Doctor Who: 8 Stories That Would Have Made Wonderful Regeneration Stories

6. "The Last Of The Time Lords"

There's a scene in "The Time of the Doctor" in which an aged eleventh Doctor tells his companion Clara that he is on his last life, citing the forgotten War Doctor as one of the uncounted incarnations. The other? A wasted regeneration used as a Russell T. Davies brand of deus ex machina far worse than anything Moffat would attempt. The problem seems obvious: Davies wrote the Master as too powerful and too manipulative and too smart for the Doctor to handle. The only way he could resolve this problem without scrapping the script and without ending Tennant's run early was to wish the tenth Doctor back to youth with some noncommittal arm wave of an explanation as to why the use of regeneration energy didn't regenerate the Doctor. This three-part episode is flawed in many ways: it relies more on subtly dissing the 1996 TV movie than it does a coherent plot, and it's grandiose for no reason other than its own grandiosity. Also it doesn't play like a regeneration episode, and it came before Tennant's time was up. And crucially, it was not emotional, not even the uncharacteristic hug between the Doctor and the Master. But it should have been a regeneration story for the sake of maintaining the integrity and dignity of storytelling.