13 Things Non-Fans Always Get Wrong About Doctor Who

10. 'Regeneration' And 'Incarnation' Mean The Same Thing

Wrong! 'Regeneration' and 'Incarnation' are absolutely not interchangeable. They mean two completely different things. 'Incarnation' describes the end-to-end lifecycle of The Doctor in the one body, from the moment he regenerates into it until the moment he regenerates into another one. An 'incarnation' is, if you like, an instance of the Doctor. e.g. David Tennant's character was the Doctor's tenth incarnation, Matt Smith's was the Doctor's eleventh incarnation, and so on and so forth. 'Regeneration', on the other hand, describes the physiological process of renewal, when the Doctor changes from one form to another. e.g. when the Tenth Doctor changed into the Eleventh Doctor, the process of physical renewal was the 'regeneration'. That's to say, the Doctor 'regenerated'. The term 'regeneration' can be used in a variety of ways. First and foremost it refers to the process of regenerating. It can also be engaged as a question, as in this exchange between the First Doctor and the Fifth Doctor in 1983's twentieth anniversary special The Five Doctors:

Susan: Is he really...? Doctor 1: ...me? Yes. Yes, I'm afraid so. Regeneration? Doctor 5: Fourth. Doctor 1: Goodness me! So, there are five of me now!

So the Doctor's fifth incarnation was the result of his fourth regeneration, just as his sixth incarnation came from his fifth regeneration, his seventh from the sixth and his eighth from the seventh. The recently revealed existence of the so-called War Doctor threw a spanner in the works, in that all the Doctors remain known by the numbers previously used to identify them, but this new one came between the Eighth and Ninth Doctors. So in fact the War Doctor is actually the Ninth incarnation of The Doctor and Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor was actually the tenth incarnation of the Doctor, Tennant's Tenth Doctor was actually the eleventh (and maybe also the twelfth) and Smith's Eleventh was actually the twelfth (or maybe the thirteenth). So you see, it's all really very simple. Sort of.