My own take is that it's a sort of "shared pool" thing. The more Time Lords you have accessing this shared pool of lives, the less regenerations they can have access to. So eventually twelve was settled on as a nice straightforward number, and everyone agreed to stick by this, and policed it themselves. The Master had (theoretically) moved onto a fourteenth "life" when he took over the body of Tremas (ie the Anthony Ainley Master) but this wasn't recognised as a formal "regeneration" as such. Certainly he did spend a lot of time after that in the Matrix (which he'd gained access to in "The Deadly Assassin") so it may be that he was using this as a way of avoiding problems.
It's likely that Romana's regeneration is a good example of the way the average Time Lord would regard the process - it's a matter of choice, and something you do in order to make a change in your life. In the case of the Doctor, as a "renegade", he has to watch himself, and thus only regenerates when he's done something supremely daft, self-sacrificing, or generally fatal. This is possibly why he doesn't have the same degree of control over the process that Romana did, and is more than likely to be the cause of post-regeneration trauma.
The business of being forcibly regenerated (as per the change from 2 to 3) also appears to produce trauma, which leads me to speculate that the removal of "lives" would be some form of punishment for misdemeanours on Gallifrey. Possibly this is where the Master lost some of his?
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-05-17 10:30 pm (UTC)It's likely that Romana's regeneration is a good example of the way the average Time Lord would regard the process - it's a matter of choice, and something you do in order to make a change in your life. In the case of the Doctor, as a "renegade", he has to watch himself, and thus only regenerates when he's done something supremely daft, self-sacrificing, or generally fatal. This is possibly why he doesn't have the same degree of control over the process that Romana did, and is more than likely to be the cause of post-regeneration trauma.
The business of being forcibly regenerated (as per the change from 2 to 3) also appears to produce trauma, which leads me to speculate that the removal of "lives" would be some form of punishment for misdemeanours on Gallifrey. Possibly this is where the Master lost some of his?