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time travel - Why couldn't Clara see future incarnations past the "11th" doctor? 


From episode 239 "The Name of the Doctor"

Inside The Doctor's grave, we are shown a beam of light which is said to be "the scar tissue" of his journey through time. The Doctor describes the light as both his past and his future.




"My own personal time tunnel. All the days, even the ones that I, uh, even the ones that I haven't lived yet." - The Doctor



But after Clara travels down the time tunnel, and sees the forgotten incarnation, she says:



"But I never saw that one. I saw all of you. Eleven faces, all of them you! You're the eleventh Doctor!"



Why was she unable to see the Peter Capaldi doctor or any other Doctor that followed?


The best answer I was able to come up with, is that when you enter the light you have to start at the beginning of The Doctor's life, and re-appear linearly through his time line. This would explain why the Gallifreyan version of Clara knew his name and what he was doing, but also why the versions of Clara who met the Matt Smith Doctor didn't know who he was. She was slowly forgetting with each new copy.


Another possible theory is that she didn't need to look any further than the point she was at when she jumped into the light. She may have been able to save The Doctor by defeating the Great Intelligence at an earlier time and re-writing events in such a way that there would be no need for her to travel into his future.


Does anyone have any other theories or evidence as to why this is? I was also concerned about the interior of the dead TARDIS being the same as the current interior, but I suppose that may be a question for another thread. Yes, I'm aware of budgets and not being able to predict what will happen later in the series, but I'd hate to see this as a plot hole later down the line. Convince me that it's not!




Answer



Because the average Time Lord has only thirteen versions of themselves, and since the 11th Doctor is actually the 13th, it means his timeline stops at Trenzalore: his death. That's why Clara never saw the 12th Doctor, because is he is slightly derived from the Doctor's apparent "fate".


The Time Lords saved the Doctor by giving him a second regeneration cycle, making it so the Fall of the Eleventh never happened and never will. Capaldi is called the 12th Doctor, but is really the 14th, or if you wanna be really technical, the first incarnation of the new set.


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