Doctor Who Regenerations: A Tribute To 11 Epic Changes

9. November 2013: War/Ninth Doctor

So it turns out the War Doctor is actually the Ninth Doctor, according to the established and accepted Doctor numbering convention. Nobody had any idea he existed until his surprise reveal at the end of the Series 7 finale The Name Of The Doctor in May 2013. Nobody understood who he really was until the 50th anniversary special The Day Of The Doctor six months later. And nobody had any more than his on-screen proportion of the special's 76 minutes to actually get to know him. Then, right when viewers were realising that this Doctor probably wasn't as bad as his three future selves had spent eight years banging on about, he pops back into his TARDIS and, without warning, starts to regenerate. And just as features uncannily similar to those of the Ninth Doctor begin to appear on his face... we cut back to the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors still standing in the gallery that War just dematerialised from and that was the end of that. Everything produced in the lead-up to the 50th anniversary suggested that War's incarnation was even longer and even harder-fought than that of the Eighth Doctor before him. But with only a proportion of 76 minutes' screen time by the time his regeneration came around, the War Doctor's era obviously feels like the shortest of them all. The gap between the Eighth and Ninth Doctors has been neatly bridged for fans, but as regenerations go it kinda just sprung up out of nowhere. There was no dramatic lead-in and viewers were denied the closure that comes from seeing the regeneration process through to completion. Even the visual effects weren't quite up to scratch, relative to previous regenerations. It was certainly memorable, but really only because he was a brand new old Doctor, regenerating at the end of the same story that introduced him, told his backstory, revealed him not to be a genocidal monster and allowed viewers to embrace him.