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doctornolonger · 5 months

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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

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claraoswalds · 5 months

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THE DOCTOR + first words

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thefiresofpompeii · 4 months

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“sometimes i think…. what if i’m the bad luck” “i’ve got no one” ah good to know not all the trauma has been therapised out of you my dude

#rehab out of order just enough to get over the time war ptsd et cetera but not enough to get over the loneliness #doctor who spoilers #doctor who #the church on ruby road #dw #jamie.txt #fifteenth doctor #ncuti gatwa #fifteen

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macbethz · 8 months

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He wonders what age he’s finally reached. The Time War used years as ammunition; at the Battle of Rodan’s Wedding alone, he’d aged to five million and then regressed to a mewling babe, merely from shrapnel. Now, the ache in his bones feels… one thousand years old? Well. Call it nine hundred. Sounds better.

In the same way RTD's 'Doctor Who and the Time War,' where the above quote is from, is a page from a novel that doesn't exist, this is a splash page from a comic that doesn't exist. Time War PTSD, much like the war itself, is multidimensional.

Now available as a print by popular demand!

#YEHAWWW this is one of my favorite pieces i went thru so many iterations before even starting this lol. i have a vision #also references to earth being replicated and used as a weapon in the war bc i like that part #you guys better clap like im your lame boyfriend i rlly love this one #doctor who #dw #9th doctor #ninth doctor #dw fanart #doctor who fanart #dr who #time war #doctor who comics #my art #dr nyarlathotep #my comics #i dont actually think ive been putting anything in that tag oops.#christopher eccleston

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clearlyaginger · 1 month

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Demisexual? No, you misheard. I said Dummysexual. I'm attracted to that moron over there. Look at them. They just tripped over nothing and set the house on fire. I'm in love.

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asuni-m · 12 days

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Do you think, in Journey’s End, when Martha threatens to blow up the Earth to stop the Daleks, the Tenth Doctor has a flashback to him destroying Gallifrey?

And how Davros says The Doctor turns ordinary people into soldiers, he realizes it’s true. Because The Doctor was an ordinary person turned into a soldier and he did destroy is own planet to stop the Daleks. And Martha was going to follow in his path. A path he created first.

Do you think he saw himself in Martha? And all the things he’s ever done? All the deaths he caused? How, the only other planet he’s ever called home, was going to be destroyed by him, again?

How it was going to happen all over again, all because of him?

Cause I do.

#doctor who #the doctor #tenth doctor #davros #the daleks #martha jones #gallifrey #donna noble #rose Tyler #the time war #the moment #journeys end #captain jack harkness #mickey smith #jackie tyler #the destruction of Gallifrey #all over again #because of him

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dimestoretajic · 7 months

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"Oh, hey, a bunch of new Doctor Who spoilers dropped! I bet they're all whimsical and well-drawn! Ooh, here comes the Edwardian dandy himself, the Eighth Doct-"

"OH COME ON, THAT WAS ONE TIME!"

#magic the gathering #mtg #doctor who #mtgwho #eighth doctor #paul mcgann #THE TIME WAR WAS HARD ON HIM OKAY #YOU DON'T GOTTA IMMORTALIZE HIM AT THE *MOMENT OF HIS DEATH*

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aletterinthenameofsanity · 3 months

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There's something to be said about Nine and Twelve as parallels, about them being these seeming grumps with hearts of gold who must relearn optimism while being fundamentally kind at the end of the day, and Eleven and Thirteen as parallels, as these lonely tinkerers who travel with multiple companions at the same time but push people away before they get too close because they are creatures built on grief, and Ten alone, as something that is all and none of the above, who starts out as a creature born of love but who loses said love and is willing to die and must find grounding but loses said grounding and declares himself the Time Lord Victorious because if he cannot have love he has to have something, anything, he can call his own, and about how all five of them are shaped, fundamentally, by their grief and their guilt over the Time War and being the last of their kind and how every companion leaves them and they will always, always be the last one in the TARDIS, always be the last one surviving, no matter what, and yet all of them, at the end of the day, die to save someone. Die to be kind, just one more time. Because that is what ties them all together. That is what makes them the Doctor.

#it's just something i've been thinking about when writing eleven and thirteen #ninth doctor #tenth doctor #eleventh doctor #twelfth doctor #thirteenth doctor #hi i'm having a lot of feelings about my favorite tragic hopeful kind afraid angry protective LONELY alien today #it's about how they stole a TARDIS and ran away from home #about how they've always been running #and then the Time War keeps them running #and so do their companions #the companions that push them to be kind also push them to be cruel #because they are both the source of hope and tragedy at the end of the day #and i'm fine #i'm not crying you're crying #doctor who #meta

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justletmeramble1701 · 1 month

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Do you guys subscribe to the theory that (at least, starting in NuWho) the Doctor can, somewhat, subconsciously control his regenerations?

Like, of course, 8 wanted to be a warrior, so he became the War Doctor (I know that he drank a potion for that, but that might’ve just been lemonade according to the Target Novelization).

War wanted to be the hero, to earn the title, the Doctor, again, so he became 9.

9 wanted to be someone who was the perfect partner to Rose (human), so he became 10.

10, in his vanity, wanted his final regeneration to be young, so he became 11.

11, after all the heartache, wanted to be more distant (and also what they said in series 8), so he became 12.

12 wanted a kind, fresh start, so he became 13.

13 wanted to open up to someone, so she became 14.

14 wanted time to heal, so he split off 15.

This is not an original theory, and I'm not even saying that I buy into it fully it, but it's interesting. It would be interesting if the Doctor had a tiny bit of control over their regeneration (Romana did, somehow) and most of the time his wants either backfire or only half work.

What do you think?

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edwardshundredyearoldspunk · 7 months

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been thinking about that scene in rose where nine looks at himself in the mirror ("could be worse," he says). there's so many ways to interpret this. rtd cheekily says he just had a haircut, others interpret it as him being fresh off a regeneration. but since it's implied he's been traveling as nine for a while now, I actually like to think that in all that time he could never look at himself because of what he did during the time war. to me that's such a rich interpretation, that the day he meets rose is the day he can finally look at himself in the mirror

#I'm at any point in time having excessive feelings about rose and the doctor #doctor who #ninerose #ninerose is such a foundational basis for tenrose and i don't understand why there's apparently ship wars?#like that's the same ship what are you fighting about?

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odakota-rose · 2 months

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so many gems in the Doctor Who script library the BBC just released but today I'm here in 4x02, The Fires of Pompeii

#doctor who #donna noble #tenth doctor #the fires of pompeii #literally this is donna's second trip #the first time she met the doctor she saw what he was capable of #and this episode does that too but in a different way #somebody far more eloquent than i needs to elaborate on how this was on a small scale reminiscent #of what the doctor had to do to end the time war #(or at least at this point thought he did. not getting into the timey-wimey retcons rn)#and how he always seems to end up having to make these soulcrushing choices on his own bc that's what being the doctor means #but donna does something very different here and chooses to take half the weight of this impossible choice #and i am very 😭 about it #don't mind me just spiraling over a sixteen year old episode of doctor who on this fine thursday afternoon #as one does #wait.... it's tuesday. dammit.#my posts

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nethnad · 5 months

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watching nuwho and then classic who depictions of the master is so funny you have ten going "i know him... i could detect him anywhere if he was on earth...." and then in the sea devils the master is just meandering around the same building complex as the doctor and it takes jo looking out the window and going "WAIT A SECOND" for him to even notice he's there. bestie your husband is committing crimes as we speak ignore the golf guy for 3 seconds maybe

#the scene where trenchard is going on abt the golf tournament to stall for time and the doctor and jo just look so exasperated... same #they dont even know hes working with the master at that point theyre just sick of hearing abt golf LMAO #anyways building up a new theory in which threegado is basically married but isnt actually #and the whole 'detecting anywhere' is bc thoschei decided to get hitched mid time war so theyd have next of kin arrangements or something #otherwise. all the doctors shit goes to brax :/// he'd just make the tardis a museum piece again #dw #threegado #doctor who #thoschei #third doctor #delgado!master

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spacerelativity · 3 months

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