“I’d like to see a butterfly fit into a chrysalis case after it’s spread its wings.” —Second Doctor, shortly after beginning to exist (1966)
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.
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.
“…you know the greatest strength my Doctor has? She’s spent her life gathering friends. She can’t help it. And she is loved, because she taught us to never give up even if someone steals your very existence.”
My friend Gig from Who Cares? has a great new piece on “Companionisation” in The Power of the Doctor. (Warning: spoilers for Love and War!)
Followup: I forgot to mention about the presence of Ireland in The Timeless Children. as unexpected as it was it was mostly a massive red herring. A red herring covered in blood which read "THIS IS NOT THE ENEMY" but still.
The bizarre Ireland flashbacks were my favorite part of series 12. They were completely inexplicable and it felt like the sort of ambitious, crazy, “oh god I can’t wait to see how this connects” thing that Moffat would do. I was a bit disappointed that it all turned out to be a metaphor, for reasons much better phrased by my friend Ingiga at GigaWho; in any case, while I spend as much time as the next guy teasing Big Finish for their boxsets about obscure and uninteresting characters, I’d certainly be more interested in seeing hearing more Brendan Who. James Goss, are you reading this? Give me that strange, lyrical spinoff series, continuity be damned!
As an aside, did you know that as far as I know, there’s never actually been a Doctor Who story set in Ireland? Isn’t that just bizarre? This fact might be a few years out of date, so I’d welcome correction!
Sorry, since your answer to my question was tagged as a shitpost I can't tell if you're joking...(I have trouble discerning sarcasm, I'm autistic (apparently Lawrence Miles is too), it's hardly my fault) I mean I don't like the Timeless Childe thing but it's hardly a show-destroying cataclysm. as much as I like the current Master he is a bit lacking in depth. Anyway. My idea for the worst Dr Who story arc involves the Doctor losing his Brain from a severe twinge of cosmic angst.
I tagged it as a shitpost just because it was kind of a shitty response to your question. Maybe series 12 wasn’t necessarily cataclysmic, but there’s a strong case to be made for it being the start of the end for Doctor Who. In any case, I agree entirely that your cosmic angst idea is infinitely worse. 😆
I had a ton of fun recording this review/discussion of the series 12 finale with the “Who Cares” gang. Check it out on Youtube or wherever you get podcasts (Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, PlayerFM...) There are also extra notes at whocares.fun!
