Doctor Who: Peter Capaldi Hints At A Unique Regeneration

Doctor Who will debut its tenth season on Saturday, and it is a season that will be a huge turning point for the venerable franchise.

Doctor Who Season 10 will be the final season with Steven Moffat acting as lead writer. Moffat has guided the show for the past six years.

In addition, Doctor Who Season 10 will be the third and final season for Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor. Capaldi’s final episode will come On Christmas Day when the BBC airs the Doctor Who Christmas Special 2017.

Speaking to the New York Times, Capaldi teases something unique about his upcoming regeneration. Capaldi was a huge Doctor Who fan since long before he was cast in the role of The Doctor and he hints that fans may have fallen into a false sense of complacency regarding how Time Lord regeneration work.

Up Next: Doctor Who Promo Offers First Glimpse At Peter Capaldi’s Regeneration

“There’s this notion now that it’s the same process he’s gone through every time, and that’s not true,” Capaldi says. “It’s only the last couple of regenerations that have been, as it were, fairly straightforward ones. I can’t go into the details of a lot of it because I know what happens, but I don’t know how it happens.”

Could this be a hint that the Doctor will regenerate as a woman? That is something fans have been clamoring for some time, and Steven Moffat has laid down the groundwork for it in his time on the show by having the Master regenerate into a female body, called Missy, having a Time Lord on Gallifrey do the same on screen during the Doctor’s most recent trip home, and by hinting that the Doctor himself may have previously been a woman in the Neil Gaiman-scripted episode “The Doctor’s Wife.”

As for why Capaldi is vacating the role, he says he wanted to leave while he was still giving the show his best work.

“They asked me to stay on. And I love this show,” Capaldi explains. “But I began to get worried about my capacity to deliver my best work. The schedule is very intense, and I began to wonder, how many different ways can I find to say, ‘The time vortex is going to open up and destroy the entire universe as we know it unless we blow up that model spaceship over there’? It concerned me that if I did more, yes, I’d be able to do it, but I’d just be phoning it in. And I didn’t ever want to be in that situation.”

Doctor Who Season 10 premieres April 15 on the BBC and BBC America.

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