I love you. Get out!

“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)

They’re restarting NuWho – I told you so. When Russell T. Davies was announced as returning showrunner in 2021, it only made sense that his role was to echo what he achieved in 2005. Start the show again. Yeah, there are other motives behind resetting the season number to 1; the BBC was bent on packaging the show to an international streaming partner, delivering it to a new world. And yet…as we’re now seeing, the change is deeper than skin. Age is more than a number. This is a TV show craving a break with its cultural detritus, a chance to feel genuinely unfamiliar once more.

The familiarity had become rot, and the rot had become horror. What perhaps seemed quaintly outdated by 2017 had become an unbearable, insular parasite by 2020. Not merely because it’d do something as churlish as throw up Morbius Doctors (which I can picture RTD doing with as much indulgence as Chibnall), but because it had become so hooked on the taste of eating itself that it brandished its swollen entrails to the whole nation: a hideous knot of fandom complexes wherein Reference, Continuity and Mythos chug round and around, as people’s lives go all but forgotten in the gaps. The dessicated state of the programme’s human element was amply evidenced by the disinterest it showed in its leads’ inner lives toward the end. The Doctor’s adoptive mother(!) was revealed and eliminated without consequence. The Doctor’s companion fell in love with her, was fobbed off, and never spoke of it again. Meanwhile it was helpfully clarified that Cybermen developed resistance to gold bullets, a weakness few remembered and fewer cared about.

How will you ever convince people to re-engage with this lifeless landscape?
A promise that things will not be as they were before, a shock infusion of the radical and the relevant, would certainly be a place to start. Already in the teaser for 2023 Christmas special The Church On Ruby Road, we see the new Doctor living in a way he never has, moving and simply being in a way that’s far removed from Who’s Victoriana yet also ripped straight from reality, from the true cultural life of joy. Everything else more-or-less unspools and explains itself from that image. There’s your reboot, located firmly in people rather than legacy.

When you have a new start this clearly defined, you could say wrapping up what came before is optional. The show’s used to moving on without fuss. Should one make the fuss, though, the result will not only colour everything behind it but teach us how to think about what comes next. This is where RTD’s little 60th anniversary mini-series, a bridge between Who (2005-2022) and Who (2023-), comes in. These three episodes form something of an intervention, a last outing for Who-II before Who-III begins in earnest.

You could argue it needed one. Or deserved it. Or more pragmatically, the reboot will benefit from a final act of healing performed on the crash site of its predecessor – bring viewers from II to III with a lot more than promises and faith.
The meta-plot had become as scarcely-salvageable as the human element; the Doctor’s home planet had been casually blown back up while you weren’t looking, any semblance of emotional stakes or an arc was spaffed out the window, and by the end the show was giving mixed messages about whether it had just obliterated the entire universe, or at least whether anyone noticed. An unenviable wreck. As if spurred by both its implosion and its inability to go anywhere that mattered, RTD now rushes in to bring that meta-plot to a full stop. It’s his first project upon returning, like an emergency manoeuvre disguised as an anniversary celebration.

For what we’re about to receive isn’t just the usual soft-reboot that accompanies each new Doctor. This one needs to be hard enough to cover, like, a decade’s worth of lost time. (Capaldi’s tenure is my favourite, but I can still admit we’re playing catch-up.) So mere newness may not be enough – something calls for an actual separation, the way the 2005 revival was distanced from everything it followed. And Davies can’t manufacture 16 years off-the-air out of thin air. The break must be narratively driven.

Thus he comes up with something quintessentially RTD, steeped in his own bizarre, mythical dream-logic…yet as direct a symbol of show-rebirth as anyone could imagine.

And some fans aren’t prepared to accept the story that’s just been told. Many are simply lying to themselves about it. So let’s cut through the bullshit first – then we can talk about opinions.

(If it wasn’t obvious – big, big, BIG spoilers for all of the 60th anniversary specials, right below the cut!)

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Sometimes, when a picture’s telling you what it is, you have to just believe it. The imagery is not an accident. It’s screaming at you – HE’S SPLITTING. One man was standing there. Now there are TWO. Two Doctors, meaning two outcomes. Instead of one traditionally replacing the other, he has ripped himself out into a separate body, leaving the first intact.

FIFTEEN: Push.
FOURTEEN: Does this work?
FIFTEEN: I don’t know!

The full implications of this are not carefully detailed at length, but the thematic purpose is made very plain. It’s a new type of ending.

14: an actual retirement

Throughout the three episodes of what I’m personally dubbing The Return, the Fourteenth Doctor (David Tennant) wonders why an old face of his has returned – and is asked by his returned friend Donna Noble about what’s been happening in his life since they last met, why he won’t open up to her about it, and why he’s always running away to the next crisis. Her suggestion in The Star Beast that he simply stay with her family is not-so-subtly foreshadowing where he’s headed. Wild Blue Yonder sees an emphasis placed on the trauma the Doctor’s accumulated in recent seasons, deploying strategic references to the destroyed universe and the adoption origin story as a convenient shorthand (and showing him emotionally wounded by them to an extent Chibnall never bothered with). When will he finally be okay after all this, Donna wonders. “A million years”, comes the reply. But how, if everything that happens only makes him worse and worse?

RTD’s thesis (or at least, his pretext) is that there hasn’t been sufficient reckoning with what the character’s gone through. But he’s not just talking about weirdly downplayed Chibnall storylines; in The Giggle, the Toymaker taunts 14 about trauma from Moffat’s run too. So rather than a mere recent fluke, the argument extends to cover NuWho as a whole. Can you ever really have a clean slate for a show that works like this? We witness the Doctors dying and being reincarnated every so often, but these are only ever transitions – gateways to the next battle, preparations for another go-round. Sometimes they stay in one place for a while, but it can only ever be a diversion before the struggle takes them somewhere else. The curse of a neverending adventure: a main character denied the catharsis of an ending.

These ideas didn’t come out of nowhere. In the latter half of Capaldi’s run as the Doctor, a recurring theme was that he’d grown sick of the cycle – his great burden. Heaven Sent literalised this as a purgatory wherein he spent billions of years destroying and recreating himself, just to overcome the odds. “Why is it always me? Why is it never anybody else’s turn?” he despaired. “I can’t keep doing this, Clara…burning the old me to make a new one.” And yet he did. Fatally wounded in The Doctor Falls, he seemed set on refusing to regenerate at all, embracing death. But he gave in and went on – purely because the show must go on – as if challenging his successor to find him a reason. Instead, we saw Whittaker’s Doctor not dealing with it. Not dealing with anything. Regressing as a character. Suffice to say the ball was still in RTD’s court when he resumed the showrunner role.

So in The Giggle, he starts putting emphasis on the claim the Doctor’s worn himself out. You could spin that as a swipe at the state of the programme, but there’s an internal point to it, which is to create the eventual catharsis. The thesis is that the status quo isn’t working, so something new has to happen. Hence we get the true controversial passage of the episode, as the new Fifteenth Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) insists the Fourteenth is ‘running on fumes’ from all the loss and fatigue he’s suffered, and they finally arrive at a theory of why the freak “bi-generation” just happened to them:

FOURTEEN: But you’re fine.
FIFTEEN: I’m fine because you fix* yourself. We’re Time Lords. We’re doing rehab out of order.
DONNA: He’s saying you need to stop.
FOURTEEN: I don’t know how.
DONNA: Well, I can tell you. Cos you know what I did when you went flying off in your blue box, Spaceman? I stayed in one place, and I lived day after day after day.
FOURTEEN: It would drive me mad.
DONNA: Yeah. It does. But you keep on going. And that’s the adventure. The one adventure you’ve never had. Because I’ve…I’ve worked out what happened. You changed your face, and then you found me. Do you know why?
FOURTEEN: No.
DONNA: To come home.
FOURTEEN: Do you mean… he flies off?

* It sounds like ‘fix’. Disney+ subtitles have it as ‘fix’. But iPlayer subtitles have it as ‘fixed’. This will be awkward in a minute.

Fifteen does fly off, cheekily duplicating the TARDIS with a pinch of the Toymaker’s reality-bending power, and Fourteen watches him go. Then he settles down, part of Donna’s family, feeling like this is his reward for all the struggle and he’s never been so happy in his life.

The end!

But wait. The Doctor has stayed in one place and time before. When he was Capaldi, he settled down at the university with the vault (that he had to guard with his life). Before that, he spent 24 years of bliss with River (whom he knew would be going to her death afterwards). Comb through the archives and you can find even more examples of him pausing the adventures in favour of what you could call a casual existence. So why is this different? Whyever is he happy now if he wasn’t before?

We’ve already seen. Refer to the image screaming at us earlier. There are two of him now, and the other – the more mature, healthy, confident one – has taken over. What this actually means is that Fourteen is free to retire. There’s no longer some abstract need for his presence in the universe bearing down, no ticking clock of duty or self-blame. HE’S FREE. That’s the part that’s new, the one thing he’s never been able to have in 60 years of stories: the neverending story will no longer be about him. We’ve said goodbye to individual incarnations of the Doctor, as they each died and were reborn into their successor, but we’ve never ended an entire narrative of the Doctor as a person. This is an unfamiliar goodbye; the happily-ever-after and the closed book.

But why’s Fifteen like that? How come Fifteen is fine to take the reins; what does ‘rehab out of order’ even refer to? Two Doctors means two outcomes and we’ve only looked at one. The answer is a pet favourite of RTD’s – time flowing backwards.
Journey’s End, the last time Donna and the Doctor were together, saw Donna beset by the mysterious disembodied sound of a heartbeat only she could hear. When she then inadvertently created the Metacrisis Doctor (another Tennant offshoot, funny that), he told her the sound must have been his own heartbeat; “because I’m a complicated event in time and space. Must have rippled back, converging on you.” Davies really likes the concept of things rippling in reverse; in the commentary for The Giggle he even elaborates a theory for how the bi-generation incident could send an echo “happening backwards” down the Doctor’s entire timeline and thus explain certain Classic Who inconsistencies. (God, what a nerd.)

What I’m getting at is, this is an established part of his universe. And the style tells you how you should be receiving it anyway – Fifteen handwaves it all with ‘we’re Time Lords’. No convoluted mechanical diagram is forthcoming. It’s rehab out of order, but not because a time machine has rearranged the pieces. It’s happening in reverse, and that’s a mystical process belonging to an incomprehensible alien lifeform. That’s all you’re getting. Dream logic. The spiritual restoration of a Doctor finally allowed to leave Doctor Who…rippling back, manifesting in the moment of Fifteen’s birth, a twin as pure and fresh as if he’s entering it for the first time. The capacity to end the past, for real, generates a new start with no hangups about said past.

This is where we have to talk about the fans. Because they have other ideas.
Allow me to describe what I will call the Flowchart – a fan theory about what’s happened to 14 and 15, which replaces all of the above theming with an enormous loop-de-loop on a diagram. The conceit of the Flowchart is that now, when Fourteen ultimately dies and regenerates after living out his retired life, his body will disappear and his soul will go back in time – please stay with me here – to become Fifteen. This is intended to explain how Fifteen can benefit from the healing Fourteen’s about to do; he’s already lived through it all, he already remembers it all. And more importantly, it’s intended to ensure that there aren’t two Doctors. There’s just one. And Fourteen isn’t free – he’s just on a break.

(There’s another Flowchart variant where Fourteen’s death will ‘merge’ him with 15 at some point. Don’t ask.)

The most explicit flaw with this theory is that it’s not describing ‘rehab out of order’, rather rehab in order. Functionally, it’s indistinguishable from Fourteen regenerating into Fifteen normally then hopping back in time to talk to his past self for a bit. It renders the entire bi-generation a pointless exercise.
Once more – LOOK at the screen.

You’re watching one being split into two beings. How much effort can you really exert to convince yourself there’s still only one of them? To dream up, without evidence, a pathetic little time loop ensuring as much?
Fandom is currently littered with people saying “I’m okay with the bigeneration now because [Flowchart]”. “I hated the idea of this but [Flowchart] means it’s actually fine”. “Don’t panic, everyone! Look, [Flowchart]!”. Often met with likes, upvotes and raucous applause. Shortly before the episode even aired, someone leaking the plot on Discord was trying their utmost to sanitise it with Flowchart logic. This is driven by a desperate need for the story fans want, rather than one with any reason to exist.

We see the confusion, wonder, and excitement on Fifteen as he erupts into flesh. His first words: “No way!” Fourteen asks him if pushing will separate them properly; Fifteen giggles “I don’t know!” You’d think he would know if he’d already been on the other end of this. The truth is there’s nothing to support the Flowchart interpretation of Fifteen – nothing indicating he has foreknowledge, definitely nothing indicating he’s just spent an entire lifetime chilling with the Nobles and now has to say goodbye to them. It’s an entire alternative clusterfuck of a story that fans are having to invent because it’s not here. They’re trying to unwrite the narrative before their eyes.

Oh, there are stumbling blocks. Little points for Flowcharters to try and latch onto, or get confused by, because the simple and explicit narrative is unthinkable to them. When Fifteen teasingly calls Fourteen “old man”, the latter objects, and Donna agrees that Fifteen’s the older one because he “came after”. But that’s just the truth. Fifteen is an incarnation further along than Fourteen, and the fiery blaze of regeneration is how a Time Lord grows up. So they may have existed for the same amount of time, but Fifteen has seniority.
There are conflicting sources on whether Fifteen says “you fix yourself” or “you fixed yourself” in the dialogue cited above – it doesn’t matter. Man’s a time traveller; present and future are both viable points of reference for him, especially when overviewing an event that he’s sure must happen. (Have happened. Be happening.) His choice does not recreate his entire character.

The final point of confusion is how can Fifteen be like this? How can his birth be influenced by the new life of his predecessor? Of course we’re talking about a creature who doesn’t even understand his own biology, a species that transcends time can handle time going both ways – the real question is not how, but why, what biological purpose does this serve as a response to long-term trauma? If we map this out: bigeneration enables the process of healing to occur in the first body, and expedites that process into a split second for the new body. The miracle of ‘rehab out of order’ is that Fifteen doesn’t have to have lived out Fourteen’s future; he still reaps the benefits. The Doctor’s self has been bifurcated so that both versions of him might survive, instead of one running itself into the ground. It’s an emergency self-repair mechanism for an entity that’s burned through countless lives.

And the process of healing is not as simple as a temporary break. Not when the trauma goes as deep as the Doctor’s. He has to actually change his life. He cannot forever go on re-traumatising. Fourteen’s job isn’t to become Fifteen and return to the grind eventually – Fifteen already happened, he was born, he’s taken off! – Fourteen’s sole duty is to himself. That very change is why Fifteen exists, and how Fifteen can shine so brightly.

“Why is it never anybody else’s turn?” begged Twelve. Now it is. For good.

Because that’s what closure means. CLOSED.

15: assimilation averted

Fifteen is emotionally regenerated. Formed from the totality of Fourteen’s spiritual closure, all of it woven back into the instant of their separation, Fifteen appears fully formed straight away. Equipped with peace, self-compassion, he embraces and comforts Fourteen like a loving father (or at least an older brother). He strides out of the gate, not questioning or confused about who he is – the way so, so many past Doctors have behaved upon birth – but in complete control, complete confidence.
Before he’s even been alive five minutes, he’s charmed all the companions and sent the villain packing. He has nothing to prove and nothing to beat himself up about. In bringing a peaceful ending to everything he was before, the split has freed him – and the new Doctor Who – to be immediately ready. It’s always been ready. It just needed the willingness to draw that line.

But all these symbolic gestures can do, when push comes to shove, is micromanage the abstract. There’s an ocean of intangibles rolling and cresting in the mind of a long-term Doccy Who viewer. Like this creeping unfamiliarity…a sense of detachment in watching the old Doctor watching the new Doctor fly away, then following the new Doctor forwards for the rest of the show. We know, rationally, both of them are the Doctor. But is one…the original?

Is one of them more our Doctor than the other one? Is the new one a clone? A duplicate? A stranger? An imitation? Is it really going to feel the same when his personality seems so different? Can things ever be the same again? Is he really the Doctor we know and love? Have we bid farewell to the real Doctor forever, consigned ourselves to some kind of hollow simulacrum for the rest of time?!

These questions melt into nothingness when you realise they’re just about William Hartnell turning into Patrick Troughton. Troughton’s first scenes, following the first ever regeneration (then termed ‘renewal’), saw his companions suspect he wasn’t even who he said he was; he acted differently, he was suspicious, slightly sinister, not quite all there. The show was totally unafraid to play up that dissonance. Because it’s a wild proposition – this is meant to be the same character, and yet he’s different. He doesn’t act the same, he doesn’t speak the same. The idea that he’s the same person is inherently a challenge to the imagination. The moment the decision was taken to replace a beloved lead actor with an utterly new interpretation of the role, that challenge was baked into the premise. It did not feel safe, predictable, or normal.

Yet here we still are…many, many, many Doctors later. Which would suggest that being the Doctor is the point. Your active presence in the role is how you become the Doctor. And all the abstractions about whether each new Doctor still counts as the same person when their very personality has changed, every cell in their body seems to have been replaced…are not the point in the slightest.

Another intangible – the optics. The optics! A black man takes over the role of the Doctor, the first time anyone not white has been cast as the incumbent, and it’s made out that he’s…vaguely unfamiliar? An uncanny presence, ripping himself from the body of the well-known Doctor we were just watching? Spending his first moments a little bit distanced from us, a little bit of a stranger to us, like he understands things we don’t? No blanket of reassurance draped over him (and us) as we move forward? Forking away from the old Doctor, travelling a different path, even as it’s stressed that he’s the same man with the same memories – he’s contrasted, god forbid, with his predecessor? What is all this saying to the people in the audience who find a black Doctor inherently terrifying to begin with?! Haven’t you thought about the racists?!?!

Let’s turn that on its head, dear reader. What is the supposed virtue of that reassurance?

What is the benefit of our first black lead Doctor turning up the way he’s ‘supposed’ to, going through all the steps in more or less the same way, insisting to the last detail that nothing is different, nothing has changed, and nothing about this is explosive or a confrontation?

Fans have begged for this – some, for a total retroactive do-over of last year’s Durdle Door clifftop regeneration, wherein Jodie Whittaker no longer transforms into Tennant but instead Gatwa, the way she was ‘supposed’ to in their imaginations. For this entire Tennant interregnum to be tidily unhappened. Others want the Flowchart. They share the desire to erase any and all sense of rupture. Because otherwise, we will have lost the only opportunity for things to be normal; for this to be a seamless integration of the new actor into the old convention.

In other words: an assimilation. A demonstration that business as usual can, and will, be done as safely with a black man as with 60 years of white people. Because this then hypothetically serves as a balm of healing – an institution amicably joining hands with those it used to ignore, a gracious absolution of the show and its rituals from any ugly bias they’ve been charged with.
In order to preserve the reassurance that Who has transcended racism even if nothing has changed, nothing has to change, and nothing will change, any source of discomfort must be binned. Narratives that play with weird ideas: binned. Doing anything radical? Binned. An even slightly orthogonal relationship to the history – binned! Taboo!
Only total fealty-to and consistency-with the past can correctly incorporate Gatwa into the inheritance paradigm. Otherwise nobody will love him. The existing architecture is perfect, it is everything, vastly eclipsing the importance of a mere actor, and people of colour deserve to prove to the white masses that they can slot into it without a fuss! It’s not enough to just show that he’s the Doctor; there must be 10,000 protective layers of reaffirmation that he is not special, but in fact a totally uninterrupted continuation of the great, British, Doccy Who Legacy!!!!!!!!!1!11!!!!!

These political desires imagine themselves as the definitive anti-racist position, but of course there’s no such thing. Even (especially) within ethnic minority communities, there have always been other, more incendiary angles…

The alternative transition RTD has actually performed here – a spot of visual magic to separate the Doctor from his old body, leaving it behind altogether – is, on its face, symbolising the hardest of soft-reboots. It brazenly declares that we now begin a new phenomenon, and ought even consider the old one concluded. Of course the new one will have no compunctions about raiding the archives; Mel will assuredly be back along with whatever Classic (or Nu) entities present an opportunity. But any impetus to inherit the old narratives or myths has been cast off. Even the TARDIS has undergone mitosis. The new Season One is going to plough ahead like anything’s possible.

And this transfer coincides with several new things. Among them, an incumbent Doctor who’s black.
Suppose we don’t make a show of this not mattering?
Suppose we insist it does matter, and is indeed an integral part of a programme reinventing itself to show interest in new, wider, younger audiences?
Suddenly the ‘otherness’ of Fifteen – intangible and trivial though it is, a snag of sci-fi logic – starts to become a statement. Visibly separating him from the telos of the show’s past, a conceptual line drawn between them, looks like a statement about the programme having never shown interest in casting a lead Doctor of colour before. Oh, some actors have auditioned. And we recently saw some guest turns from Jo Martin as an enigmatic Ur-Doctor. But for 60 years it never got as far as…happening. In real time. Which projected a cumulative, institutional disinterest in how this might be different, or even brilliant. Not one stemming from Doctor Who in some kind of vacuum, but endemic to it as an outgrowth of the UK, a media receptacle for certain ideas the UK has about itself.

So when Fifteen joyfully tears himself out – like a butterfly from a chrysalis case, as Troughton’s Doctor put it back then – and Fourteen hangs up the coat, it’s an announcement that this is a new thing. That it won’t be the exact same; he will feel like a new creation that you aren’t acclimatised to. And if you’re truly unsettled by that, it won’t matter, because he is the Doctor and (if everyone does their job properly) you will love him anyway. If not already after the 15 minutes’ screentime he just received, then assuredly before we’re very far into his first dedicated story. Because the substance of this character is who he is, every single minute of every episode, not where the continuity lines up or how the rituals suture the pieces together.

Inasmuch as Fifteen’s a discrete physical body, he’s also warm, effervescent, playful, gentle and authoritative. He gets one of the most attention-grabbing TV twists of the year as his opening act, and is immediately framed as a figure we can trust unconditionally (a far cry from Troughton’s first moments). His confidence is a proxy for the programme’s belief in its new lead actor and new direction, all of which it has the temerity to celebrate rather than dissemble about. A break from the past, here, is a source of excitement. You want to talk optics? Here is an insistence on bringing closure to one institution so that the next may be built anew. A rejection of the endless relay. For those who believe in any hope of a mended world – this has meaning.

None of which is me representing Davies as some kind of anti-racism CEO or revolutionary champion. The man talks a big game about dealing with the implications of the original Toymaker’s mandarin costume, but writes a scene where Gatwa’s grave recounting of the Doctor’s hardest struggles culminates in him namedropping Mavic Chen. Anyone familiar knows it doesn’t even make much emotive sense in the script – it’s there just for that sick, Doccy Who Fan thrill of invoking a yellowface villain from 1965 on national television like a fearsome legend. “But the Time War…Pandorica…Mavic Chen.” This shit is pathological.
The creative mind that almost brought you “Ten Little—” “Niggles aside…” in Unicorn and the Wasp can rationalise things like this, even brag about them to the official magazine months in advance, because for him and his producer mates it’s still just a silly trifle at the end of the day. They will never have skin in the game, not the way many of their employees and audience have.

That’s the timeline we’re in, a dimension nested within dimensions, with entire ensconced universes of embedded assumption to penetrate before we even begin to glimpse external reality or adjust to its daylight. A fetish for how esoteric your references are is merely a special mode of the British fetish for how twee you can be, how quirky all your eccentric little customs and rituals are – in reality a frantic process of persona-construction, one that serves to block you from understanding who you really are or what you’re really playing at. In fixating on your own surface traits, all manner of deeper cruelties can be forgotten and even made mockery of. Thus a comfortable belief in your own innocence can be maintained (a national innocence, if need be) and you need never leave any part of yourself behind.

The new is not that new, then. But maybe that’s because we haven’t bigenerated enough. In so many ways, everything we are is a nightmare. Complacent, craven, immune to the screams of the suffering, too busy drowning in our own sewage. When is the moment to fork away, let the entrenched and bedraggled structure wind to a close, and create an untainted replacement? The relay has precluded all escape and rejected the very notion of goodbye. When will the next world rip itself out into a new branch of the diagram, fully formed with all the knowledge we already have? What if there’s no one moment, and in truth the divergence must be repeated, over and over until the intangible enchantment of legacy no longer has any hold on us…?

Thanks. If you liked this, you may also like the last time I wrote about current Who.