Convince people to obey his will through the power of words alone (Battlefield)
Render people helpless by simply applying his fingers to their heads (Battlefield, Survival)
Ease pain with a mere touch (Curse of Fenric)
Write different things with two hands simultaneously (The Curse of Fenric)
Forge signatures from memory (The Curse of Fenric)
Expel foreign bodies such as a medical probe from his cardiovascular system, even breaking his skin in the process (Doctor Who)
Pick pockets (various)
Slow down his perception of time to negotiate obstacles such as giant fan blades (The End of the World)
Speak five billion languages (The Parting of the Ways) including Baby (A Good Man Goes to War) and Horse (A Town Called Mercy)
Identify human blood types by taste (The Christmas Invasion) as well as viscum album, the oil of the mistletoe plant (Tooth and Claw), iron (The Idiot’s Lantern), the age of paint on a shed (The Eleventh Hour), and the mineral composition of grass (The Hungry Earth). He can also identify where an envelope was manufactured by licking it (Day of the Moon)
Re-grow appendages using residual regeneration energy – so long as the said appendage gets hacked off within the early hours of a regeneration. (The Christmas Invasion)
Absorb Roentgen radiation, channel it through his body and expel it – a trick he learnt with Roentgen bricks in the nursery (Smith and Jones)
Hear the TARDIS’s operations from a considerable distance (The Sound of Drums)
Identify the decade by smelling the air (although the appearance of a vintage car may help) (The Unicorn and the Wasp)
Expel a dose of cyanide by stimulating the inhibited enzymes into reversal. All he needs is some added protein, ginger beer, salt and a snog. From Donna (The Unicorn and the Wasp)
Open the TARDIS with a click of his fingers (Forest of the Dead)
Wipe memories (Journey’s End)
Play football to a surprisingly high standard (The Lodger)
Transfer memories by means of a head-butt (The Lodger)
Share his regenerative energy with other Time Lords, (The Angels Take Manhattan) an ability shared by River Song (Let’s Kill Hitler)
OTHER TIME LORD ABILITIES
Susan shows evidence of telepathy in The Sensorites.
The Time Lords in The War Games are able to inflict extreme pain with just the power of their minds.
The Master shares the Doctor’s mimicry talents. He is able to perfectly impersonate the Brigadier in The Time Monster.
Morbius shields his mind from the psychic probing of the Sisterhood of Karn. (Pyramids of Mars)
Romana feigns death by stopping both her hearts. (Destiny of the Daleks)
Professor Chronotis manipulates the beating of his twin hearts in time to Gallifreyan Morse. (Shada)
The Master merges his decaying Time Lord body with that of another life form. (The Keeper of Traken) He subsequently transforms his mortal remains into a gloopy, slime-snake that inhabits and reanimates Bruce the ambulance driver’s body. In this form he also spits out deadly, paralysing mucus. (Doctor Who)
THE MANY WIVES OF DOCTOR WHO
‘Look, sorry. I’ve got a bit of a complex life. Things don’t always happen to me in quite the right order. Gets a bit confusing at times. Especially at weddings. I’m rubbish at weddings. Especially my own.’
The Doctor, Blink
The Doctor very rarely mentions his family but, over the years, he has let slip a few details. In The Tomb of the Cybermen, the Second Doctor tells Victoria that the memory of his family sleeps in his mind, while years later, in The Curse of Fenric, the Seventh Doctor admits he doesn’t know if he has any family any more. In The Empty Child, Doctor Constantine confides that he has been a father and a grandfather but the Second World War has left him as neither. The Doctor comments that he knows the feeling.
When he left Gallifrey, the First Doctor was travelling with his granddaughter, Susan Foreman (An Unearthly Child), and the Tenth Doctor tells Rose Tyler that he ‘was a dad once’ (Fear Her). It’s fair to assume that he had a partner, maybe even a wife, and that she was probably Gallifreyan, as Susan was brought up on the Doctor’s home planet.
Later, when faced with his new daughter, Jenny (see Other Notable Relations) the Doctor says that he can see his family in her, the hole they left and the pain that filled it. He claims that when they died, part of him died with them.
In The End of Time, the Doctor boasts that he married ‘Good Queen Bess’. He later suggests, in The Wedding of River Song, that ‘Liz the First’ waited in a glade to elope with him.
Others are aware of this royal wedding, too. On Starship UK (The Beast Below), Queen Liz 10 needles the Time Lord about his relationship with the Virgin Queen (he’s ‘a bad, bad boy’ apparently) while the Dream Lord points out the Doctor’s love of redheads, specifically mentioning poor old Lizzy (Amy’s Choice).
For whatever reason, the liaison, it seems, did not go well. Elizabeth herself doesn’t seem too happy to see her former hubby at the Globe theatre in 1599. In fact, as soon as she claps eyes on the Tenth Doctor she orders his decapitation! That must have been some break-up (The Shakespeare Code).
If all this wasn’t complicated enough, at one point Amy Pond (the Doctor’s mother-in-law from his fourth marriage) accidentally married Henry VIII (the Doctor’s father-in-law from his second marriage) while she was still married to Rory. To add insult to injury, the muddled matrimony happened on the Ponds’ wedding anniversary.
The First Doctor uses a Time-Space Visualiser to spy on a conversation between Queen Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare in The Chase. Little does the old rogue know he’s looking at his future trouble and strife.
24 December 1952. The Doctor attends a party in Hollywood, California with the young Kazran Sardick and his sweetheart, Abigail. Just as he is about to sing a duet with Frank Sinatra, the Doctor somehow manages to ‘accidentally’ get engaged to Marilyn Monroe. The Time Lord tries to skedaddle, but there is no escape – Marilyn has already booked a cab to the chapel. The Doctor reluctantly slopes off to marry the model-turned-actress.
Do they go through with the wedding? Well, when Marilyn later manages to phone the TARDIS, the Doctor questions the chapel’s legitimacy… (A Christmas Carol)
‘Yes, I made some cocoa and got engaged.’
The Doctor, The Aztecs
This isn’t the first time the Doctor has accidentally got engaged. The First Doctor cosies up to an elderly Aztec woman called Cameca, making her a nice cup of cocoa. Little does he know that such an act is a proposal of marriage. The man just can’t help himself. Although the Doctor reveals a lovable sentimental streak as he leaves Mexico with the brooch his fiancée gave him – harrumphing all the way, of course. (The Aztecs)