An Overview of Twelfth Doctor

"I think it's going to be a whopper," the Eleventh Doctor predicts of his upcoming regeneration and he hardly undersells it. Although the problem of the regeneration limit is hand-waved by a puff of golden pixie dust, the long term emotional and psychological implications are definitely not glossed over and define the Twelfth Doctor from his opening episode to his final scene as the most troubled, unhappy and yet fundamentally honest of incarnations.

The first thing we know about the Twelfth Doctor is that the Eleventh Doctor had no faith in him: unlike every other regeneration where both outcoming and incoming Doctors tend to wing the entire transformation, the Eleventh goes to great lengths to take precautions. He immediately assumes his replacement will alienate Clara and calls ahead to beg her to help his future self out of pity; he sets the TARDIS to take his new self straight to the Paternoster Gang to look after him; and he deliberately patterns his new face on Lucius Caecilius to remind him to save lives and help people. Alas, the Eleventh Doctor is proved right to be wary - the Twelfth Doctor immediately alienates Clara, nearly gets himself killed without Vastra's help and even fails to remember why he has his current face and, immediately upon working out the reason, makes one of the biggest mistakes of his entire life.

Part of Clara's initial mistrust of the Doctor is down to how the Eleventh Doctor prepares her for the change. Although he is facing regeneration with dignity and a reasonably-positive spin, he is quick to emphasize that the Doctor who is coming is not him and that everything Clara knew of as the Doctor would vanish like breath on a mirror. Even his phone call to her significantly has him speak of his future self as a stranger, a separate individual who is not the man in the bow-tie. The Twelfth Doctor is the one to insist they are the same, but the Eleventh Doctor clearly did not share that belief.


But why the Eleventh Doctor has so little confidence in his future self? The answer lies in the fact he didn't want there to be a future self. The Time of the Doctor showed him fully accepting his inevitable death for at least seven centuries of the siege of Trenzalore. It was Clara, not the Doctor, who begged the Time Lords for a new life cycle after all. Having exceeded his natural life span, the Doctor has lost any moral high ground over villains like Davros or the Master who have refused to accept their time was over. Although he makes light of this hypocrisy at times (he claims his entire incarnation is a "clerical error" in Before the Flood), his unhappiness at still being alive doesn't take much to find. "Immortality isn't living forever," he tells Clara in The Girl Who Died. "That's not what it feels like. Immortality is everybody else dying."

The idea of another dozen lives ahead of him holds next to no appeal; he is willing to sacrifice regenerations on the flimsiest of pretexts in The Witch's Familiar and Extremis, he recklessly puts himself in needless fatal danger in Listen, and while all Doctors have been willing to risk their lives to save the day this incarnation at times appears to be looking for an excuse to put himself in the firing lines. He throws himself to the monsters like the Teller, the Foretold, the Dream-Crabs, while later he goes out of his way to get himself killed defeating Davros, Harmony Shoal, the Monks, or the Cybermen. Nardole himself fears the Doctor's reckless suicidal streak, which started long before he was heartbroken after the death of River Song. In his final moments, the Doctor tells Testimony he has no desire to survive, regeneration or not: "A life this long, do you understand what it is? It's a battlefield, like this one, and it's empty. Because everyone else has fallen."

Not only does an extended lifespan not appeal to this Doctor, but the existential angst following a regeneration seems worse than ever. The Doctor always seems uncertain of what a regeneration is, always claiming he is the preceding man in a new body but that his replacement will be an entirely different person yet this Doctor is the first to be unsure if he is the same individual at all. Although he just saved all the children of Gallifrey and defended Trenzalore for a thousand years, the Twelfth Doctor claims none of the credit or put it forward as proof he is intrinsically "good". In his first episode, he clearly realizes he has much more in common with the Half-Face Man than he'd like - they are both beings who have been rebuilt so often nothing of the original remains except an ideal that justifies their behavior. Is there anything of the real Doctor left in the Twelfth Doctor?

The Doctor himself doesn't seem so confident. Although his previous incarnation started to believe "the Doctor" was a sort of code of conduct he had chosen to follow, the Twelfth Doctor describes it as nothing more than a role he is more often than not unfit to play. As he says to Davros, "On a good day, if I try very hard, I'm not some old Time Lord who ran away. I'm the Doctor." Later, when enraged with Ashildr, he warns her: "The Doctor is no longer here! You are stuck with me!"

Perhaps it's part of his uncertainty following regeneration, or perhaps the fact after a thousand years of acting as Trenzalore's sheriff, but the renegade Time Lord now considers himself a separate individual to the hero of all time and space. Like Robin Hood, he is impersonating a legend that's simply too good to be true, but unlike Robin Hood the Doctor doesn't feel up to the job. "I can't be the Doctor all the time," he tells Clara in their last adventure together and pointedly it's his "Doctor-y" behavior that alarms his original self more than simply being embarrassing with sunglasses and a guitar. "Who the hell do you think you are?" the First Doctor gasps, unable to accept anything of himself could act in such a way. "I am the Doctor. Who you are, I cannot begin to imagine!"

Yet while the Doctor has doubts about his identity, no one else does. Vastra, UNIT, Davros, the Time Lords, the Sisterhood of Karn, and especially River Song and Missy never doubt that this is the same man. Yet despite this constant reassurance of who he is, the Doctor still doubts - almost certainly because his new self not being the Doctor has some appeal. People constantly expecting him to behave in a certain manner, do things in a specific way and always remain on a pedestal clearly rubs him up the wrong way and he almost instinctively from his first appearance struggles to do what people are not expecting.

Throughout Deep Breath, Clara and the Paternoster Gang guess his motives and predict his actions and he impulsively does the opposite; give him a murder to investigate and he'll wander the streets doing nothing, a daring rescue and he'll run away, an urgent deadline and he'll sit down and drink some whisky. His contrariness becomes a dominant feature as he disagrees with everything and everyone, even though he's inevitably wrong about things: he's the first to dismiss a good Dalek, Robin Hood or Danny Pink as what they appear yet comes up with elaborate fantasies about invisible aliens, evil trees and even sinister conspirators manipulating them.

Yet it's clearly not simply a stubborn desire to disappoint that leads to his appalling behavior of his first year. Although his thoughtless brutal honesty is a core part of his personality, and he's just as unflattering about himself as everyone else, he goes out of his way to deliberately offend and upset people from the get-go. The Doctor has never had much time for the military mind - indeed, it's suggested that all Time Lords have scorn for soldiers as the lowest of the low - but the Twelfth Doctor takes it to a new level. He scorns Journey Blue for daring to mourn her dead brother, sneers at Danny Pink for ever having seen military service, and delights in mocking UNIT for its attempts to actually stop Cybermen just as he had no sympathy for Morgan's men fighting and dying to hold back the Daleks. In The Zygon Inversion, he addresses the fact that none of the aforementioned warriors - nor even the extremist Zygons - have committed any crimes on the levels of his own atrocities in the Time War. So his hatred for soldiers fighting monsters is not that they are bad people or doing bad things, but more that they remind him he has done much, much worse. His sudden palpable disgust of spending time with soldiers would be the height of hypocrisy were the Doctor not to have stated in his opening episode that he intends to stop making the mistakes he once did. When he turns aside Journey's plea to be a companion - the same plea, word for word, Leela made to him in The Face of Evil - it's comparable to a reformed alcoholic turning down the offer of a drink. Traveling with soldiers was something, he has decided, he should not have done.

However, his distaste for soldiers turns into outright prejudice and bigotry when it comes to Danny Pink. Although his initial "can't retain that" spiel does appear to be an act (in context of the scene, he is trying to get Danny to leave him alone so he can speak with Clara), it quickly becomes clear he doesn't like the man even though he has retired from soldiering and started educating children with mathematics, just like the Brigadier did. His previous career, his ruining of the Doctor's plan and also his courtship of Clara combine to make the Doctor outright hate Danny Pink, especially as Danny is the first to note the Doctor's anti-soldier stance is borne of self-loathing. It's not hard to imagine the Doctor dislikes Danny because he reminds the Time Lord of himself - a learned man who has nonetheless spent far too much time fighting wars. We also learn that Danny, while undoubted a good man, is also suffering intense post-traumatic trauma, anger issues and guilt over the death of children.


The Twelfth Doctor's no-more-mister-nice-guy approach is a deliberate performance, albeit one he might actually enjoy. If he truly thought soldiers were unworthy of life, he wouldn't save Journey and return her home, yet his horrible treatment of her will ensure she won't befriend him. For this is a Doctor who believes he needs to be alone, that he should not have friends. Consider the Eleventh Doctor, whose spirit was almost totally broken by losing Amy and Rory - people he barely knew for a decade - compared to watching generations on Trenzalore grow old die for a thousand years straight. After so much heartache, the Doctor has decided (as he did in The Snowman) to keep the universe at arm's length. He's more uncomfortable and awkward around Journey, Robin Hood and Perkins when it seems they might actually enjoy his company and befriend him. The Twelfth Doctor is desperate to leave right away and will even "delete" people from his memory rather let them linger. From the moment that his "big sexy woman" dinosaur dies screaming in agony, the Doctor would rather be alone and hated than lose someone.

Of course, the fundamental core of the Doctor is that he cares about other people. "Is it so hard to credit that a man born into wealth and privilege should find the plight of the oppressed and weak too much to bear until one night he is moved to steal a TARDIS, fly among the stars, fighting the good fight?" wonders Robin Hood. For all his apparent callousness, the Doctor's gut instinct is still to do the right thing - from diving to save Danny from the Skovox Blitzer, to risking his relationship with Ashildr to spare Sam the Swift, all the way to saving a nameless World War One soldier from pointless death. His compassion betrays him from the very start, finding it all too easy to sympathize with a serial killing cyborg, the endless plight of the Foretold, or even the potential redemption of Davros and the Master. "Hardly anything is evil," he muses, appropriately enough given his continual encounters with malfunctioning tech with the Clockwork Robots, Skovox Blitzer, the Foretold, the Pilot and the Vardy. He's quick to defend non-evil threats like the Teller, the creature hatching from the moon, the Dream-Crabs, the giant fish in the Thames and he gives the benefit of the doubt to the Boneless as long as he can.


The Doctor first doubted he was a good man when he hesitated to help Rusty the Dalek, as if anything less than one hundred per cent moral certainty was unacceptable. Given he had spent a thousand years fighting a morally-black-and-white war where his every enemy had publicly decided to murder civilians and commit genocide, it's not surprising the Doctor found it difficult at first deal with moral complexity like a good Dalek. Similarly, after a thousand years of crazy schemes like wooden Cybermen and see-through Sontarans, he expects conspiracies and subtexts where there are none - he is nearly defeated by the Clockwork Droids and the Sheriff of Nottingham simply by them doing exactly what they appear to be and not carrying out a cunning bluff, while he mistakes the magical forests for evil. Unsurprisingly he finds himself relying on what certainties he can find, and it's only when he accepts that he is an idiot who doesn't know anything that he is able to start managing to save the day instead of quite often endangering it. Adding to his anxiety is the fact a lot of the nasty adventures are his fault: his survival lead to Missy's masterplan with Cybermen and cyborgs, his quest for the hidden creatures affected Danny's life for the worse, the TARDIS summoned the Boneless, his presence drew out the Dream-Crabs. In short, if the Eleventh Doctor was right and the Twelfth's anger is born of shame and fear, there's a lot of it about.


The biggest change between the Twelfth Doctor and his predecessors is that he starts his life without the deep-rooted survivor's guilt of the Time War hanging over him. As the War Doctor noted, his successors overcompensated for this with their childish good humor. Without that prompt, the Twelfth Doctor has no desire to be good company (and valid reasons not to). Yet this changes forever when he abandons young Davros on the battlefield in The Magician's Apprentice. It is an act of utter, unforgivable cowardice - especially given there was no reason not to think it was a completely different Skaroine boy who just happened to have the same name - and the Twelfth Doctor is never the same again. Having completely failed to be "the Doctor", his sudden predilection for sillyness, guitar-playing, sonic-shades and baggy trousers shows he is, like the last three Doctors, retreating into childishness to deal with the guilt. As Clara says, "This isn't you!"

"I spent all day yesterday in a bow tie, the day before in a long scarf," replies the Doctor, justifying his sudden hoodie and baggy check trousers, eager to connect back to his past incarnations than emphasize his current "failed" one. Although he does go back and save Davros, the fact is the Doctor never intended to show that mercy and even at the end of The Witch's Familiar, neither Missy nor Clara have learned what caused his sudden shameful change of character. Nor does he abandon his new easygoing persona; his "minimalist" uptight suit and short haircut were to emphasize who the new Doctor was now, presumably to deal with his post-regeneration uncertainty. Post-Davros, the Doctor is more eager to soften the edges, let his hair grow, hide his eyes with sunglasses and embrace people so they don't have to look in his face.

Yet, even though he'd abandons his outer vileness, he still falls prey to the one thing he was trying not to do - get his hearts broken. He initially treats Clara with a mixture of respect and contempt, constantly bowing to her judgement but continually mocking her appearance and arrogance, but his obsession with her returns all too soon. He keeps her at arm's length for his first two episodes, but by Dark Water pledges undying loyalty to her after she's revealed herself as a manipulative liar who used everything she knew about the Doctor against him. By focusing all his love onto Clara, by abandoning any other friends he might have, the Doctor rapidly sets himself up for a fall. Even as it becomes obvious their travels together are borderline driving her to insanity, he is reluctant to put up more than a vague gesture of concern. When she does finally die, her loss is combined with the fact that she was trying to be "the Doctor" in saving others. In short, the Doctor feels entirely responsible for her death in a way no other companion has made him feel and his attempts to stunt his emotions virtually destroy him.

It's hinted that Face the Raven is the last time we actually see the real Doctor and that from Heaven Sent onwards we are dealing with a clone of a cone, the real Doctor having died four and a half billion years ago. Certainly, given the Doctor's heartbreak, death wish and other emotional issues it's not hard to believe he willingly killed himself knowing someone else would be "the Doctor" and take his place. Either way, the Doctor's actions are telling. He puts himself through hell in every sense, driving himself to insanity rather than come to terms with his loss. Ironically, once this Doctor has gone bad he is the most likable and charismatic he has been so far. There is a reason for his cruelty and cowardice, for who truly hasn't wanted to get their loved ones back?

But his good humor is superficial, a front to show the Doctor has actually betrayed his promise to Clara and turned bad as a result of her death. Ohila is the one to note that the Doctor's apparently-worthy actions of defeating Rassilon and saving Clara are born of nothing but selfishness and spite. His aim is to absolve himself of blame for Clara's death, not bring her back. His plan is to wipe her mind and abandon her somewhere to live an obscure life, which as Clara notes is not the act of someone who cares how she feels. The Twelfth Doctor, so sick of having to be "the Doctor" ultimately manages to become the villain of his own show, murdering unarmed allies and plotting the total destruction of the entire universe. At the start of the story arc, the Doctor impulsively saved Ashildr by granting her immortality but was quick to realize "I was angry. I was emotional. Just possibly, I have made a terrible mistake."


Clara's initial relationship with the Doctor got off to the wrong foot when she joined him out of promising the Eleventh Doctor rather than the Twelfth proving himself to her. Similarly, her neural block solution robs the Doctor of the lesson he learned. "I went too far. I broke all my own rules," he mutters, but the whole thing is reduced to the level of a vague dream, easily-forgotten. When we next see the Doctor in The Husbands of River Song, he's sulky, miserable and eager to start a fight with total strangers. Has he also lost the memory of Danny Pink knocking some sense into him?

When the Doctor insists Danny should embrace his hellish existence because "without the capacity for pain, we can't feel the hurt we inflict," Danny counters that if the Doctor is aware of how much his behavior hurts people, he has no excuse to carry it out. The Doctor thus gets to learn that lesson all over again as he sees just how much emotional pain he has put River through, and his decision to actually be a married couple with her - instead of a variety of intense one-night stands - gives him a slightly better learning curve with relationships than with Clara. Ironically, the self-styled psychopath has a healthier mindset than Clara ever did, and gives the Doctor the strength to confront their love's true obstacle: his hatred of endings. He tells River that "every Christmas is last Christmas", accepting their time is finite - but the first time those words were said to him, by a seemingly-dying Clara, he became absolutely obsessed with stopping it ending.

After 24 years on Darillium (though we should note the Doctor reminds River that they weren't necessarily stuck with just that) the Doctor has again learned to love and also to lose, very appropriate since his first episode showed him unable to remember the events of The Girl in the Fireplace when he achieved both. Yet the loose end he faces after River heads off for her final fate brings back the weary nihilism that so haunted his first days. He's outlived all his friends, he loses everyone whether he admits he likes them or not. He's descended to a low ebb when he agrees to finally kill Missy and make sure she stays dead. This depression was something River foresaw and through Nardole she is able to restore the Doctor's hope - if Missy can be redeemed, then it's worth saving her and staying alive no matter what the difficulties.

For if there is one thing unique to the Twelfth Doctor is that he is not happy his day job is saving the universe. While many an incarnation might grumble at not being able to have holiday now and again, this Doctor resents the lifestyle he has inherited. He clearly has no real interest in the "designated days out" he is obliged to offer Clara, and spends most of his free time in the TARDIS console room rather than exploring or having adventures. He dislikes Clara's perception of him being a hero who "stops bad things happening every day" and when in Last Christmas she asks him to stay to defeat any leftover Dream Crabs, he compares the request to dealing with polar bears. "Am I supposed to do something about that, too? I'm the Doctor, not your mam!" he spits angrily.


In Heaven Sent, when we're given a unique view into the Doctor's mind palace he endures a moment of despair and breakdown unlike any incarnation seen before. "I can't keep doing this, Clara! I can't! Why is it always me? Why is it never anybody else's turn? It's not fair! Clara, it's just not fair! Why can't I just lose?" Notably it is Clara, not any conscience or impulse of his own that convinces him not to give up. Once he assumes guarding the vault, he's able to promise Grant "I'll take care of anything that comes up," but it's hard said with enthusiasm. Although seeing Bill again, his first proper companion not inherited from the Eleventh Doctor, invigorates him and rekindles his desire to see the universe, it is all too easily broken.

The Doctor certainly seems happier in one place and one time than any other to be imagined. He's exiled himself to twentieth century Earth entirely by choice, to a place and time which doesn't challenge his expectations or ask him to save the day (since his previous incarnations are already doing it). He's effectively retired and at the start of The Pilot is taking his duty seriously enough that Nardole doesn't need to scold him once. Bill is probably the latest in a long line of students, but the first one to be "companion-worthy" and lure him into resuming his old life. Of course, the Twelfth Doctor has to be one of the unluckiest on record. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong from accidentally making children immortal superheroes to causing massive alien invasions, and his attempts to provide Bill with easy and fun-loving adventures rapidly falter and she suffers more hurt, trauma and near-death experiences than Clara managed in her suicidally-reckless phase. Added to this is a return his earlier contrariness, where the Doctor's response to having a duty to guard the vault is repeatedly trying to get killed doing something else.


In one last big speech before his regeneration crisis, the Doctor finally admits he gains nothing from his duties of fighting monsters and saving people. He defines it as an inescapable duty, as inescapable as breathing. "I'm not trying to win. I'm not doing this because I want to beat someone. It's not because it's fun and God knows it's not because it's easy. It's not even because it works, because it hardly ever does. I do what I do, because it's right!" If the Doctor's job is defending the universe, it's a job he hates and wishes he could quit. He yearns for the kinder, happier times of meeting Robin Hood or defeating Space Vikings, but it comes as no surprise that he ends up facing his doom fighting a one-man war against an unstoppable enemy, the man who hates soldiers perishing on a battlefield.

Although his initial reluctance to regenerate in The Doctor Falls seem innocuous - he has good reason not to go through the change in the middle of a siege - it soon becomes clear that his death wish has grown. Having failed to keep Bill safe, having failed to redeem Missy, outlived River and forgotten Clara, the Doctor sees nothing but more pain and heartbreak ahead of him. Unlike the First Doctor, who is contemplating death rather than what regeneration might bring, the Twelfth Doctor is not afraid of the unknown. It is his knowledge that drives him to seek oblivion, screaming "I don't want to change again! Never again!"

We've seen him sacrifice himself in Heaven Sent and Extremis, but never before has his desire to simply end his life never been more acute. He desire is less to stay the same, as the Tenth Doctor, but not to start afresh and have to go through all these harsh lessons and painful truths all over again. Even the revelation that his lost companions live in on in Testimony does not change his mind, and he ends his life as he tried to from the beginning - alone in the TARDIS and free of the burden of being a hero: "The silly old universe, the more I save it, the more it needs saving. It's a treadmill!" Even the joy of remembering Clara and all their time together doesn't help, proving only to be a reminder of all his failures and losses.


The First Doctor accepts regeneration at last in the knowledge that if it is a kind of death, it is a death that ensures people like the Brigadier's grandfather Archie will be saved from certain death. It is thus selfless kindness that convinces him to go through with it and the same argument wins over the Twelfth Doctor. His last act is, as always, to give a brief and passionate lecture summing up all he has learnt so that the next Doctor will not have to learn it from scratch. The Eleventh Doctor dropped the Twelfth in the deep end, while the Twelfth gives the Thirteenth the same to do list he gave Clara. It is his final, maybe even his only true victory as the Thirteenth Doctor is born happy and eager to be the Doctor instead of wary, scared and unfit for the task.

Yet while the Twelfth Doctor initially appears the complete antithesis of the Eleventh, if we look back to the last minutes on Trenzalore we see the Doctor as an old, tired man ready for death but obliged to fight monsters, who has stopped making connections with the people he is saving (often nicknaming them) yet capable of a genuine smile when he sees Clara. In the TARDIS he is somber and still and prone to giving speeches as he thinks of earlier, happier times he will never get back.

Perhaps that was what caused all the trouble for the Twelfth Doctor? Not that his regeneration on Trenzalore was so massive, but that he simply didn't change enough...?