There’s nothing like a good Doctor Who regeneration to grab the media’s attention – even if those regenerations aren’t quite what they seem. Let’s take a look at all of the Time Lord’s regeneration fake-outs…
The Stolen Earth
The 2008 episode ‘The Stolen Earth’ had one of the most shocking cliffhangers in the whole of Doctor Who history. The Tenth Doctor had just been shot by a Dalek, moments before he could be reunited with Rose. Gasping for breath, his friends rushed him to the safety of the TARDIS, his hand glowing with regenerative energy. “I’m sorry, it’s too late,” he uttered. “I’m regenerating!”
Arms wide, the Tenth Doctor exploded, on the cusp of becoming a new man. And viewers were stunned. Nobody was expecting a Doctor Who regeneration. David Tennant hadn’t said anything about leaving. What was going to happen? And who would he turn into?
Of course, as it transpired, this was no ordinary Doctor Who regeneration; it was simply an excuse for good cliffhanger (albeit a very good excuse.) The Tenth Doctor regenerated into himself, and channelled the rest of his regenerative energy into a bio-matching receptacle, namely his “handy spare hand” which was sitting in a glass jar on the floor of the TARDIS, because reasons.
This wasn’t a completely fake Doctor Who regeneration, though. ‘The Stolen Earth’ regeneration did actually count in the Doctor’s life cycle, and the next version of Tennant was canonically the Eleventh Doctor. Until we found out about the War Doctor, making him the Twelfth. Until we found out about the timeless children, making him the… anyway, moving on!
The Impossible Astronaut
In the opening episode of Series Six, the Doctor summons his friends to a lakeside in Utah to watch from afar as he converses with a mysterious astronaut, who has just emerged from the depths of the water. The pair briefly converse, before the astronaut raises their hand and zaps the Doctor with a laser, killing him. The Doctor begins to regenerate, his hands aglow, but the astronaut shoots him before he can complete the process. And he dies.
So what was this Doctor Who regeneration about? Well, spoilers sweetie – this wasn’t actually the Doctor. Well, it was. And it wasn’t. The Doctor that Amy, Rory and River were looking at was in fact a robot duplicate known as a teselecta, which housed a whole army of miniaturised people who controlled it. And the Eleventh Doctor was one of these people, effectively controlling a robot duplicate of himself.
Thus, the regeneration effect that the Time Lord’s companions witnessed was nothing more than a light show, put on to convince the universe that the Doctor had been legitimately killed, meaning he could slip quietly into the background and keep working in secret.
The Lie of the Land
The 2012 episode ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’ established that the Doctor could summon regenerative energy at will, and this ability was put to an interesting use for the next of our fake Doctor Who regenerations.
In ‘The Lie of the Land,’ the Doctor has seemingly allied himself with an alien race known as the Monks, who have plunged planet Earth into a 1984-style dystopia. His companion Bill has turned into something of a freedom fighter, and doesn’t believe all the propaganda the Doctor is broadcasting to the citizens. She’s determined to speak to the man in person, and stealthily makes her way to his secret lair to learn the truth.
However, when she arrives she quickly discovers that the Doctor isn’t playing around; he really has joined the Monks. Consumed with anguish, Bill raises her gun and shoots, looking on in tears as the Twelfth Doctor begins his regeneration.
Or so it seems. Naturally, this wasn’t a true Doctor Who regeneration; the Time Lord was simply pushing Bill to the limit to check that she wasn’t being controlled by the Monks – although why he went so far as to stage a fake regeneration is unclear, apart from the fact that it made for a great trailer.
The Power of the Doctor
As mentioned previously, there’s nothing quite like a Doctor Who regeneration to get the media’s attention, but no one wants to spoil the surprise by putting the actual regeneration sequence into the episode trailer. So, as with ‘The Lie of the Land,’ it makes sense to have a fake regeneration scene of some sort, to pique viewers’ interest.
This was certainly true of Jodie Whittaker’s last episode ‘The Power of the Doctor.’ Viewers knew that a Doctor Who regeneration was on the way, but they didn’t know how it was going to play out. And so, to tease them, the BBC included a brief shot of Jodie Whittaker shouting “Yaz!” as she was engulfed in plumes of regenerative energy. One could well believe that this was a shot from her final scene.
In reality, it wasn’t – but it wasn’t a completely fake Doctor Who regeneration a la ‘The Lie of the Land’; the Thirteenth Doctor was legitimately dying, undergoing a forced regeneration by the Master who was determined to perform a full body-swap, rendering her a lifeless shell.
So the Thirteenth Doctor did technically regenerate in this scene into the shape of Sacha Dhawan’s Master. This was only temporary, though, as the process was reversed later in the episode. But once again, the sequence did provide a rather exciting piece of trailer footage.
Which is your favourite of the fake Doctor Who regenerations? And did any of them fool you? Let us know in the comments below.
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