Who's The Most Resilient? Here's How Long Each Doctor Who Incarnation Has Lived

Summary

• The definitive age of Doctor Who is impossible to count, but fans never give up.
• A Redditor recently did an extensive research of the Whoniverse media and came up with an age for every Doctor Who incarnation.
• The modern era Doctors lived much longer than the classic era ones, and the sum of all the ages makes the Time Lord impressively old.

Have you ever wondered how old Doctor Who is?

Thanks to their ability to regenerate, Time Lords can live thirteen times longer than Earth humans. But the show has proven that each incarnation can have a very different lifespan, up to thousands of years.

Plus, the Doctor is not your average Time Lord. The modern era has established that the charming space traveler's origins are much more complicated than that. As a result of being a Timeless Child, the Doctor has an infinite number of regenerations and past lives that we know little about.

On top of that, the show doesn't often go into detail about its timeline, and when it does, it sometimes contradicts itself, which makes it impossible to count the age of Doctor Who conclusively. But fans try anyway.

How long did each incarnation of the Doctor live in the Whoniverse?

The fan on Reddit u/11_Hiraeth_11 has done a tremendous job of researching the BBC show and the extensive Doctor Who media (novels, audio, comics, TARDIS wiki, etc.) to roughly estimate the age of each of the Doctor's incarnations, and has come up with some very interesting results.

• First Doctor (William Hartnell) - 450 years (Seasons 1-3)
• Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) - 50 years (Seasons 4-6)
• Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) - 250 years (Seasons 7-11)
• Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) - 54 years (Seasons 12-18)
• Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) - 37 years (Seasons 19-21)
• Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) - 153 years (Seasons 22-23)
• Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) - 56 years (Seasons 24-26)
• Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann) - 720 years (TV movie)
• War Doctor (John Hurt) - 400 years (Series 7, 2013 Special)
• Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) - 130 years (Series 1)
• Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) - 6 years (Series 2-4)
• Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) - 1,194 years (Series 5-7)
• Twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi) - 4,500,000,233 years (Series 8-10)
• Thirteenth Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) - 23-25 years (Series 11-13)

If we add up all the tenures, the total age of Doctor Who will amount to 4,500,003,758. Quite an impressive longevity.

Of course, you might be skeptical about the time the Twelfth spent in the Confession Dial, a Time Lord device designed to allow its users to confess their sins and make peace with their lives before death. For the Doctor, the device became a prison in which he spent 4.5 billion years. Speak of the man's resilience!

But even if we don't count the time he spent in the Confession Dial, Doctor Who still had a long life, almost four thousand years.

What stands out in this list is how short the tenure of the Tenth was. Only six years! No wonder he thought it was too soon for him to regenerate.

Moreover, the life span of the Fourteenth is set to be the shortest yet. Already in the third 60th anniversary special, The Giggle, which will land on BBC and Disney+ this Saturday, December 9, we will meet the new incarnation, played by Ncuti Gatwa.

It seems the Doctor can't keep his body alive for too long when it's David Tennant's, eh?

Source: Reddit.