Alternate timeline ( The Name of the Doctor ) An alternate timeline in which the Doctor died during the Siege of Trenzalore and the planet became a battlefield graveyard initially existed , ( TV : " The Name of the Doctor " ) before Clara Oswald and the Time Lord s changed history . ( TV : " The Time of the Doctor " ) History . Background . It was originally believed by the Doctor that Gallifrey and the Time Lord s 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 Zygon s , 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 incarnation s of the Doctor teamed up to save Gallifrey by placing it into a pocket universe . Due to their timelines being out of sync , 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 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 Eleventh 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 realised that this was the fulfillment of the prophecy he had received from Dorium . More , the Doctor realised 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 defence on Trenzalore ultimately failed . At the end of his life and with no more regeneration s left to him , the Doctor died . The Doctor was laid to rest in his TARDIS which was left upon the planet ' s surface to die . ( 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 : " The Name of the Doctor " ) The Doctor visits his tomb . In its efforts to negate all of the Doctor ' s victories , the Great Intelligence managed to locate the Doctor ' s tomb in the battlefield graveyard on Trenzalore . In order to access the Doctor ' s TARDIS which now experienced a " size leak " as it was dying , the Great Intelligence set out to lure an earlier version of the Doctor to his tomb . Using Clarence DeMarco , the Paternoster Gang and Clara , the Great Intelligence was able to pass the space - time coordinates for the Doctor ' s tomb on Trenzalore to him . In order to save his friends , the Doctor reluctantly crossed his own time stream in a big way by taking his own TARDIS to the future Trenzalore . During a confrontation between the Doctor and the Great Intelligence , a data ghost of River Song , manifesting through a psychic " conference call " link with Clara , opened the TARDIS doors . Inside , the Doctor , his friends and the Great Intelligence found not a body , but the Doctor ' s time stream . To destroy the Doctor , the Great Intelligence entered the time stream , but Clara followed it to save the Doctor . After saying a final goodbye to River , the Doctor entered his own time stream to rescue Clara , encountering his greatest secret . Following Clara ' s rescue , the Doctor departed his time stream and the future Trenzalore with his friends . ( TV : " The Name of the Doctor " ) An accepted fate . After seeing his tomb on Trenzalore , the Eleventh Doctor came to accept that his fate would be that he would die there despite not knowing the circumstances . After saving Gallifrey and the Time Lords alongside the War Doctor and the Tenth Doctor , the Eleventh Doctor told his predecessor that he had seen their tomb on Trenzalore . Despite the Tenth Doctor ' s protests , the Eleventh Doctor insisted that their fate was to die in battle on Trenzalore amongst millions and that they could not stop it . ( TV : " The Day of the Doctor " ) Negation . The Doctor eventually arrived on Trenzalore in response to the Question ' s broadcast throughout time and space and initiated the Siege of Trenzalore . However , this time both the Doctor and Clara knew what would happen since they had seen the future Trenzalore . Despite Clara ' s attempts to convince him otherwise , the Doctor refused to leave the planet and did not believe that he could change the future that he had witnessed . After nine hundred years and having fended off all but the Daleks , the Doctor became old , frail and weak and was dying of old age , out of regenerations with which to continue his life . With the Daleks having broken through the final defences at Christmas , Tasha Lem brought Clara from her own time to be with the Doctor so that he would not die alone . With a Dalek saucer descending and the Daleks demanding the Doctor ' s surrender , the Doctor went out to meet his fate , continuing to believe that he could not change the future . The Doctor admitted that when there were still Time Lords he could have , but alone he had no chance . In a desperate act , Clara pleaded with the Time Lords through the crack in the universe to save the Doctor and help him change the future . As the Daleks prepared to kill the Doctor , the Time Lords intervened to save the Doctor by moving the crack into the sky above Christmas and sent the Doctor a new regeneration cycle through the crack . The Doctor immediately underwent an explosive regeneration and used the regeneration energy and resulting shock wave to destroy the attacking Dalek forces . With Trenzalore saved and the crack closed , the Doctor departed the planet in his TARDIS and shortly afterwards regenerated into the Twelfth Doctor , changing the future and negating this timeline . ( TV : " The Time of the Doctor " )