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I recently made the mistake of checking out a trending topic on Twitter. Yeah, I know, what was I thinking? Anyway I found a new bit of controversy has become attached to the Thirteenth Doctor regenerating not into the Fourteenth but back into the Tenth. The tweets are long gone and I only saw the comments from defenders so for all I know this is Twitter pushing back on something that didn’t happen. Wouldn’t be the first time.

The controversy as I read it was that this is a regressive regeneration. Throughout the long history of both installments of Doctor Who and the TV movie, when a Doctor is gone, he’s gone unless they do a crossover story like “Day Of The Doctor” or “The Five Doctors”. Big Finish has done a few Doctor crossovers along with revisiting past adventures of the previous Doctors, and there were two comic miniseries involving the Doctor’s previous incarnations. On TV a Doctor doesn’t regenerate into their previous selves, though the Curator did suggest to Eleven that he might in the future, even hinting that the Curator may himself be a form of the Doctor like the War Doctor, the later Fugitive Doctor, or even the Valeyard to show off my creds. So there are folks who feel that going back to Ten and to a previous showrunner is a step backwards. John Nathan-Turner never returned to the show after he left.

The defenders however…are a curious lot. While as a comic fan I have to see new incarnations of classic characters and the old ones tossed out, I’m told it’s a good thing. However, the Doctor going back to a previous incarnation in their eyes is a good thing. One defender even posted a clip from the show How I Met Your Mother where one character is championing new things even after the champion of the old uses scotch as an example of how wrong he is.

For the record they were talking about the prequels as the Star Wars sequel trilogy hadn’t happened yet. The point of using this is that the older Doctor was better so why not bring him back…I think that was the argument. However I’d like to point out a few things on this topic myself. It should be fun to see who I end up agreeing with and who has a good point even though I disagree. First I think we need to remember a few details going in.

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