Clara prevented the events of The Name of the Doctor in The Time of the Doctor by getting the Time Lords to give the Doctor another regeneration. So this means that The Name of the Doctor could never have happened, right? Well I don't know about that, it was supposed to prevent it. But in S8E2 the Daleks don't remember the Doctor, because Clara/Impossible Girl wiped their memories. How is this possible since The Name of the Doctor events never technically happened??
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2I suspect the answer is that some wibbly wobbly, timey wimey, stuff happened.– Rand al'Thor ♦Apr 8, 2016 at 20:10
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Note that the Daleks re-learned about the Doctor during Time of the Doctor, so we may be able to claim that no paradox has been created even if Clara memory-wiping the Daleks did cease to be a thing. I'm not sure if this counts as an answer since I'm also highly confused about the whole thing.– IxrecApr 8, 2016 at 20:15
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yes 'some' Daleks learned about the Doctor In that episode from data banks, thank you for giving me something to rest my mind at haha– Dominic WilsonApr 8, 2016 at 20:19
2 Answers
Two possibilities present themselves.
First, we have no idea if the events that created the setting for The Name of the Doctor will still happen or not. Just because they didn't happen during the Siege of Trenzalore as depicted in The Time of the Doctor doesn't mean there won't eventually be another battle there that will result in the Doctor's death. That was an awfully large graveyard that we saw there, which doesn't really seem to match up with the state of things by the time the Doctor regenerated.
Second, the only thing we know for certain from Name is that the Doctor is buried on Trenzalore. We are given the impression that there was a battle that the Doctor led and died at the head of, but that's all an assumption that we have no proof of. Maybe the Church of the Papal Mainframe consecrated Trenzalore after the Siege and now the whole planet is a cemetery -- we don't know. The Doctor could simply have programmed the TARDIS to always return his remains there after his death upon learning that it is where he must be buried. His actual death, though, could be from anything and still be centuries or millennia in his future.
In either case, there is no reason to think that Clara's actions in Time necessarily cancel out the events of Name.
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Exactly - The event has only been postponed. The Doctor will eventually die, and will still be buried on Trenzalore, but at a far later point in his life. Indeed, considering he spends more time there protecting its people than he has anywhere else, he may choose to be buried (immolated - a Time Lord's body is a miracle, you know) there, as opposed to Earth or even Gallifrey. Mar 2, 2018 at 14:29
if you look at it in terms of when the doctor and Clara episode journey to the centre of the TARDIS, we saw when it happened all the times people died and what they did to rectify it, I have in my mind then when we are watching doctor who each episode we are watching HIS personal timeline, so by the end of the episode we see them go back in time and re-write that day.
so the way I see it is that the name of the doctor was before the 50th in terms of the doctors own personal history then some time later he gets the chance to go back to the time war and fix it, the other doctors are just there for the ride and thats why only Smith and Capaldi remember and because clara is there an follows him along most of his personal history what she has done stays