10 Times Doctor Who Broke Its Own Canon

The Tenth Doctor changed everything we thought we knew about regeneration when, holding back tears in a depressing little cafe on Christmas Eve, he told Wilfred Mott that, "Everything I am dies. Some new man goes sauntering away, and I'm dead."

Except, that's not been true of regeneration before or since The End of Time, has it?

After the very first regeneration in 1966, the Second Doctor explicitly stated that "Life depends on change and renewal", which affirmed the process as a means to extend life, rather than end it. But it's not just classic Doctor Who that the cafe scene contradicts – Russell T Davies' writing creates an inconsistency with his own work earlier in the show.

That's because, just a few years prior, the Ninth Doctor regenerated into the Tenth, all the while telling Rose that regeneration was a Time Lord trick to cheat death! Then, in the Tenth Doctor's first full scene (the Children in Need minisode Born Again), he stressed to a deeply concerned and baffled Rose that he was very much the same man, just with a new face.

Steven Moffat would then appear to take a shot at the Tenth Doctor's regeneration in the weeks leading up to Matt Smith's departure, when he explained that:

"The Doctor doesn’t die. He really doesn’t. He just gets a new body. He escapes death, he evades death, so that’s a triumphant ending rather than a sad ending."

The Eleventh Doctor's regeneration would reflect this sentiment, reaffirming the process as a change of body rather than a change of mind, exactly as it was introduced all those years ago.

So is this a canon inconsistency... or evidence that the Tenth Doctor was being a bit too melodramatic? Well, when RTD and David Tennant returned to Doctor Who in 2023, they essentially confirmed that Ten was being a crybaby when the Fourteenth Doctor told Donna and Mel that regeneration "isn't dying."