In modern fandom, canon is king. This isn’t a jab towards an admiration of an ordered continuity and worldbuilding, the mandatory features of making a narrative to be misplaced in. However what goes past it—a craving for uncooked, wiki-able knowledge and details that may be collated and held in amber, the place interpretation provides solution to a singular thesis—usually threatens to override it. Which is why for Physician Who, a present that has spent 60 years rising and altering and writing over and beneath itself, its newest shock is much less about breaking its personal world, however fairly setting itself free.
It did so within the remaining act of “The Giggle,” the final of the three particular episodes launched over the previous couple of weeks to mark Physician Who’s sixtieth anniversary. Starring David Tennant not as a returning incarnation of the Physician, however a brand new, fourteenth face, audiences got here into the specials anticipating one factor as their solely assure: by the tip of the third particular, David Tennant’s newest Physician would die, and remodel into Ncuti Gatwa’s fifteenth.
Which he did… of a kind. Mortally wounded by classic villain the Toymaker, the 14th Physician’s regeneration started similar to each different modern imagining of the method has, impressed by Who’s lengthy historical past—coalescing orange-yellow energies coursing by the Physician’s physique, making ready to blow up in beams of radiant, transformative mild. However right here, they didn’t. As an alternative, the glow pale, and the Physician, with the assistance of a push and a pull from his buddies Donna and Mel, one way or the other break up into two co-existent beings: the 14th Physician and the fifteenth Physician, collectively in a single place.
“I’ve Bigenerated,” the fifteenth Physician explains to his previous self, confused onlookers, and the viewers alike. “There’s no such factor. Bigeneration is meant to be a fable, however… have a look at me.” It’s unquestionable on this, or any second that comes after, that Gatwa is something apart from the particular article, though there have been legitimate issues of the optics of creating this alternative with the transition from considered one of, if not the, most beloved actors to ever tackle the function to the primary Black, brazenly queer man to play it.
However the episode clearly establishes that that is the Physician’s future staring proper again at themselves—Time Lord rehab out of order, as 15 places it later, imploring his previous self to go on the journey of therapeutic that has result in his personal presently revitalized lease on life. From the 14th Physician’s future, his continued existence will not be seen in a lot as dishonest demise however as soon as once more, attending to see his personal future mirrored again at him. Ncuti Gatwa is the Physician. David Tennant is the Physician. It’s simply that for the primary time in Physician Who’s lengthy historical past of regeneration, we noticed a model of the method that was much less about bodily demise and rebirth, and extra about divergence in time itself.
A part of understanding that divergence has been made all of the extra common to Physician Who past simply this particular second, due to returning showrunner Russell T. Davies. Talking on a supplementary commentary track launched to accompany “The Giggle,” Davies supplied his personal interpretation of what Bigeneration means:
“My principle… I believe what with Peter [Davison] having been in, with with Colin [Baker] having been in, I believe down the timeline, they all seperated. All of them went like that, all of the Docs got here again to life, with their authentic TARDISes, the present of the Toymaker. They’re all touring on the market, I’m calling it a Physician-verse. I wish to create a future the place, , Sylvester McCoy survived [the 1996 TV movie] and has an journey! One of many issues about [the first 60th special] “The Star Beast” is to get [David Tennant] again and get Catherine [Tate] again, we’ve got to leap by so many hoops. Which is a good story, but it surely’s similar to… ‘why can’t you simply arrive and step out the TARDIS?’”
It wouldn’t be the primary time just lately that Davies proposed such an concept, both. In Tales of the TARDIS, a particular anniversary miniseries slicing down traditional Physician Who episodes with new interstitials from returning Docs and companions, it’s floated by the varied Docs that there are, within the universe, many intertwined timelines—timelines the place, in contrast to those we noticed onscreen, incarnations of the Physician survived their regeneration tales and stored going, providing an evidence as to why Docs can return trying older than once we noticed them “die.” An interpretation then, as Davies put it, that realities can now intersect the place all these Docs, no matter the place they’re in their very own private journeys and what we understood to be the finish of these journeys, can come again. In a single single second, each Physician turns into the Physician endlessly, variations of themselves echoing out throughout time and area. It’s big!
But it surely additionally isn’t. As a result of that’s all it’s: an interpretation. None of those particulars, about what Bigeneration is and isn’t, are sourced from throughout the major textual content itself—Physician Who, the tv present—and maybe it ought to keep that means. Actually, a part of what makes “The Giggle” so liberating is that every one it makes truly express about this course of is just what our base understanding of what it’s within the first place already was. The Physician adjustments faces, and goes on endlessly. All we’ve added is that these faces can go on endlessly too, in no matter means we or the present may at some point need them to. It’d contradict issues mentioned up to now; in one other 60 yr’s time ought to we be blessed with each a livable planet and the continued well being of Physician Who, a brand new author may fully upend “The Giggle” altogether and convey us again to our prior understanding of all of it. Or they might do one thing fully totally different another time! We don’t have a logical, scientific, organic breakdown of how the method works, proper now Bigeneration is a vibe, a sense. It’s, because the Physician himself places it, a fable, and the entire level of myths and their persistence is that the story is retold and reinterpreted by totally different texts and views throughout eons.
That’s the magic of Physician Who, that’s the purpose of it: it carries on and it grows and it adjustments, on a regular basis, endlessly and at all times. I don’t wish to clarify to you, reader, what Bigeneration is, as a result of Physician Who doesn’t wish to proper now both. For each now and again, in a really lengthy whereas when the wind stands honest, Physician Who merely simply ask us to have our personal view on one thing, as a substitute of treating its story as a sequence of definitive, immutable details. By itself sixtieth birthday, it provides us this stunning present: to be free to think about what may be for ourselves.
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