Doctor Who Regenerations: A Tribute To 11 Epic Changes

5. June 2005: Ninth/Tenth Doctor

It was the first televised regeneration in nearly a decade and the first regeneration of a regular TV Doctor in almost twenty years. Those two facts alone ensured it would be memorable. The revived series was at the end of its first season and, only thirteen episodes in, was about to lose the actor who relaunched the character of The Doctor. The Parting Of The Ways was always going to make for blockbuster viewing. Over the course of thirteen episodes viewers rekindled their love affair with Doctor Who, with this new, more serious, sometimes happy/sometimes angry Doctor and his cocky council estate companion Rose. Such was the high drama of the preceding twelve episodes that it was as if viewers had known the two characters for years by The Parting Of The Ways. In that final three quarters of an hour of the two part story, there's a whole lot going on: there are Daleks all over the place; the Emperor Dalek makes a surprise appearance; the Bad Wolf thing is explained (sort of); Captain Jack is killed; the girl from the Big Brother house (who later ended up as Tanya Branning on EastEnders) is also killed; Rose, Jackie and Mickey combine forces to yank open the Heart of the TARDIS; Rose looks directly into the time vortex, gains astonishing powers as a result and uses said astonishing powers to destroy every single Dalek and bring Captain Jack back to life... there's so much going on that it's quite exhausting to watch. By the time the Doctor sucks the time vortex energy out of Rose (or, otherwise, 'kisses' her) and she collapses into his arms all damsel-like, the average viewer couldn't have coped with much more drama. But the best was still to come. As Rose comes to in the TARDIS the Doctor is at the console, hunched over it and ostensibly doing whatever he normally does, but as he talks more nonsensically than usual to her Rose becomes aware that something clearly isn't right. Nothing beats a regeneration sequence backed by a rousing score and an even more rousing final line from the outgoing Doctor. Murray Gold's score was so perfect for this scene, raising it to an emotional level previously unheard of in the series. Eccleston's final line was just about as perfect as it could've been, even if a little cheesy: "Rose, before I go, I just want to tell you, you were fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And do you know what? So was I". And with that, after just three months and thirteen episodes, the Ninth Doctor and his "every planet has a North" accent was gone, replaced by a skinny bloke with a lot more hair, "new teeth" and a southern accent... a skinny bloke who would go on to change the face of Doctor Who forever.