The End of Time one is curious; the moment he's irradiated in the booth he starts to regenerate, hence his facial wounds healing, yet he's able to hold the full effect off for ages.
The Night Of The Doctor
- Thread starter Lonemagpie
- Start date
So, you can look at that two ways:
(1) Which doesn't make SENSE! Grrrrrrr! See?! It was better in the 1970's! EVERYTHING was better during OLD WHO!!!!
or
(2) It shows that he has a measure of control over it and it might depend on the nature of the injury, or something else. The point is, we don't know. There are some blanks that can be filled because he's an alien being.
I'm cool with that.
And let's not even mention "The Angels Take Manhattan," where the Doctor gives River some of his regeneration energy in order to heal her wrist. In that particular event, neither of them was even remotely near death and, according to the rules we knew, neither of them should have been able to access that kind of power.
Wibbly-wobbly whatever. It doesn't bother me.
Wibbly-wobbly whatever. It doesn't bother me.
Fakeout? Rumor has it was anything but a fakeout... Calling it the vanity regeneration, they are.
To be exact, it's an effect caused by a faulty vision mixing desk: I mention that because it's a lovely example of happenstance: the plan had been that the change would happen off-screen, with Ben and Polly walking into the TARDIS, to find the Doctor on the floor covered by his cloak, and rolling him over to find... eh's got a different face.
But the vision mixers arrived at the studio to find one of the two mixing desks marked off as 'Out of Order' So they check out what was wrong, just in case the other one failed as well and they had to use it anyway, and found it was doing this weird flaring effect. When they director arrived, they said "Hey boss, look at this, good innit? Reckon we could use it to actually show the change?" So they did.
But didn't Romana at some random time decide to change (regenerate?) and was not dying. And she was trying different bodies to boot. Maybe a Timelord can control their regeneration energy and the 1st doctors hadn't mastered that yet.
But pretty much the same thing happened when the Third Doctor received a lethal dose of radiation -- he was lost in the vortex for weeks before he got the TARDIS back to UNIT HQ and regenerated. Which makes sense, actually, since a fatal dose of radiation can take weeks to kill a person.
I'm not sure what you mean. What I'm referring to is that "The Stolen Earth" ended with a cliffhanger in which we thought the Doctor was going to regenerate, and everyone was expecting a new actor to take over as the Doctor, and then "Journey's End" resolved the cliffhanger by having the Doctor shunt off the energy into his spare hand so he didn't change. Thus, fakeout.
Okay, granted, that scene does create a precedent. But it's long been widely hated for the way it ignored everything previously established about regenerations. Fans have been debating that one for decades, and there have been a couple of stories published that retconned it away in a couple of different ways.
But it wasn't just the First Doctor who regenerated while lying down, unconscious, or even evidently dead. It was also the Third through Seventh inclusive. The closest the original series ever came to showing the Doctor regenerate standing up was the end of "The War Games," since the Second Doctor was conscious as the Time Lords evidently began the transformation process. But that doesn't really count since it was imposed from without.
Yes. None of it makes sense. It is all just preference and it will most likely continue to change as the show goes forward and new creatives come around that can alter it to fit their preferences. I, for one, like the more dramatic effect but I could go for something more subtle in the case of a more subdued regeneration scene. The lightning/morph effect in the movie worked just as well for me in that particular instance. Maybe if the next regeneration is quieter, with him really struggling to regenerate instead of it being triggered by such a traumatic event as 9-to-10 or holding it off for hours/days/years as in 10-to-11 we can get something more like the original regeneration without all the fireworks. Whatever is going to be more effective in context. You'll note that the 8-to-War Doctor regeneration was quite a bit more subdued compared to the others shown in the rebooted series to date.
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That was probably because it was a mini-episode and they were trying to keep the budget down.
It's the reason why I first believed that John Hurt would not be the Time War Doctor. Ten spoke about the Time War as if he had experienced it himelf and he also stated that he had been the one to end it which involved, among other things, deliberately killing off the Timelords. (We learn that it was a conscious decision in "The End of Time".) We'll see how it will play out in the special. I mean, if we go by the trailers and the little we see of what I think is "The Moment" it's entirely possible that it was indeed Ten who had a hand in using it to end the war (together with Eleven and the War Doctor). In the preview clip with the rabbit Ten states his age as 904 which would put the events of the special before the beginning of "The End of Time" (he says he's 906 in that one).
Well, he's slowly dying of radiation sickness. That's actually somewhat realistic.
The regeneration effect is really quite simple. Compared to the rest of the effects in the minisode it wouldn't even register on the budget.
Interestingly, it was kind of suggested that the first Doctor needed to get back to the TARDIS to regenerate (and hence the TARDIS had something to do with it).
Well, now we get a Jesus Christ Pose, so that might have something to do with it.
Well, the thing is, he never claimed the Hurt incarnation was a different person, per se; he just didn't count him as one of the Doctors, because he didn't go by that title in that incarnation. So when he said he was the tenth or eleventh Doctor, he wasn't denying that what he'd experienced in his "warrior" incarnation had never happened, just that the title "Doctor" didn't apply to that incarnation. It's not about denying a part of his identity, it's just a semantic trick Moffat employed to reconcile the new incarnation with the established number of Doctors.
Yes, in "The Power of the Daleks," the Doctor said the "renewal" process was "part of the TARDIS. Without it I couldn't survive." At that point, the producers hadn't actually established him as an alien yet. The assumption in the first few seasons seemed to be that he was a human from the distant future when the species was far more advanced. So it stood to reason that any extraordinary abilities would be attributed to his technology rather than his biology. I don't think it was until "The War Games" that the Doctor was definitively established as a member of another species.
I mean that, as rumor has it, Moffat has taken that fakeout into account as an actual regeneration, that the Eleventh Doctor is the 13th incarnation because of it, and not the 12th, and that Moffat does so in order to have Capaldi be, essentially, the first Doctor of a new cycle.
^Which doesn't have anything to do with what I meant by the word. I'm talking about the fact that at the time it faked us out into fearing that Tennant was leaving the show. Whatever Moffat has decided about it years after the fact does not alter the events of the time.
Yeah, though I also thought it was more of a nod to the Fifth Doctor's last story, where it looked like at one point he was going to regenerate earlier on in the story after he'd been poisoned.
I was referring more to the fact that a big deal was made out of the fact that the Doctor had tried very hard to forget this incarnation and even made him an "other" by not acknowledging him as the Doctor. One would think that if you tried very hard to forget something you wouldn't speak about the events of that life as freely as past Doctors like Ten did.
What do you mean, "freely?" My recollection is that the Doctor was always portrayed as being very uncomfortable about discussing the Time War or his actions in it. He didn't tell Rose he was the last of his kind until the end of the second episode. We didn't even find out the war was against the Daleks until episode 7, IIRC. And it was years more before we discovered the actual role the Doctor had played in the war. So he wasn't free in discussing it at all. It was clear from the start that he was trying to avoid facing his memories, and only reluctantly opened up about it when circumstances forced the issue.
We can argue semantics all day but my point still stands: the Doctor mentioned it pretty often for something he was trying so hard to forget and he stated more than once that he was the one who ended it and killed the Timelords. To my mind, this behaviour clashes with having an incarnation who did all this that he hides away. It seemed that Ten had come to terms with his role in the Time War in "The End of Time". That's why I thought at first (i.e. after the last series' finale) that the incarnation he wouldn't want to acknowledge was not the Time War one but another, possibly before he became the Doctor.
I only brought it up to show that I understood where Emperor Tiberius was coming from.
I only brought it up to show that I understood where Emperor Tiberius was coming from.
I don't think it's semantics, because I'm not talking about the definitions of words, but about story structure. That's more syntax than semantics. My point is that the stories we see on TV don't represent the everyday, comfortable parts of a character's life, but the extreme, difficult parts, the parts that challenge them and force them to confront painful truths. So just because a character talks about something a fair amount of the time in the episodes we see, that doesn't mean it's easy for the character to talk about them. It just means that the 13 or so hours per year that we get to see of their lives are selected to focus on the more strenuous, unusual moments out of the whole. The Doctor wants to avoid talking or thinking about the Time War, but there have been occasions that have forced him to face those unwelcome memories, and it's those occasions that the show focuses on disproportionately, because they're the most dramatic parts.
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