#doctor who the return

[doctornolonger]

People are sometimes surprised when I mention that the unproduced story I regret the most isn't any of the many cancelled FP projects but Steven Hall's Fifty-Fifty, which would have wrapped up some of Big Finish's best character arcs with a conflict between the Seventh and Eighth Doctors at "the moment where 7 went bad".

It would have been the retroactive pinnacle of Wilderness Years, taking its two Doctors with such different characterizations and pitting them against each other. It also … doesn't make a ton of sense. Even taking into account the timey-wimey memory effects of a multi-Doctor event, how could such a dramatic character arc for the Seventh Doctor possibly come and go without the Eighth Doctor – his future self – having any idea?

This question keeps coming up in Doctor Who, and every time the answer feels contrived. Steven Hall would have solved it for Fifty-Fifty by introducing a "Temporal Wish" that allows parts of history to be rewritten without timeline damage. Elsewhere, Big Finish has resorted to hand-waving: every story where characters meet out-of-order has to involve an ad hoc disguise, a memory wipe, or a promise from one of the characters that next time they'll pretend not to have met (🥴). And don't even get me started on "season 6b"!

In what Ingiga cleverly calls Doctor Who: The Return, RTD faced the same question. What if we had more Tenth Doctor stories, not squeezed into any of the well-trodden gaps in his timeline but set after The End of Time – genuinely new stories, taking the character places that it never would've made sense for him to go (such as therapy)?

RTD answered this question twice. Once the regular way, the ad hoc way: David Tennant's contrived return at the end of The Power of the Doctor. And then, emboldened by the Power of the Showrunner, he solved it again – and he solved it for every story, now and forever.

I think down the timeline, they all separated. They all went like that. All the Doctors came back to life with their individual TARDISes. The gift of the Toymaker. And they're all out there traveling around in what I'm calling the Doctorverse. It's the Doctorverse. And I want to create a future in which Sylvester McCoy, he can survive and have an adventure. Because one of the things about The Star Beast is, to get you back and Catherine, we had to jump through so many hoops. Which is great story, but it's like, why can't you just arrive and step out the TARDIS? […] Because this is exactly what Big Finish does. It's exactly what everyone does in their imagination. […] It's time to just kind of open it up and say, they're all out there now.

Or as he put it a different time,

Doctors galore, with infinite possibilities. All Doctors exist. All stories are true.

Gig's latest piece rightly dismisses the "Flowchart" theory of bigeneration, but frankly, I think the fiddly stuff about "fix" vs "fixed" etc. is a red herring. The simple fact is that if Fourteen's post-Giggle memories flow backwards into Fifteen – if Seven's post-TV Movie memories flow backwards into Eight – bigeneration wouldn't solve the Fifty-Fifty problem.

Yes, RTD tries to have his cake and eat it too. In the dream logic of The Giggle, "emotional healing" is a mysterious essence that can be transferred through time independently of memories, just as incinerated roads can magically heal themselves in The Star Beast. But in terms of what RTD's trying to accomplish, in terms of what bigeneration is, I think it's okay to take him at his word.

Speaking of words, the leak called it "bi-regeneration", and even after the episode aired, much of the internet followed suit. But that's not what it's called. It's just bigeneration: not a type of regeneration, an alternative. And indeed, now we have this option – now we have Fourteen, not just Ten – why would we ever go back to playing the timeline-squeezing game? If Big Finish officially untethered itself from the past Doctors' timelines and, say, freed Eight from his interminable death march – would anyone miss it?

Lawrence Miles certainly didn't think so when he advocated a similar untethering 24 years ago.

When you watched Doctor Who as a kid, it kind of lost some of its edge from the start, because you knew for a fact how things were going to turn out. […] I've always felt that the Missing Adventures… or PDAs, or whatever you want to call them… have got a similar problem. The Doctor can't die [or go to therapy – n8.] We know the future, it's not even an issue. That was why I did what I did in Interference. Even if they don't like it, I hope people realize there's a purpose behind it all. It's suppose to justify the existence of the PDAs. From that point on, you can never be sure what the outcome's going to be.

Nobody picked up his suggestion back then, but then again, Miles lacked the Power of the Showrunner. If Tales of the TARDIS' therapeutic dreamscapes are any indication, it won't be long before other writers adopt RTD's in-vision musings as gospel.

So what will happen when Fourteen dies? Will he regenerate? Will he dissolve into sparkles, his ✨emotional healing✨ shooting back in time to become Fifteen? Or like the prior iteration of the "Tenth Doctor happy ending offshoot" idea, is he simply mortal now? The frank answer is that we'll probably never find out: that's simply not the kind of story that bigeneration is meant to tell.

Or maybe RTD's already told us. The quote earlier about "Doctors galore" came from the note accompanying his "Doctor Who and the Time War". That story shows us an Eighth Doctor who survived to the very last days of the Time War, with no War Doctor to be found; it's easy to imagine a bigeneration on Karn not unlike RTD's speculation that "Peter Davison once was left behind on the surface of Androzani and woke up and there was a TARDIS and he carried on having those adventures."

And in the story – released almost seven years after The Night of the Doctor showed us the birth of the War Doctor – Eight struggles, and he succumbs, and he regenerates … into Christopher Eccleston's Nine. Now there's a flowchart that I could get behind.

#bigeneration #the giggle #fourteenth doctor #fifteenth doctor #ingiga #gigawho #rtd 2.0 #doctor who the return #effortpost #doctor who and the time war #interference #fifty-fifty #50/50 #steven hall #seventh doctor #tales of the tardis

[spacephobos]

the doctor: propositions the toymaker

the master hearing it from inside his tooth:

#THOSCHEI RETURN GUYS #IM NOT CLOWNING #15S GONNA HAVE HIS BF BACK #the doctor #master x doctor #doctor x master #doctor who #the giggle #the master #thoschei

[rebelsafoot]

queen of iconic outfits im not gonna lie

#doctor who #doctor who fanart #rose tyler #rose tyler fanart #dw #dw fanart #billie piper #regular donnaposting will return after this message

[davidtennan-t]

at one point during the Christmas special I randomly remembered oh yeah fourteens probably binging a Netflix series or dusting his living room

#that episode was soooo good tho! #really do love Ncuti #and ROSE NOBLE AND MEL RETURNING??! #manifesting a Donna cameo 🥹 #dw spoilers #the church on ruby road #doctor who #ncuti gatwa #fifteenth doctor #david tennant #fourteenth doctor #ruby sunday

[olympain]

From three years of being the greatest chums, the firmest of friends, part-time lovers and occasional time-travellers.

#dwedit #timelordgifs #dwgif #doctor who #matt smith #karen gillan #arthur darvill #11th doctor #eleventh doctor #rory williams #amy pond #karen and the babes #original #*gifs #i am manifesting them returning in wild blue yonder

[yourtinseltinkerbell]

1x02 // 2x03 // 3x03 // 4x03

#doctor who #dwedit #rtdedit #timelordgifs #~ #i can't believe RTD is returning to us 😭

[astrhae]

After a very long time, something's coming back.

#say what you will about ten returning as fourteen #but david tennant really did come back to deliver THIS level of performance #and i NEED the full specials now #doctor who #dwedit #david tennant #davidtennantedits #tvedit #televisongifs #tvarchive #dailydw #dailyflicks #mediagifs #doctorwhoedit #my edits #fourteenth doctor

[noblogname765]

Oh JUST LOOK AT HIM

#could I imagine I will see David return as a doctor? how lucky we all are! #he got to top dilf list of the year #best doctor in the universe #david tennant #14th doctor #fourteenth doctor #doctor who #doctor who special #doctor who 60th anniversary #dw 60th

[romanovanatalia]

twojamie + letterboxd reviews

#dwedit #dwgifs #classic who #doctor who #twojamie #second doctor #jamie mccrimmon #two #mine #* #this is my triumphant return

[bobbie-robron]

The DoctorDonna Returns!!

#doctor who #dr who #dr who 60th anniversary #14th doctor #david tennant #catherine tate #donna noble #DoctorDonna returns #adored this sequence #what a joy to have these two back together #dw spoilers #dr who spoilers #doctor who spoilers #the star beast #20231125

[lonelyzarquon]

I'll look after everything else.

#doctor who #dwedit #twelfth doctor #dwgif #timelordgifs #peter capaldi #the return of doctor mysterio #mine #my gifs

[doctornolonger]

The first six minutes of Who Cares' review of "The Giggle" are the most satisfying visualization I've seen of how the 60th celebrated Doctor Who's anniversary so well: it may have omitted multi-Doctor schenanigans and the Centenary's cameos galore, but – just like the 50th – it was a culmination of the Doctor's character arc from the whole show up to that point.

And that's just the first six minutes! Kudos to Neo, Gig, Oliver, and Missy for capping off NuWho in such spectacular fashion.

#the giggle #fourteenth doctor #rtd 2.0 #doctor who the return #bigeneration #but also ... #twelfth doctor #Youtube #who cares #ingiga #gigawho

[thespianwordnerd]

Everyone stop and look at Jodie's reaction to being told her food is delicious!!

#pov me if they announced 13 and Yaz returning to doctor who #doctor who #jodie whittaker #thirteenth doctor #bake off #great british bake off #gbbo #gbbo 2024

[mizgnomer]

David Tennant at Emerald City Comic Con (March 2023) answering the question: What's your favorite costume you've ever worn?

Con video source: [ tentaclecouple.com ]

Question: What's your favorite costume you've ever worn? David: Oh! That's a great question. I don't know. It's hard, isn't it? Because there's different answers to that. There's most comfortable, which is probably something I wore in Staged. [ audience laughs ] I suppose it's almost after you've finished it - that something becomes so recognizable with a character. So I suppose it would be something with the Doctor or with Crowley who wear sort of a version of the same thing. It's very nice to slip back into that when you've been away for a while. I don't know. I'm very pleased with the costume we came up with for the last version of the Doctor, I must say. I'm very pleased with that. The coat's got a lovely swish to it.

#david tennant #this post was fun to make #goodness it took a while though #I couldn't even fit all of crowley's looks #good omens #tenth doctor #crowley #fourteenth doctor #doctor who #(and himself) #it's good to know he likes returning to each of them #stuff i posted #costumes #characters to come back to #with iconic looks

[doctorwhoisadhd]

not enough rock murder in modern who. we need to return to our roots

#ari opinion hour #rtd give me rock murder RIGHT now #doctor who #dw #dr who #enough returns of past companions! MORE ROCK MURDER RIGHT NOW.

[romansmartini]

have you ever seen two people more married in your entire life. please

#doctor who #twelveclara #so much to unpack here. #first of all the banter. just kill me. #the fact that he's helping her students on a regular basis. the intertwining of their lives to a dangerous degree #the fact that he jokes about their season 8 breakup as if that's something they joke about #the hug. THE HUG. #suggesting that physical touch is something they Do now #him admitting he missed her. not a huge deal but meaningful To Me. #the doctor who classic 'im never leaving you!' <- dies 1-3 episodes later. which will never get old #can we return to the hug one more time. insert joke about how i know he takes it from behind. and so on and so forth. #and last but not least the way he looks at her. man. stares off into the distance forever #i always forget about this little moment but it really is such a beautiful one