Bigeneration? Sure, why not?
Dec. 20th, 2023 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shivverOne of the most disappointing things about my circle of friends (okay, to be honest, my coworkers, because I don't actually have friends) is that there's only one person who has enough interest in Doctor Who to actually want to talk meta things. It's doubly disappointing that this person, despite being a brilliant programmer and analyst, can't for the life of him express his thoughts in a coherent and logical fashion and, when asked to repeat himself so that we can try to understand what he means, gets angry and thus even less rational. Sigh.
So, my husband and this person, whom I'll call Dylan, were discussing "The Giggle", and Dylan expressed the belief that the bigeneration wasn't really a bigeneration, but it was Fifteen from sometime in the future coming back to this point in time to battle the Toymaker. He wasn't really clear on his reasoning and the discussion devolved as my husband tried to get more details, and so he never really figured it out. He had, however, noted that he'd gotten the theory from the Internet, so at least we had some inkling of a source. We discussed it a little bit and didn't see any real reason to not take the bigeneration to be just that, and that was it.
Thenelisi put up a post this week with a link to the Tumblr post that originated this idea, and so here it is: Post about Fourteen-Fifteen transition
I've been digesting this post, and we've been discussing this - sans Dylan; that's not likely to be fruitful at all - and well, we really don't buy into this theory. Cue long post about this.
Note: I'm not going to be summarizing the post, since you can just read it above. I will be referring to individual things the author says. But the idea is that rather than bigenerating, Fourteen lives his life with the Noble family and whatever else, then when he regenerates, he gets yanked back to this moment and pops out of himself as Fifteen.
To be entirely honest, we have no problem with bigeneration - defined as one Time Lord splitting off into two separate entities - as presented in the episode. At the first viewing, it was weird and sparked a "Really???" reaction, but on subsequent viewings (two more at this point), we're good with it and the consequences. We are not looking for an alternate explanation for what happened.
The author of the post is looking for an alternate explanation, because they felt that Fifteen couldn't possibly be so happy and carefree given the Doctor's past of tragedy and trauma and Fourteen's recent wrestling with the Toymaker (he'd just been shot with a laser cannon!) and, a little while later, his mourning for the devastation of the planet. That's a good point... except that other Doctors have emerged from their regeneration with the same energy. Most relevant case in point is the Eleventh Doctor, coming out of the epicly tragic Tenth Doctor's "I don't want to go" with energy and excitement in "The Eleventh Hour"; we didn't get to see his broodiness and weariness until the space whale. And Eleven isn't the only one; I'm not all that familiar with Twelve's regeneration episode, but Thirteen certainly didn't display Doctor-trauma in her first episode. Is Fifteen really and truly, at his core, only flighty and happy and lacking all the trauma of previous Doctors? We don't know yet, but he certainly can be putting on that face right now. In "The Giggle", he's no more a departure from the previous Doctor than any other was.
I would also like to point out that Fourteen wasn't all that affected by "all of the Sad and the Trauma that the Doctor had undergone", as they put it. As I noted in a previous entry, Fourteen wasn't Ten - he wasn't weighted down by Time War guilt, loneliness, and the Time Lord Victorious, in part because the Doctor worked through a lot of that in the intervening incarnations. Yes, Fourteen was tired (physically as well as spiritually - his entire existence up to the bigeneration was a total of fifteen hours of nonstop running, including a confirmed-canon Dalek adventure before "The Star Beast" in DWM) and, personality-wise, he's very apt to mourn deaths and blame himself for causing/not preventing them, but that's a trait peculiar to him, not a Doctor trait in general, and Fifteen is obviously different from him.
However, let's say that we are looking for an alternate explanation. Does this one work for us? It really doesn't - it doesn't make sense, and the supporting evidence doesn't work.
So, bottom line is that I don't see any problems that need to be corrected by an explanation that replaces the explanation given in the episode, and even if I did, this particular theory, its ties to Four's regeneration, and its supporting evidence are not compelling.
So, my husband and this person, whom I'll call Dylan, were discussing "The Giggle", and Dylan expressed the belief that the bigeneration wasn't really a bigeneration, but it was Fifteen from sometime in the future coming back to this point in time to battle the Toymaker. He wasn't really clear on his reasoning and the discussion devolved as my husband tried to get more details, and so he never really figured it out. He had, however, noted that he'd gotten the theory from the Internet, so at least we had some inkling of a source. We discussed it a little bit and didn't see any real reason to not take the bigeneration to be just that, and that was it.
Then
elisi put up a post this week with a link to the Tumblr post that originated this idea, and so here it is: Post about Fourteen-Fifteen transitionI've been digesting this post, and we've been discussing this - sans Dylan; that's not likely to be fruitful at all - and well, we really don't buy into this theory. Cue long post about this.
Note: I'm not going to be summarizing the post, since you can just read it above. I will be referring to individual things the author says. But the idea is that rather than bigenerating, Fourteen lives his life with the Noble family and whatever else, then when he regenerates, he gets yanked back to this moment and pops out of himself as Fifteen.
To be entirely honest, we have no problem with bigeneration - defined as one Time Lord splitting off into two separate entities - as presented in the episode. At the first viewing, it was weird and sparked a "Really???" reaction, but on subsequent viewings (two more at this point), we're good with it and the consequences. We are not looking for an alternate explanation for what happened.
The author of the post is looking for an alternate explanation, because they felt that Fifteen couldn't possibly be so happy and carefree given the Doctor's past of tragedy and trauma and Fourteen's recent wrestling with the Toymaker (he'd just been shot with a laser cannon!) and, a little while later, his mourning for the devastation of the planet. That's a good point... except that other Doctors have emerged from their regeneration with the same energy. Most relevant case in point is the Eleventh Doctor, coming out of the epicly tragic Tenth Doctor's "I don't want to go" with energy and excitement in "The Eleventh Hour"; we didn't get to see his broodiness and weariness until the space whale. And Eleven isn't the only one; I'm not all that familiar with Twelve's regeneration episode, but Thirteen certainly didn't display Doctor-trauma in her first episode. Is Fifteen really and truly, at his core, only flighty and happy and lacking all the trauma of previous Doctors? We don't know yet, but he certainly can be putting on that face right now. In "The Giggle", he's no more a departure from the previous Doctor than any other was.
I would also like to point out that Fourteen wasn't all that affected by "all of the Sad and the Trauma that the Doctor had undergone", as they put it. As I noted in a previous entry, Fourteen wasn't Ten - he wasn't weighted down by Time War guilt, loneliness, and the Time Lord Victorious, in part because the Doctor worked through a lot of that in the intervening incarnations. Yes, Fourteen was tired (physically as well as spiritually - his entire existence up to the bigeneration was a total of fifteen hours of nonstop running, including a confirmed-canon Dalek adventure before "The Star Beast" in DWM) and, personality-wise, he's very apt to mourn deaths and blame himself for causing/not preventing them, but that's a trait peculiar to him, not a Doctor trait in general, and Fifteen is obviously different from him.
However, let's say that we are looking for an alternate explanation. Does this one work for us? It really doesn't - it doesn't make sense, and the supporting evidence doesn't work.
- They tie this to the Watcher by saying "canonically, the Watcher is explained as a future version of the doctor that comes about in sort of a weird overlapping thing with the doctor's timeline". I can't find how this is canon. Tardis Wiki has a few explanations from different sources, but all of them boil down to the Watcher being a projection or phantom of possible future regenerations, not an actual physical future version.
- "Logopolis" itself stay ambiguous on what the Watcher actually is.
- Either way, I'm not entirely sure how the Watcher is related to explaining how Fifteen appears at this point. Even if we go with the Watcher being a future version of the Doctor coming back, the Watcher isn't what Four regenerates into - the Watcher merges with Four, who then becomes Five. (Or are we saying that Peter Davison will be coming back to play the Sixteenth or future Doctor?)
- I actually have a bigger problem with believing that Fourteen starts regenerating at some point in the future and suddenly disappears from wherever he is, travels through the time vortex to this specific point in space and time, and pops out, than I do with forking him into two separate individuals. (I could go into a lot more detail about the absurdity of the logistics of this, but I won't.)
- The author points to the line "I'm fine because you fix yourself" as evidence that Fifteen has already gone through Fourteen's life of healing. Another interpretation is that the "you" in this sentence is the Doctor in general, not Fourteen in specific. As I noted in my previous entry, Fourteen has already healed tons since Ten; Fifteen is acknowledging all of the work that the Doctor has put into themselves to get to him without discounting that Fourteen, like everyone ever, has his own things to work on.
- And then there's the "We're doing rehab out of order" line. That makes perfect sense to me. Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen each worked through Ten's problems to produce a healed Fourteen (and Fifteen, too), and now Fifteen is counseling Fourteen as well, to help him realize that he now can rest and heal/grow in ways that Fifteen will never benefit from. That's pretty much out of order. (If Fourteen did live to heal himself and then circle back to become Fifteen, that would be doing rehab in order.)
- The author interprets Fifteen's first words incorrectly. They say that he says to Fourteen, "So good to see you! So good!", but that's not right. First, there's a bunch of dialogue before this, with the Doctors branching out of Fourteen's torso and being more or less stunned, then once they separate, Fourteen says, "Look at you!" and Fifteen agrees with him, saying, "So good!" Fifteen is not saying it's so good to see Fourteen, and thus not saying anything like he's expecting this, as the author claims.
- The author then says that Fifteen says, "Does anyone want to tell me what the hell is going on here?" and says it only made sense if there were regeneration / multi-Doctor shenanigans going on. That makes sense, asking where in this scene he's just appeared because he can't remember... except they got the quote wrong. Fifteen actually says, "Now, someone tell me what the hell is going on here," in the sense of "how in the world did this mythical process just happen?" He's not asking for information - the dialogue moves on without anyone providing him information and he's fine with it, so obviously he knows everything that's happened so far. He's just going, "All right, now that I'm me... What the hell just happened???"
So, bottom line is that I don't see any problems that need to be corrected by an explanation that replaces the explanation given in the episode, and even if I did, this particular theory, its ties to Four's regeneration, and its supporting evidence are not compelling.
