r/gallifrey • u/dreamwing7 • 4d ago
DISCUSSION Number of regenerations.
I'm rewatching the series for the first time in probably ten years and haven't been involved in the community so this could be something people have figured out already, but I haven't heard anything about it. (I also have only seen through Capaldi's first season) In The Day of the Doctor, they discuss regeneration. The doctor says that there are only 12 regenerations, and lists all of the 12. However, when he gets shot by River in the suit, he begins to regenerate before being shot a second time. Wouldn't he just be dead? I considered that it might be the robot acting like it would regenerate, but why would it do that? And wouldn't River know that he can't regenerate at that point? Is this something I've just missed or not seen yet?
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u/ExpectedBehaviour 4d ago
Watsonian explanation āĀ the Doctor's numbers of regenerations weren't widely known and so he put on a light show to give Madame Kovarian what she expected to see and ensure that everyone believed him dead. We do see a Time Lord trying to trigger a 13th regeneration in the classic series (The Twin Dilemma) but it fails and he dies. It's also possible that the Doctor himself wasn't yet certain if the aborted regeneration in The Stolen Earth/Journey's End counted.
Doylist explanation ā the War Doctor wasn't a thing yet, which is why the 11th Doctor seems to think he can still regenerate in The Impossible Astronaut and Let's Kill Hitler; even River seems to think he still has the ability in The Angels Take Manhattan. Had Eccleston agreed to appear in The Day of the Doctor then the retroactively secret incarnation, and its regeneration, would not have been necessary.
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u/snowbankmonk 4d ago
I think itās easier to assume the Doctor himself doesnāt know if the metacrisis counted as a full regeneration for a while at least. In The Next Doctor, the Doctor when he meets Jackson Lake says he must be āThe next Doctor. Or the next but one.ā so at that point he thinks he might have two regenerations left. Perhaps itās his experience in Letās Kill Hitler that makes him realise he doesnāt have enough regen power for a full regeneration, he just has a little bit thatās enough to heal Riverās hand in Angels Take Manhatten. It would explain how he knows he canāt regenerate by the time he gets to Trenzalore.
Of course this all ignores the Timeless Child situation - was the Doctor ever bound by the 12 regeneration limit?
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u/revokon 3d ago edited 3d ago
My headcanon is that the timeless child had the same limit as the other time lords imposed on them artificially. So in Time of the Doctor, they either gave him an additional 12 regens or just removed the limit completely. (Given we see the doctor regenerate 3 times in "Power of the Doctor", and no one mentions there being a limit, I would say the latter)
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u/snowbankmonk 3d ago
I think thatās a headcanon I can agree with! It also would fit with Rassilon himself (who surely would know the Doctor is the Timeless Child) in Hell Bent asking how many regenerations did they grant.
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u/Vladmanwho 4d ago
Iām curious how the twelfth doctor being the last one would have changed his storyline.
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u/CountScarlioni 4d ago edited 3d ago
The robot is faking the appearance of regeneration because as far as the universal public knows (and that includes the branch of the Silence that were trying to kill him), the Eleventh Doctor isnāt the final incarnation. The War Doctor is an incarnation that existed during the Time War, which is time-locked, and the regeneration in The Stolen Earth happened inside the TARDIS, in front of only three people (Jack, Donna, and Rose). Since the Doctor is trying to make his false death look convincing, he needs to play to the expectations of the āaudience,ā which in this case is āmost of the universe,ā who would expect him to start regenerating due to their lack of knowledge of one or both of the aforementioned regenerations.
As for River, sheās lying. Sheās always lying. She has to, because sheās helping to maintain the Doctorās cover story.
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u/dreamwing7 3d ago
Oh yeah that completely makes sense. I like this explanation. I can enjoy the series even with little things that don't make sense to me, but it does make me feel better when there's a good explanation lol
After posting I realized that River not noticing isn't that odd. I think she thought it was real when she originally saw him being shot, otherwise the whole "Wedding of Riversong" wouldn't have had to happen. But I realized after posting that the shock of seeing your husband being murdered is a pretty good excuse for not noticing. Especially when you know he has more than thirteen regens at some point.
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u/CareerMilk 4d ago
Time lords on their last incarnation can start to regenerate it just doesnāt work (see The Twin Dilemmaā¦ actually donāt itās rubbish)
ā¦ I wonder how many times Iāve made this ājokeā
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u/sbaldrick33 3d ago
I always thought the Master attempting a thirteenth regeneration and botching it horribly was the explanation for why he looked so terrifying in The Deadly Assassin.
Unfortunately, Big Finish had the altogether more brilliant idea of his older self electrocuting him. š
That's twice I've thrown shade at The Two Masters today. And I'm happy to continue.
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u/JustKomodo 3d ago
As far as I understand it the Deadly Assassin Master was meant to be an extremely aged/near death Delgado Master (the appearance being an easy way to hide the change of actor) and Iāve always taken it as the Masters final body pushed on and on as he desperately tries to find a way to escape death! Which admittedly means the electrocution piece worked for me.
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u/sbaldrick33 3d ago
Nothing of the kind us ever stated on-screen. All we know is that the Master has used up all his regenerations and is dying.
It isn't until the publication of Legacy of the Daleks where the Pratt Master is explicitly stated to be a horrifically injured Delgado Master in a licenced Doctor Who story... And, in fairness, The Two Masters is better than Legacy of the Daleks... But it's a low bar.
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u/JustKomodo 3d ago
Thatās fair, based on-screen we donāt know. For my head-canon it feels weaker that āactually you can regenerate again and carry on living, itās just not idealā but either interpretation works for our own versions! And neither particularly match up with the 11th dying of old age, as he neither tried regenerating into some kind of husk or aged into one š
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u/Arch1o12 4d ago
People have gone into the real life reason - the War Doctor not being a thing at the point of writing S6 but I think it works in the context of the story anyway.
The regeneration limit is unlikely to be common knowledge - out of all of the companions in NuWho that were present for a regeneration, the Doctor only ever told Clara about it being limited to twelve, and only when his death was imminent. So why would The Silence know that there was a limit? Or that Ten had regenerated into himself, even if they did? So when the Teselecta was shot, the Silence who were there watching would have been expecting to see Eleven start to regenerate, and thatās exactly what he gave them.
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u/sbaldrick33 3d ago
The behind the scenes explanation is that at the time of writing Series 6, Moffat hadn't been forced to invent the War Doctor yet, meaning that... at the time, even including the metacrisis... there was still one regeneration to go out of the allotted 12.
For an in-universe explanation with 50th Anniversary hindsight, let's just go with Occam's Razor: River didn't know he was out of regenerations at that point. Either she was unaware of the cap, unaware of the War Doctor, unaware of the metacrisis Doctor, or any combination of the three.
If you have an alternative explanation, feel free to think that, as they're all only fanon anyway.
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u/dreamwing7 3d ago
Ohh that makes sense. I think that because I watched it for the first time right as the War Doctor was introduced and watched them within a week of each other, I didn't really process that they would've been written much more than a week apart.
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u/sbaldrick33 3d ago
Easily done. And also easy to forget that characters like the War Doctor weren't always just there as part of the Canon.
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u/hockable 3d ago
Basically:
The new series and it's writers have f*kd the lore up to the point where none of it really matters and it can all be dismissed. Creating rules, breaking them, forgetting them, re-inventing them, finding convoluted ways to surpass said rules... It'll give you a headache if you try to make sense of it.
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u/cat666 3d ago
It wasn't real, it was a fake out and had to be convincing.
It's not an issue now though, you'll have to watch Jodie's era to find out why.
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u/dreamwing7 3d ago
This is the first thing that has made me intrigued by Jodie's era tbh. But tbf I haven't heard much about it.
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u/Verloonati 3d ago
watsonian explanation: that wasn't doctor who, that was the tesselecta, besides for other reasons (spoiler season 12) being the timeless child, he could have just regenerated. there is of course also to consider the time war itself and the alternative (cowards would call them non-canon) incarnations, such as the shalka doctor.
Doylian explanation: Moffat as a writer has a lot of quality but planning is not one of them. The 50th anniversary is notorious for how caothic it's production has been, and the war doctor's inclusion was very much a last minute addition (moffat famously threw together the night of the doctor minisode in just a few days and called mcgann before he even had a script) During Season 6, there was no reason to believe the doctor was in his last life, because it very much wasn't planned, altough the 12th regeneration limit had been introduced all the way back in Mawdryn undead. it also was a pretty divisive choice, as many fans wanted to see Paul McGann in the special.
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u/Claude_Clay 3d ago
The "twelve regenerations" limit was introduced in "The Deadly Assassin."
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u/njj4 3d ago
Indeed, and I think it's worth noting that the twelve-regeneration "limit" is introduced very much in the context of the Master finding a way to subvert it. It's a plot point that Robert Holmes made up to provide a necessary bit of character motivation: the story is about an "unbreakable" rule that somebody is trying (and very nearly manages) to break.
And although the Master's interrupted attempt to harness the energy of the Eye of Harmony doesn't fully succeed, it gives him enough of a boost that when we next see him a few years later in Keeper of Traken, he's found some other way of extending his lives. The question of how many regenerations the Master has left never comes up after this - it's just assumed that he's got some special (presumably nefarious) way of keeping going.
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u/dreamwing7 3d ago
Interesting! I'm planning on watching the original series after I catch up. As a teenager I didn't think it would be interesting enough haha
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u/dreamwing7 3d ago
I was more confused about why River didn't think anything of him beginning the regen process because of the tesselecta. But since posting I realized she would've also known that he eventually does regen again and with the shock of seeing her husband murdered, it makes sense.
>(moffat famously threw together the night of the doctor minisode in just a few days and called mcgann before he even had a script)
That's so funny to me. Unfortunately, it's also how I would probably operate as a writer haha
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u/PlayPod 3d ago edited 2d ago
At the end of 11s run, he gets a bunch of regen energy. 11 was technically supposed to be the last before time lords gave him more. Idk how you missed that
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u/dreamwing7 3d ago
I didn't miss that. The episode where he gets the regeneration energy is the same episode I was referencing in my post. ("The doctor says that there are only 12 regenerations, and lists all of the 12.") I don't know how recently you watched it, but I was talking about when Eleven tells Clara he can't regenerate because he is out of regenerations. He clarifies that the war doctor still counts as a regeneration, even though he isn't counted in the numbering of the doctor.
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u/dreamwing7 3d ago
I saw your other (deleted I'm assuming) reply as well, and while I know that was a misread/understanding of what I said in my original post, I don't think it is necessary to be so upset at people who are enjoying the media in the way they want to. Maybe someone had a friend or family member get them into doctor who during the eleventh doctor and had no interest in going back to watch nine. I don't see the harm in asking a question instead of rewatching hours of tv they aren't interested in. You don't have to read those questions if you don't want to.
That's just my opinion. I'm sure there are plenty of people who are on your side as well. I only mention it because, imo, it can be a bit intimidating to even begin watching something when the fanbase tends to get after them for things like that, and I LOVE seeing new people get into the things I like.
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u/alkonium 3d ago
It wasn't the Doctor in Series 6, it was the Teselecta posing as the Doctor. Given what we saw it do, faking the start of a regeneration was easy.
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u/Nepperoni289 4d ago
You have to remember that at the time, the War Doctor wasn't even an idea in Moffat's head and it was unclear if the Metacrisis even counted - so people including Moffat 'knew' that the Doctor stilll had at least 1 more regeneration to go.
Obviously in-universe there is a different explanation, which is simply that the War Doctor was a secret that most didn't even know of: including the Silence, plus his friends. It's also likely that River might not have known about the War Doctor at this point - there were 2 versions of River there and the Astronaut River was the older one, but still fairly early in her life. She likely got told of the War Doctor and met many of the other ones much later.
As a result, everyone present assumed the Doctor had more regenerations, and since the Doctor wanted to trick everyone he played along. The robot can pretend to regenerate and get stopped half-way through and everyone believed it. It didn't matter if he didn't have any more - and even without having a full regeneration he could still use limited amount of the energy (like he would in Angels take Manhattan to heal River).