When Canon Ended for Doctor Who

“…after the 12th regeneration, there is no plan that will protect against death.”

• Co-Ordinator Engin in The Deadly Assassin

According to Google, “In fiction, a story’s canon is the official, authoritative material that is accepted as part of that story’s universe. It is what the creators have officially established as true, and it serves as the foundation for any related works, such as sequels, spin-offs, or fan fiction.”

This concept was understood long before Google, and was held to in most classical genres. From poems to short stories to novels, and most television and movies up to about 15 years ago, writers broadly understood that if you do not maintain consistency in your storytelling, you have no story to tell.

It cannot always be easy to maintain consistent canon, especially in the latter two examples I cite. In my teens I was gifted the Star Trek The Next Generation: Technical Manual which I read thoroughly cover to cover. The show’s technical advisor, Michael Okuda, explained with many citations throughout inconsistencies and contradictions, both with The Next Generation and the original Star Trek. It was a clear example how in a long-running show, despite the writer’s best good-faith attempts, story telling will start to trip over itself from time to time.

If I recall, nothing in the technical manual “broke canon” or at least not in any meaningful way that caused fans to start questioning the integrity of the show.

Six years ago I wrote, “I have never been a big fan worrying about canon in fiction, as it is largely meaningless and irrelevant. Its only point of relevancy is in keeping stories internally consistent and believable to their audiences.” I still largely feel this way, yet in hindsight this sentiment was more in reaction to the butchery of canon taking place in Disney’s bizarre attempts to profit from George Lucas’s sci-fi fantasy classics. The evil mouse’s “sequel trilogy” had absolutely no consistency from film to film; they were abhorrent and filthy to consume. Still to this day, the only time I watched Disney’s penultimate atrocity, The Last Jedi, was during two wasted hours of my life in a theater.

I minimized the importance of canon because as a classical consumer of these genres who believed in reasonable best-attempt standards, I always understood that creators up until that point, whether original world builders or inherited creatives, tried their best to keep the universes they built and worked in feeling consistent.

I could cite examples how canon was ruined in the last decade, but my goal here is to focus on when I believe canon ended for one of my childhood bedrocks, Doctor Who.

If you are a true fan of classic Doctor Who which ran from 1963 to 1989, then you are aware of the crux of canon for the primary character and his species, that a Time Lord can only regenerate 12 times, translating into 13 lifetimes, since birth is not counted as a regeneration.

The concept of Time Lord regeneration developed slowly along the show’s run. It was initially a brilliant mechanism to replace the lead character, from William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton. A completely different actor, but if you were a kid in the UK watching the show in 1966, you were probably amazed and relieved that the Doctor lived on. For on the telly, he was was literally still the same person, who had merely changed his appearance.

Each switch of lead actor sprinkled in a little more canon on the regeneration concept. It was not until Jon Pertwee’s third Doctor that he was firmly established as a Time Lord from a planet called Gallifrey.

I frequently watch the Classic Doctor Who channel, because of course there is little new television content worth my time. And I enjoy it, since many of these stories I have not watched in 40 years, giving me a chance to relive and fill in my many knowledge gaps. With exception of a few spurts in the Hartnell and Troughton eras, I am very confident I can recite the string of companions from granddaughter Susan to Ace.

The other night, I watched in its entirety The Deadly Assassin, a key story in 1976 from the Tom Baker era. Aside from being the only classic story without a companion for the Doctor, it was laced with Time Lord canon possibly like no other story up until that point. It also resurrected the Doctor’s arch nemesis, the Master, three years after Roger Delgado’s death.

(Side note: Roger Delgado was, by far, the best Master, hands down. I did not realize he had died in a car crash, apparently a core reason why Pertwee left the show a year later. This is a remarkable “what if” scenario on the fate of Doctor Who if Delgado had lived, a speculation for another time.)

The Deadly Assassin established Time Lord regeneration as primary, original source canon, in both comments (see quote above) and by commentary on the Master’s situation, clinging to his barely alive thirteenth self, only by his outlier evil genius. This is terribly crucial, for both that story and Doctor Who for the decades that would come. You cannot rewrite primary source canon, lest the fiction world build becomes devoid and meaningless.

This regeneration canon would be leveraged amply from 1976 onward in the classic series, through the remainder of the Tom Baker era, then for Peter Davison’s fifth Doctor, and into the sixth Doctor’s years, arguably ending with Colin Baker’s final series, The Trial of a Time Lord. Outside of rare allusions (e.g. Remembrance of the Daleks) this strict classical canon was mostly forgotten or at least put aside for Sylvester McCoy’s run as the seventh and final classic Doctor.

When the series ended (err, was “put on hiatus”) in 1989, the regeneration canon remained, and would be foundational again in the 1996 Fox made-for-TV movie, and once again the 21st century BBC series reboot.

So, when did primary, original source canon on regeneration actually cease? It ended when “the official, authoritative material that is accepted as part of that story’s universe…what the creators have officially established as true” completely failed to address the Doctor’s death at the end of his thirteenth life.

You can pinpoint either the specific episode, or a point within the episode, it does not really matter which. It was Matt Smith’s final story, The Time of the Doctor.

Matt Smith portrayed the “eleventh” Doctor from 2010 from 2013. Eleventh, yes, and you Who fans reading know about the discrepancy, but please allow me to explain it for the uninitiated.

While yes, Smith is commonly known as Doctor 11, he was within regeneration canon the Doctor’s 13th life, for he had regenerated twelve times. So 11 Doctors means he regenerated ten times. How do we account for the additional two?

First, John Hurt’s “War Doctor” was a brilliantly hidden regeneration of the Time Lord that was not revealed until the show’s 50th anniversary special. The War Doctor was the character’s forgotten lifetime between Doctor number eight (Paul McGann) and Doctor number nine (Christopher Eccleston).

The other unaccounted regeneration was what I refer to as David Tennan’s tenth Doctor’s “vanity” regeneration. You can look this one up yourself, but in short, after Doctor number ten was shot fatally by a Dalek, he consumed a regeneration cycle to keep that his tenth lifetime going. Was this, perhaps, the Doctor bearing the weight of his own mortality, knowing he only had one regeneration left? It would have been a fascinating story arc, if modern story telling had the guts to tackle such a hard topic.

By primary canon, Matt Smith’s Doctor was the character’s final lifetime. Full stop. End. Finis. There is no plan to prevent death, unless apparently you are a BBC show runner.

In a sane and rational story telling world, it would have been fitting to put the character to rest after a half-century run. Or have groomed a successor. Or even continue the spirit of the show with Romana. Yes, Romana, who always was the Doctor’s trained heir apparent to his renegade Time Lord ways. It’s a deep pull from 1980 tangled with a few non-TV tales, but it would have been workable.

Instead, all we got in The Time of the Doctor was the Time Lords mysteriously granting the Doctor more regenerations for…what? The Time Lords are now gods that always held the power to cheat death?

It was there, at that very moment of the that 2013 Christmas special, that Doctor Who primary canon ceased. All classic stories and concepts had been invalidated, the world building of 50 years set to flame, ironically on a snow world called Christmas. The owners and writers have their prerogative to keep adding absurd layer upon absurd layer of explanation for how the Doctor continues to live on, destroying all Time Lord mythology in their wake, but they are only reshuffling the long-burnt ashes of a once great story and epic hero. All integrity nullified forevermore.

Do you agree with my assessment that Doctor Who canon is thoroughly vanquished, or do you believe in the show and its continued longevity? Let me know in comments!