Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-121.45.54.78-20130925110520/@comment-188432-20140227011607

Back to the conversation. Let's save ourselves some time here.

All thirteen Doctors appear in The Day of the Doctor. We don't even need to go to any of the conditional clauses of the rule. The first twelve Doctors appear by virtue of the fact that they're credited. So that automatically gets them in. We don't need to consider the qualities of the appearance at all. They're credited, so they appear. And Capaldi/Twelve is in because of the first exception: non-speaking extra in new footage for which union rules would generally say he doesn't deserve a credit.

In The Time of the Doctor, Amy appears for the same reason. Gillan is credited as Amy Pond.

Note, however, that the case of Piper in Day is quite different. There, she's credited as Rose — something that had never happened before. She is not said to be playing, as she was on every other occasion, Rose Tyler. So Rose Tyler does not appear in Day.

This is not to say that we should be slaves to the credits. We have to be sensible and note that credits sometimes lie so as not to give the game away in Radio Times or other news outlets. That's certainly why we get the "Rose" credit. It throws Radio Times readers off the scent. They were expecting Rose to appear, so the credits apparently confirm that. But those same credits give ample wiggle room for the production team to creditably claim, "We never said Rose Tyler was appearing."

Equally, we know that credits are manipulated with some frequency. The credited "little girl" in Day of the Moon is actually Melody Pond. "Kalid" is a totally intentional mis-credit in Time-Flight episode 1. And we regularly dismiss 18 years of crediting as "Dr/Doctor Who" in favour of calling the character "the Doctor". We need to realise that sometimes credits do lie. But in general, if a character is credited, they have "appeared".

If we stick to that, almost every case will be taken care of before we even require any of the exceptions.