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Actor Matt Smith Will Be 11th Doctor Who
Jerry Smith was among a large number of readers letting us know that the 11th Doctor Who has been named. It's Matt Smith, 26, who will be the youngest actor to play the time-traveling Doctor. The head of drama at BBC Wales said this about Smith's audition: "It was abundantly clear that he had that 'Doctor-ness' about him. You are either the Doctor or you are not."
I heard about this earlier I am waiting out to see his performance as the doctor, before I start judging.
Seems like they have been burning through regenerations in the latter Dr. Who series. What are they gonna do when they hit twelve? No more Dr. Who?
Since it wasn't included in the summary and searching for "Matt Smith" brings up page after page of listings on IMDB, here's the profile of the actor in question.
It looks like he hasn't done much in his career so far, and (other than one episode of Secret Diary of a Call Girl) I don't see anything that American audiences would be familiar with there.
Goo goo g'joob.
No, just The Doctor
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The Master was given an extra set of regenerations by the Time Lords for... something. The Sisterhood of Karn had the secret to true immortality, but the Time Lords rejected it because they realised that immortality lead to a static society. Without the Time Lord rules against it being enforced, there's nothing stopping The Doctor from regenerating more than 12 times. There is a lot of evidence in the series that the limit of 12 was artificial - to encourage Time Lords to savour their lives and then move on to make way for a new generations.
Allowing infinite regenerations could easily be done without breaking continuity, but it would destroy the show by making the Doctor's death totally meaningless. There are lots of ways of extending the number of regenerations too. It is implied several times that regeneration is something that only happens to Time Lords who are joined with time capsules. The TARDIS is presumably not connected to the Eye of Harmony (the black hole contained on Galifrey) anymore, so the amount of energy it can provide for regeneration might be more or less than normal.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_(Doctor_Who)#In_the_series
The BBC's Series 4 FAQ suggests that now the Time Lord social order has been destroyed, the Doctor may be able to circumvent the limit on regenerations; it says: "Now that his people are gone, who knows? Time Lords used to have 13 lives.
In "The Sound of Drums" (2007) the Master is revealed to have been granted a new body by the Time Lords during the Time War with at least one new regeneration. Non-Gallifreyans are also seen to regenerate in Underworld (1978) and Mawdryn Undead (1983), but with adverse side effects.
Sounds to me like regeneration is a socially-imposed limit to keep them from living forever. ;)
But they aren't immortal... found this interesting tidbit:
In The Mind of Evil the Master points a conventional firearm at the Doctor and threatens to "put a bullet through both your hearts", while in "Forest of the Dead", Professor Song warns that an impending electrocution would stop both the Time Lord's hearts, killing him. From these, it is apparent that a Time Lord can die if both his hearts stop.
This quote also further supports it:
The TARDIS appears to assist in the regenerative process. In addition to the second Doctor's explicit statement to this effect shortly after regenerating from the first, regenerating outside the TARDIS has never been shown to go particularly well. Of the four occasions on which this has happened, one is forced on him by the Time Lords (The War Games), one requires a Time Lord to give the Doctor's cells a "little push" to start the process (Planet of the Spiders), one needs the TARDIS's "Zero Room", a chamber sealed from all outside forces, to help him recover (Castrovalva) and the last occurs a few hours after he has actually "died" (The 1996 television movie). That last regeneration remains the only one that takes place significantly far away from the TARDIS, without any obvious interaction from other Time Lords, though it may be noted that in The Doctor's Daughter, Jenny - a woman created from the Tenth Doctor's DNA - dies and later reanimates in a process that has some apparent similarities to a regeneration, some time after the TARDIS leaves her planet.
All these + more indicate that the limit may not be a physical one.
Another:
In "Last of the Time Lords", the Master and the Doctor demonstrate that regeneration is not an automatic process (or the process is automatic but the Time Lord undergoing it can halt the regeneration at will) as, despite the Doctor's pleas for him to regenerate, the Master instead chooses to die after being shot by Lucy Saxon
It's quite possible that it's a socially imposed limit - that is, multiple timelords can collectively decide whether you get to regenerate or not.
Twelve regenerations was never a biological limit; it was something imposed by the Gallifreyan leadership. ISTR that once they offered the Master an extra set of regenerations, in exchange for doing some of their dirty work. Now that the other Time Lords have been exterminated, who's to say there can't be a Fourteenth Doctor?
As for the regeneration rate, the Ninth was short-lived, but the Tenth has had a good long innings. He first appeared in 2005 in the final episode of the first new series, and is scheduled to regenerate in early 2010. So... four or five years. That's quite long for a Doctor. The First did three years, so did the Second and the Fifth. The Third did four, the Sixth two, the Seventh two (well, nine, but he was off the air for most of that), the Eighth and Ninth one each (again, the Eighth technically nine years, same objection).
It's only really Tom Baker who's outdone Tennant in terms of years in the TARDIS. And since he has an enormous TV fanbase from Blackpool, Casanova and Doctor Who, and has lately proved himself to considerable acclaim on the legitimate stage as Hamlet, I imagine he thinks it's about time to move on to some extremely lucrative roles.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I think it really depends on when you first started watching it.
I'm not sure if the tenth regeneration could count either. Ohhhhh! In THAT sense! Ok. It's unclear. Time Lords may be able to change their appearance without actually using up a regeneration (Romana was way too bright to have wasted an entire life after a mere 150 years), so it would seem to follow that "partial" regeneration is possible without using up an actual regeneration in the process.
Although this is the 11th Doctor, it is also questionable as to whether each life has used up a regeneration. The Second Doctor to the Third may or may not have been a regeneration but it was under the control and supervision of Time Lord technology. The life-energy (or whatever) that is involved in the process could therefore have been external. If so, it would not have used up that amount of energy internally. The same could be argued for the Fourth to Fifth, as the Watcher was an external source of regenerative energy. (The Third to the Fourth was started externally but the energy was internal.)
If you want to take this line of reasoning further, you may also wish to consider Mawdryn Undead. In that, The Doctor was due to have all his remaining regenerations drained to kill off Mawdryn and his associates. The Brigadier intervened, saving him. But is that all he did? Action and reaction are equal and opposite, and the circuit was still complete. If the machine could take regenerations away, a reverse surge should logically add them. This should give The Doctor potentially another six lives.
Also consider Brain of Morbius. We don't know what effect the elixier had on The Doctor. It is supposed to aid in failed regenerations, so presumably provides an external energy source in addition to any other curative properties. Those who drank it did, after all, become immortal for the duration of drinking it, which suggests that it had that kind of restorative power. This potentially gives The Doctor another additional life, as he didn't require a regeneration to heal.
Finally, if you subscribe to the notion that Russel T Davis is, in fact, a Dalek Agent hell-bent on destroying The Doctor's reputation, you can disregard as much of DW:TNG as you like.
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