A Double Romana

It's always strange seeing the two Romanas together. The first time I was watching through Doctor Who, of course, it was strange seeing Princess Astra replacing the original Romana. Last night I finished watching through The Armageddon Factor again, the last serial to feature Mary Tamm as the Doctor's companion, Romana, before the character regenerates at the beginning of the next serial, from which point she was played by Lalla Ward, who confusingly played the character of Princess Astra in The Armageddon Factor.

It always seems to me they could have more artfully explained the change. In The Armageddon Factor, Princess Astra turns out to be a missing, final segment of the Key to Time, a powerful object the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Romana had been assembling over the course of the season (Armageddon Factor is the season finale). They could have worked in some explanation about how Astra's physical form, no longer being of use to Astra herself, was passed on to a critically injured Romana.

Steven Moffat worked in an explanation for why the Twelfth Doctor resembled a character previously played by Peter Capaldi in the Tenth Doctor's run, hinting it was a subconscious choice on the Doctor's part. In Destiny of the Daleks, Romana seems to choose the Lalla Ward shape based purely on personal taste. I'm amused by the scene in which she tries on various shapes, including a bodacious barbarian woman to which the Doctor has an amusingly stunned, almost shaken reply of, "No thank you. Not to-day."

It's hard for me not to read that as him picturing himself going to bed with each model. The scene is also slightly reminiscent of Tom Baker's first episode as the Doctor, when he humorously tried on a variety of costumes before settling on his familiar frock coat and scarf.

A lot of fans have tried to rationalise Romana casually trying out different bodies. My headcanon tends to be that she was using a holographic projection of some kind before finally regenerating for real, that being an aristocrat among aristocrats, Romana's family had more flexible regeneration capacity than riffraff like the Doctor.

Anyway, it's hard for me to see Lalla Ward as anyone but Romana. Even when I saw her playing Ophelia in Hamlet. Both she and Tom Baker put so much of themselves into those roles.