Capaldi is the 12th Doctor, so does this mean he's the penultimate? The idea that the Doctor has 12 regenerations is first mentioned in The Deadly Assassin, a episode from the Tom Baker era.
The Master - an evil Time Lord close to his final regeneration - is said to have been offered a new cycle of lives in exchange for helping to rig the election of a new Time Lord leader. He fails, but in a later series we see him get around the regeneration problem by stealing the body of a dupe called Tremas an anagram of… well, you get the point. 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. Otherwise, the power of rejuvenation remains a miraculous and highly coveted trait. Indeed, characters such as Mawdryn David Collings and the Family of Blood have attempted replicate or steal this power, but their actions are shown to incur disastrous consequences. For Time Lords though, regeneration is filled with opportunity.
Additionally, though Time Lords can regenerate into an already aged body such as the Twelfth Doctor , there is no set lifespan for an individual life. Yet whilst regeneration might seem like the key to limitless possibilities — and seemingly, even immortality — Doctor Who has ultimately shown that is not the case.
Even if they avoided accidents and illnesses, each form would eventually wither and die from old age, as the First and War Doctors did. So, despite their huge longevity, a Time Lord would eventually reach the ultimate limit of their regenerative cycle and pass away for the last time.
However, they are still forced to either change — or else perish — at some point shortly afterward. On a similar note, the Time Lord device known as the Chameleon Arch essentially transformed a Time Lord into a human— and consequently removed both the Time Lord's consciousness and regenerative ability.
On another note, the Twelfth Doctor showcased that Time Lords can transfer their energy to restore non-Gallifreyans as well. Yet this is kind of healing is rarely done by Time Lords since it their power levels are substantially drained, resulting in an adverse effect upon their future regenerations.
Time Lords can also be definitively killed mid-way through their change when they are in a weakened state. Doctor Who largely posits that regeneration is a question of "change or die" for Time Lords, although the show has offered some degree of wriggle room for these characters. During this period of time, the Time Lord had to choose whether or not they would ultimately regenerate or else they would grow weaker as time passed by.
At this period's end, the Time Lord would either regenerate or die permanently. TV : Twice Upon a Time While a state of grace could be voluntary, some forms of death could induce a similar state unless they received aid. The First Doctor , fearing the change, held off his own regeneration for several hours. However, unlike his future incarnations, the Doctor's face did not stay the same, becoming "mixed up" while in the state of grace.
When the Doctor regenerated, he passed out as his state of grace ceased. TV : Twice Upon a Time However, his regeneration was comparatively peaceful compared to when his future selves regenerated after halting the process. TV : The Tenth Planet. The Fifth Doctor was able to hold off his regeneration from Spectrox toxaemia for several hours AUDIO : Winter while trying to retrieve the bats' milk needed for the antidote, but finally accepted the need to regenerate when he was only able to acquire enough for his companion, Peri.
TV : The Caves of Androzani. The Ninth Doctor momentarily delayed his impending regeneration to explain what was happening to Rose Tyler. After subjecting his body to a lethal amount of radiation, the Tenth Doctor delayed the regenerative process long enough to revisit each of his former companions, TV : The End of Time including those of his past selves, TV : Death of the Doctor before he finally regenerated, which severely damaged the TARDIS.
A few minutes before the regeneration began, his "state of grace" ended causing the Doctor to experience excruciating pain, resulting in him collapsing to the ground, barely possessing the strength to reach his TARDIS.
When the Eleventh Doctor was granted a new regeneration cycle on Trenzalore, he was able to use the energy from the resulting "reset" to regress his body to a younger state and hold back the regenerative process for a time.
TV : The Time of the Doctor During such, he phoned his personal future to ensure Clara Oswald stayed with his future self, TV : Deep Breath and later said goodbye to his companion before finally undergoing a full regeneration. The Twelfth Doctor regenerates; the process would soon cause the control room to explode. When severely injured by a Cyberman, the Twelfth Doctor was able to resist regeneration for several weeks despite struggling to walk. He further resisted it despite numerous Cybermen mortally wounding him, buying himself time to ignite Floor TV : The Doctor Falls He then encountered the First Doctor , who was also in a state of grace, holding back his regeneration as he feared regenerating.
Throughout this time, the Twelfth Doctor steadily grew weaker, nearly collapsing at one point while at Villengard and having to sit down for a few minutes to recover. After the adventure, both Doctors chose to regenerate. While holding his regeneration back a little longer to make an advisory speech to his future incarnation, the Twelfth Doctor continued to grow weaker and collapsed to the floor just before his regeneration occurred, though he managed to stand up once more by leaning on the TARDIS console to help him to his feet.
While most regenerations seemed to cause moments of mental instability, with temporary amnesia often noted, some offered particularly profound instances of physical peril.
Ambient complexity could also contribute to the failure of a regeneration. TV : Castrovalva The Eighth Doctor claimed that anaesthesia had "nearly destroyed the regenerative process" during his seventh regeneration as an explanation for the particularly severe amnesia he suffered afterwards. TV : Doctor Who During the Tenth Doctor 's post-regenerative state, he suffered an arrest in one of his hearts and began to exhale regenerative energy when Rose Tyler revived him too early.
After this, he said that he was having a neural implosion , and slipped into a coma-like state for most of the day. TV : The Christmas Invasion Upon hearing of this, the Third Doctor suggested that his future self was suffering from a regeneration crisis. The Master regenerates. TV : Utopia. Regeneration, especially later ones, could be painful.
After trying to deflect the question, he quickly said, "It always hurts," before, in the same breath, continuing with the task at hand. TV : The Night of the Doctor After being asked if regeneration was painful when she described the process, the Thirteenth Doctor replied that "you have no idea.
In some cases, it was possible for the regenerative process to be restarted by another Time Lord if it failed, such as when K'anpo Rimpoche gave the Third Doctor's body "a little push" to initiate the regeneration process after he was exposed to the radiation of the Metebelis crystals , although he warned that the new Doctor would be somewhat shaken up as a result of this method.
There were many ways to reverse a regeneration. One way involved the sacrifice of another, causing the regeneration to reverse. One example of this was when the Third Doctor had an encounter with the Nurazh. As the Doctor battled the Nurazh's main host, the two fell off a building, killing the Doctor. As the Third Doctor nearly regenerated into the Fourth , the Nurazh possessed the Time Lord's body; however, it found itself unable to cope with the two Time Lord minds within the body and it soon perished, restoring the Doctor to his previous incarnation in the process.
When trapped in a dimensionally-unstable pocket universe created and controlled by Iam and the First Rani , the Sixth Doctor's morphic print was destabilised, causing him to unwillingly and painfully regress back through his previous selves as his body sought a stable morphic print.
He was forced to rely on the stabilising atmosphere of the TARDIS and a personal morphic stabiliser he designed to operate in this realm until it was returned to the real universe. Some Time Lords of the first rank attempted retro-regeneration, reverting from their current incarnation back into a prior body, but this procedure was relatively rare, to the extent that the Sixth Doctor was unable to recall any examples of it.
Moments later, he changed back, but wondered if he got back the regeneration he wasted. On rare occasions, it was possible for Time Lords to deliberately allow themselves to mentally regress back to the personas of previous selves while remaining the same incarnation physically.
When he was trapped in Iam's unstable realm, the Sixth Doctor was able to use his current morphic instability to allow the Third Doctor 's persona to take control, allowing him to draw on his past self's skill for hand-to-hand combat.
PROSE : State of Change On another occasion, the Seventh Doctor used the TARDIS telepathic circuits to bring the Third Doctor to the fore so that he could use his past self's skill with technology to disarm a dangerous bomb, although his control sometimes slipped as his current self tried to assert itself, resulting in the Third Doctor referring to his current associates by the names of his own companions. Considered as a rare mental illness, Time Lords might not lose their past personas when they regenerate.
As a result, these Time Lords acquired new physical bodies, but the past personas remained conscious and active in their minds, rather than simply retreating into the Time Lord's subconscious. These past incarnations thrived and accumulated inside the current incarnation's head, fighting over control of the physical body.
One known Time Lord who had this illness was the Eleven. AUDIO : The Eleven Immediately after regeneration, the previous incarnations would be mentally weaker and more disorientated, but they would eventually assert themselves and resume the Eleven's warped sense of mental balance.
The Time Lord who lasted the longest with this condition other than the Eleven died after shooting out both his hearts with a staser in his eighth body. AUDIO : World of Damnation The very nature of this illness also had an unusual side-effect of somehow affecting the regeneration energy produced by the Eleven, with the result that he was the only known Time Lord the Ravenous could not feed off.
The Doctor begins a regeneration without changing his appearance. TV : The Stolen Earth. A Time Lord could avoid the change of appearance and personality caused by regeneration by focusing the regenerative energies into a "bio-matching receptacle", as the Tenth Doctor did with his own severed hand. The hand siphoned off the excess energy that would have changed his appearance while the Doctor used just enough to heal himself TV : Journey's End from the injury sustained from a Dalek gunstick.
TV : Journey's End As a result, the Doctor used up a full regeneration his eleventh of twelve overall , TV : The Time of the Doctor but kept his appearance, allowing him to avoid the usual post-regenerative confusion and disorientation experienced in the past. During the time when he controlled the Source of Traken , TV : The Keeper of Traken the Master was able to use the Source to heal his injuries in place of regenerating, noting that this process was far smoother than regeneration as it avoided sacrificing the healthy tissue in the process, although this method eventually proved short-term when he expended the last of the Source.
The regeneration process could also be delayed to allow healing. The Second Doctor was shot in the head when confronted by guards on Skybase , causing damage to his skull and frontal lobe; and the subsequent fall broke his nose, jaw, right femur, and collarbone, along with causing some spine damage.
He began to regenerate, but an injection of Shiner DNA delayed the regeneration and kept him alive long enough for his body to go into a six-month healing coma to recover on its own, although he was briefly certain that he had regenerated when he woke up.
PROSE : The Indestructible Man When the Seventh Doctor deliberately affected himself with light wave sickness to save the Spiridons from the Daleks, he briefly believed that he was going to regenerate until he retreated to the TARDIS, his body spending some time fighting between its cellular paralysis and natural desire to regenerate until it stabilised in his current self.
When his second heart was extracted by Sabbath and placed in Sabbath himself, the stolen heart created a link between the Eighth Doctor and Sabbath that rendered the Doctor essentially immortal; as his second heart was still beating in Sabbath's chest, the Doctor could survive normally fatal injuries, such as having his chest crushed by sandbags or being stabbed in his remaining heart, without changing, although he would go into a near-death state until his body could heal.
However, it was unspecified if there were any limits to this connection - the Doctor only needed to use it when he and Sabbath were on the same planet at the same time in the same city - and the connection was lost when Sabbath tore the Doctor's heart out of himself.
The ancient Gallifreyan scientist Artron was able to devise a system of perpetual regeneration where the subject would not need to change their appearance during the process, but even after this knowledge was regained during the Time War with the recovery of Artron's Matrix print, the Time Lords were never shown putting it into full practise, save for granting the Master a new set of regenerations in return for his assistance while insisting that he limit himself to the standard thirteen lives under the usual rules.
One of Romana's intermediate forms during her first regeneration. TV : Destiny of the Daleks. Foreman , an early Gallifreyan but not a Time Lord , absorbed the DNA around him and underwent indescribable changes as a result of mutations, transcending sex, species and even physical existence itself.
AUDIO : Spring Although the Doctor 's actual tenth self was, like the Time Lord's previous and later bodies, indistinguishable from a human , the previous incarnation of the Doctor had mused that his next body "might have two heads… or no head" before regenerating. Occasionally, a regeneration would fail and the process would abort. Though the Time Lord would have regenerated, they would be severely deformed. Though Time Lord technology could treat this, on some occasions the damage would be too severe to fix.
Regenerative collapse was a potentially fatal complication of regeneration. Mortally wounded by Zor , the Sixth Doctor 's body attempted to regenerate when he found himself on the brink of a regenerative collapse. Fortunately, he was found and healed by Captain Jack Harkness , saving his life as well as stopping him from regenerating. After being shot by the War Lords , the War Chief was barely able to survive.
While being returned to the War Lords' planet , his body attempted to regenerate. Due to the massive injuries and the lack of medical care, this regeneration aborted. This resulted in two conjoined individual bodies, poorly fused together, and also apparently compromised his ability to regenerate ever again, preventing him from simply regenerating once more to solve the problem. During the Last Great Time War , Rassilon experimented on other Time Lords, retro-evolving their timelines and connecting them to the time vortex, in order to build a possibility engine - a machine to question about decisions to make during the conflict.
A side effect of the process on the so-called Interstitials was the trapping in a loop of an iterative regenerative cycle, which caused their appearance to enter a state of constant flux among their different incarnations.
Even if a Time Lord's body was damaged to the point that regeneration became impossible, their cells would continue attempting to do so, making the actual process of death very slow; it took each copy of the Twelfth Doctor imprisoned in his Confession Dial "about a day and a half" to die after being attacked by the Veil.
TV : Heaven Sent There were, however, ways to circumvent this. A "full blast" of the Master 's laser screwdriver killed Missy within a minute, with no visible wound and not even the beginnings of a regeneration.
More simply, dealing a second killing blow to a Time Lord while they were already regenerating could prove fatal, as after beginning to regenerate from a first shot the Teselecta duplicate of the Eleventh Doctor at Lake Silencio appeared to die instantly when shot mid-regeneration.
As noted above, regeneration was not guaranteed. The Doctor on numerous occasions believed they were at risk of actually dying. Even with regeneration a possibility, the Doctor came to feel such a change as being a "death".
In recollecting the events surrounding the Master 's attempt to steal the Eye of Harmony , the Eighth Doctor referred to his incarnations as "lives". The Twelfth Doctor also referred to regeneration though not his own as the same as death, but also stated that to Time Lords, death was simply "man flu".
TV : Hell Bent When faced with regeneration himself, however, this Doctor truly valued his life, resisting the process as he didn't want to change.
After seeing what his future would bring though, he felt more comfortable, embracing the change as he lost consciousness. In fact, the Doctor sometimes seemed to regard their previous incarnations as different individuals, capable of interacting and working with each other. TV : The Three Doctors , The Five Doctors , The Two Doctors , Time Crash , The Day of the Doctor , Twice Upon a Time However, they still regarded their other selves as them, to the extent that their seventh incarnation became ashamed of the actions of his sixth self , going through a period of keeping his memory of his previous self locked up in his mind PROSE : Head Games until he accepted that he was the Doctor in all of his incarnations, and forgave his past self's sins after he nearly died after being shot by an arrow.
TV : Hell Bent The Missy and Harold Saxon incarnations of the Master grew to outright despise each other, despite having grown attracted to each other when working together, due to their juxtaposed view of the Doctor, to the point that they actually killed each other.
At the same time, meeting other Doctors could allow other incarnations the chance to re-evaluate their opinion of themselves, such as the Eighth Doctor coming to admire the Sixth Doctor where his seventh had feared his potential, PROSE : The Eight Doctors and the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors recognising that the War Doctor was a true Doctor despite denying him for years. TV : The Day of the Doctor. The Twelfth Doctor was also rather fond of the First Doctor, in a way very much tied to their shared identity; presented with this embodiment of his younger days, the Twelfth Doctor was amused at the First's old ways such as how he still called the TARDIS "the Ship" , and how he looked wearing the sonic sunglasses.
He was, nonetheless, incredibly embarrassed by his original incarnation's occasional sexist remarks. The First Doctor's reaction to his future was much less warm; he was dismayed at learning the Twelfth Doctor played the electric guitar , and disappointed in the Twelfth Doctor's lacklustre treatment of their TARDIS deeming the new decoration "hideous" and expressing dismay at the dirtiness of the console room, which he attributed to the absence of Polly Wright , who, in his days, cleaned the TARDIS for him.
He also criticised the Twelfth Doctor's over-reliance on technology over his own intellect, and his need to always boast about his plans. As a whole, the First Doctor was, at first, horrified to learn he would eventually become a "Doctor of War". However, he grew to admire his future self, believing their actions were for the greater good rather than malicious purposes as he initially believed. Most other Time Lords never expressed any strong opinions about their other incarnations as they had never met their other selves.
However the General 's twelfth incarnation noted an immediate dissatisfaction with her predecessor shortly after her regeneration. TV : Hell Bent More notably, when the Time Lord Straxus learned that he would become the insane Kotris in his next incarnation, he was horrified at his next self, proclaiming that Kotris was a psychopath, although Kotris claimed that his insanity was the result of Straxus' insanity and self-loathing.
However, despite his disgust at Kotris's actions, Straxus only made a few half-hearted efforts to kill himself to avoid becoming Kotris which were prevented by a drone Kotris had sent, until the final confrontation between the two incarnations culminated in Straxus being exterminated as even the Daleks were disgusted with his selfishness.
AUDIO : X and the Daleks When the Master made contact with the Cult of the Heretic and was offered an alliance with them if he killed one of his past selves - with the promise that the Cult would use the Anomaly Cage to prevent him being wiped out by the paradox - the Master laughed as he dismissed his past incarnations as foolish. Although he later claimed that he had targeted his past self at a point when he knew that the younger Master would survive, the two Masters found it difficult to cooperate, as the younger Master was more serious and dedicated to ensuring victory where the future Master's new lease on life had left him more inclined to make various bad jokes as he taunted his enemies.
The older Master noted that the Cult's plans to remake the universe had been inspired by the beliefs of the renegade Time Lord known as the Heretic, whose belief that the universe was sick, led him to perceive regeneration as the only cure for this 'illness'.
In general, the Doctor avoided discussing regeneration with their companions unless someone else brought it up first, TV : Planet of the Spiders but explained the process in the aftermath. They were particularly open about the process in their eighth incarnation , telling companion Charley Pollard about regeneration and their past faces, noting at one point that he considered regeneration superior to the straightforward immortality of the ruthless Sebastian Grayle , as regeneration allowed him to change and develop as time went on where Grayle was stuck with one point of view and no real way to change.
AUDIO : Seasons of Fear Despite this, the Doctor's attitude towards regeneration seemed to change during their later incarnations, considering it more like true death. In their ninth incarnation , the Doctor bade farewell to his companion even though he was not actually dying.
TV : The Parting of the Ways The Doctor's tenth incarnation was concerned about a prediction made regarding his own impending regeneration, saying, "Even if I change, it feels like dying. Everything I am dies. Some new man goes sauntering away TV : The Day of the Doctor Following his regeneration into his seventh incarnation , the Doctor's memories of his sixth self's persona came to resent the current Doctor, accusing the current Doctor of "murdering" him PROSE : Head Games before the Doctor came to accept that he was the Doctor in all his lives and forgive the sins of his previous self.
TV : The Day of the Doctor After receiving his new regeneration cycle, the Eleventh Doctor appeared relatively comfortable about his imminent regeneration, reflecting that everyone changed throughout their lives and the important thing was to remember who you had been, TV : The Time of the Doctor although his fear about the scale of the change he was about to experience prompted him to call his current companion in their personal future to ask her to stay with his next incarnation and help him through the transition to his new body.
TV : Deep Breath The Twelfth Doctor later recalled that the end of the First Doctor 's life at Snowcap was "the place where [he] died", comparing it to Clara Oswald 's limited memories of her 'splinters' by describing it as something so huge and terrible that the mind had to block it out in the aftermath. Harriet called the Tenth Doctor "absolutely the same man ", still believing in this despite the Doctor threatening to destroy her government after she ordered Torchwood to blow up the Sycorax spaceship.
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. Info from television stories can't be added here until after the top or bottom of the hour , British time , closest to the end credits roll on BBC One. Therefore, fans in the Americas who are sensitive to spoilers should avoid Tardis on Sundays until they've seen the episode.
A regeneration cycle or life cycle referred to the number of regenerations a Time Lord normally possessed. Time Lords normally had twelve regenerations, which resulted in thirteen incarnations before permanent death. It was believed that a Time Lord could only regenerate twelve times because their symbiotic nuclei could only divide so much. The Valeyard , however, claimed this was imposed by Rassilon to prevent a thirteenth regeneration and keep Time Lords from immortality.
As noted by the Tenth Doctor , a Time Lord could die prematurely should they be killed before regeneration could occur.
TV : The End of Time As well as that, weaponised inhibitors were developed with the purpose of preventing regeneration. Curiously, the Eleventh Doctor , who had already expended all twelve of his regenerations, TV : The Time of the Doctor once claimed to Clyde Langer that he could regenerate times. TV : The Time of the Doctor.
During the Last Great Time War , the Time Lords acquired the Matrix print of Artron, a Gallifreyan scientist from Rassilon's era who had been experimenting on means of extending the natural ability to regenerate. Thanks to his research, Artron was able to devise a means of not only granting TIme Lords new regenerations, but even grant non-Time Lords potentially unlimited regenerations without actually changing in appearance or personality.
When this print was acquired by the War Master, he returned it to the other Time Lords after working with a past and future version of himself to restore another past Master to life as part of his deal with the Celestial Intervention Agency , as they thought he would make a perfect warrior. This restoration granted the younger Master a complete new regeneration cycle, although the Master was explicitly forbidden to give himself anything more than a standard set of regenerations AUDIO : Day of the Master.
Without access to additional regeneration energy , a Time Lord would ultimately perish at the end of their thirteenth incarnation. In his thirteenth and final body, Azmael deliberately regenerated past his limit, killing him and Mestor , who had been attempting to possess Azmael's body after his own was destroyed.
TV : The Twin Dilemma. As witnessed by the Sixth Doctor and Peri Brown , an elderly Time Lord at the end of his final life disintegrated as he "degenerated" into molecules. Despite the limit of thirteen lives, the High Council of Gallifrey possessed the ability to bestow additional regenerations upon individual Time Lords. While the Master was offered a complete life cycle by Borusa , TV : The Five Doctors the Eleventh Doctor was granted an indeterminate amount of additional regenerations through regeneration energy provided from Gallifrey.
0コメント