Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-183721-20130220034316/@comment-188432-20130220192529

The TV movie is a valid source for this wiki. So while any fan is of course at liberty to do what they want with the TVM, you can't just chuck it to one side here.

And I don't think it's an island of information that you can just disengage from the body of Doctor Who fiction. The way I see it, RTD has sorta rejected teh Barry Letts Buddhist "he's not dead" thing to say, "Nope, these are discrete parts of the gestalt Doctor's life, and the way it works is in every way like death."

There's literally no regeneration sequence for a true Time Lord since 2005 (so, not including River Song) where some form of the word "to die" doesn't appear.

It strikes me that the half-human comparison you wanna make is a bit irrelevant. The half-human line is a tiny detail with only marginal plot relevance, later beautifully clarified by The Forgotten. So from the wiki's perspective of taking all media equally, the half-human thing is a total non-issue. (In fact, I'd argue that the TVM alone takes care of it, since Eight says he can in fact change species during regeneration — just like we see Romana doing in Destiny of the Daleks — so there's every reason in the world to think that maybe one of the Doctor's regeneration was half-human, while leaving the gestalt Doctor wholly Time Lord.

As between the "half-human" and "death" thingies, there's no doubt but that the death idea is absolutely the more integral to the plot. Take that out and you've lost about a third of the whole film. Take out the half-human thing, and the Master merely has to find a different way to open the Eye of Harmony.

The TVM lets us look at regeneration in a clinical setting, in a way that no other story does. We've got the Doctor hooked up to medical monitors throughout so that we can actually say, "Yes, he died."

This is something obscured by the fact that Harry Sullivan arrived late for Regen 3, and there are swirling SFX for Regens 4, 5, and 6. For all we know, Five's heart could have stopped and the "Day in the Life" boom is supposed to indicate his heart restarting.

In any case, the CIN special ends the debate really. Is there a practical difference between "not being able to go back to Nine" and "Nine is dead"? If there is, I wouldn't know how to articulate it. Regeneration obviously means that the gestalt Doctor is not dead. But there is a finality to the process — which we didn't know until the CIN special — that acts as an actual, hard barrier between two phases of life. Moreover CIN and TEOT and LKH all show us that there is a physiologic difference between the incarnations ("New teeth", "I've got a mole", "Slight weakness in the dorsal whatever") So this isn't, as could have been supposed previously, the shedding of skin or trick of the lights or metamorphosis of an exterior or something similarly superficial. It is the ending of one life and the beginning of another.