Absolutely right, izlear.<br /><br />Actually, there are bigger contradictions about that. In "The Brain of Morbius", when the Doctor has the mind-bending contest with Morbius, he is forced to regress through his memories. Stock footage is shown of the Third Doctor, the Second Doctor, the First Doctor, and then various members of the production team get to have cameos as previous Doctors. The assumption was that there had been many Doctors. In fact, the Second Doctor at one point made the assertion that Time Lords were virtually immortal "barring accidents".<br /><br />This is contradicted by "The Deadly Assassin", which is in fact the episode that Leovinus refers to above. It's one of my personal favorites, because it's a darned good murder mystery. But it infuriated many fans when it first came out because of how substantially it changed what we know about the Doctor. Most significantly, it gave Time Lords a limited (albeit extremely long) lifespan. Twelve regenerations, thirteen lives. Castellan Spandrell points out that the Master had nothing to lose by commiting suicide, since it was the end of his regenerative cycle. Ultimately, the new information did win out, mainly because it was so explicitly stated, and later episodes reinforced it quite strongly. Of course, this gave the production team a bit of a challenge with the character of the Master, but hey, if the character is really popular, there's always a way to bring them back. <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" /> Just look at Davros, who isn't even a Time Lord!<br /><br />Late in the series, writers started to drop additional hints, laying the groundwork for the Doctor to be something even more. I didn't like that; making the Doctor too powerful really paints the writers into a corner, and also makes it harder to see the "mad uncle" persona (as Elizabeth Sladen, who played Sarah Jane Smith, often described the Doctor). In particular, there are bits that were edited out of "Silver Nemesis" and "Remem <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em> -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>