Chris

It’s intriguing isn’t it. Would the Doctor actually have died at the end of The Time of the Doctor? Did the massive pulse of regeneration energy sent from Gallifrey really renew the Doctor’s life cycle, or simply kick-start a regeneration that would have happened anyway, had the doctor not been resisting his ‘death’?

I could be reading in a bit here, as I don’t know how intimately acquainted Chris Chibnall is with the deep continuity of the show, but his solution, especially with the snippets of buried memory in ‘Ireland’ also explains a couple of bits and pieces from the early days of the show (for example, Pat Troughton’s second doctor saying that barring accidents a Time Lord could live forever, and the appearance of faces earlier than William Hartnell in the Doctor’s mental regression battle In The Brain of Morbius - both of these can now plausibly be explained in-universe as similar buried memories briefly surfacing, rather than a production team making it up as they went along and only respecting continuity when they could remember what it was).