Doctor Who fans, let’s talk about that bigeneration…was this a smart idea or a really dumb one?
It seems like its purpose was so they didn’t have to fully close the door on David Tennant as the Doctor once again…but then the 14th Doctor didn’t reemerge during the era of the 15th Doctor.
So maybe there was a plan to continue to make David Tennant led specials…but that didn’t happen.
And didn’t David Tennant still being there undermine the introduction of Ncuti Gatwa, even if it was cool to still have David there and there to be two Doctors working together to defeat the Toymaker.
You could claim that they did it so David Tennant’s Doctor could have a happy ending of sorts, but are they really saying that any version of the Doctor would just stop helping people?
Well maybe, the 14th Doctor is the one who is destined to become the Curator version of the Doctor that we saw played by Tom Baker in the 50th Anniversary special.
But that also raises the question of whether the 14th Doctor will continue to regenerate or even bigenerate.
But doesn’t the idea that the Doctor can bigenerate actually lose the stakes of the Doctor being able to get killed? Yes, regeneration was always a way that the Doctor could cheat death, but it would force a change of actor, which for fans of the actor currently playing the Doctor would still be something we’d have to mourn as if the Doctor had died.
But of course, they reused the bigeneration thing straight away with the return of The Rani, which again, did kinda make the bigeneration of the Doctor suddenly feel less unique.
And if the 15th Doctor could see that The Rani has bigenerated and split into two, why didn’t the 15th Doctor think to enlist the support of the still alive 14th Doctor?
To be honest, I just think the whole bigeneration concept was poorly thought out.
My biggest piece of evidence being that shortly after David Tennant split into Ncuti Gatwa and then wanted to go off in the Tardis, David Tennant protested that why should Ncuti be the one to continue on and Ncuti proclaimed that he is the older one…
What? Did Russell T Davies forget how time travel works in the show?
David Tennant split into two, so the 14th and 15th Doctor would be exactly the same age. This wasn’t a situation like when the 12th Doctor met the 1st Doctor and could rightly say that he was much older than the first.
But despite Russell clearly not thinking through the concept enough to know that they would be the same age, it was just another thing that caused issues with the established rules of the franchise.
This is after David Tennant regenerating twice, secret versions of the Doctor like the War and Fugitive Doctors and the controversial Morbius Doctors and the Timeless Children versions of the character, as well as somewhat unexplainable things like Richard E Grant being canonised and potentially three different iterations of the Doctor.
But more on those another day.
You can get loads more Movie and TV Show articles in the Movies section of the site, and don’t forget to check out all our pop culture videos and Geek Battle Podcast on the Geek Battle social channels below:
