Does the Doctor Now Have Infinite Regenerations?

Guest contributor Jacob Adams explores the idea and how it could change the Doctor if true.

After watching ‘The Witch’s Familiar’, an interesting thought popped into the heads of many fans. The Doctor used regeneration energy to save Davros, create Time Lord-Dalek Hybrids and eventually destroy the Time Lord-Dalek Hybrids by turning their own kind against them. However, to do this, a substantial amount of energy must have been used. So the question is, how did the Doctor have the energy to do this?

In Kill the Moon, it is possibly suggested that the Time Lords gave the Doctor infinite regenerations, but if this episode is proof of this theory, what does this mean for the rest of the Doctor’s possibly never ending life? A user suggested in the comments that it would make the Doctor God like, but would he be a good God?

Imagine living for billions of years, trillions of years, and seeing the universe move and develop around you. The perspectives you formed as a child would advance and develop as you learnt more and more, and the morals which you once followed would be twisted by what you saw, and the consequences of what you saw.

If you lived to see World War I and II, you would see the evil occurred, and you would see the suffering and death. But you would also see the aftermath of the war, and you would see that these horrible wars led towards freedom and independence in the nation of Britain, France, America and countless more.

At the time, if you were in World War II and told the soldiers that what they were fighting and dying for was good, they’d probably tell you to shove off, because what they would see was a man telling them to die for a ‘pointless’ war which would be over by Christmas.

So, if the Doctor had lived long enough to have his morals changed and twisted by a long life which, from never ending Time Travel, would show him the end to every scenario, could he possibly be good by the end of it? I would like to suggest that he would not. I personally feel that if the Doctor knew that pushing a race to their deaths to reach the finishing point was needed, and he had lived long enough to realize that changing time only made his life horrible and more complicated, the Doctor would give them the push. Like we would to World War I soldiers on either side of the trenches, he would tell them that their deaths would leave to something.

Now you may feel that I am making a jump to say that the Doctor wants a simple and less complicated life, but we have to remember the Doctor’s hatred of living long enough to see everybody he loves die. So to know that he would live forever and see everybody die would no doubt send the Doctor to the point of extreme loneliness, and possibly push him to a point in life where he doesn’t want to create any complicated relationships with people, because for the Doctor, relationships would always end and the Doctor would be left heartbroken.

So, we’ve seen the Doctor without a companion before, and it normally pushes him to the point of doing the wrong thing (hello, ‘The Waters of Mars’ and ‘A Town Called Mercy’). Give this man infinite time without a companion and I bet he’d happily pull the trigger on Kahler-Jex.

So, my conclusion… What would the Doctor be like if he could live forever? My suggestion? I think he’d be a bad man who would think about the events occurring around him, and not the people being influenced by the events. In fact, I think he wouldn’t be able to call himself the Doctor anymore. And wouldn’t that be great to see happen on screen?

Tell me what you think would happen if the Doctor had infinite regenerations in the comments below!