I was recently mulling over why Doctor Who retains his memories but loses his personality with each regeneration, like how extremely ADD Matt Smith’s Doctor is, more so than David Tennant’s, which is saying something. I know why the BBC started the regeneration thing, so that they could keep the story going even when William Hartnell decided to leave, and, yes, I know the Doctor is fiction so I shouldn’t be worrying about such things to begin with, but it’s something that I’ve dwelled on more than once while watching an episode.
In a fictional world, we writers create parameters that we must adhere to so that we don’t jolt our readers out of our story with, “Hey, that doesn’t make any sense.” It doesn’t matter if our story is set on Mars where the green men live when we know for a fact that no life, apart from possible bacteria, exists there. If we set up the story properly, the reader will suspend disbelief long enough to live among the green men until they read the words “The End.” Even so, if we set up the story that the Martians don’t dream but then we end the story with a Martian waking up from a dream, the reader is quite likely to throw your book against the wall in disgust. Whatever rules we set up, like those of Quidditch, we better stick to unless we have a damn good reason, a good reason that the reader can understand, not because the author needs to fix a plot hole.
So I needed to understand the Doctor’s personality changes in terms of the world of Doctor Who, not in terms of actors deciding to leave the show. I haven’t been quite satisfied with the simple explanation that his personality changed with each regeneration. Why did David Tennant’s Doctor mourn the fact that he was to die when he knew he would simply come back in a different form? If he retained his memories, why didn’t he retain his personality?
Perhaps I’m slow on the uptake, but it finally clicked with me. Amy Pond zapped the Doctor’s hearts with a defibrillator and I thought about biology. All those drugs they advertise on TV for every chemical disorder they can think of, from depression to anxiety to bipolar, developed because we came to understand how much our biochemistry is at the root of our personality. If we have a stroke or get a concussion, our personalities can change as well, even if we keep our memories. So when the Doctor regenerates he has a completely new brain in both shape and biochemistry. (I do think Matt Smith’s biochemistry could use a little Ritalin, but perhaps that’s ‘cause I’m still in love with Tennant’s Ten…sigh.)
So this is an explanation that makes sense to me in the context of the DW world. Meanwhile, I’m still mulling over what it means for Jack Harkness to be a “fixed point in time” that turns into the Face of Boe.
~Shara