Why does doctor who regeneration

The Doctor's regenerations have also been caused by a wide variety of different threats, some considerably more dramatic than others. Doctor Who 's early creative team cooked up the idea of regeneration after William Hartnell, the original actor to bring the Doctor to life, began to struggle with memorizing scripts and delivering lines. Seeking to continue the show with a younger star, the Doctor would "renew" himself and transform into a completely different man.

Throughout the First Doctor's final adventure, "The Tenth Planet," the Time Lord appears weakened and frail, sometimes being forced to rest as he battles the Cybermen for the first time. Although not explicitly addressed, the generally accepted reason for the First Doctor's regeneration is old age. The Doctor is already several hundred years old before the start of Doctor Who and his recent adventures have evidently taken a toll on his ailing body. When it came time for Patrick Troughton to move on from Doctor Who , the "old age" excuse wasn't going to work, with the Second Doctor not only younger and more cheerful than his predecessor, but far more sprightly.

Instead, Doctor Who introduced another element to the mythology that would form a core part of the franchise for decades to come: the Time Lords. Although clearly of alien origin, the Doctor's background had never been previously addressed, but "The War Games" revealed his heritage and established the Time Lord code of non-interference. The Doctor was wildly in violation of said code, but a dire situation forced him to call for aid from his Gallifreyan kin, even knowing that punishment inevitably awaited.

Charged with various counts of meddling, the Doctor was forced to give up his current regeneration and was exiled to Earth.

Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor was the most human version yet, driving a jaunty car, joining U. However, the Third Doctor's eventual regeneration was definitively alien in nature. Having previously stolen a blue crystal from the planet Metebelis 3 for study, the Doctor discovers that a race of mutated giant spiders have taken over and are seeking the return of their crystal. While this sounds like a reasonable request, the spiders seek to use the crystal as part of a larger plan to dominate the galaxy.

Always a step ahead, the Doctor knows that the crystal's overwhelming power will kill, not enhance, the spiders' leader, and handing back the stolen crystal will therefore save the day. Problematically, the spider's cave is teeming with lethal radiation but, in a noble effort to protect the universe, the Doctor ventures into the cave of the Eight Legs and hands over the crystal, defeating the spiders.

Tom Baker's regeneration into Peter Davison is unique in that it requires the cooperation of a mysterious third party. In "Logopolis," the fabric of reality is beginning to unravel and the Doctor is forced to team up with the Master to save the universe. Even so, the Doctor Who regeneration cycle was only on its Ninth Doctor Christopher Eccleston , so it stood to reason the show had some time to figure out exactly what to do about that plot point should the show become a hit.

The Doctor Who regeneration cycle was addressed much sooner than the final incarnation in the cycle, as the Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith explained to companion Clara Oswald he exhausted all of his regenerations after an aborted regeneration and the discovery of an unknown "War Doctor" who existed between his Eighth and Ninth incarnations.

Now towards the end of his life and dying, Clara pleaded with living Time Lords via a "crack in time" asking they help the Doctor for all the times he's helped them.

The Time Lords seemingly obliged, and The Doctor was able to use his 13th regeneration process to defeat an invading Dalek army. Afterward, it's revealed The Doctor had been granted a new regenerative cycle and would be allowed an additional 12 regenerations. The Doctor Who regeneration question has only gotten more complicated in Season 12 after a bombshell reveal by The Master to The Doctor.

The season finale finally answered the Season 11 mystery of the Timeless Child and revealed the news that The Doctor was not actually a Time Lord or even from Gallifrey. She was adopted by a Gallifreyan named Tecteun, who discovered the child had regenerative capabilities after a fatal fall off a cliff. The Time Lords engineered the regeneration capabilities into their own genetics, but decided all Time Lords would be capped at 12 regenerations.

With that said, the experimentation sequence showed The Doctor regenerate several times in a short amount of time and appeared to have the capability for far more than the 12 regenerations viewers originally knew about.

That's certainly possible due to The Doctor allegedly not being a Time Lord, assuming The Master's story and presented visions are accurate. The idea is mentioned again in the show's 20th anniversary special, The Five Doctors.

There are said to be some fans so hardcore that they say they will not watch the show if the Doctor survives beyond his 12th regeneration. However, this is the sort of thing which hardcore fans tend to say.

The fact is that Doctor Who's producers have often played fast and loose with "the laws of time and space" - for instance, the Doctor's only ever time lord or lady companion, Romana, apparently possessed the ability to regenerate several times before breakfast, trying on several different appearances before transforming from Mary Tamm to Lalla Ward.

It might be that if the programme retains its popularity, the producers will find a way to get round this dilemma. It remains to be seen whether it's as drastic a solution as the recent Star Trek film which used time travel the plot device which keeps on giving to effectively wipe out the entire "history" of the Star Trek universe. But ultimately, one doesn't need a sonic screwdriver to realise the Doctor's continuing existence will owe less to the laws of the space-time vortex than the health of the TV ratings.

Here is a selection of your comments from Twitter and Facebook. The regenerations in the new series are different from the original series.

The Master even managed to regenerate. So a different type of regeneration may be in use allowing many more regenerations. TV : The Christmas Invasion , The Stolen Earth While the Brigadier noted that one Doctor was more than enough to deal with at any time, TV : The Three Doctors he nevertheless confidently proclaimed that all of the Doctors were "remarkable chaps", willing to work with whatever Doctor answered his calls for help even if he acknowledged that he knew certain Doctors better than others.

After deciding to help the Doctor against the Mondasian Cybermen , the Missy incarnation of the Master was shown to see her past self as still being her, stating that she'd loved being him and the feeling of all that he was. However, due to her genuine desire to change, Missy mortally wounded her past self to force his regeneration into herself, appearing to see it as necessary to ensure the Master became Missy. Although most associated with Time Lords , regeneration also existed in other species, or sometimes in specific individuals, directly copied from the Time Lords.

This form of regeneration was explicitly shown to allow a change in gender. TV : The Hand of Fear. Like their masters the Time Lords, the living timeships the TARDISes were capable of regenerating themselves if they were heavily damaged, leaving a very characteristic Artron energy trace when they did so.

The Timeless Child was a member of a "Timeless" species with the power to regenerate an infinite number of times. This child's ability to regenerate was used by the Shobogan scientist Tecteun from Gallifrey to create the Time Lords. Kate Yates regenerated her hair when her Dalek Factor was activated after being hit by a car.

Swarm regenerates. TV : The Halloween Apocalypse. Swarm , an enemy of the Division and of the ancient versions of the Doctor who fought on the Division's behalf, showed the ability to renew himself after consuming the life force of Division agent En Sentac , reducing her to ash in the process. As he regenerated, Swarm glowed blue and red and the crystal growths on his face extended, before receding again as he settled into his new incarnation. Early in their history, the Time Lords discovered the planet Minyos , and gave the natives some of their technology.

TV : Underworld This included bestowing the power of regeneration on the Minyan royal family, who knew it as "cellular renewal", and kept it secret from their subjects until Oxirgi 's revolution against the rule of the "Gods", during which the princess Malika faced public execution by firing squad and renewed herself in a flash of golden light immediately after she'd been shot.

Over time, they wearied of life. TV : Underworld. Time Lords fighting the War in Heaven gave the ability of regeneration to their lesser species regen-inf soldiers. After the Celestial Toymaker , a Guardian of Time , merged with the Doctor 's friend and fellow Time Lord Rallon , he gained a form of regeneration, albeit not in the direct way one might have expected; after centuries of keeping the Toymaker in check, Rallon 'died' when he triggered all twelve of his regenerations at once, but the Toymaker was subsequently kept in check by Rallon's Watcher, with the Doctor explaining the situation to his companions by using the analogy of the Toymaker having regenerated himself.

Mawdryn and his followers, who had stolen the Time Lords' regeneration technology, also had a great number of incarnations, though they had no control over when it would happen and what form, often grotesque, they would change into. Consequently, they longed for death, making their mutations a kind of de facto punishment by the Time Lords for stealing their technology.

TV : Regeneration He later regenerated again after exhausting his power core to defeat Trojan. TV : The Eclipse of the Korven. During the Last Great Time War , the Daleks discovered the ability to use artron energy leeched from other time travellers to enact a similar renewal to the Time Lords'.

This would allow the Dalek to repair its casing as well as heal its inner organic body. However, this process was still primitive by the time the destruction of Gallifrey by the Doctor ; PROSE : Dalek it also caused the Dalek to absorb DNA from the time traveller it had used to power its regeneration, beginning to mutate and thus deviated from the Dalek baseline.

TV : Dalek. Due to being experimented on by the Dalek Overseer , an Ogron was sent to Gallifrey with the memories and certain biological traits of the Doctor , retaining DNA traces of the Doctor that created the impression that he was actually a regenerated Doctor rather than a completely different person.

The Ogron, named "Doctor Ogron" by Bliss , was exterminated by the Daleks, but, due to possessing aspects of the Doctor's biology, regenerated. He was restored to life but did not change his appearance like a Time Lord would. Davros , with the help of Colony Sarff , once tricked the Twelfth Doctor into sacrificing some regeneration energy to him and then funnelled much more energy than the Doctor had meant to give into the systems of the Dalek City , pumping all the dying Daleks there full of the regeneration energy.

Lit aglow with the familiar orange halo, the Daleks emerged "renewed" and "more powerful", though this victory was short-lived, as, all according to the Doctor's plan, the mass of the regenerated Daleks in the sewers led to the destruction of the City. The CyberMasters , a group of Cybermen created by the Spy Master from the corpses of Time Lords, possessed the ability to regenerate due to their origins. The Aja'ib contained tales involving regeneration. Regeneration was introduced to the mythos of Doctor Who to solve a practical staffing problem: the production team needed to find a way to exit William Hartnell but still keep the show running.

The original idea for this replacement came from producer John Wiles and script editor Donald Tosh. They proposed to write out Hartnell during The Celestial Toymaker , a serial they commissioned and prepped, but ultimately didn't produce.

Their notion was that the Celestial Toymaker would make the Hartnell Doctor disappear, but when the Doctor re-appeared he would magically be another actor entirely. REF : The First Doctor Handbook , The Second Doctor Handbook Though not at all a regenerative process as the term has since come to be understood, Wiles and Tosh do at least get some credit for being the first people to moot the possibility of carrying on the show with a new lead — and for the necessity of finding a narrative explanation for this switch.

Though this is taken for granted today, this was an important milestone on the way to regeneration. Doctor Who could have just as easily gone down the route of another s show, Bewitched , where a main character was simply recast without narrative explanation. His successor, Innes Lloyd , was better able to negotiate Hartnell's departure, in part because the climate within the BBC hierarchy had changed with Shaun Sutton 's management elevation.

REF : The First Doctor Handbook Still, it is uncertain who, precisely, came up with the idea of regeneration-as-biologic-process, rather than the mystical solution Wiles had earlier mooted. Howe , Stammers and Walker believed "the likelihood is that it emerged in discussion between Lloyd and his story editor Gerry Davis " — along with additional input from Shaun Sutton , and Kit Pedler.

The metaphysical change which takes place every or so years is a horrifying experience — an experience in which he re-lives some of the most unendurable moments of his long life, including the galactic war [which was believed, at this time, to have been the cause of the Doctor and Susan's departure from their home planet]. It is as if he has had the LSD drug and instead of experiencing the kicks, he has the hell and dank horror which can be its effect.

Initially, the concept wasn't called "regeneration" at all, but rather "renewal". In fact, the term, so familiar to Doctor Who fans today, didn't appear until the Doctor's third regeneration, first seen by fans in 's Planet of the Spiders.

Since The War Games , Troughton's final story, merely had the Time Lords suggesting that they would "change [his] appearance", the only explanation of regeneration — for the show's first twelve years — was found in a cryptic exchange in part one of The Power of the Daleks :.

The phoenix rising from the flames: the first illustration ever used to explain the process that would later be called regeneration. Doctor Who Annual Although the Second Doctor's last claim of a connection between the TARDIS and regeneration has never been explored in detail, it is heavily suggested by later regeneration stories.

There, the effect used for regenerative energy was the same as the energy that emanated from and was returned to, the heart of the TARDIS. Beginning with the regeneration that resulted in the Fourth Doctor , each successive regeneration reveals a bit more about the mystery of the act. Planet of the Spiders shows viewers that one Time Lord can help another by giving the process "a little push". This act of "gifting" regenerative energy is later expanded upon in Mawdryn Undead and Let's Kill Hitler.

Both these stories take Cho Je 's "push" one step further by suggesting that regenerations can be outright gifted from one being to another. The Watcher , a mid-regeneration Doctor. TV : Logopolis. The "Cho Je push" is also tweaked a bit for the Doctor's fourth regeneration. In Logopolis the audience is introduced to a kind of "mid-regeneration Doctor", a being called " the Watcher " who exists between the Fourth and Fifth Doctors.

He then merges with the dying Fourth Doctor to start the regenerative process, and thus become the Fifth. The notion that there is an existence for the Doctor within the act of regeneration is again mooted by the audio story Winter , which takes place almost entirely in that interim between incarnations. In Winter , the Doctor again merges with the Watcher to complete the transition into his next incarnation, though on this occasion the merging takes place inside the Doctor's mind between psychic recreations of both the Doctor and the echo of his future represented by the Watcher.

The story's chief antagonist is implied to be the Doctor between his twelfth and thirteenth lives. A variation of this was seen in The Brink of Death , which depicts the Sixth Doctor in his mind at the moment of regeneration, including a brief moment where the Seventh Doctor 'speaks' to the Sixth before their voices merge as they state " It's far from being all over Another novelty of the fourth regeneration is the introduction of the idea that a regeneration can "fail", resulting in the Doctor's death.

TV : Castrovalva But if the fourth regeneration focuses on a physical crisis, the next three surely stress the mental hardships of the act. The fifth regeneration leads to a kind of mania never before experienced by the Doctor.

It even shakes loose some criminal tendencies. TV : Time and the Rani , Doctor Who This condition is particularly profound in the newly arrived Eighth Doctor , who completely forgets all of his past history for a number of hours. Additionally, complications like amnesia can be brought on by anaesthesia , which holds chemical agents that interfere with regeneration. TV : Doctor Who This regeneration also brings forth the notion that the Doctor actually dies prior to the metamorphosis of regeneration.

The idea that the Doctor dies, even if briefly, is something that the Tenth Doctor later explains to Wilfred Mott in the first part of The End of Time. The tenth regeneration, whose after-effects are documented in The Christmas Invasion , introduces the notion that the regenerative cycle lasts for fifteen hours.

Within that window, the Doctor can lose body parts and yet re-grow them as he does with a hand he loses in battle with a Sycorax. Both Invasion and the preceding mini-episode also add another wrinkle to the mythos of regeneration. They show that the Doctor needs to expel regenerative energy in the aftermath of a change — something seen again in The Eleventh Hour.

The Doctor's twelfth regeneration is shown to be tangibly explosive, something that hadn't been explored by any previous BBC Wales — or, for that matter, any — regeneration. That is, regenerative energy is depicted as being able to physically damage things. Aspects of both the ninth and tenth regenerations are invested in River Song 's second regeneration, as seen in Let's Kill Hitler. River Song practically begs to be shot by Nazi soldiers immediately after regeneration so that she can re-trigger her explosive regenerative energy and hurt them.

The Hitler regeneration also definitively proves that skin colour can change through regeneration — though this had actually been practically settled long before by the "blue option" seen in Romana 's Destiny of the Daleks regeneration. The story Twice Upon a Time featured what the Twelfth Doctor called "a state of grace", during which the regenerating Time Lord is restored to full health for a period of time, but grows steadily weaker and must decide whether or not to regenerate once it's over.

This "state of grace" allowed an explanation for the Tenth Doctor 's ability to delay regeneration to visit all of his former companions TV : The End of Time , Death of the Doctor and allowed for a story where the First Doctor and the Twelfth Doctor shared an adventure together that would help them determine whether or not they would regenerate or die.

Because of a relative lack of narrative explanation about regeneration, some writers of non-fictional or reference books about Doctor Who have tried to fill in the gap. One theory from such a source is that regeneration is caused by a "nanomolecular virus " that rebuilt the body much like the "self-replicating biogenic molecules". Each new regeneration was also radically different from the previous one, even in terms of the visual effects used to represent the moment of regeneration.

The Doctor's first regeneration. The very first regeneration was devised and executed by vision mixer Shirley Coward , who had rather unexpectedly come up with a method of achieving the effect electronically. The original plan of the production team was simply that William Hartnell would fall to the floor at the end of The Tenth Planet and pull his cape over his face. Troughton would then appear at the beginning of The Power of the Daleks , retracting the cloak.

Coward's then-innovative vision mix necessitated that Troughton be hastily contracted for The Tenth Planet , part four. The series' first regeneration sequence was then duly recorded on 8 October , with the cliffhanger resolution filmed two weeks later on 22 October. The final episode of The Tenth Planet is missing from the BBC archives, however footage of the regeneration survives through a clip that was used on Blue Peter.

As part of a missing episode, the Doctor's first regeneration has also been reconstructed four separate times:. Each subsequent regeneration was then filmed in a variety of different ways, as dictated by the director on that particular episode. Indeed, no two regenerations were particularly similar until the Russell T Davies era. With The Parting of the Ways came what is now the standard "golden glow explosion" although the colour of the explosion is fiery orange in The Parting of the Ways and is milky white in Utopia.

The subsequent Children in Need Special established that there was residual " regeneration energy " after a transformation which had to be expelled through the mouth.

Davies later gave the Restoration as a narrative explanation why the Doctor's regenerations are now golden in Doctor Who and the Time War. This visual standardisation has allowed narratives to play around with regeneration. The mere presence of "regeneration energy" can now be used to heighten dramatic tension. This visual shortcut, unavailable to production teams in the classic era, has been a particular favourite of Steven Moffat , who used the "golden glow" liberally throughout the series ; in fact, unlike in the Russell T Davies era, in which nearly every regeneration had subtle differences, every Moffat era regeneration until TV : The Time of the Doctor is nearly identical.

Several of the episodes used that VFX in a way that wordlessly suggested regeneration. The standardised visual effects style carried into Staz Johnson 's art for the comic story Doorway to Hell , which featured the Master pre- Parting of the Ways and Utopia starting to regenerate. Colourist James Offredi also coloured the glow in golden shades similar to what was shown in the Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat eras. Fans have long speculated as to whether the Doctor could change sex or skin colour as a result of a regeneration.

They've also long speculated on the number of times that a Time Lord can regenerate since both Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures have given different impressions on separate occasions. It had long been " fanon " that regeneration can cause a change of gender in Time Lords. This theory was proven correct with the regenerations of several characters in the DWU, including the Doctor , whose thirteenth incarnation was a woman.

Eldrad already displayed this change in The Hand of Fear and even stated that his species' regeneration process was the same as the one used by the Time Lords. Female versions of the Doctor previously appeared in Comic Relief story The Curse of Fatal Death and in the Doctor Who Unbound story Exile , though the latter included rules and mindsets which do not exist in the prime Doctor Who universe.

Foreman was portrayed as having changed gender as a result of regeneration, though the character is noted as having received the gift of regeneration when the process was still experimental and unstable. He thought this would "keep life interesting. In The Doctor's Wife , the Doctor mentions the Corsair , who has regenerated into both male and female incarnations.

Similarly, Harvest of Time revealed that one of the Master 's potential future incarnations was female; a female Master going by the name Missy later appeared in Deep Breath. The Night of the Doctor had the Sisterhood of Karn boast that they could control regeneration and give the Eighth Doctor the choice of "man or woman" for his next incarnation. Hell Bent showed the first on-screen male-to-female regeneration with the General 's eleventh regeneration, shortly after The Black Hole had featured the first one ever.

The General's first nine incarnations were female and she was pleased to return to a female incarnation. The Gallifrey series later depicted the first female-to-male regeneration through Trave 's regeneration in Enemy Lines.

The Twelfth Doctor's regeneration finally resulted in him becoming a woman , in 's Twice Upon a Time. In The Sarah Jane Adventures story Death of the Doctor the Eleventh Doctor noted that his racial characteristics were not limited to white; he "can be anything".

Although both actors to play K'anpo Rimpoche were Caucasian, Kevin Lindsay donned an accent and was made up to appear ethnically Tibetan. Further, the General 's eleventh regeneration was from a white man into a black woman. Russell T Davies noted how firmly the concept of limiting Time Lords to thirteen lives, introduced in The Deadly Assassin , was lodged in fans' minds. Davies attempted to deliberately subvert the limit in Death of the Doctor , though he admits that fandom may resist his attempt to alter the programme's mythos.

When they came [to America] to launch The Eleventh Hour , I went along to this screening in LA and journalists put their hands up, and one of the first questions was, "What will happen when he reaches the thirteenth regeneration?

It's really interesting, I think. That's why I'm quite serious that that thing won't stick, because the 13 is too deeply ingrained in the public consciousness. But how? How did that get there? Russell T Davies [1]. However, events depicted in Steven Moffat's The Time of the Doctor confirm the twelve-regeneration limit for Time Lords, and of the Doctor in particular, with the events of Time exploring the impact this has on the character having finally reached his limit, the Doctor facing his final death of old age until the Time Lords send him the energy for a new regeneration cycle.

Several characters express a lack of knowledge over how many regenerations the Doctor currently has including the Doctor himself, TV : Kill the Moon Rassilon who had a hand in giving him the new regeneration cycle TV : Hell Bent and the Master.

TV : The Doctor Falls Currently, a number has never been given for the number of regenerations the Doctor possesses in this second cycle. It is also unclear if the portion of regeneration energy that was stolen from the Twelfth Doctor by Davros impacted his ability to regenerate in any way. TV : The Witch's Familiar The number of possible future regenerations came into more dispute with the release of The Timeless Children , which revealed the Doctor to be of a species with seemingly unlimited regenerations.

It has not since been made clear if they retain this ability, or if they are still bound by the usual Time Lord limitations. Tardis Explore.