton's time as the Doctor. Unbeknownst to viewers at the

time, the show was seeding a shift away from space-set stories with bases staffed by futuristic

crews to those set on contemporary Earth, where monsters were fought by traditional soldiers

Things really got going in 1968's The Web of Fear, which brought yetis to the London Underground

and introduced unit boss the Brigadier, initially just a colonel and working for the regular army

The great work continued in that same year's The Invasion, which promoted Lethbridge Stewart to Brigadier and introduce Unit Proper

A few stories later, The Doctor was forcibly regenerated and exiled to Earth, and the rest is history

It's common for some elements of one Doctor's era to carry over to the next, to ease the transition

But this is taking things to the next level. Has one era ever set up another so stealthily

Without the invasion and the web of fear, the Pertwee era and the course of Doctor Who history would have looked radically different

4. The Canon of the Doctor One of the many things that fans loved about The Night of the Doctor was the way that it didn't ignore existing 8th Doctor continuity

Right before he regenerates, Paul McGann's Doctor name-drops all the companions that he'd travelled with up to that point in big Finnish audio dramas

including Charlie Pollard, Lucy Miller, and Molly O'Sullivan. Beyond putting a neat bow on the Eighth Doctor's era

this line had bigger implications, because it was the first time televised Doctor Who

had directly acknowledged Big Finish. And extrapolating this further, you could argue that this single line

effectively canonized all Big Finish, before and since. Which would mean that the Sixth Doctors met Jackie Tyler

the Masters being played by Neil's dad from The Inbetweeners, and River Song, the best character

has met every classic Doctor. Obviously, Big Finish's audios had always been licensed by the

BBC, and before the 2005 revival, they were the closest thing to new Doctor Who that fans had

But acknowledging Big Finish on screen gave it a legitimacy it hadn't had before

while simultaneously giving new fans an excuse to check it out. 3. The Truth Behind Four Teens Anger

One of the things that made the 14th Doctor different to the 10th is the fact that he was

so much older, carrying the weight of everything that had happened to 11, 12, and 13. We see

evidence of this in all three of his television adventures, but most notably in Wild Blue Yonder

when the not-thing Donner taunts him about the timeless child and the flux. Directly after this

we see the Doctor crash out in a corridor, having just been tricked into opening up by an alien

pretending to be his best friend Yep that certainly do it But according to the script for Wild Blue Yonder it also goes much deeper than that In this moment the Doctor actually thinking about everything that happened to him since he last had this face including all the people he lost

And one person in particular? Clara. The script notes, quote, The Doctor runs, but he's ragged, wild-eyed, desperate. Everything the Donner 2 said to him

rising and rising. The flux, his losses, Clara, 15 years, everything. So David Tennant wasn't

just doing some generic angry acting in this moment he'd been told to think about the person

who arguably had the single biggest impact on the doctor in those intervening years something that

as a fan himself he'd have absolutely understood they might not always be obvious but it's touches

like these that make 14's character arc truly special number two the significance of the info

stamp 2008 christmas special the next doctor tried to trick us into thinking that david morrissey

was the TARDIS's next occupant. Until we learned that he's actually just a human dude

called Jackson Lake, who accidentally absorbed information about the Doctor from a Cyberman info stamp

We're then treated to a good old Doctor Who clip show of all the previous incarnations

from Billy Hartnell through to Davey T. With the amount of clip shows we've seen in the show

over the last 20 years, or hell, even in the last two years, you'd be forgiven for thinking

that they've always been as common as hot dinners. But amazingly, this next Doctor clip show

was the first time footage of classic Doctors had featured in New Who. Yes, really. King of

flashbacks, Russell T. Davis, waited till he was almost out the door to do his first classic

highlight reel. This was a time when Doctor flashbacks were actively avoided for fear of

alienating the audience, and as a result, there were some people who, three years into the revival

still weren't sure whether the classic series was properly canon. So this particular clip show was

important for that reason too. Of course, in the years since, we've had plenty more sequences

showcasing all the Doctors, with memorable examples in The 11th Hour and The Name of the Doctor

And these days, it feels like we get one every other week. Imagine how effective it would be

if we'd had to wait another four years for the next one. Just saying

And number one, Master of Disguise. The Timeless Children gave us a pretty comprehensive account

of the Doctor's early life as the timeless child. But there are still some things we don't know

Things like, who was the boy who tries to steal the child's toy spaceship on the clifftop

inadvertently causing them to fall and regenerate? Sure, it could have just been some random kid

but for a long time, fans have suspected he was the master. After all, stealing one of the Doctor's toys out of jealousy

is exactly the kind of thing you can imagine the younger master doing, and it would be rather fitting for him to have been inadvertently responsible

for the Doctor's first regeneration. It doesn't feel like it would quite work timeline-wise, given that we also see a child

master after the formation of Gallifrey in The Sound of Drums, but it's a bloody cool

idea nonetheless. The question has since been put to Chris Chibnall, who confirmed that this character was indeed

a deliberate parallel to the master, saying, quote, It's not canon, but I agree

If this boy really was the master, it means he's been messing with the Doctor for much

longer than we thought, since before the Doctor was actually the Doctor, in fact, which is

kind of twisted, but also kind of fitting for their relationship. And that concludes our list. Well, we've looked at the important moments

so why not look at the opposite and check out 10 huge Doctor Who moments that didn't matter

at all. In the meantime, I've been Ellie for Who Culture, and in the words of River Song herself

goodbye, sweeties