David Tennant’s 14th Doctor was killed and bigenerated into Ncuti Gatwa’s 15th Doctor.
Now, I’m not sure how well established the whole bigeneration thing is because even Russell T Davis seemed confused within the episode where the idea debuted as Ncuti’s Doctor would incorrectly say to David’s Doctor that Ncuti was older of the two…as if he was from the future…which he wasn’t.
David Tennant split in half and so the two were the exact same age.
But there is another unclear wrinkle here.
David’s Fourteenth doctor was fatally injured which is why he started to regenerate.
But instead of regenerating he split into two and bigenerated.
How did that allow the fatally injured Fourteenth Doctor to remain? Did he still remain healed or did he in fact also regenerate and just keep his appearance as he had done when the tenth regenerated and syphoned his excess regenerative energy into his spare hand which incidentally also regenerated twice when he first became the tenth doctor.
Because if the Tenth staying as David Tennant could happen because the excess regeneration energy went into another form of himself which was his cut off hand previously, if the bigeneration was happening it does appear to be the same process whereby the excess energy went into the second version of the character which was the new Ncuti Gatwa regeneration,
whilst David Tennant actually is probably also a new revived regeneration of the Doctor who like before was just able to not change as he hadn’t before.
So, with this possibility, we could say that David Tennat actually played both the Fourteenth Doctor and a different Fifteenth Doctor to Ncuti.
And that would now mean that David Tennant has arguably played the 10th, 11th, 12th, 14th, 15th,
16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st Doctors depending on what you consider to count or not.
But we’re not done yet…As a minor sidestep we should look at the thirteenth Doctor becoming the Fourteenth as it was a rare occasion whereby clothes were also included as part of the regeneration process.
Now this probably happened so David Tennant didn’t have to try to fit in Jodie Whitaker’s costume, but was something that by established lore, shouldn’t seem to happen.
Except that when transitioning from the Fourth to the fifth Doctor we did see the Watch take the place of tom Baker and then as part of the process we did see Peter Davison dressed as a clown before taking his final form as the fifth doctor.
So, clothes can rarely but on multiple occasions are established to be part of the regeneration process.
But now, back to the main confusing web.
During the era of the fifteenth Doctor, they showed his past lives which didn’t show all the timeless children or morbius Doctors, but did show the Fugitive Doctor and strangely included an appearance of Richard E Grant as the Doctor.
Now, this was a representation of him that has never been seen on the show before,
and Richard E Grant had previously played the animated Shalka Doctor, who was originally announced as being the official Ninth Doctor before the show’s 2005 revival.
And he also played a version of the 10th Doctor in the supposedly non canon comic relief special from 1999, The Curse of Fatal Death.
So, who was this Doctor? You could say it was the animated one, but didn’t appear as he did when animated.
Or you could say it was the Curse of Fatal Death Tenth Doctor,
but he looked older, which we know can be excused for when older actors return to the role, although within the Curse of Fatal Death we did see the entire lifespan of the Richard E Grant doctor play out on screen. So, it can’t be him right?
Well assuming Grant’s Doctor shown in the Ncuti episode was the Shalka Doctor in non-animated and reinstated canon form, that would push David Tennant’s Fourteenth Doctor up to being the 22nd Doctor and Ncuti to the 23rd.
If It was Grant’s Curse of Fatal Death Doctor being canonised it would make David now the 26th Doctor and Ncuti the 27th Doctor.
If both the Shalka and Curse of Fatal Death Doctors are now canonised,
that would make David the 27th and Ncuti the 28th.
And if this Richard E Grant Doctor was neither the Shalka or Curse 10th Doctors and in fact a new one we didn’t otherwise know of that would make David either the 22nd again or potentially the 28th and Ncuti the 29th Doctor.
And then we have Billie Piper.
We saw that Ncuti began to regenerate and we saw that he became Billie Piper.
The only question as to whether this was the Doctor or not comes from the end credits of the show where it said introducing Billie Piper and didn’t do it in the traditional way where it would have said introducing Billie Piper as The Doctor.
So, there’s where we are at, at the time of writing and Billie Piper is either the Sixteenth Doctor or possibly the Thirtieth.
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