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Christopher Eccleston might only have been the Doctor for one season, but it turns out he might have been more Time Lord than any other Doctor we’ve seen onscreen… because he predicted the 2025 season finale twist four years early.

Spoilers for ‘The Reality War,’ the season finale of Doctor Who, follow. Keep reading only if you’re okay knowing what happens at the end of the episode.

As has been much-discussed since the episode dropped, the end of ‘The Reality War’ saw Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor regenerate into none other than Billie Piper, who had previously played companion Rose Tyler in the series from 2005 through 2006, with multiple return appearances across the next few years. Piper’s first season on the show was also Eccleston’s first and only season as the Doctor, but she clearly left an impression on the actor; when it was announced in 2021 that showrunner Russell T. Davies was returning to the show, Eccleston told fans at Fan Expo Denver that year that he knew who should play his Doctor.

“Who’s gonna be his Doctor? I think it should be Billie Piper, actually,” he said. “I'd like to see you all struggle with it. 'How can she be the Doctor when she was an assistant?!' I like the idea of it blowing fuses in the canon, or whatever it's called. 'No, this cannot! Dissonance, dissonance!’”

To be fair, Eccleston was saying this after it had been announced that David Tennant and Catherine Tate would be returning to the show in 2023, even if the specifics weren’t known yet — so the idea of stunt casting was not coming from nowhere. Nonetheless: four years before it actually happened, Christopher Eccleston predicted the twist ending of 2025’s Doctor Who.

Let’s see if he has any suggestions about future sporting events that we can bet on, just in case.

More about that twist ending from this year's Doctor Who, and what it might mean for the show's future.