Howling:The Doctor merging with the time vortex in "The Flood"

In the very last Eighth Doctor comic strip "The Flood", in Doctor Who Magazine, the Doctor leaps into the time vortex and is imbued with its power. After the temporal energy leaves him, he recovers. But then if he could survive that, why did his absorbing of the energy from Rose in The Parting of the Ways necessitate a regeneration? 82.20.113.152talk to me 21:34, April 21, 2013 (UTC)

I have two good reasons for you! First off, the Eighth Doctor wasn't meant to survive his exposure to the time vortex. The comic writers wanted to depict a canon regeneration for Eight to Nine, but it would've broke a taboo- the Ninth Doctor was only meant to travel with one girl, Rose. Eight had Destrii as his companion, but she would have to be written out, almost certainly by being killed, which the writers objected to. So it was retconned and Eight lived on.

Secondly, the Eighth Doctor did not expose himself to the Time Vortex as long as Rose did. She held the energy inside her body for several minutes. It didn't harm her in that time period, but it slowly began to turn corrosive. Nine had to pull out the energy before the corrosion started and save Rose. Unfortunately, he caught the energy in its volatile state, burned from it on the cellular level and had to regenerate. The Eighth Doctor just didn't contain the Time Vortex long enough to suffer the body corrosion, but he was still affected. --Thunderush ☎  04:30, April 23, 2013 (UTC)

With the recent revelation at the end of ‘The Name of the Doctor’ it could be that the Eighth Doctor didn’t fight in the Time War or simply perished during the early years and it was in fact John Hurt's Doctor who ended the Time War. Hopefully the mystery behind the Eighth Doctor’s regeneration is finally explained in the 50th Anniversary Special…