Fandom is facing one of the biggest questions in its history, one that makes ‘are characters such as Sara Kingdom and the Brigadier companions?’, ‘when exactly is the UNIT era?’ and ‘how many chickens have there been in Doctor Who?’ look trivial by comparison. Any non fans or newbies reading this will just have to take my word on those: they’ve been biggies in the past! Anyway, this one is sure to keep fans arguing over their pints for years to come: just what number of Doctor is Peter Capaldi supposed to be playing? It should be a simple calculation of ‘the previous Doctor’s number plus one’, but recent revelations about the Doctor’s past have thrown the whole system into disarray. Don’t tell Sesame Street’s The Count for goodness sake: he’ll be in therapy for years!

There are arguably three ways in which this can pan out:

(1) Everybody sticks with tradition and simply calls Peter Capaldi the twelfth Doctor.

(2) We count John Hurt and shunt up the Doctors so that Capaldi is No. 14

(3) Actually, I think I’ll come to this one in a bit…

The case for Capaldi being the twelfth Doctor is purely to keep things simple. It’s a long established fact that complexity can lead to confusion, and confusion and market branding are not very comfortable bedfellows. When marketing the new range of books or comics, or indeed, the new TV series, it’s important to be able to categorically state that it features the twelfth Doctor without having to go into long winded explanations why the new Doctor is being called the fourteenth when the previous one was called the eleventh, which would be necessary if they splashed the news that he was actually the fourteenth over the publicity material. They’d have to embark on a massive rebranding campaign to inform everyone that Eccleston was actually the tenth, Tennant the eleventh (and twelfth - which adds yet another level of complexity) before establishing Smith as the thirteenth and Capaldi’s immediate predecessor. It seems nonsensical that they should go through all that just to maintain that Capaldi is one number rather than another. It’s so much easier to stick to him being No. 12 as far as marketing is concerned.

Of course, in the continuity of the series he is indisputably the fourteenth Doctor. We’ve had an unbroken succession of regenerations on screen, with November’s online minisode showing McGann becoming Hurt (great in-joke there btw ‘will it hurt?’) and Hurt’s regeneration giving a brief visual hint of him becoming Eccleston (in addition to the leather jacket and a back-reference to the ninth Doctor’s comment about his ears in 2005’s Rose), and we also saw the regeneration culminate in two tenth Doctors in 2008’s Journey’s End, and it’s all made a plot point in Matt Smith’s Xmas 2013 finale. So, Peter Capaldi is the fourteenth Doctor.

But I have a third option. In all likelihood no-one’s going to like it, but considering that Capaldi is the first Doctor of a fresh new regeneration cycle, would it be appropriate to call him Doctor 2.1?