10 Doctor Who Answers Given YEARS Later

Doctor Who has had a lot of mysteries and unanswered questions over the years, which isn’t terribly surprising given that the show’s title is literally a question.

It’s also a show that’s never been hugely interested in long-form storytelling – it may have lasted 60 years, but it’s rare for a plot thread to run longer than a single season, never mind multiple seasons. And so, most of Doctor Who’s unanswered questions are either answered pretty quickly, or end up fading into the background and being forgotten.

But sometimes, a mystery that’s been left open will finally receive an answer years later. Writers will go back to revisit older episodes, reinvent concepts that haven’t been seen in decades, or sometimes will just accidentally clear something up without really intending to.

From story arcs that took years to resolve, to items that disappeared for decades before coming back as important plot points, these are the answers Doctor Who didn’t provide until years after the original questions.

Queen Elizabeth I’s surprise appearance at the end of The Shakespeare Code was mostly just included
as a one-off joke, with no real plan as to what the Doctor would do in his
future to upset her to the point that she calls for his head.

For the rest of the Tenth Doctor’s run a lot of fans wondered if we were ever going to see what had happened, but there was no such luck.

Series 3 and 4 passed without a return to Elizabethan England, David Tennant
regenerated into Matt Smith, and it seemed like the mystery of the Tenth Doctor and Lizzy Number One was going to
be just another reference to the many random adventures the Doctor has offscreen.

But then over six years after The Shakespeare Code, The Day of the Doctor rolled around, which reunited Ten with his so-called “sworn enemy.” But instead of chopping off each other’s heads, they were feeding each other grapes, and – against the Doctor’s wishes – getting married.

The Doctor then abandoned his bride and fled in the TARDIS, explaining why she had been so angry at him all those years ago.

It was rewarding for everyone who remembered watching The Shakespeare Code in 2007 to finally
get an explanation for the episode’s memorable surprise cliffhanger.