Board Thread:Tales from the Tardis/@comment-188432-20131124015923

Hope everyone has enjoyed The Day of the Doctor!

Obviously, it leaves us, as a wiki, with a bit of a conundrum over the numbering of the Doctor's incarnations, since we now know – for sure — that John Hurt is a real, proper incarnation of the Doctor. More to the point, we even got a glimpse of the next Doctor and were told there were officially 13 Doctors in dialogue. There's of course an argument to be made that Eccleston is now the Tenth Doctor, Tennant Eleven, and Smith Twelve.

Thing is, though, the technical complexity of changing all that — and, worse, makings sure it stuck with everyone — is just not something that we can contemplate doing at this time. I don't know about you but I'm not sure I could retrain myself to put Eleventh Doctor to indicate Tennant's Doctor, so I'm not prepared to ask other editors to do what I couldn't do myself.

So:
 * All BBC Wales incarnations will stay at their current numbers.
 * We'll call Hurt the War Doctor
 * The now-revealed Peter Capaldi is Twelfth Doctor.

'Please do not'' pipe trick one doctor to another. None of this, please: Eleventh Doctor

That's actually wrong, because the Tenth Doctor (Tennant) does not believe himself to be Eleventh, and we have explicit narrative confirmation that other people, like UNIT, believe he's Ten.

Remember: Day bluntly states that only the Matt Smith Doctor remembers the change this episode brought to the timeline. Hurt goes back, believing he's committed genocide. Eccleston is therefore still grieving for his part in the Time War — though his grief is in error. Tennant likewise still believes his people are all dead. And until the moment of this episode, Smith is still telling people like Craig Owens that he's the Eleventh, because he's not proud of the true Ninth Doctor. So Nine and Ten truly believe themselves to be Nine and Ten their entire lives, and Eleven thinks he is Eleven until what's basically his "Eleventh Hour".

If the narrative situation changes as we get into the Capaldi era — like, if he starts telling people that he's Thirteen — then we'll adjust accordingly. But for now, it's important to take the path that requires the least amount of busy work, and that pays attention to the script of the episode we've just seen.  