Right, I feel like it's quite a bold and experimental bunch of stories but it doesn't advertise that about itself and the scale of the experiment goes unnoticed by people. Like, the fact that he willingly sacrifices himself for the sake of one person and isn't even sure he can regenerate after was an entirely new idea then. It's not just about switching into a new body when the old one wears out or he trips and falls in a hole or something in the process of saving the universe-- with all the emotional weight of changing his shirt. There's personal stakes in regeneration and the Dr can be uncertain about his own survival, he is also now just as dependent on his human friends to keep going as he is on time lord biology. The basis of the modern Doctor's simultaneous existential dread and drop-of-a-hat suicidality basically starts 20 years into the show.
And he makes sense as a self-correction after both Three and Four's increasingly fractured and abusive relationship with Gallifrey, I think. Like the Time Lords had pushed Four near to the point of justifying genocide and radically altering history for them, so he slams on the breaks and goes off to be relentlessly nice and play Space Dad with the humans instead. There's a precedent for Eight's refusing to be a pawn in the War.
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Like, the fact that he willingly sacrifices himself for the sake of one person and isn't even sure he can regenerate after was an entirely new idea then. It's not just about switching into a new body when the old one wears out or he trips and falls in a hole or something in the process of saving the universe-- with all the emotional weight of changing his shirt. There's personal stakes in regeneration and the Dr can be uncertain about his own survival, he is also now just as dependent on his human friends to keep going as he is on time lord biology.
The basis of the modern Doctor's simultaneous existential dread and drop-of-a-hat suicidality basically starts 20 years into the show.
And he makes sense as a self-correction after both Three and Four's increasingly fractured and abusive relationship with Gallifrey, I think. Like the Time Lords had pushed Four near to the point of justifying genocide and radically altering history for them, so he slams on the breaks and goes off to be relentlessly nice and play Space Dad with the humans instead. There's a precedent for Eight's refusing to be a pawn in the War.