When William Hartnell became too ill to continue working on Doctor Who back in the 1960s the producers were in a jam. They had replaced other characters before but this was the title character. How do you do a show without him? The solution was something that would later be called regeneration: a different face with a different outlook and different physical and personal traits becoming dominant over others but at the core still the same man, even if that man is a woman. This has allowed the show to go on for decades (with a break while sci-fi haters ran the BBC and an attempted American revival made the mistake of going with Fox, a network with a science fiction failure rate so large that its one success not called X-Files ended up moving to Hulu) without a reboot. Unless you count the two Peter Cushing movies and nobody does. I mean, I like them and will defend it partially based on when it came out, but they’re better off as their own thing.
Now the current Doctor, Jodie Whitaker, will be leaving the show, meaning she’ll be regenerating soon. And I’ll say this about the rumors of David Tennant coming back…save him for the Big Finish audio dramas. The “familiar faces” bit between 11 and the Curator was cute but the Doctor shouldn’t return to old lives. He should move forward, not backward. The other “big deal” about this regeneration has been that she doesn’t do so within the walls of the TARDIS like this is some big deal. While this tends to be a thing in New Who, especially when a new showrunner wants to destroy a console room and internal design–a sin Chibnall doesn’t get marked enough him as he replaced the best console room in New Who with the worst–is it really that unusual? Sorry for those of you on slower systems or those of you who may not have time to watch this now, but let’s take a look back at all the regenerations of the Doctor and get a proper count, as well as how those regenerations were handled. Luckily the official YouTube channel has them all.
