The Regenerations of Doctor Who: How to Kill a Television Character Without Really Killing Him

It was time for William Hartnell to leave the show Doctor Who. It was not that Hartnell wanted to leave the show, but the onset of arteriosclerosis was making it harder for him to remember his lines. The problem with Hartnell leaving Doctor Who was he played the Doctor, the title character of the show. You could not just write the Doctor out of Doctor Who. And if you brought a new actor in to take over the role then viewers would notice. The show's story editor Gerry Davis came up with a solution. Since the Doctor was an alien then why not give him the ability to make himself younger? In the story The Tenth Planet the Doctor collapses after defeating the Cybermen. While lying on the floor he changes into a younger man, played by actor Patrick Troughton. In the next episode* Troughton explained that he had been warn out by their last adventure, but instead of dying from old age he had simply renewed his body.

*While this article refers to each individual Doctor Who adventure as an episode, in fact when originally broadcast they were broken up into several half hour chapters. The BBC also edits the chapters together for syndication allowing stations to chose from either broadcast individual episodes or as one complete movie length adventure. These movie length versions are what is usually made available for the home video release, as what is usually found when downloading old Doctor Who episodes off the Internet. To cut down on the confusion I will refer to each complete adventure as an episode.

Troughton remained with the show for three years, just as long as Hartnell had, when he announced he was leaving. Once again a new actor would be needed to play the role. To explain this a episode was written where the Doctor was arrested by his own race and sentenced to exile on Earth, his appearance being changed as part of his punishment. In the episode it was suggested that they could chose exactly how he would look once his appearance changed. Troughton was replaced with actor Jon Pertwee who remained with the show for another five years before calling it quits in 1974 after a salary dispute. Once again a new actor would play the Doctor. Since the Doctor had already changed twice before the shows writers decided that he had the ability not just to renew his body but to change it. Their solution to departing actors in the lead role was that Time Lords ( the race of aliens the Doctor was part of ) had the ability to regenerate whenever they are dying. In the regeneration process their body repairs itself, but in doing so takes on not only a new form but an entirely new personality.

This was an ingenious solution. Unlike James Bond where you had to accept that Sean Connery and Roger Moore were the same character, with Doctor Who regenerating into a completely new person one could accept that he was both the same character and a different person. It also gave each actor playing the Doctor a chance to have a memorable death scene without actually killing off the character. And since the show dealt with time travel it did not mean that a past incarnation of the Doctor could not return. For the show's 10th anniversary special called The Three Doctors had all three incarnations meet and team up to save his home planet. This gimmick was repeated a decade later for The Five Doctors and again for a special called The Two Doctors. Pertwee's final episode was Planet of the Spiders where he is fatally injured when he enters a cave full of radiation. This time a fellow Timelord explains to the rest of the cast of the regeneration process while Pertwee appears to have died from radiation poisoning so they will know what is happening when he begins to change. It was also established that after a Doctor regenerates he suffers from a temporary physical and mental incapacity while he recuperates. Pertwee's first episode had him collapse and spending a day in the hospital. In Tom Baker's first full episode he passes out almost immediately and is once again brought to a hospital to recuperate. When he awakes again he is still not mentally sound and returns to the T.A.R.D.I.S. where he now has to find new clothes as he is now wearing a hospital gown. This was the beginning of a tradition where each new Doctor would try on several outfits until he found one that fit his new personality.

Tom Baker remained with the show for seven seasons before finally deciding to leave in 1981. It was around this time that Time-Life first began syndicating the show to the United States where no one realized that three prior actors had played the Doctor. Time-Life was not interested in introducing any other actors playing the Doctor. The BBC's own syndication company Lionheart Television became the first to syndicate Tom's replacement Peter Davison. Tom Baker's final episode, Logopolis, had the Doctor receiving fatal internal injuries after falling off a radio tower. Davison first episode, Castrovalva, once again showed the Doctor suffering from his regeneration. This time he asks his assistant to immediately take him to the zero room, a place in the T.A.R.D.I.S. specifically created for Time Lord's to recuperate in after regenerating. This is the first and last time the zero room is mentioned as the Doctor is forced to eject 25% of the rooms in the T.A.R.D.I.S. to keep it from being sucked into a vortex. Davison left in 1984, his last episode The Caves of Androzani where the Doctor is fatally poisoned.

The next Doctor was played by Colin Baker. Baker's version of the Doctor proved unpopular with viewers and he was the first actor to have been fired from the series. After his firing Baker was invited to return to appear in the first few minutes of the episode Time and the Rani so that they could show his Doctor being injured and a regeneration scene filmed. Baker was still upset about being fired and refused to return for the cameo, making him the first Doctor since Troughton not to film a regeneration scene for the incoming Doctor. The BBC was not very respectful about dealing with this, so instead of giving Baker's Doctor a dignified sendoff they had him bang his head on the T.A.R.D.I.S. control panel while the ship was being blasted by the Roni's ship. The Doctor was played by Sylvester McCoy who wore Baker's Doctor's costume and a wig of his hair and was filmed from the back, only being seen from the front after he hit his head. In the novelization of the episode Baker's Doctor was given an even more undignified ending, choking to death on food while exercising.

*Urban legend has it that Sylvester McCoy and Colin Baker had attended the same science fiction convention and after being approached by the promoter agreed to videotape a regeneration scene which was shown to those attending once as a surprise and never again. I can find no confirmation this has ever really happened nor has the video ever turned up on Youtube.

About the same time Sylvester McCoy became the seventh Doctor the BBC decided to syndicate the entire run of Doctor Who from the first season to the current episodes. Previously Time-Life Television had syndicated most of the Tom Baker episodes and Lionheart had syndicated the Peter Davison episodes. Since the Davison episodes were syndicated a year behind the original BBC broadcast there was some reluctance to syndicate Colin Baker due to his poor reception with British viewers. In 1987 they completely skipped the Colin Baker episodes and syndicated Sylvester McCoy's first episode as a special, this due to interest with American viewers who had read news about the upcoming regeneration in magazines like Starlog. American viewers were just getting use to the idea of there being more Doctors than Tom Baker. As the North American syndication rights to the Tom Baker episodes were still in the hands of Time-Life the BBC decided to syndicate the first three Doctors, which stations would run through just in time for Time-Life's rights to lapse allowing the BBC to syndicate the Tom Baker years, along with Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. The only problem with this plan was the missing episodes that apparently the BBC had erased from their archives. They still had a copy of the first episode but no longer had many of the other Hartnell, Troughton, or Pertwee episodes. Missing at the time was The Tenth Planet, the episode where Hartnell regenerates into Troughton.

Syndication turned out to be a success, and the BBC was making more money off of Doctor Who then ever showing episodes worldwide. But that did not stop them from cancelling the show in 1989. No series finale was written as the writers had assumed there would be a 27th season the following year. The BBC offered to bring the show back provided a production company who could provide special effects as good as on Star Trek: The Next Generation would take over the show. Seven years passed before Universal Television in the United States agreed to produce a new series based on the Fox network agreeing to air it. The producer of the new series decided he wanted it to be a continuation of the classic BBC series and not a rebooted American adaption. Paul McGann was hired as the eighth Doctor. Sylvester McCoy agreed to appear in the movie long enough to show his Doctor regenerate. In the pilot movie for the new Doctor Who series McCoy's Doctor makes the mistake of landing the T.A.R.D.I.S. In East Los Angeles where he is gunned down by gang members. But it is not the bullets that do him in but the hospital he is rushed to who do not know he is an alien and subsequently accidentally kill him during surgery. While in the morgue the old Doctor regenerates into the new one. Unfortunately Fox decided not to pick Doctor Who up as a series after the pilot movie aired, so McGann only appeared in that episode.

In the current Doctor Who series producer Russell T Davies once again decided for a continuation from the original rather than a reboot. But he decided not to bring McGann back for a regeneration scene. Instead we meet Christopher Eccleston as the new Doctor, his regeneration happening some time during the series nine year hiatus. Davies reason for this was that he did not want to confuse new viewers by regenerating the lead character after they just got to know him. After a single season Eccleston left the series and the first regeneration scene with both actors within a regular series in over 21 years was shown. Eccleston was replaced with David Tennant who stayed with the series for another four seasons where he regenerated into actor Matt Smith who will be the 11th Doctor. While officially only 11 Doctors have existed since the beginning of the series, there have been others. Peter Cushing played the Doctor in the movie's Doctor Who and the Daleks and Dalek's Invasion Earth: 2150. Both movies were remakes of Doctor Who episodes, but were both a reboot from the series where the Doctor was an Earthling. Doctor Who and the Curse of the Fatal Death was a special episode made for a charity broadcast. It was a spoof of the Doctor Who series starring Rowan Atkinson as the Doctor. Towards the end of the show the Doctor regenerates many times, as Joanna Lumley, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant and Richard E Grant. Richard E. Grant also appeared as the voice of a cartoon version of the Doctor in Scream of the Shalka and for a while was considered the 9th Doctor, that is until it was announced that the series would be coming back to television with Eccleston as the 9th Doctor. None of these Doctors were connected to the original series and therefore do not count as one of the Doctor's past lives.