Honestly out of all the Timelords, it doesn’t surprise me that other than the Doctor the Rani is the one that’s able to Bi-regenerate
Like if I had to choose one that’s smart enough to be able to replicate this rare thing the Doctor accidentally stumbled upon, Of course it was The Rani.
HUGE DOCTOR WHO SPOILERS IF YOU HAVE NOT WATCHED THE THIRD 60TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL THAN LOOK AWAY
I have a theory
Okay SO I think bigeneration is RTD taking the timeless child and running with it.
So the doctor, right as they split, goes "But bigeneration is a myth!" Or something along those lines. But where would that myth come from, realistically? Probably from a pre-mind wipe doctor. They had already regenerated a solid chunk of times, its possible one of those times resulted in bigeneration, leading the timelords to wonder "shit is that possible? Can we do that?" With the answer likely being "no" due to their man-made regenerations vs the doctors natural ones. For all we know, this is how the doctor's actual species reproduces. All that being said however, some of you just noticed a flaw: "Where the fuck is the other doctor then?"
Well, they probably had to track down that version, de-age them, and wipe their mind too, as they had all the doctor's memories up until their split, and if they found their other half than the whole plan would be messed up. Its likely they were de-aged at the same time and went to live their respective childhoods. Maybe even ran into eachother. Became friends.
Became enemies.
Listen all I'm saying is RTD could do the funniest possible thing and make the Master a bigeneration of the Doctor. ALL I'M SAYING.
How insane do you think the Master is going to go when he finds out not only does his regeneration energy come from the Doctor but now every incarnation of the Doctor has Biregenerated and is alive so there is an infinite number of Doctors throughout the universe but only 1 of him?
He already felt so small compared to the Doctor and it made him go insane, what will this new information do?
Not only is the bigeneration great, but the entire plotline with the Fourteenth Doctor returning and staying put is brilliant.
I've seen a lot of people criticize it after (seemingly) making the starting assumption that the only reason it was done was to bring back David Tennant, just to wank off the first RTD era and bring the ratings up after the Chibnall era with the two lead actors from the show's most popular (according to ratings) series.
This is entirely the wrong outlook, in my opinion.
A better outlook is to start with the desire to heal the Doctor's trauma, to lighten the weight of the emotional baggage at the start of this brand new era with brand new viewers. And then you ask, how is the best way to do that, without some cheap memory wipe or time skip or simply ignoring it and pissing off fans?
The bigeneration isn't what I would have thought of, but it is definitely an answer to this question, and I think it's a great one. Doctor A has a few episodes, then Doctor B pops out of him, and flies off in the Tardis while Doctor A stays and... gets therapy, I guess.
The trouble is that you now have one Doctor that only has a few episodes of screentime, which is going to be considered unfair and cause a lot of upset in the fandom.
One solution is to give that role to someone who's already had it. And once you've decided you're going to do that, having the person that the Doctor settles down with makes sense to be a companion of said actor's previous Doctor. The resolution of RTD-era trauma for a lot of the audience, the pull of the return of David Tennant, all of that is a bonus stemming from this solution to achieving the main goal of helping Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor be as carefree as ever.
Is this actually how I think the Fourteenth Doctor and the biregen were conceptualized? I have no clue. And neither do you.
My point is partly that if you're going to make up a narrative anyway, why not make up a positive one? Furthermore, the exact order of how things were come up with don't necessarily matter because what the Fourteenth Doctor's existence did was ultimately great for the show and great for the Fifteenth Doctor's run.
'In 2005, writer Russell T Davies accomplished the miraculous feat of bringing back Doctor Who from the dead. And now with “The Giggle”, the last in his three 60th anniversary specials, it feels as though he has done the same thing all over again.
It has been a long time since Doctor Who has felt this exciting, this funny, this rich, this camp, this smart, this scary, this, well, sublime. It is almost cruel to have been given so little of David Tennant and Catherine Tate – a dream TARDIS team deserving of a full series – but but Ncuti Gatwa’s charismatic new Doctor, who made his debut tonight, suggests the future is bright for the sci-fi series.
Forget the Doctors, however. The real star of tonight’s spectacular was the villain: Neil Patrick Harris’ delightfully devious Toymaker. The character first made an appearance as a playful enigma in the classic series, opposite William Hartnell’s First Doctor.
Here he was recast as an “elemental force” beyond the science of the universe, a maniacal trickster governed only by the rules of play. His big game was to plunge Earth into chaos by making every human believe that their own opinion is supreme. It was a mischievous idea, and a satirical swipe at the last few years of rent-a-gob culture war blowhards and terminally online conspiracy theorists.
It was joyous to watch an actor having such an obvious blast with a role as Harris played the Toymaker as an agent of chaos. There are few scenes in Doctor Who – indeed, in all television – as magnificent as the one in which Harris lip synced for his life around UNIT HQ to “Spice Up Your Life”. What a flamboyant explosion of colour and delirium!
And yet, the Toymaker was no clown. It is rare for a Doctor Who villain to feel so unsettlingly unbeatable: like a god among insects, as frightening as he is frivolous.
The scenes in the Toymaker’s toy shop, for instance, in which the Doctor and Donna were trapped in an infinite hallway of tricks and terrors, were deliciously creepy. Just take the unsettling moment in which the Doctor discovered the body of a man who has been turned into a marionette, or when Donna was ambushed by a gang of Tim Burton-esque stop-motion puppets.
These moments not only showed off Russell T Davies’ talent for elegantly marrying tones (jump scares one moment, ludicrously camp the next), but how lavish Doctor Who is under his stewardship. The scale is bigger, the CGI is expensive, the visual language sharper, more polished. This is Doctor Who with Disney+ money.
The episode’s last laugh, however, was its big surprise: having been wounded by the Toymaker, David Tennant’s Doctor not only regenerated into Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth incarnation, he “bi-regenerated”, meaning that both Doctors now get to co-exist with each other.
It’s a totally new concept for the programme – and a slightly garbled way for the show to have its cake and eat it too. David Tennant’s Doctor got the happy ending he deserves, settling down with the Noble family to live a relatively normal life. The tender and humane Tennant was marvellous in these scene and as nonsensical as it is, I’m glad the bi-regeneration leaves the door open for his return.
And then there is Gatwa, our new Doctor. While he arrived sans trousers, his characterisation already felt complete. The Toymaker resolution – in which he and the two Doctors played a high-stakes game of catch – might have fallen flat in comparison to the rest of the episode, but the sassy Gatwa was already such a commanding presence that it didn’t quite seem to matter. Every scene with him in it was a joy. Every line was a reaffirmation that he is the Doctor.
What a time for to be a Doctor Who fan. The programme has never felt quite so alive.'
I really liked the Biregeneration, but I interpreted it in quite a specific way:
The Tenth Doctor is strange among the Doctors because he behaves the most like he’s a completely distinct individual— and because he seems more aware of how much power the Doctor truly has. I think he’s the most human Doctor because he is the most likely to try and use that power for good: then to get corrupted, and to fail. And he sacrifices himself in a messy and horrible way.
The Fourteenth Doctor is not like this: he acts like he is just a part of a much bigger life— he sees the face as just a face. But the twist is that this isn’t really true: there really is a person within that face, a person who isn’t able to be the Doctor, who died in a horrible way and was forgotten. This story is about giving that person another chance, at life, just like Donna. It’s about the Doctor leaving both of them, not about them carrying on eternally.
I choose to believe all those trips to Mars and so on the family talk about at the end do not really happen, and that this Doctor will not go on any adventures again. Once Ncuti has taken the Doctor away from David, I think you can see David’s performance change: he’s a bit shrunken, now, there’s less of a swagger. The face has a chance to live without the responsibility or the mythos. That’s why it came back: it came back so it could be saved. The TARDIS gives hope to anyone, Doctor. Even you.
