Does the TARDIS contain Time Lord regeneration energy?
In the Doctor Who episode Badwolf, Rose Tyler looks into the heart of the TARDIS and its inside was a similar yellow colour (as seen in this image).
Is that a form of Time Lord regeneration powers?
Not precisely. Though regeneration has been shown to be a Time Lord capability, exposure over billions of years to the Untempered Schism (Time Vortex) contributed to the Time Lords' ability to regenerate. (TV: A Good Man Goes to War) Based on that, there may be some overlap in the energies involved.
The visuals of recent regenerations have pretty much all involved golden light and pyrotechnics to some degree (which also matched the time vortex energy revealed in the TV episode Bad Wolf), but there have been many other different presentations of the regeneration process too:
During a regeneration, a Time Lord's body could:
- shine with milky white light, (TV: The Tenth Planet, PROSE: The Indestructible Man)
- a swirl of rainbow colours (TV: The Caves of Androzani, Time and the Rani, Utopia)
- or no colours, (COMIC: The Night Walkers)
- crackle with electricity, (TV: Doctor Who),
- appear as the body being engulfed in flames, (PROSE: Exodus, COMIC: Fast Asleep)
- or with a discharge of golden energy, which could vary in speed and intensity from being brief and contained to explosive and capable, in extreme circumstances, of causing damage to the nearby area. (COMIC: The Forgotten, Doorway to Hell, TV: The Parting of the Ways, Utopia, The Stolen Earth, The End of Time, Day of the Moon, Let's Kill Hitler, The Night of the Doctor, The Day of the Doctor, The Time of the Doctor, Hell Bent, The Lie of the Land, World Enough and Time, The Doctor Falls, Twice Upon a Time)
In other cases, there was no apparent energy discharge at all, just a fade away to the next incarnation. (TV: Planet of the Spiders, PROSE: The Ancestor Cell, The Touch of the Nurazh)
In the case of the Doctor's fourth regeneration, the Doctor appeared to merge with and become the Watcher, after which he transformed from the Watcher into his fifth incarnation. (TV: Logopolis)
On the occasion that the Doctor had just been granted a brand new regeneration cycle, he initially emitted a large eruption of energy in an almost liquid form. Sometime later, when his actual shift to a new body occurred, there was only a very short, almost negligible discharge of energy. (TV: The Time of the Doctor).
The TARDIS has a link to the Time Vortex ( lots of info here: https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Time_Vortex ) - thus enabling it to travel in time.
Time Lords have an ability to regenerate ( you can find lots of detail here: https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Regeneration ) and the TARDIS is known to have beneficial capabilities that can assist the likelihood of either a smooth/easy regeneration or the ability to recover after a regeneration:
I can't be dogmatic and say "no" outright. The TARDIS has been shown to be symbiotic with The Doctor in various ways. However, I can't agree with the reasons you give for suggesting that the TARDIS possesses the same regeneration energy as the Timelords.
Firstly, the energy that filled Rose when she looked into the heart of the TARDIS (in 'The Parting of the Ways', not 'Badwolf') actually came from the Time Vortex:
ROSE: I looked into the Tardis, and the Tardis looked into me.
DOCTOR: You looked into the Time Vortex. Rose, no one's meant to see that.
Also, The Doctor saved Rose by absorbing this energy from her:
DOCTOR: I absorbed all the energy of the Time Vortex, and no one's meant to do that. Every cell in my body's dying.
This energy is what killed The Doctor, so it is not regeneration energy. Evidently, regeneration energy is not the only golden, firey energy in the universe.
Consider though that the TARDIS itself sort of "regenerates" too. Although the change in control rooms has been explained away as simply a change of "desktop theme", in 'Eleventh Hour' the Doctor described the process of the TARDIS renewing itself as something out of his control and completely surprising:
DOCTOR: Okay, what have you got for me this time? (as he is about to enter his newly regenerated TARDIS)
We don't see any of the same golden energy emitting from the TARDIS (there is a bit of an orange glow on The Doctor's face when he first opens the door but that appears to be from the lighting and colour-scheme), although the TARDIS key does glow orange when it is ready.
I would say the implication is that "regeneration" is something of a Timelord philosophy as well as an ability. Just as they use their dimensionally-transcendental technology in things like paintings (Day of The Doctor) as well as their TARDIS, it makes sense that they would make their vehicles regenerate so they last as long as they do! Incidentally, K9 also regenerated in the Disney spin-off series, if you consider that canonical! But the ability of the TARDIS to regenerate appears to come from a different technology to their own inherent ability to physically regenerate their bodies.
I don't think an explicit link has been made clear between the time vortex energy that Rose was subjected to when she looked into the Heart of the TARDIS and timelord rejuvenation in any of the TV shows or the expanded universe.
However, there are some similarities to suggest this:
It would seem that time travel and rejuvenation are also somehow linked - again, I don't think this is explicitly stated anywhere. But, timelords are exposed to the naked vortex on Gallifrey at an early age.
So, while not conclusive, there may indeed be a link between rejuvenation energy and vortex energy.
No.
The first explicit mention of regeneration being an energy process was in the 1983 serial "Mawdryn Undead."* Mawdryn and the other "mutants" in the story need the Doctor's regeneration energy to put an end to their unending cycle of regeneration and mutation. It turns out that the energy needed does not actually need to come from a Time Lord; any source of compatible time energy will work, such as when two versions of the Brigadier "short out their time differential," releasing a huge blast. If the TARDIS had had regeneration energy available, it could have been harnessed by the mutants (who had a definite understanding of Time Lord technology) or the Doctor, to solve the mutants' problem without potentially robbing the Doctor of his remaining regenerations.
*This term "energy of a Time Lord," used in "Mawdryn Undead" may actually have been intended as a reference to the original notion that the Doctor's first regeneration in "The Tenth Planet" was actually rejuvenation effect caused by the release of an enormous amount of energy during the destruction of the Cybermen's planet, Mondas. (During John Nathan-Turner's time as producer of the show, there were a lot of allusions to old episodes from the 1960s, even though most of those episodes had never been rerun.) The first time that the Doctor actually regenerated as a clear result of his body being damaged beyond repair was in the "Planet of the Spiders." Before the Third Doctor regenerates in episode six of "Planet of the Spiders," there is actually another regeneration scene for another Time Lord, probably so that the regeneration process could be explained to the audience properly.
I don't think so because the Doctor says that he can regenerate whenever he chooses. He also said that the power of the heart of the TARDIS is powerful for any body. I guess even himself. So the Doctor made himself regenerate so that the energy from the TARDIS would pour out of him in little bits.
