Alternate timeline (The Name of the Doctor)
This article is currently undergoing significant editing. Editors should not use this tag for more than 72 hours. Please do not edit it until you no longer see this message, or until 72 hours have passed from the time this message appeared in the edit history.
An alternate timeline where The Doctor died during the Siege of Trenzalore and the planet became a battlefield graveyard. (TV: The Name of the Doctor)
History
Background
It was originally believed by the Doctor that Gallifrey and the Time Lords were destroyed by the War Doctor and the Moment at the end of the Last Great Time War. (TV: The End of the World, Dalek, The Name of the Doctor) However, during a crisis with the Zygons, the Moment brought the War Doctor, the Tenth Doctor and the Eleventh Doctor together to show the War Doctor what would happen if he went through with his plan. With the encouragement of Clara Oswald, all incarnations of the Doctor teamed up together to save Gallifrey by placing it into a pocket universe. Due to their timelines being out of synch, only the Eleventh Doctor would remember this. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
Due to fears that the Doctor would speak his true name and release the Time Lords from their pocket universe at Trenzalore, the Kovarian Chapter of the The Church went rogue in an attempt to prevent the Doctor from ever reaching Trenzalore. (TV: The Time of the Doctor) The Chapter, or the Silence as it generally became known, attempted to blow up the Doctor's TARDIS to kill him (TV: The Pandorica Opens, The Big Bang, The Time of the Doctor) and to "engineer the perfect psychopath" in River Song to assassinate the Doctor. (TV: Day of the Moon, Closing Time, The Wedding of River Song, The Time of the Doctor) However, these efforts all failed and played a role in the Doctor reaching Trenzalore. (TV: The Time of the Doctor)
Having become aware of the Silence's plan to kill him and that it was a fixed point in time, (TV: The Almost People, Let's Kill Hitler) the Doctor sought answers for why he had to die before going to Lake Silencio where history stated that River would kill him. The Doctor learned from Dorium Maldovar of the Silence's prophecy of The Question: "on the fields of Trenzalore at the Fall of the Eleventh when no creature can speak falsely or fail to answer a question will be asked, a question that must never, ever be answered." This question, which Dorium called "the oldest question in the universe, hidden in plain sight" was "Doctor Who?" or a request for the Doctor's real name. Eventually, with the help of River and the Teselecta, the Doctor faked his death so that all but a few believed him to be gone. (TV: The Wedding of River Song)
The Siege of Trenzalore
After a message was broadcast throughout all of time and space, the Doctor and "half the universe" followed the signal to a Level 2 human colony planet where the Doctor discovered a residual crack in the universe that the message was being broadcast through. With the help of Handles, the Doctor translated the message which was "Doctor Who?" The Doctor learned from Tasha Lem that the planet was Trenzalore and realized that this was the fulfillment of the prophecy he had received from Dorium. More, the Doctor realized that the Time Lords, trapped in their pocket universe, were attempting to get out. If the Doctor spoke his true name, the Time Lords would know that it was safe to return and would come through the crack. However, with "half the universe" surrounding the planet, the return of the Time Lords would spark a new Time War. If the Doctor left the planet, Tasha would have it destroyed by the Papal Mainframe to prevent this outcome.
At a standstill, the Doctor remained on Trenzalore to defend the town of Christmas during the ensuing siege. Over the next nine hundred years, the Doctor defended the planet from his various enemies. (TV: The Time of the Doctor)
The death of the Doctor
Despite allying with the Silence when the siege turned into a full battle, the Doctor's defense of Trenzalore ultimately failed. At the end of his life and with no more regenerations left to him, the Doctor died on the fields of Trenzalore, presumably from a final Dalek attack. The Doctor was laid to rest in his TARDIS which was left upon the planet's surface to die. (TV: (TV: The Time of the Doctor, The Name of the Doctor)
Along with the Doctor, millions died in the siege, "a minor skirmish" for the Doctor, but enough to permanently end him due to the Doctor's intent to defend Trenzalore to the end and his inability to regenerate. The population of the planet was exterminated and the entire surface became one big battlefield graveyard. Trenzalore itself transformed from a beautiful habitable world into a barren wasteland with a cracked molten surface and lost its rings and its moons. (TV (TV: The Name of the Doctor)
