Tomorrow sees the final bow of the Eleventh Doctor, as Matt
Smith regenerates into Peter Capaldi. But “The Time Of The Doctor” figures to
be more than just this incarnation’s last hurrah – like so many regeneration
stories before it, the Christmas special is a chance to define just who this particular
Doctor is, once and for all.
The fundamental appeal of a regeneration story is really a
practical one: Such stories allow the show to continue after the departure of
its star. There’s no particularly requirement for any narrative or thematic
significance beyond that, and indeed not all of Doctor Who’s regenerations have been accompanied with all that much
fanfare. As long as an old Doctor
leaves and a new Doctor arrives, the change itself doesn’t have to be the
result of anything more serious or compelling than a bump on the head – which is
precisely what happened to the poor Sixth
Doctor in the wake of Colin Baker’s firing.
But at their best, the regeneration stories offer the closing
arguments for their Doctors, revealing just what each particular incarnation
cares about most and what each is willing to die for. There’s even an
opportunity to fashion the Doctor into a kind of tragic hero, as each Doctor confronts
his fatal flaw and comes to understand why it may well be time to become
someone new.
And so, just as I used the occasion of the Tenth Doctor’s
demise to rank the
regenerations – although I’ll warn you right now that my opinions of some
of the stories have changed quite a bit since the heady, carefree days of 2010 –
the moment of the Eleventh Doctor’s farewell offers a chance to explore what
previous regeneration stories set out to accomplish, and what they reveal about
each Doctor’s era, both in-universe and behind the scenes.
https://gizmodo.com/ranking-the-regenerations-of-doctor-who-5437510
The First Doctor: “The
Tenth Planet” (1966)
“The Tenth Planet” isn’t really about saying goodbye to
William Hartnell; rather, it’s about ensuring the show’s very survival. Hartnell’s
health had deteriorated to the point that he could no longer continue in the
starring role, and so producer Innes Lloyd and script editor Gerry Davis came
up with the brilliant, frankly bonkers idea of having Hartnell turn into
Patrick Troughton. Even then, there was no guarantee that Hartnell would be
well enough to make it through his final adventure, and indeed his illness
forced him to miss the taping of the third episode at the last minute. Planning
for just such a contingency, Davis had minimized the Doctor’s role throughout
the story so that the character could be written out on short notice.
The cumulative effect is a farewell to the First Doctor in
which the First Doctor barely appears. The Doctor has only 92 lines in the whole
adventure, compared to 212 in his penultimate story, “The Smugglers.” The
Doctor effectively delegates his responsibilities to his companions, as Ben
Jackson gets to play the man of action – hardly unheard of for male companions
in the Hartnell era, admittedly – while Polly emerges as the most vocal critic
of the Cybermen and their cold, unfeeling logic. The Doctor gets in a couple
fierce rebukes of these new monsters, but he spends an awful lot of the story standing
on the sidelines.
As such, while “The Tenth Planet” is best understood for its
valiant efforts to resolve the greatest behind-the-scenes crisis in its history
(at least until the show was cancelled) while telling a very good
base-under-siege story, it’s harder to see this as a fitting capstone to the
Hartnell era. Still, given all that we’ve subsequently learned about the
Doctor, I’d actually suggest that it’s oddly appropriate for this Doctor to
simply grow old and fall ill. Unlike all his successors, this is the one Doctor
who was actually born, who naturally aged from child to old man, with an entire
life tucked in between those points that we’re unlikely ever to see. A
relatively natural death is fitting for this Doctor, and his recognition that “this
old body of mine is wearing a bit thin” plays as an acknowledgment that he hung
onto his original body a little too long. In that sense, it’s right that there’s no
longer a natural place for him in “The Tenth Planet.”
The Second Doctor: “The
War Games” (1969)
Like “The Tenth Planet,” Patrick Troughton’s final adventure
is more about setting up the show’s future than celebrating its present. By the
end of the Second Doctor’s tenure, viewer interest was flagging, and the
incoming production team decided to reduce the budget and shake up the show by
reformatting the series as an Earth-set, UNIT-centric show. “The War Games”
then must contrive a way to deposit the Doctor in that new status quo, and it
accomplishes this through the Second Doctor’s trial, exile, and de facto
execution at the hands of his own people, the Time Lords. That enforced change
in appearance only happens because Troughton had decided three seasons was
enough; if he had decided to stay on, “The War Games” would need only the quickest
of rewrites to account that hypothetical change.
Indeed, the Second Doctor’s fate is only really dealt with in the
final episode; the preceding nine entries in the story simply represent the
biggest, most epic adventure of the Second Doctor’s tenure. The gigantic scale
of the story means there’s plenty of room for Troughton to show off the various
sides of the Doctor – his compassion, his cunning, his comedy, even his
cowardice – but there’s not much sense that this story represents the end of
the line for the Doctor, at least not until the Time Lords are mentioned. When
the Doctor’s own people do enter the story, nothing is ever the same again. The
Doctor is terrified of the Time Lords’ godlike wrath, and he would rather leave
his companions Jamie and Zoe behind on an alien planet than risk putting
them in harm’s way by letting him join his last, desperate escape attempt.
Multiple times in the last episode, the Doctor attempts to escape his people’s
clutches, although the sense is that he’s more trying to keep up appearances
for his friends than anything else. He knows there’s nowhere left to run, and
so he’s finally forced to account for his actions. He does so successfully, but
only at the cost of this particular incarnation and his companions’ memories of
him.
As grim an ending as this is for the Second Doctor, it’s not
entirely inappropriate. I’m reminded of the description of the Eleventh Doctor—who
is, thanks to Matt Smith, the closest match for Troughton’s Doctor among all
his successors—in “The Day of the Doctor” as “the man who forgets.” That seems
an appropriate description for the Second Doctor as well, who spent his existence
relishing the wonders of the universe with almost childlike glee. The First
Doctor at least acknowledged that he and Susan someday hoped to return to their
home planet, but the Second Doctor was just as happy to keep on adventuring
forever. His trial at the end of “The War Games” forces him to defend his traveling
as something more than mere frivolity. The Second Doctor was always more
serious than he is given credit for, but it’s only at the very end that he is
forced to recognize that himself. Playtime is over, even if he hates to admit
it.
The Third Doctor: “Planet
of the Spiders” (1974)
This is really the first proper regeneration story — and not
just because this is the first story in which the term “regenerating” is
actually used. This is the first time in the history of Doctor Who in which its star departs with the show’s future secure.
Unlike “The Tenth Planet” and “The War Games,” “Planet of the Spiders” is Doctor Who working from a position of
strength, and so the only real goal here is to provide a fitting swansong for Third
Doctor Jon Pertwee, producer Barry Letts, script editor Terrance Dicks, and the
particular vision of the show that they forged over five seasons.
As such, this
adventure pioneers many elements that recur in subsequent regeneration stories.
The story forces the Doctor to confront his fears and admit the terrible cost
of his hubris, of his greed for knowledge. Old friends are acknowledged: Richard
Franklin returns to redeem the disgraced Mike Yates, while an unseen Jo Grant
helps set the plot in motion when she mails the Doctor the Metebelis crystal he
gave her in “The Green Death.” The nature of regeneration itself is considered,
specifically in the context of Buddhist philosophy; there’s rather obvious
significance to Cho Je’s observation in the first episode that “The old man
must die and the new man will discover to his inexpressible joy that he has
never existed.”
Admittedly, most of these elements are rather underdeveloped.
Mike Yates and the Doctor pick up where they left off, with no onscreen
discussion of the former’s treachery. In theory, the first episode most clearly
demonstrates the danger of the Doctor’s thirst for knowledge when his psychic
experiments on Professor Herbert Clegg result in the man’s death, but this
event is quickly forgotten. All the pieces are there for this to be one of the
most powerful regeneration stories. The fact that it isn’t somewhat reflects
how the priorities of television storytelling have changed between 1974 and
2013, but that isn’t the most immediate reason why this adventure doesn’t live
up to its potential.
Ultimately, “Planet of the Spiders” is more concerned with
saying goodbye to Jon Pertwee and Barry Letts than it is the Third Doctor. That’s
why Pertwee is allowed to pilot every cool vehicle in existence during the
second episode’s notoriously pointless chase sequence, and it’s why Letts – who
co-wrote, directed, and produced the story – injects so many Buddhist elements
into the plot, whether they make sense or not. As Terrance Dicks himself argues
on the story’s making-of documentary, the Doctor’s lines about his greed for
information is more an indication of Letts’ fascination with Buddhist thought
than it is a particularly well-considered critique of the Third Doctor. I’m
inclined to be a little more charitable than Dicks on that one. Because of the
humiliation of his exile, the Third Doctor always felt his innate superiority more
than most Doctors, and so many of his adventures with UNIT are driven by his (usually
justified) belief that he knows better than everyone else. His admission that
he stole the Metebelis crystal is a necessary acknowledgment that he sometimes
gets it wrong, that there are rules that even he must abide by, even if it
means facing a gigantic, super-intelligent spider in a radiation-soaked
chamber. If that doesn’t seem like an entirely
apt summation of all the Third Doctor stood for… well, at least the attempt
is there.
The Fourth Doctor: “Logopolis”
(1981)
Unlike Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker didn’t have the luxury of
leaving with his most iconic production team, whether you consider that to be
Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes or Graham Williams and some combination of
Anthony Read and Douglas Adams. New producer John Nathan-Turner and new script
editor Christopher H. Bidmead had restored much of the Fourth Doctor’s
seriousness after years of mounting silliness, and his most somber story is his
departure. “Logopolis” is most commonly noted for its funereal tone; more than
any other regeneration story, it feels like the end of an era, and Baker brings
to every scene the full weight of his seven long years in the role.
It can feel strange to see such a consistently melancholy
Fourth Doctor, and it’s a far cry from the manic clown that first appeared way
back in “Robot.” And yet, whatever else the story’s problems, it’s difficult to
imagine how else this Doctor could have met his fate. The Fourth remains the
most alien of the Doctors, and “Logopolis” succeeds most in making a Time Lord’s
regeneration feel otherworldly and unknowable. The presence of the Watcher is crucial
to this effect, and Baker ably conveys the idea that the Doctor is moving
resignedly towards his doom. For eons, the Fourth Doctor has treated the
universe as a playground, but what always made this incarnation work is that he
always knew when it was time to be serious. In the case of “Logopolis,” that
time simply occurs about three minutes into the story, as an ancient alien
quietly prepares for the end.
The Fifth Doctor: “The
Caves of Androzani” (1984)
Really, what more is there to say about “The Caves of
Androzani”? More to the point, what more is there for me to say? It’s my favorite story starring my favorite Doctor, and
I’m tempted to just leave it at that. Still, in terms of the present
discussion, “The Caves of Androzani” should be recognized for how purposefully small
its stakes are. The setting amounts to little more than a nasty little resource
war between a corrupt establishment and a wronged psychopath, and the Doctor himself
barely takes an interest in it beyond the first episode. That’s because the
Doctor and his companion Peri are dying from almost the opening scene of the
story, even if it takes them a little while to learn that fact.
Spectrox toxemia is a brutally appropriate cause of death
for the Fifth Doctor, considering he and Peri only contract the disease after
idly brushing against some raw spectrox. It’s a careless mistake, but one that
is demanded by the Fifth Doctor’s entire worldview. He is the most idealistic
of the Doctors, the one who sees the cosmos as a grand adventure best
approached with open arms and a brave heart. He assumes the spectrox is
harmless because, on some level, he needs to give everything the benefit of the doubt. The universe has failed to
live up to his high standards so, so many times – most famously, as he stood among
countless corpses at the end of “Warriors of the Deep,” he observed, “There
should have been another way.” As such, the Doctor’s ultimate rejection of the violence
around him in favor of finding the cure represents that other way, even if the
death toll in “Caves of Androzani” is just as high as that in “Warriors of the
Deep.” There’s only one innocent in the Doctor’s final adventure, and he gives
his life to save hers.
In doing so, the Doctor also earns a measure of redemption
for the death of Adric. The Fifth Doctor cannot help but be defined by the companion
that he failed to keep safe, and it’s only fitting that “Adric” would be this
incarnation’s last word. It’s been pointed out that the Doctor has likely
already begun his regeneration cycle long before he makes it back to the
TARDIS; when he cries “I’m not going to let you stop me now!” in the greatest cliffhanger in
the show’s history, he might be talking as much to himself as he is to the
man pointing a gun at him. Compared to other Doctors, the Fifth can sometimes
seem woefully naïve, even feckless in his willingness to let events unfold
around him. But when push comes to the proverbial shove, there are no lengths
he won’t go to in order to save Peri. In his final actions, the Fifth Doctor
reveals the man he always was, and he offers one last example for the rest of
the cosmos to live up to.
The Seventh Doctor: “Doctor
Who: The Movie” (1996)
Much like his predecessor, the Seventh Doctor’s regeneration
is really just a tiny part of his successor’s debut. Circumstances were more
favorable for Sylvester McCoy to return for the regeneration than they had been
for Colin Baker, which is why the Seventh Doctor gets an entry here and the
Sixth Doctor does not. Still, the Seventh Doctor’s appearance in the TV movie
constitutes little more than a glorified cameo, comprising only ten lines and a
few dozen words. It’s a nice, well-intentioned nod to the show’s past – even if
was ludicrously misguided from a storytelling perspective, as the old Doctor’s
introduction and immediate death could only serve to confuse new viewers – but it’s
a rather perfunctory farewell for the Seventh Doctor himself.
And yet, there’s a certain weird thematic logic to this
Doctor dying because he forgets to check the TARDIS scanner and wanders into
the middle of a gang war, leading to Dr. Grace Holloway’s botched exploratory
surgery. Considering all the endless schemes and manipulations that defined
this Doctor, it’s ironic that his regeneration would be the result of a tactical
blunder and human error. After eons of outwitting the cosmos, chaos finally
catches up to the Seventh Doctor. When he briefly wakes up on the operating table,
he finds himself in a situation beyond his control, one that he failed to
account for. The pointlessness of the Seventh Doctor’s death can be seen as the
point, even if the makers of the TV movie didn’t intend it that way.
All that said, if some hypothetical regeneration story had featured
the Seventh Doctor defeating some unimaginably powerful godlike being by enact
his most fiendishly complex masterplan, one that ultimately required him to
sacrifice himself… yes, I could see how that probably would have been a slightly better way for Time’s Champion to
bow out. Ah well, can’t have everything.
The Eighth Doctor: “The
Night of the Doctor” (2013)
The Eighth Doctor’s long-awaited regeneration story is
effectively “The Caves of Androzani” in miniature. Like the Fifth Doctor’s
departure story, “Night of the Doctor” shows the Doctor desperately trying to
save the life of a young woman he barely knows; hell, both stories prominently
feature the Doctor crashing a spaceship into a desert planet. The divergence is
that Peri is the Fifth Doctor’s friend and companion, whereas the gunship crew
member Cass hates the Doctor from the first moment she learns just what he is.
As bleak as “The Caves of Androzani” is, it still leaves room for the Doctor to
be the Doctor. There is still the potential for him to triumph, to emerge
victorious. The universe is a much darker place by the time of “The Night of
the Doctor,” and the Eighth Doctor cannot even sacrifice his own life to save
that of another. In terms of what the story is setting up for “The Day of the
Doctor,” the crucial moment comes when Paul McGann observes that the universe
doesn’t need a Doctor anymore. A warrior is now required.
Just before he regenerates, the Doctor acknowledges Charley,
C’rizz, Lucie, Tamsin, and Molly, the companions whose adventures were recorded
in the Big Finish audios. And without treading too far into spoiler territory, some
of the names on that list didn’t fare much better than Cass. All Doctors are
touched by tragedy and death, but the Eighth Doctor in particular lost so many
people that he cared about so deeply. If we’re allowed to acknowledge reality
here, that’s probably because the Eighth Doctor’s adventures were almost
exclusively chronicled in spinoff media, where there tends to be more latitude
to kill off companions than there is on the televised, more explicitly family-friendly
version of Doctor Who. But still, throughout
all media, the Eighth Doctor consistently defined himself in contrast to his predecessor.
After the endless stratagems of the Seventh Doctor, the Eighth explicitly tried
to embrace once again the more romantic – in multiple senses of the word – side
of this grand adventure.
His decision to become a warrior in “The Night of the Doctor”
may stand as the final rejection of this effort, but remember what the
Sisterhood of Karn tells him: By then, he has already been dead for minutes. If
that’s the case, then the last living act of the Eighth Doctor is his decision to
remain on the crashing ship, pleading with Cass to put aside her fear and her
hatred. It’s a futile gesture, perhaps, but it says everything you need to know
about this Doctor.
The War Doctor: “The
Day of the Doctor” (2013)
John Hurt’s brief tenure as the Doctor leads directly into
the events of “Rose,” thanks to Christopher Eccleston’s digitally inserted
eyes. The War Doctor’s regeneration is there to close final big gap in the Doctor’s
chronology, leaving as little question of further hidden Doctors as there can
be, given Who fans’ proclivity for
wild, unfounded speculation. It’s likely significant that he regenerates
immediately upon his departure (again, assuming no future writer crowbars in
subsequent adventures between the dematerialization and the cut to the TARDIS
interior). After all, the Eighth Doctor chose to regenerate into a warrior, and
so the War Doctor’s tenure must necessarily end upon the Time War’s conclusion.
Whether that’s down to the magic of the Karn sisterhood, the Doctor’s own buried
wish to shed his warrior persona, or just general thematic appropriateness is
something to be interpreted by the individual viewer.
But let’s not forget the War Doctor’s own comment on his imminent
regeneration, as he acknowledges that his body – which, given his youthful
appearance in “The Night of the Doctor,” has visibly aged more than any other
Doctor except the First – is wearing a bit thin. That specific callback to William
Hartnell’s line in “The Tenth Planet” is one last meta-textual reminder of the War
Doctor’s purpose in “The Day of the Doctor.” In his frequent criticisms of his
successors, he serves as a proxy for all the classic Doctors, particularly the
older, grumpier incarnations like Hartnell’s and Pertwee’s. Even though this
Doctor theoretically comes after Paul McGann (and Peter Davison, for that
matter), he’s played as an earlier Doctor, with little patience for the
affected youthfulness of his future selves. As such, it’s a nice touch that his
death so closely recalls that of the First Doctor; they’re even standing over
the TARDIS console in roughly the same position when their regenerations begin.
The Ninth Doctor: “Bad
Wolf”/”Parting of the Ways” (2005)
There’s a bunch of ways to approach the Ninth Doctor’s death,
and the meaning of his regeneration feels different in the wake of “The Day of
the Doctor.” I don’t mean that in terms of the altered history of the Time War,
at least not directly, because that might suggest this Doctor’s sacrifice – his
very existence, even – doesn’t matter so much when his most formative memory is
a lie. But I’d argue that that misses the true significance of what “The Day of
the Doctor” has to say about the Ninth Doctor, namely that the choices of that
war-scarred, traumatized incarnation helped rebuild the shattered psyche of the
Doctor, allowing those incarnations that came after him to choose a different
path. The Ninth Doctor himself chooses that better way when he refuses to
unleash the Delta wave to defeat the Daleks at the cost of every life on Earth.
He calls himself a coward, but that’s just because his
self-loathing allows the Daleks to get inside his head. It might seem that he’s
no longer capable of making the hard choices that ended the Time War, but that
assumes that the hard choice is always the most violent one. The Ninth Doctor
refuses to have any more blood on his hands, and for that he is rewarded with
the arrival of Bad Wolf Rose. I’m pretty sure all this subtext was always
there, but I’ll admit that it helped me considerably to understand just where
all this was going. The Ninth Doctor’s entire existence was really one long
regeneration, an attempt to reclaim his identity after all the terrible actions
that he was forced to commit during the Time War. The show asked viewers to
fill in rather a lot of narrative blanks to understand all that back in 2005 –
and I doubt anyone foresaw precisely how the show would ultimately fill in
those blanks – but “Parting of the Ways” is a more fitting end than I initially
gave it credit for.
Of course, the Doctor doesn’t die at the hands of the Daleks;
rather, he absorbs the power of the time vortex in a last-ditch effort to save
Rose’s life. That means he joins the Fifth Doctor (and arguably the Eighth) as
an incarnation that sacrificed his own life to save a companion. Unlike those
two previous incarnations, who died trying to save people they had only just
met (although the Fifth knew Peri rather better than the Eighth knew Cass), the
Ninth Doctor’s entire life was defined by his relationship with Rose. He needed
to meet someone like her so that he could learn how to live with joy and a
purpose once more. For a Time Lord, it’s only a tiny extra step to learn how to
die with joy and a purpose as well.
The Tenth Doctor: “The
End of Time” (2010)
I’ve warmed considerably to “The End of Time” since it first
aired in 2010. Selective memory helps here; in particular, “Part One” could be
chopped down to about ten minutes without sacrificing much of the story. But
once the not inconsiderable padding is removed, what’s left is the departure story
that offers the most explicit meditation on what regeneration means to the
incarnation about to meet his demise. His conversation with Wilf in the first episode
is a beautifully written scene, one that cuts to the heart of just why the
Tenth Doctor fears regeneration or death – assuming there’s a difference – so much.
At the time, I found his perspective rather irritatingly selfish, one that
seemed to implicitly put down the incoming Doctor before he had even arrived. My
opinion didn’t change all that much when the circumstances of his fate finally
snap into focus, and he is dearly tempted to abandon Wilf to his fate in the
radiation chamber because, as he angrily cries, “I could do so much more!”
The thing is, though, that these moments of selfishness are entirely
right for this particular Doctor. David Tennant’s incarnation is capable of a
whole lot of things, but stoic resignation isn’t really one of them, at least not
immediately. His melancholy and his impotent rage merely externalize and
clarify the same kind of internal conflict the Third Doctor was likely going
through in “Planet of the Spiders.” It’s hard to blame the Tenth Doctor for not
wanting to die, especially when, unlike so many of his predecessors, it all
happens slowly enough for him to realize exactly what he’s getting into.
Part of what makes the regeneration portion of “The End of
Time” work is that, well, it really has nothing to do with the rest of “The End
of Time.” I don’t mean to dismiss the rest of the story entirely, but the story
of the Master Race and the Time Lords’ return is Russell T. Davies at his most
absurdly, even goofily larger-than-life. The Tenth Doctor could have died
stopping the Time Lords, and that might have worked well enough, but the fact
of the matter is that the Doctor saves the universe (or at least significant
chunks of it) all the time. There’s nothing wrong with epic stakes, but they
don’t really reveal what makes the Doctor special. The Doctor is the Doctor not
because he would die to save everything; he’s the Doctor because he would
gladly die to save the life of one old man. The fact that this particular
Doctor momentarily hesitates is true to his character, but it doesn’t undermine
the beauty of that ultimate sacrifice, and all the ones that came before it — give or take the odd bump on the head.
