Doctor Who Series 7 plot questions (OPEN SPOILERS for all series, with apologies to Dr. Song)

Cafe Society
1

So, Series 7 begins with a shooting death.
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At a picnic in Utah, the Doctor is shot by a figure in an astronaut suit. As his body begins to show the golden glow of regeneration, he’s shot again, disrupting the regeneration and permanently (!!) killing him.

Moments later, the Doctor shows up: a three hundred year younger version of himself. The remaining episodes of Series 7 deal, in some measure, with his companions agonizing over the fact that they know the date, time, and place of his fated death, but can’t tell him, lest space and time are disrupted by paradox and get even more wibbly wobbly timey and whimey.

Later on, we learn that this incarnation, the Eleventh Doctor, is in fact the last of his available regenerations. The Eighth Doctor regenerated into the unnumbered War Doctor, so that the Ninth Doctor is really number 10. And the Tenth Doctor halted his own regeneration once, pouring the energy into his own extra cut-off hand, setting up the biological meta-crisis that created the human version of the Doctor that lived happily ever-after with Rose. So when Eleven came along, he was really 13.

Therefore, when Eleven was shot by the astronaut, he should not have regenerated.

But of course we also learn that what was shot was NOT The Doctor, but rather the Teselecta, a robot controlled by miniaturized people, one of whom was the Doctor. He faked his own death by allowing the robot to be shot and cremated. Since the Teselecta robot was just a robot, The Doctor must have added a fake “regeneration glow” effect to happen when the robot was shot.

But why did he do that, when in fact if he really had been shot, there would have been no regeneration?

2

Actual Answer: Because they hadn’t decided to do the “war doctor and Tennant counts as two because severed hand thing” until after they showed his death.

In-universe Fanwank: The Doctor knew that he wouldn’t regenerate, but that fact was not widely known to the universe at large, so he included the fake, aborted regeneration as a signal to his past self that “this is fake” so he would know that he should fake it. (The silence would assume that stopping the regeneration was necessary, so they would be none the wiser).

Since Amy and Rory were being so secretive about the event, he didn’t realize he had sent the signal until he saw the Teselecta’s more detailed records, which explains why he was so emo up to that point.

3

An easy way around the regeneration limit (which is oddly self-limiting by the writers) is to note that it’s canon that the master was given extra regenerations so he could fight in the Time War. It’s not unreasonable to think that the Doctor got some extra regenerations as well.

4

It was always known that the Time Lord high command could grant extra regenerations (in fact they did exactly that for The Doctor in the Christmas special). But at the time in question, as far as The Doctor knows, there are no other Time Lords at all, much less Time Lords with the authority and capability and desire to do this for him.

(My personal fanwank is that “naturally” Time Lords would keep regenerating forever, but those regenerations get progressively more explode-y so the Time Lord High Command puts a block at 12. If that block is removed, like it was for the Master and the Doctor, they are effectively immortal).

5

My theory is that even the Doctor doesn’t know for sure whether Doctor 10.5 really “counts” as a regeneration. There’s several moments in Series 6-7 that make more sense if you assume he’s at least hoping he might have one more left. Then, sometime during “The Time of the Doctor”, he somehow finds out that he doesn’t.

6

Of course, it was intended to be self-limiting.

WARNING: Geeky stuff follows.

The 12-regeneration limit was introduced by Robert Holmes in the 1976 Tom Baker story “The Deadly Assassin.” Previously, it had been established that Time Lords could regenerate into a new body whenever they “died.” Holmes, who was script-editor at the time, felt that this idea killed all notion of suspense in the show. Why should we care when that Dalek has the Doctor in its sites at the end of episode 3? Even if he gets shot to death, he’ll just regenerate. Where’s the suspense?

So Holmes introduced the notion of a limit to the number of regenerations. He also tried planting some hints, in various episodes, that the Doctor might have had previous incarnations before William Hartnell, so that we didn’t know which regeneration he was on now. For all we know, he might even be on his final regeneration at this very moment! If that Dalek shoots him, he might actually die for real!!!

The hints at previous incarnations have been long forgotten, or fan-wanked away. But fandom really seized on the 12-regeneration limit, so much so that as they’ve approached the point where twelve different actors really have played the role, the writing staff has had to deal with it. The “getting a new batch of regenerations” idea was probably the easiest and most obvious solution, and that’s what they did. Holmes had probably thought that, by setting the number at 12, they were leaving themselves plenty of room for future developments. After all, Tom Baker was only the Fourth Doctor. Who could have dreamed they would really make it all the way to a Twelfth?

Of course, it could be argued that Robert Holmes was wrong to even worry about suspense in the first place. After all, was anybody ever REALLY worried that the Doctor might die in any of those cliffhangers? He was the lead character of the show. I suspect that even in the 1970s, people had enough understanding of the conventions of television to understand that the hero isn’t going to die.

7

By that point, Eleven was well aware that Gallifrey still existed, preserved in a pocket universe as a result of his actions (in triplicate) at the end of the Time War.

8

AKA “The Manchurian Candidate on Gallifrey.”

9

The Day of the Doctor crossover didn’t happen until much later, and his memories from experiencing it as 8.5 and as 10 didn’t “stick”.

10

The regeneration limit was a legal limit, not a physical limit. Time Lords were not allowed to regenerate more than twelve times, even though it was possible.

The was established in the original series. In “The Deadly Assassin,” the Master had used up all his regenerations. In “The Keeper of Traken,” he manages to regenerate by stealing Tremas’s body, and he’s had two regenerations since then.

11

But it couldn’t have been just a legal limit or else on Trenzalore, 11 could have just told the Daleks, “Fuck you, I’m regenerating anyway – if you don’t like it, file a complaint with the Gallifreyan embassy on Skarro and they’ll get back to you in eight to ten weeks with a case number for follow up”. It must be a legal limit coupled with some implanted device to enforce that limit, and the Gallifrey high command knows how to reset or disable it.

12

When he was brain-wrestling with Morbius in Holmes story The Brain of Morbius, written a few years prior to The Deadly Assassin, the screen of the apparatus showed him being taken back through his incarnations as Morbius gained the upper hand {well, gnarled claw, really}, including a number prior to William Hartnell’s First Doctor: naturally a number of fans latched onto that as evidence that Hartnell Was Not The First.

13

Which is exactly how they were intended to understand it. This was the biggest of those “hints” that I mentioned. The wikipedia article on this episode quotes producer Philip Hinchcliffe: “It is true to say that I attempted to imply that William Hartnell was not the first Doctor.”

These days, of course, the most common fan explanation for those extra faces (significantly, there were eight of them, which would have made Baker the twelfth Doctor), is that they were Morbius’s previous incarnations–Morbius also being a renegade Time Lord. But that’s not really the way that it plays on screen.

14

Yeah, as depicted it was pretty clear that Morbius was laying a beating on the Doctor, and it was the Doctor being forced to regress through his earlier incarnations, with the implication that he would die when he reached the beginning: once the Doctor began losing, he never landed a mental blow on Morbius, and all of the regressing was on the Doctor’s part. The faces they used, incidentally, were just of the production crew.

15

Well this is a new theory. How do you reckon that? Every indication in the original series - when they pay attention to it at all - is that this is a physical limit. Especially ‘The Deadly Assassin’ and ‘Mawdryn Undead’.

Exactly. Why would the Master of all people be concerned with a legal limit? He had reached his physical limit in his current body and couldn’t regenerate any more. If it had been physically possible for him to regenerate, surely he would have?

Not sure how this establishes the regeneration limit is a legal one. The two recent regenerations we’ve seen him undergo have been since the Time Lords “resurrected” him, as he puts it. All the previous changes since The Keeper Of Traken have simply been him jumping from body to body, first using the power of the Traken source to take over Tremas, and then the snake thing to take over the body of Bruce the ambulance driver. (And in the BBC’s attempt to make an animated series before it came back properly in 2005, he was in the body of an android. Played by Derek Jacobi.)

16

Finally! They seemed to acknowledge that the Doctor not only has Grandchildren, but Children as well (all presumably lost). As far as I can remember, there hasn’t been a peep about any family since the first season (not 2005 noobs), i’m talking 1963, when the Doctor was traveling with his Grandaughter, Susan Foreman. Maybe she just hadn’t chosen her TimeLord moniker yet (The Master, The Doctor, etc), but she still used her original “real” name… Does that mean the Doctor’s real name is something boring like John Foreman? They did say all of his 4 (?) wives were dead, but will he find the rest of his family if he finds Gallifrey?

17

Before he unceremoniously left her in 23rd Century Earth without asking her, and never went back. Quite the family man, our Doctor.

The second Doctor on thinking about his family: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaDw79__VRc

Foreman was a name the Doctor nicked off the gate of the junkyard where the TARDIS was parked in 1963, owned by. I. M. Foreman. (The 50th Anniversary special opened with a shot of a sign for it.)

Queen Elizabeth, Marilyn Monroe, River Song, and one other. Possibly Susan’s grandmother, possibly some other person we haven’t heard about.

If he has other family and they were still alive after he left Gallifrey, he never seemed bothered with seeing them on any other visit he made to the planet before its destruction (or non-destruction).

18

And how does Peter Cushing fit into this?

19

The Peter Cushing films were made for an American audience, QUITE different:

My recollections of the early seasons is admittedly foggy… my wife and i started some years ago working our way chronologically through the series, starting at the beginning. so many doctors ago…

20

And did you notice who was the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the nearby Coal Hill School?