Doctor Who's companion novels considered a different regeneration for the Doctor in 1996, one that involved him being blown to pieces and still coming back. The BBC rejected this idea as it pushed the character's abilities and the boundaries of regeneration too far. Regeneration has limits, with the Doctor needing to stay intact for a new form.

Doctor Who has seen many actors play The Doctor thanks to his regeneration abilities, but those abilities almost took a different direction in a 1996 installment of the Virgin New Adventures companion novels. Named for their publishers - Virgin Publishing - and intended to fill the void after the original Doctor Who show went off-air in 1989, the novels spanned from 1991 to 1998. They focused on Sylvester McCoy's Seventh Doctor until the final book. At that point, the focus shifted to a character named Bernice Summerfield, rather than Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor, originally introduced...