Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 460: The Deadly Assassin, Episode Four
Dear diary,
What with the Doctor reaching the end of his thirteenth body last Christmas, the way that a Time Lord’s regeneration cycle works has been in the spotlight a lot lately. For as long as I can remember in fandom, it’s always been a talking point, and there’s been any number of theories as to exactly how the Doctor would manage to escape his ‘final’ death. The suggestions ranged from the unconcerned (‘they’ll simply ignore it’), to the over complex (something about the number of trips he’s made in the TARDIS naturally extending his lifespan). Some people suggested that all ‘limits’ on the number of lives a Time Lord can have were lifted when the Time War became serious, and some have suggested that it’s never really been an issue.
In my mind, the whole ‘twelve regenerations’ thing has always been a suspension applied by the Time Lords themselves. The Doctor implies that - barring accidents - Time Lords can effectively live forever - I think the limit is imposed simply to stop them from going on, and on, and on. The Time Lord society may be stale, but they’d never want it to become so stale that they never changed, but the same group of people carried on forever. I’ve always imagined that the more you regenerate, the less effective it becomes. By the time you reach your twentieth-or-thirtieth body, the process is fairly unstable. There’s only so often that you’re able to change every cell in your body before the effect starts to wear off. It’s why the Ninth Doctor wonders if he’ll end up with two heads - or no head - and it’s why the regenerations have been getting gradually more explosive over the last few occasions.
The fact of the matter is that over the years, a number of different production teams have all had a hand in the evolution of the regeneration mythology. The Second Doctor implies that he couldn’t have done it without the TARDIS, and the Time Lords of The War Games seem to treat it as something unique to the Doctor (‘You have changed face before…’). By the time Romana fancies a change, she’s even able to ‘try on’ a few bodies before settling on one. When we get to The Five Doctors, the High Council are even able to bribe the Master with promise of a whole new regeneration cycle. It’s at this point that I have to wonder… did the Master give them the technology to do that?
In this story, we learn that the Master is on his final life, and it seems that the only way he’s found to overcome that is to tear Gallifrey apart by ripping into the Eye of Harmony. Could it be that Rassilon programmed the ’13 lives’ limit into all Gallifreyans and it’s being held in check by the Eye? Maybe, now that the Master has helped to show the Time Lords that it actually exists, and it’s left sticking through the ground of their grand Panopticon, they’ll find a way to harness the power and gain a bit more control over the way in which regenerations work?
Aside from inspiring a little speculation like this in my head (which is never a bad thing - Doctor Who, and indeed TV in general, is at its best when it makes you think), I’ve watched this episode with the same kind of disconnect which has tainted the rest of the story. My disinterest is perhaps best mirrored by Spandrell’s faction to the Master’s survival at the end of the story, in which he half heartedly points and exclaims ‘Look, it’s the Master’, with all the interest of a man who’s just seen some leftover cabbage in the fridge.
The highlight of today’s episode is, again, the Panopticon set, which actually does look rather impressive as it collapses around the Doctor and the Master. When the destruction first begins, and a few polystyrene rocks are thrown towards Tom Baker’s face, I worried we were in for a rather limp ending, but by the time the floor starts to split open and the roof really begins to cave in, things were looking decidedly upwards. It’s just a shame that the whole story hasn’t been as fantastic as that!
