Doc 11 sure has a thing for headwear, doesn’t he. Can’t decide if the cowboy hat or the fez suits him better. They never did get him that fez in the White House.
I suspect that the Doctor will, in some way, be duplicated. One Duplicate will then have to die to stop two Doctors from running around and mucking up the space/time continum for some such.
Remember at the start the Doctor said he had been running for too long.
BBC America has been pushing this season of Doctor Who here in the States for quite a while - ads in front of movies, planted newspaper features, etc - they’ve done the whole marketing thing as much as their budget allows. They even had a season five recap, ala Lost prior to the S6 premiere.
Hence the 20-second voice-over, letting new viewers know a bit about what is happening. No big deal.
No. It’s a time-ship of unknown origin. It crashed, and the pilots were killed. The episode premise wouldn’t have made sense for a life-boat. A life boat after reaching a safe environment would sit tight and wait for rescue, it wouldn’t look for pilots to go back out into the environment it was adrift in.
So when the Doctor first meets Amy and Rory at the beginning of the episode:
Two hundred years have passed for him since he saw them last? And he didn’t regenerate or even age during that whole time? I never had the impression that the Doctor is either immortal (unless something kills him) or at least extremely long-lived, and that his body was as physically vulnerable to aging, injury, etc. as a human.
Why would you think that? We’re on the 11th doctor and he’s 900 years old at a minimum. Simply math gives us an average of 82 years per regeneration. Since they don’t start out as infants…
He’s got to be extremely long-lived.
-Joe
He got 900 years in 8 incarnations, before the restarted series started. (He claimed to be a little over 900 shortly after the series started.)
Even ignoring the fact that each regeneration is, generally physically younger than the previous one, that requires Gallifreyans to be significantly longer lived than humans - especially since One is the only one who was significantly physically aged when he regenerated.
This article covers the topic as part of the general question of how old he is.
Key quotes:
Between when he said that and when he regenerated into Four…
At that point his age gets a bit hinky - he lost a couple hundred years somewhere between 7 and 9. But even with that, it’s pretty clear that Time Lords age slowly, relative to humans.
[Edit - also, according to that article Moffat’s on record as believing the Doctor has no idea how old he is, at this point. So he could be ancient, or he could be merely very, very old.]
Nine and Ten were real outliers, being less that 5 years a piece, meaning the first 8 get over 100 years each, by the lower estimate of the current series.
Of course, One was stated to be ~450 when he regenerated, which lowers the average of 2-8 back to 50 years each. But Two and Three lasted for an average of ~160 each, meaning 4-8 get ~20 each.
On the other hand, that means One was 450 when he regenerated. Also that Two and Three, who were late middle age/young senior citizens got ~150 years before regenerating (and Two was forced to regenerate, and Three died of radiation poisoning - neither aged to death).
I’ve only seen the series from Eccleston onward. Is it certain that the first actor to portray the Doctor is actually playing his first incarnation- that he never regenerated before that?
And where does the idea of a regeneration limit of 13(?) with the 12th supposedly being evil come from? If that’s a story they’re going to pursue (and why wouldn’t they?), it’s about time to start dropping some hints, if they haven’t already. 
Yes, we know the First Doctor is the first Doctor.
It’s not explicitly stated until Eleven (who calls himself the eleventh), but there are multiple times where if he wasn’t, it wouldn’t have made sense to not mention prior ones (The Three Doctors, the Five Doctors, etc).
The Valeyard, the evil version of the Doctor (taken from ‘between his twelfth and final incarnations’) is the primary enemy from Trail of a Time Lord, a season-long story from Six’s run.
The hard limit on regenerations is first mentioned, I believe, in The Deadly Assassin, a Fourth Doctor story. (And, of course, important to Trail of a Time Lord.)
I first remember the 12 regeneration limit being mentioned in the Tom Baker/Third Doctor years, particularly in regard to The Master who supposedly had used up all of his and wound up stealing someone else’s body.
Well, that’s as best I remember it - it’s only been about 20 years since I saw those episodes.
Thing is, the doctor doesn’t always tell the truth. And at one point the Time Lords offered The Master a new “set” of regeneration cycles. And there was another episode where a group of people in a space ark that used Time Lord type regeneration had undergone hundreds if not thousands of regenerations on their journey… so “12” might be a custom or a limitation imposed by the Time Lord society. However, Gallifrey is gone and The Doctor is the last one… so he can, really, do whatever he pleases, can’t he?
There was a lot of fan speculation on that point during the initial run of the series.
But it was finally canonically stated in the serial “Mawdryn’s Undead” that the then-current Doctor (Peter Davidson) was the fifth incarnation and that he had eight more incarnations left.
Dialogue from the serial “the Deadly Assassin” (one of the few stories depicting the Doctor’s home world & culture in depth) specifically stated that a Time Lord’s twelfth regeneration is his last one. However the Master managed to circumvent
that barrier by stealing other people’s life-forces. It was also stated in the new series episode “Utopia” that the Master was granted “a new series of regenerations” as a reward for helping them fight in the Time War. Also, Matt Smith guest starred on an episode of the Sarah-Jane Adventures as the Doctor in which he off-handedly dismissed the 12-only limit. So, apparently, that bit of canon information has been retconned.
Time Lords don’t necessarily turn evil, but the Valeyard - the main villain from the epic-length serial “the Trial of a Time Lord” - was revealed in the end to be a future incarnation of the Doctor.
Unless going beyond the regeneration limit requires intervention from the Time Lords or something on Gallifrey…
I did see the bit from Sarah Jane Adventures, and it seemed more like the Doctor was simply being flippant.
Heard a rumor a while back about the BBC considering putting the show on a lengthy hiatus after another series or two. A multi-Doctor epic dealing with him reaching his final regeneration would be a great story to go out on. As the current run began with the Doctor being the last of his kind, the next would find him dealing with being on his last life.
Tom Baker was the Fourth Doctor…the Third was Jon Pertwee. (William Hartnell - Patrick Troughton - Jon Pertee - Tom Baker - Peter Davison - Colin Baker - Sylvester McCoy - Paul McGann - Christopher Eccleston - David Tennant - Matt Smith.)
And we don’t really know what the mechanism of the regenerations or the limit is, so we don’t really know what will happen when the Doctor reaches the end of Unlucky Number 13.
Damn - keep losing track of who’s Who!
I’m just catching up and watched this morning.
What an explosive start to the series. 
Kill the Doctor in the first few minutes and burn him. Amy’s weepy scene was well done.
I’m not sure what to make of this episode. We’ve learned so very little about what happens in 1969. The Silents are a creepy bunch. I like the ex-FBI Agent. River seems a bit lost. This time, She doesn’t seem to know much about what’s happening.
Is this supposed to be a three or four part arc? I can’t imagine how this can be wrapped up in one more episode.
Overall, a good start. Now lets hang on and see how it works out.
Two-parter. Though, of course, how much will be left to spread out over the rest of the series remains to be seen.
I believe this Doctor has already been regenerated when he showed up at Amy’s wedding.
For some reason, they remind me of the Gentleman from Buffy. I’m a little puzzled why that one group was all huddled up as if they were hiding from something.
My own catching up; I did not see the last season’s finale until this weekend. Has anyone explained how River knew that she needed to give her blank diary to Amy?
Good episode, although the cliffhanger bugged me. It was so exposition-heavy I really wish they’d done a two-hour episode rather than a two-parter. It felt…well, like half a story.
[spoiler]River seemed odd. Her lack of reaction to The Doctor’s apparent death seemed hard to buy to me. It’s possible she was trying to be stoic, but I read it more as either her not really caring about The Doctor (but that doesn’t add up) or knowing The Doctor wasn’t really dead but (for whatever reason) trying not to let Amy in on that fact. I’ll admit I have a hard time with River in general – ever since her original appearance, I’ve had a hard time placing her. She’s can’t be purely a “bad guy” or her relationship with The Doctor just doesn’t add up. But obviously she’s hiding a dark secret. I really hope Moffatt’s got something up his sleeve interesting enough to justify all the attention the character gets.
The Silence are creepy as sin. They also fit with Moffatt’s great habit of using psychological fear. A monster you can’t remember unless you’re looking at it? What a good next act after a monster that doesn’t exist when you ARE looking at it. [/spoiler]
The production quality was amazing in this. Good sets, wonderful on-location stuff, great colors.