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In The Day of the Doctor, all 13 Doctors turn up to help save Gallifrey, and it's assumed that Ten, Eleven, and War have summoned the rest. Given Twelve's presence - a form that Eleven hasn't yet seen - how come Eleven doesn't know he's going to regenerate again? In The Time of the Doctor, he tells Clara very clearly that he can't.

Two possible answers that don't quite work:

  • Twelve wasn't summoned; he turned up of his own accord (because Eleven's experiences are in his past but in the future of all the others). But if he remembered what really happened that day, then Eleven should have remembered too; also, even if he wasn't summoned, the Gallifreyan defence council saw him, and Eleven should have made the obvious deduction from the Time Lord General's exclamation "thirteen!"

  • Eleven lost some of his memories of the end of the Time War, due to being together with too many versions of himself (Ten and War definitely forgot everything that happened, because 'the time streams were out of sync' or some other wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff). But Clara should have remembered Twelve's appearance, since she was presumably with Eleven in his Tardis and no older version of herself was around, and her only rebuttal of Eleven's defeatist I-can't-regenerate I'll-die-on-Trenzalore speech is "you can change the future" rather than "we already know you'll regenerate again".

Why do Eleven and Clara both seem to forget having (summoned and) seen Twelve?

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    Timey wimey... you guessed it... wibbly wobbly.
    – Omegacron
    Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 21:32
  • You're assuming Clara a) was in the TARDIS at the time, b) was aware of Capaldi's TARDIS in particular (there were, after all, a dozen others, all spread out around the planet, while a Dalek fleet was attacking... easy to miss things in that kind of chaos), and c) understood the significance of it well enough to recall it when she was emotionally devastated at the thought of the Doctor's impending death.
    – Roger
    Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 21:56

2 Answers 2

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For the same reason that the War and Tenth Doctors would not remember trying to save Gallifrey instead of burning it. When the Doctor interacts with past incarnations of himself, only the older version remembers it. Eleven would remember trying to save it, but he'd forget seeing Twelve there as well, because Twelve was the older incarnation.

As for Clara, I'm not entirely sure that she was in Eleven's TARDIS when the plan was carried out and the 13 Doctors got together.

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  • OK, Clara doesn't actually appear onscreen when the 13 Doctors get together, but where else would she be? Left in that shack with the Moment? She came with Eleven to the shack, so why wouldn't she accompany him afterwards too?
    – Rand al'Thor ♦
    Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 21:54
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    Why couldn't he have dropped her off at home or someplace safe, knowing that he was heading into the heart of a war zone with no guarantee of success?
    – Roger
    Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 21:58
  • @Roger Clara doesn't seem the sort of girl to accept being dropped off somewhere safe while all the excitement happens :-p Or am I wrong?
    – Rand al'Thor ♦
    Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 22:05
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    Oh, I never said she'd be happy about it. :D I'd need to rewatch, but in all the shots of Eleven dashing around the console, I don't think we get any shots of Clara even in the background, and I can't imagine that, if she were on the TARDIS, she'd be anywhere but in the console room.
    – Roger
    Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 22:10
  • And it's a small screen...
    – tilley31
    Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 22:14
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"But Clara should have remembered Twelve's appearance, since she was presumably with Eleven in his Tardis and no older version of herself was around"

As you say, it's also not clear that Eleven actually "summoned" him--it's possible Eleven just sent a signal summoning all his past selves (and telling the First Doctor to begin the necessary calculations, since the Gallifreyan General said "The calculations alone would take hundreds of years" and Ten said "Don't worry, I started a very long time ago" to which Eleven added "You might say I've been doing this all my lives", and then we see all the previous Doctors arrive). So, Twelve definitely could have come of his own accord because he remembered they needed all the help they could get. You say that Eleven would have known anyway because the Gallifreyan General said "Thirteen!", but it's not clear they were still transmitting audio to the Doctor when he said that, and anyway all the versions of the Doctor looked pretty distracted by the task at hand at that point.

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