Arguably the biggest problem with Doctor Who in recent years is something that few have discussed: regeneration, the very concept that keeps the show alive. So how did we get to this point, and why is this such a big deal? And can regeneration be fixed again?
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When William Hartnell first stumbled out of the TARDIS in 1963, nobody could have predicted that
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this character would still be around six decades later. The secret to the Doctor's and, by extension
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the show's longevity? Well, regeneration. Originally, it was a practical solution. Unfortunately, William Hartnell had become too ill to continue, and rather than pulling the plug
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altogether, the producers invented the idea that the Doctor could, at the point of death
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change his face. Now, second Doctor Patrick Troughton's arrival was a stroke of genius
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Not only did it keep the show alive, but it gave Doctor Who something no other series had
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a built-in reason to reinvent itself whenever it needed to. But this wasn't just clever
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television trickery. Regeneration made the Doctor mythic. He was a character who could cheat death
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but only by paying the price of becoming someone new. This meant that every Doctor's tenure carried
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an extra layer of drama. No matter how many Daleks were defeated, Jammie Dodgers consumed
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or planets saved, every single Doctor was always, at some point, going to say their goodbyes and be
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gone forever. Well, unless of course your name rhymes with pennant. When John Pertwee collapsed
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onto the floor, when Tom Baker slipped from that tower, when Matt Smith sneezed a little too hard
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each of these moments felt monumental because they were final. That face, that era, that personality
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he was gone forever, replaced by something brand new yet exciting and fresh all at the same time
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Regeneration is more than just a casting trick. It's the heartbeat of Doctor Who
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the thing that allows it to go strong for a few years, then pass the torch before the flame dies
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out. Without it, the show likely would have ended in the 1960s. With it, the Doctor has become one
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of television's longest running and most beloved characters. This is the mechanism by which Doctor
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who renews not just its title character, but also the show itself
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Over time, though, regeneration started to get a bit too complicated for its own good
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In the classic series, it was kept relatively simple. The Doctor gets fatally wounded or weakened, collapses, and emerges with a shiny new face
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Sure, the special effects changed over time, and we had that weird one-off with the Watcher and his weird cotton wool face
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but when the baton was handed over, there was no grand mythology attached
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The language of regeneration was straightforward and clear. I mean, even the Master's regenerations were simple enough, if slightly difficult to plot on a timeline
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After several decades, though, the show has slowly chipped away at that simplicity
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The modern series started off strong and simple, Christopher Eccleston blazing into David Tennant
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Tennant exploding into Matt Smith, Matt Smith time-sneezing into Peter Capaldi. But regeneration quickly began to border on gimmick territory
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The War Doctor was retroactively squeezed between Paul McGann and Christopher Eccleston
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The Curator was hinted to be a far-future version of Tom Baker
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Joe Martin's Fugitive Doctor was slotted into a hidden past we never knew existed
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and still have next to no information on. And then came The Timeless Child a law bomb that revealed the Doctor wasn just a Time Lord with 13 lives but an endless well of regenerations with their memories wiped away And not only that but they were the original source of regeneration
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with their DNA having been spliced into the very first Time Lords
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Each of these twists chipped at the emotional weight of regeneration. If there are secret Doctors hiding in the gaps, if there's no limit to how many lives the Doctor can have
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If the past is constantly rewritten, then what does any of it matter
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Once, regeneration was about mortality. It was about change and loss, about accepting that loss
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and yet being hopeful of the future and moving on with your head held high
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It used to mean something, but now it just feels like it's being used as an absolute content mine
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and it's very nearly run dry. Instead of moving forward with a new Doctor
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the show looks backwards, adding caveats and contradictions. Casual viewers, who once knew the simple rule of
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Old Doctor falls over, new one gets up, are left with flowcharts forced to take to Reddit
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or other online forums to understand the show's basic progression. At this point, The Doctor's regeneration history
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looks almost as convoluted as River Song's timeline, and that is truly saying something
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The difference being, though, The Doctor is the main character in a primetime drama
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He's not a side character with a deliberately twisty backstory. Casual viewers don't want to untangle this stuff
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They just want to watch the cool science person run around and crack on with saving the universe. And now it needs an hour-long lore video to
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understand. Which, just to add, I will very happily make if anyone wants one
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If the Timeless Child rattled fans, and boy, it certainly did, then Bi-Generation jumped the shark
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In The Giggle, the Doctor's regeneration split him in two. One version continuing on
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as Shuti Gatwa, and the other still alive as David Tennant. For the first time, we had a regeneration
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without a proper goodbye. And that's not even the worst of it, because according to Russell T. Davis
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this isn't a one-off. According to him, every previous Doctor has bi-generated, meaning that
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every incarnation still exists somewhere, living out their own adventures. And this was largely
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confirmed in relation to how the past Doctors can suddenly look older in Tales of the TARDIS
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and to be fair you can see the logic. Want to bring back Tennant for another special? No problem
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Want to show Twelve hanging around with Clara? Easy. You can even explain why they've aged since
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their last appearance, as opposed to something like Time Crash which offered the painfully
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throwaway explanation of the two of us together has shorted out the time differential. But really
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nobody asked for this. Some things just don't need explaining and they certainly don't need you to
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take a hatchet to the core concept of the show. Where's the finality if every Doctor just keeps
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on living? How am I meant to shed a tear when I know they actually just walked it off? When Tennant
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said, I don't want to go, we wept because it was the end. When the longest serving Doctor of all
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time Tom Baker flashed back to his old foes, it felt monumental. But now, apparently it wasn't
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He's just living in his own little pocket universe, happily carrying on. And the less said about the
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Rani's rushed post-credits by a generation, the better. I mean, could you imagine Derek Jacoby
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regenerating into John Sims so unceremoniously It honestly baffling that the very idea that keeps Doctor Who alive has been degraded to this extent The quantity of these regenerations is also an issue
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Regeneration used to be incredibly powerful because we barely saw it. Now it happens every
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five minutes. In the last three years, we've seen four regenerations. Five, if you count Lux's
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little smack in season two. Peter Capaldi and Matt Smith had fake-out regenerations
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as did David Tennant. Regeneration energy started to be used almost for fun, healing minor injuries
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and playing pranks on companions. All of these things over the last 10-15 years have been chip
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damage that have led us to this point. And there's a bigger problem at play within all of this as
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well. Something we'll refer to as the Tenant Problem. David Tennant has now played at least
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four versions of the Doctor. First, there's the original Tenth Doctor, pre-self-regeneration
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Then came Doctor 10.5, who siphoned off excess regeneration energy into a hand and grew a half
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human clone, the Metacrisis Doctor. Essentially, Tennant again, now living out a parallel universe
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life with Rose. And now he's back as the Fourteenth Doctor, only to split into two with
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by generation, meaning that he still exists even after handing the baton to Shutigawa
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That's four Doctors, all wearing the same face, all of which supposedly are alive and kicking
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And the issue isn't tenant fatigue either. He's a truly wonderful actor, as anyone who's seen his work both in Doctor Who and away from
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Doctor Who will attest. It's just that he's become the face, quite literally, of this problem
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And the problem is casting. Once, speculation about the next Doctor was electric
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Would it be someone completely new? Someone who would redefine the role? Or a familiar face stepping into an altogether new dimension
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Now, the answer might just be, it's David Tennant again. Or, it's Billy Piper for a while. Or, it's someone else you've already seen quite enough of
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Instead of endless possibility, the future of the show risks shrinking to the same handful of familiar faces, recycled again and again
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And as a result, I'm now less excited for whoever the next announcement is
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because part of me now believes it'll be Catherine Tate, or John Simm
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or hell, even Russell T. Davis himself at this point. I don't think we've quite reached this point yet, but the show risks becoming a parody of itself
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Remember The Curse of Fatal Death from 1999? The comic relief parody, where the Doctor regenerated into Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant
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and Joanna Lumley in rapid succession, once felt like affectionate satire. But now, with by-generation, Tenet regenerating into himself
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and convoluted law dump upon convoluted law dump, Doctor Who has drifted uncomfortably close to territory that was once firmly a spoof
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Billy Piper's head being strangely CGI'd onto Shooty Gatwa's body at the end of the reality war
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almost feels more like something you'd see in a parody of Doctor Who. Not Doctor Who proper
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And then there's the problem of how these castings are revealed. Once, announcing a new Doctor was a national event
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Peter Capaldi's reveal got its own live television special. Jodie Whittaker dominated the front pages
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Matt Smith's casting was headline news. Compare that to Shuti Gatwa revealed quietly on social media with a couple of emojis and Billy Piper who appeared suddenly in an episode without so much as a press release confirming her as the Doctor What was once Doctor Who James Bond moment an event that got the entire country chattering has become less of a
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cultural milestone year on year. And that's because, as I've discussed, the concept of
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regeneration itself has been fundamentally damaged. The fortunate thing about all of this is that regeneration can easily fix these problems
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as well as causing them. Doctor Who has always been able to regenerate itself
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no matter how bad a state it gets itself into. When the show was a laughingstock in the mid-1980s
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with people karate-kicking giant lizards and battling literal candy monsters, did anyone think it could achieve the highs of the 2005 revival? When there was doubt about the
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show's popularity during the latter Capaldi years, Jodie Whittaker's debut episode came roaring back
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with some of the highest ratings Doctor Who had seen in years. Okay, yeah, that's hardly a comparable
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situation to the 1980s, but you get the point I'm trying to make here. However, the show needs to
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rediscover its central masterstroke and start treating regeneration with the gravity it requires
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And you know I'm being deadly serious right now because I didn't say mavety. No more gimmicks
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no more Doctor double dips. For at least the next few years the rules should be simple again
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No more secret Doctors, no more duplicate Time Lords splitting off and no outlandish and mythical
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quirks that only get mentioned for the first time 60 years into the show. Stop bringing people back
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as the next mainline Doctor and start looking to the future. Regeneration should be the end of one
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story and the beginning of another, not an RTD patented content moment. Doctor Who is a wonderful
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show all by itself, with just a doctor, a companion and a little blue box. So let's get back to that
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simplicity, that straightforward storytelling. Over the last few years, the show's main mission
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seems to have been to generate viral moments and get people talking on social media, much to the
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expense of regeneration. But if you simply tell compelling stories, people will do that anyway
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And equally as importantly, we need to change how casting is handled. And hopefully on screen now
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there's a card linking to our Doctor casting suggestions, so do go and give that a watch after
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this video. The Doctor is one of the BBC's greatest cultural exports in terms of television. Announcing
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a new incarnation should feel huge, a moment when the world stops to take notice. Prior announcements
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mattered. They were actual news, breaking news even. The BBC should be making each reveal a
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celebration, a reminder that the Doctor is a British icon that, on a good day, can stand with
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the likes of James Bond and Sherlock Holmes. If regeneration is going to survive as a storytelling
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device, it has to be respected. Without the weight of change, loss and renewal, the show risks
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becoming hollow and imploding under the weight of its own irrelevant and unwarranted law. What was
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once the thing that saved Doctor Who could end up being the very thing that destroys it. You could
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even say that regeneration needs to regenerate. But I won't say that because that sounds kind of
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pretentious. I've been Ellie for WhoCulture, and in the words of Riversong herself, goodbye
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sweeties


