The Brief History of Doctor Who‘s Forced Regenerations

When Patrick Troughton’s time as the second Doctor was coming to an end, so much of both the nature of the Doctor’s ability to cheat death and change faces, as well as their relationship to their people, the mysterious Time Lords, was still unwritten. We’d only seen regeneration once, and “The War Games”—which the BBC recently announced as its next colorization project after last year’s anniversary release of “The Daleks”—would also mark the very first time we saw other Time Lords at all. But alongside that introduction, Doctor Who explored an idea it would only rarely return to across the next half-century: what if regeneration itself didn’t occur naturally?

The Second Doctor’s Forced Regeneration

The second Doctor’s regeneration at the climax of “The War Games” is unique in several ways. Trapped and placed on trial by his own people, the Doctor is given a sentence for his crimes of violating the Time Lord’s sacred policy of non-interference: firstly, that he’ll be exiled to Earth without use of the TARDIS, and secondly, that he will be regenerated into a new identity as part of that exile.

It’s the first time we ever see the process considered less as a natural reaction to death, and instead as something that can be actively triggered in some way by the Time Lords themselves, and even more interestingly, it’s the first time we ever see regeneration treated as a selective process. The Time Lords offer the Doctor a series of potential faces for his next incarnation, all of which he refuses out of protest—only for his captors to then decide that they’ll force a new identity on him without the luxury of choice, suggesting that not only is there the capacity for a Time Lord to have regeneration triggered by force through non-fatal means, but also that at least upper echelons of Time Lord society had devised ways to decide what future incarnations of any given Time Lord could be in that process.

It’s also clear in “The War Games” that the act of a forced regeneration is deeply traumatic and painful, even compared to the usual traumatic scenario that triggers the process. There still really hasn’t been a regeneration presented to us in Doctor Who quite like it: the Doctor begins convulsing mid-sentence as he assails his people for their judgement of his actions, his face contorting as we see floating versions of Patrick Troughton’s head spin and blur around a dark space, before seeing the Doctor himself plummet into the metaphorical abyss. But what’s interesting is that it’s also the only time we’ve ever not actually seen the Doctor’s moment of regeneration into a new incarnation occur on screen: “The War Games” ends with the Doctor trapped in that black abyss, having to wait another six months until “Spearhead From Space” opened with Jon Pertwee’s freshly regenerated Time Lord tumbling out of the TARDIS onto earth, and into Doctor Who‘s first story broadcast in color.

Forced Regeneration In Other Doctor Who Media

© John Canning/Polystyle Publications

That doesn’t mean that the Second Doctor’s actual regeneration went unseen, though. Six weeks before “Spearhead From Space” aired, TV Comic published “The Night Walkers,” the last of its comics to feature Troughton’s Doctor. That story established that “The War Games” didn’t actually begin the Doctor’s regeneration, but instead simply whisked him away to start his exile on Earth, with the second Doctor becoming something of a celebrity in his time on the planet. However, while investigating a case of mysterious walking scarecrows, the Doctor discovers that the animated beings are actually agents of the Time Lords sent to surreptitiously draw the Doctor away from the limelight so they can… well, essentially execute him. It’s still technically a forced regeneration, brought on by the Time Lord’s edict, but it’s still a scarecrow firing squad fatally zapping the Doctor and dragging him back to his TARDIS as his regeneration begins!

While the canonicity of the early TV Comics stories has never been all too important, this is at least one thing we might see being changed in the upcoming colorization. The trailer released by the BBC featured a brief glimpse of a scene with Troughton’s Doctor standing in the TARDIS, glowing with the regenerative energy effect that has become a staple of regeneration in Doctor Who in its modern era, potentially suggesting that we’ll actually get some version of the second Doctor’s regeneration depicted in the new version of “The War Games.”

But “The Night Walkers” isn’t the only ancillary Doctor Who material to deal with the idea of forced regeneration—it became a major worldbuilding aspect of the “War in Heaven,” a catastrophic temporal conflict between the Time Lords and a mysterious opponent known only as the Enemy in later Eighth Doctor novels and the unaffiliated “spinoff” novel and audio drama series, Faction Paradox. Occasionally conflated with what would become the Last Great Time War in contemporary Doctor Who continuity, the War in Heaven saw soldiers in the Gallifreyan military (referred to in Faction Paradox simply as the House Military, the allied forces of the Great Houses of the Homeworld) eventually bioengineered to have larger regeneration cycles to keep them fighting across generations of conflict, and eventually constructed with artificial biodata to regenerate into increasingly less-humanoid organic weapons of war. Part of that forced genetic evolution would involve missions of forced regeneration that would prime troops to be regenerated into new bodies better suited for upcoming engagements.

Forced Regeneration In Modern Doctor Who

While forced regeneration is quite rare in Doctor Who, our most prominent examples of it after “The War Games” come from after the series’ revival in 2005. “The Night of the Doctor,” the 2013 short film that finally portrayed the Eighth Doctor’s regeneration, featured a somewhat similar regenerative process, when the grievously wounded Doctor was given an elixir by the Sisterhood of Karn that both triggered his regeneration and allowed him to select an identity and personality to participate in the Last Great Time War in: the incarnation eventually known simply as the “War Doctor.” But while elements of the regeneration had parallels to the process seen in “The War Games,” it wasn’t a direct comparison.

We see something much more akin to that process during Jodie Whittaker’s tenure as the Thirteenth Doctor. Initially first glimpsed in the controversial revelation of the Doctor’s true origins in “The Timeless Children”, the young being that will be known as the Doctor is seen as the template for the transformation of Gallifrey’s native people, the Shobogans, into the Time Lords, after a Shobogan scientist, Tecteun, discovers the Doctor’s natural regenerative capabilities and experiments on them in an attempt to splice that ability into her own people—a process that sees the Doctor’s young self forcibly regenerated through multiple identities, before being forcefully regenerated with their memories lost when Tecteun and the now-Time Lords decided to make the origins of regeneration secret.

It appears again in Whittaker’s final story, “The Power of the Doctor,” where the Master not only manages to forcibly trigger the Doctor’s regeneration, but hijacks the process so that she is regenerated into the Master’s own form and psyche, trapping the Doctor’s true consciousness in a splinter of their own mind. Again, while there are definitely parallels to the regeneration glimpsed in “The War Games” here, it’s not wholly similar: the Doctor managed to reverse the effects of the Master’s forced regeneration upon her, ousting his consciousness from her form with seemingly few side-effects… until the Master managed to mortally wound her during their conflict anyway, triggering a more traditional regeneration into a new incarnation.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.