10 More What Ifs About Doctor Who

5. What If Colin Baker Had Returned For The Regeneration In Time And The Rani?

It would still have sucked. Next question. ...OK, OK, let's do this properly. Fine. Colin Baker, as we all know, was the only Doctor to be fired from the part. To add insult to injury, he was asked to take part in the Doctor Who America tour to promote the show after this happened, which of course he did - who wouldn't turn down a trip like that? The one thing he did turn down when the time came, however, was a request to come back to film his regeneration scene at the beginning of Time and the Rani. Understandably. But what if he hadn't? Here's the sad part: there's absolutely no indication that things would have been all that different. We would like to think that, if Baker had agreed to return, Pip and Jane Baker might have been briefed to include some form of proper send-off for the Sixth Doctor. But given that the BBC itself had not given the actor such a proper send-off, why would it be any more likely to do so for the character? We might have simply gotten Colin Baker rolling over on that studio floor before morphing into Sylvester McCoy rather than McCoy in a wig morphing into McCoy. Let's imagine a best-case scenario: one in which both parties agreed to give the Sixth Doctor his due and give him a proper send-off before regenerating him into a new Doctor. Baker's tenure had already begun in a curious way, with his first story airing at the tail-end of a previous Doctor's last season, so having a full story at the beginning of another Doctor's tenure wouldn't seem all that odd. (Fans should remember that Hartnell was in the first two stories of the fourth season before Troughton came on for good, and it's only from 1970 onward that we've had Doctors end their tenures at the same time as the current season ended.) Would it be a better story than Time and the Rani? God, let's hope so. Just as acceptable would have been a move that only the TV movie has attempted (with mixed results): opening the story with one Doctor only to have him be killed and regenerate into a different one. That opens up plenty of narrative possibilities, so much so that it's surprising it hasn't yet been tried in the series itself. Again, we would hope that Time and the Rani would not be that story, but if it were, we'd at least get to see Colin Baker and Kate O'Mara working together again. Even better, that would mean the regeneration would be caused by something a lot more serious than a bonk-bonk on the head.