Doctor Who Is DESTROYING Regeneration - And It Could Spell Catastrophe For The Show
It’s time to talk about the real reason Doctor Who is losing its mojo…
When William Hartnell first stumbled out of the TARDIS in 1963, nobody could have predicted that his character would still be around six decades later. The secret to the Doctor's, and by extension, the show's longevity is regeneration. Originally it was a practical solution - unfortunately, Mr Hartnell was becoming too ill to continue, and rather than cancel the show, the producers invented the idea that the Doctor could, at the point of death, change his face (side note: if you haven’t already watched it, An Adventure in Space and Time tells the real life story behind this, and it’s wonderful).
Patrick Troughton’s arrival was a stroke of genius. Not only did it keep the show alive, but it gave Doctor Who something no other series had - a built-in reason to reinvent itself whenever it needed to.
This wasn’t just clever television trickery. Regeneration made the Doctor mythic. Here was a character who could cheat death, but only by paying the price of becoming someone new. That meant every Doctor’s tenure carried an extra layer of drama. No matter how many Daleks were defeated or how many planets saved, every Doctor was always at some point going to say their goodbyes (unless your name rhymes with pennant).
When Jon Pertwee collapsed on the floor of UNIT HQ, when Tom Baker slipped from the radio tower, when Matt Smith sneezed a little too hard - each moment felt monumental because it was final. That face, that era, that personality was gone forever, replaced by something brand new.
Regeneration is more than a casting trick. It’s the heartbeat of Doctor Who, the thing that allows it to go strong for a few years, then pass the torch before the flame dies out. Without it, the show would likely have ended in the 1960s. With it, the Doctor has become one of television’s longest running and most beloved characters.
Wibbly Wobbly: The Decline of Simplicity
Over time, though, regeneration started to get complicated. In the classic series, it was kept relatively simple - the Doctor gets fatally wounded or weakened, collapses, and emerges renewed. Sure, the effects changed over time (and we had that weird one-off with the watcher and his weird cotton wool face) but when the baton was handed over, there was no grand mythology attached. Even the Master’s regenerations were straightforward enough, if slightly difficult to plot on a timeline.
The modern series has slowly chipped away at that simplicity. They started off strong and simple - Christopher Eccleston blazing into David Tennant, Tennant exploding into Matt Smith, the aforementioned time sneeze...
But as the years passed, regeneration became a gimmick. The War Doctor was retroactively squeezed between Paul McGann and Christopher Eccleston. The Curator was hinted to be a far-future version of Tom Baker. Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor was slotted into a hidden past we never knew existed and still have next to no information on. And then came the Timeless Child - a lore bomb that revealed the Doctor wasn’t just a Time Lord with thirteen lives, but an endless well of regenerations, with their memory wiped away. Not only that, they were the original source of regeneration, with their DNA having been spliced into the Gallifreyans.
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, if the past is constantly rewritten - then what does any of it matter? Once, regeneration was about mortality. It was about change and loss. Now it feels like it’s being used as a content mine, and it’s very nearly run dry.
Instead of moving forward with a new Doctor, the show looks backwards, adding caveats and contradictions. Casual viewers, who once knew the simple rule of “old Doctor falls over, new one gets up’ are left with flow charts. At this point, the Doctor’s regeneration timeline looks almost as convoluted as River Song’s timeline. The difference being, the Doctor is the main character in a primetime drama, not a side character with a deliberately twisty backstory. Casual viewers don’t want to untangle this stuff, they just want to watch the geeky science person run around and crack on with saving the universe.
It used to be simple - die, glow, new face. Now it needs an hour long lore video to understand.
Bigeneration - The Final Straw
If the Timeless Child rattled fans (and boy, it did), then bi-generation jumped the shark. In The Giggle, the Doctor’s regeneration split him into two - one version continuing on as Ncuti, the other still alive as Tennant. For the first time, we had a regeneration without a goodbye. Without a bookend.
And that’s not even the worst of it. According to Russell T Davies, this isn’t a one-off. Every Doctor has bi-generated, meaning every incarnation still exists somewhere, living out their own adventures. I can see his logic. Want to bring back Tennant for another special? No problem. Want to show Twelve hanging around with Clara? Easy. You can even explain why they’ve aged since their last appearance.
But no one asked for this. There were so many ways you could explain away these things without taking a hatchet to the core concept of the show. Where’s the finality if every Doctor just keeps on living? How am I meant to shed a tear when I know they actually just walked it off? When Tennant said ‘I don’t want to go’, we wept because it was the end. Now, apparently, it wasn’t. He’s just living in his own little pocket universe, happily carrying on… again.
Which brings me neatly on to…
Doctor Who and the Curse of the Immortal Scotsman
Doctor Who has developed a fault. It’s now gotten itself into a difficult space due to something we’ll refer to as the ‘Tennant Problem’. David Tennant has now played at least four versions of the Doctor. First, there’s the original Tenth Doctor, pre-self-regeneration. Then came Doctor 10.5, who siphoned off excess regeneration energy into a hand and grew a half human clone: the Metacrisis Doctor - essentially Tennant again, now living out a parallel life with Rose. And now he’s back as the Fourteenth Doctor, only to split into two with bi-generation, meaning he still exists even after handing the baton to Ncuti. That’s four Doctors, all wearing the same face, all of which, supposedly, are alive and kicking, but aren’t bothering to chip in on keeping the universe safe.
The issue isn’t just Tennant fatigue, though there’s some of that too. The larger problem is what this does to casting. Once, speculation about the next Doctor was electric. Would it be someone completely new? Someone who would redefine the role? Now, the answer might just be ‘it’s Tennant again’ or ‘it’s Billie Piper for a while’ or ‘someone else you’ve already seen quite enough of’. Instead of endless possibility, the future of the show risks shrinking to the same handful of familiar faces, recycled again and again. I’m less excited for whoever the next announcement is, because part of me now believes it will be Catherine Tate, or John Simm, or even Russell T. Davies at this point.
The whole concept risks making the show feel like a parody of itself. The Curse of Fatal Death - the Comic Relief parody where the Doctor regenerated into Hugh Grant, Joanna Lumley and others in rapid succession once felt like affectionate satire. Now, with bi-generation, Tennant regenerating into himself, and convoluted lore upon lore, it feels like Doctor Who has drifted uncomfortably close to that spoof territory, but this time for realsies.
And then there’s the question of casting. Once, announcing a new Doctor was a national event. Peter Capaldi’s reveal got its own live television special. Jodie Whittaker dominated the front pages. Matt Smith’s casting was headline news. Compare that to Ncuti Gatwa, revealed quietly on social media with a couple of emojis, and Billie Piper, who appeared suddenly in an episode without so much as a press release confirming her as a Doctor. What was once Doctor Who’s James Bond level moment - an event that got the country chattering - has become less of a cultural milestone year on year.
Where Do We Go From Here?
And no, the answer is not cancellation, though I do think we could do with a bit of a power nap.
Undoubtably, the show currently has some pretty serious problems. The good news is that Doctor Who has always been able to regenerate itself. But to do so, the show needs to rediscover its central masterstroke, and start treating regeneration with the gravity it requires (and you know I’m being serious right now because I didn’t say mavity). No more gimmicks. For at least the next few years, the rules should be simple again. No more secret Doctors, no more duplicate Time Lords splitting off, and no outlandish and mythical quirks that only get mentioned for the first time sixty years into the show. Regeneration should be the end of one story and the beginning of another, not a RTD patented content moment.
Equally importantly, we need to change how casting is handled (here are my suggestions for who I’d put at the helm, by the way). The Doctor is one of the BBC’s greatest cultural exports in terms of television. Announcing a new incarnation should feel huge, a moment when the world stops to take notice. Prior announcements mattered - they were actual news, breaking news even. The BBC should be making each reveal a celebration, a reminder that the Doctor is a British icon that, on a good day, can stand with the likes James Bond or Sherlock Holmes (even if they haven’t had that level of relevancy for a little bit now).
If regeneration is going to survive as a storytelling device, it has to be respected. Without the weight of change, loss and renewal, the show risks becoming hollow and imploding under the weight of its own irrelevant and unwarranted lore. What was once the thing that saved Doctor Who could end up being the very thing that destroys it.
In summary, The Doctor doesn’t just need to regenerate… regeneration itself needs to.