FAQ

One night in 1963, suspicious and concerned school teachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright follow their mysterious new pupil Susan Foreman to a scrapyard. Ian and Barbara's curiosity leads them to discover Susan resides in a police box in the scrapyard. But, they are stunned to discover that the police box is a disguised time machine and that it belongs to Susan's grandfather, an short-tempered eccentric old man whom calls himself The Doctor. The Doctor claims that Susan and himself are not human and that they are both extra terrestrials from another planet in another century and that the time machine is called the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimensions in Space) and that it can travel anywhere through space and time. However, The Doctor activates the TARDIS and the TARDIS vanishes and reappears on Earth in the stone age and it becomes the beginning of a legend.

This and the 2005 series are the same show, with season 26 ending in 1989 and season 27 starting in 2005. The BBC and all other companies involved, classified the show, when is started up again in 2005, as a new, separate show, calling the 27th season, season 1. This was done to avoid confusion for new viewers. They mainly achieved the opposite, because, by classifying the 2005 pickup as a new show, they confused the large fan base that was already familiar with the old series. Many questions were raised with this "new show", some of them include:

Is this a reboot?

Is this a different Doctor?

Is this an alternate timeline?

When does this take place?

Is this a different actor playing the same Doctor?

The answer to most of those questions are: no. The 2005 series is completely canon, and a direct continuation with some time having passed between the 26th and 27th seasons. To avoid as little confusion as possible, without having a bunch of stuff explained to you from outside sources, this is how the shows and movie should be interpreted; There are seasons 1-26, following the first 7 Doctors' adventures, then, what one could call, season 26 1/2, which would be made up of the 1996 tv movie "Doctor Who", the mini episode "The Night of the Doctor", and an edited version of the episode "The Day of the Doctor". With "Day of the Doctor", having some of the scenes with exclusively Matt Smith and David Tennant chopped down or removed. A tiny bit confusing, but then we continue with season 27-33 and onward. Even if TV stations count the new seasons as different shows, websites like wikipedia and imdb need have them as the same show, it'd be a lot less confusing and a lot more convenient. Lots of shows have stopped for a while and continued later, one example is Futurama, that show ran from 1999 to 2003, then from 2008 to 2013. that was classified as one continuous show, and so should doctor who.

This is never stated within the show.

According to the Doctor Who Wiki (Tardis Data Core), the First Doctor was taken from a point in time between "The Time Meddler" and "Galaxy 4", and the Second Doctor was taken from between "The Invasion" and "The Krotons".

With confirmed information, however, if you take into account that Jamie McCrimmon was originally intended to appear alongside the Second Doctor, then it may be inferred that the Second Doctor came from a point in the series during which Jamie was his only companion. If this is taken into account, then the candidates are either between "The Faceless Ones" and "The Power of the Daleks" or between "Fury from the Deep" and "The Wheel in Space." Since there is no gap between the latter couple of serials, that is most likely from when the Second Doctor arrives. However, there are no clues as to when the First Doctor arrives from.

Yes; the thirteenth Doctor is a woman.

This has also been hinted at previously. In the webisode "Night of the Doctor" as he was dying (or more accurately already dead with minutes given back, similar to the echoes the tenth and eleventh Doctor's had) the Sisterhood of Karn gave him the option to control his regeneration. One of the options given to him was to have his ninth life be that of a woman. Also, the Master regenerates into a woman and stays in that regeneration throughout Series 8. In "Hell Bent" the Doctor shoots the General making him regenerate into black a woman (earlier he was a white male). This proves that a time-lord can regenerate into any gender or race. And in "The Doctor's Wife", he mentions another Time Lord named The Corsair, who had regenerations both as male and female. As to why gender flipping is apparently not commonly shown is not explained in the show and can currently only be guessed at.

(addition:) My guess is that most Time Lords regenerate into the same sex as they were when they were born, but a small percentage of regenerations involve a sex change (note that the General said she had only been male during a single regeneration, the one prior to being shot by the 12th Doctor). Perhaps some individual Time Lords are more prone to switching sexes due to genetic or hormonal factors. Environmental conditions during regeneration, such as certain types of radiation, might also play a role.