I'm actually writing a positive post about Billie Piper

[shivver]

Okay, to be fair, I don't actually dislike Billie Piper. I'm not a fan, but I'm also not a detractor. I also think that Rose Tyler was a beautifully designed character, in that she had good traits but also realistic character flaws that made her come alive into a real person that I really would dislike if I met her for real. Leading characters don't have to be good or nice people. (Look at MCU Tony Stark or 616 Doctor Strange, for example.)

Anyway...

I'm still thinking about BP's reappearance in DW and I'm starting to think that it was a genius move. As I noted in my last entry, the future of the show is in serious peril and RTD may not be the showrunner for the next episode (if there's a next episode, ever), so regenerating the Doctor into a possibly not-Doctor allows the next showrunner to cast their own Doctor and doesn't lock the current new face into an uncertain contract.

The thing is, if RTD had cast a completely new person for Fifteen to turn into, it would have gone the normal route: everyone would assume that that person is the Doctor and get excited for them as they normally would. Then if the show gets canceled, everyone would get upset that the person didn't get to play the Doctor. And then, if the show comes back twenty years later (judging off the last cancellation and renewal), the new showrunner would have to bring that person back (looking twenty years older) or face fan backlash.

But RTD turned the Doctor into a known -- and wildly popular -- face and did not say she's the Doctor. This immediately signaled shenanigans. No one knows whether to celebrate the appearance of a new Doctor, either because of the credits or because really, you're making Rose the Doctor? I bet that even the most die-hard Rose fangirl who is delighted to have BP back in DW has some suspicion, deep in her mind, that something is up.

And what does this do? It generates excitement for the show. Fans are still talking about this, more than they would have talked about a completely new Doctor. People who haven't been keeping up with the show are hearing about it and looking into it, to find out what in the world is going on. And while Billie Piper is mostly a star in the UK and not globally, so this won't really affect Disney's decision about the show, signing her and generating all of this hype may sway the BBC toward keeping the show for another season.

This was RTD's hail Mary (using an American football term), and quite a brilliant one. We've still to see if it's successful.

No, I still don't believe BP is the Doctor. My thought was that it's Rose Tyler, coming back to find the Doctor (after discarding Meta like she does with all of her paramours), and landing in the Doctor's body just as he's regenerating, but I really hope not. That would be such a banal plot.

One conjecture I've seen is that this regeneration happened after the Doctor did time stuff, during which he looked into the heart of the TARDIS, and thus, the same thing that happened after the last time someone looked into the heart of the TARDIS: the Bad Wolf appeared. Now this would be exciting! Bad Wolf isn't a good entity. It's neutral. It brings life, but it also brings everything to an end. There's a god for the Doctor to battle, to return it to the heart of the TARDIS.

I'm kind of hoping that this next episode, if it ever happens, proceeds something like how the audio "Omega" did. (Yes, this is a total spoiler, but come on, this audio is twenty-two years old. I think it's an excellent audio (Nev Fountain again -- I'm nothing if not predictable), but if you haven't heard it yet, you probably won't ever.) It started with the Fifth Doctor investigating the original time travel experiment at which Omega got thrown into the antimatter universe. Then, halfway through the story, the Fifth Doctor arrives to find out what's going on -- the character we'd been following was actually Omega, in his Fifth-Doctor-biodata body.

So, I'm hoping that the next episode will be BP playing the Doctor until the real Doctor (whoever they may be) shows up to put things to rights. Here's to hoping this will ever get to happen.

Comments

[romanajo123]

“ MCU Tony Stark or 616 Doctor Steange” —

… Really?

But Yes! It’s definitely a great move to generate excitement about the series again. Rose just dropping Meta ( given her on-screen problems with men) could definitely make sense, … and nullify a whole lot of fanfic. 😃 But I have wondered who BP is: she could be Bad Wolf even!



And I so have Plans for Meta and Rose… I scribbled something down a year or so ago

[shivver]

Oh yeah. MCU Tony Stark was not a nice person, all the way through the film series. He was a genius and knew it, and treated everyone who wasn't as smart as him like idiots -- which is everybody. He was egotistical and selfish. He didn't care about anyone except himself, including his closest employees Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan. You'll note that I didn't call them "friends" because he didn't have any actual friends. And he was an alcoholic.

The first Iron Man movie dealt with this: he learns that his actions and attitudes are getting people killed and he turns it around, starting to put his considerable talents toward making the world a better place, and he starts to realize how badly he's treating the people he's closest to, specifically Pepper. However, just because he starts bettering himself, he doesn't suddenly become nice. He still treated most people like dirt and was still egotistical and selfish. This is why I think that that movie is the best of all of the MCU films -- the story is the tightest, the main character's growth is amazing yet realistic, and it's not just an action-packed hero vs villain movie.

616 Doctor Strange is thoroughly not a nice or good person. He was a brilliant neurosurgeon but was only in it for the money and for showing off how brilliant he was; he didn't care about saving lives or helping people, and he treated his colleagues like dirt. He got into an accident which damaged the nerves in his hands so he couldn't do fine surgery anymore, and he fell apart (because he no longer was the best at his profession), and he wandered the world, and ended up training in magic in Tibet. He was brilliant at it and eventually became the Sorceror Supreme, but he is still mostly motivated by selfishness, becoming a powerful magician for the sake of showing off how good he is at it. He's still on the "hero" side of the scale but he doesn't do hero stuff because he wants to help people; he does it only when things get dire enough that he's the only person who can fix it.

The Doctor Strange movie kind of alluded to all of this, but I feel like the writers didn't want their main character to be abrasive, obnoxious, and difficult to like, so they watered him down quite a bit. In the opening scenes, you see him decide to save a patient's life because he saw an opportunity to show up the patient's doctor, who hadn't recognized the signs that indicated the patient was about to die, and his motivation is mentioned but only in passing. Then later, there's a surgery scene where he's treating the assisting doctors and the nurses like dirt - or at least, the movie's trying to do that, but it's treated like normal banter between friends, so he doesn't come across as obnoxious. They show a few shots of the rows of thousand-dollar watches that he owns and his expensive sports car, to show he's greedy, but it otherwise never comes up again.

I think they really wanted Doctor Strange to be the new Tony Stark - flippant, quippy, and charismatic - but they weren't confident that they could start him off as an objectionable asshole and then develop him into a character that the audience could love despite his numerous character flaws, like the Iron Man movie did for Tony. So, instead, the selfish, obnoxious things he did were treated as jokes, such as the "absolutely forbidden" magic that no one should ever do -- he just did them because "Hey, I'm good enough to do them because why not?" (You see this again in Spider-Man: No Way Home, when Wong (the Sorceror Supreme) tells him not to do the forget spell for Peter because it's dangerous, and Strange says, I've been doing it to hide the parties that we've been throwing from you, and Wong says, fine, go ahead, do whatever you want.)

They did attempt a hero's journey-like "character learns the error of his ways" story for him, but rather than show Strange the effects his attitudes were having on the world around him and have him realize he needed to fix himself (which is what happened in the Iron Man movie), they instead had him try to do something and fail, and then after the Ancient One appeared to him and told him why he failed (like, "Your anger is holding you back"), he'd try again and succeed. They did this at least twice during the movie.

(If you couldn't tell, I didn't think that the Doctor Strange movie was good at all.)

[romanajo123]

>>>>” I'm kind of hoping that this next episode, if it ever happens… “

Well, if it help, DW is getting an animated series for the CBeebies channel.

https://www.thewrap.com/doctor-who-animated-preschool-series-cbeebies-bbc/

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/doctor-animated-series-heading-bbc-095232811.html

[shivver]

Yeah, I saw that. No, of course it doesn't help, whatever that means. An adult TV show is not going to continue its story by turning itself into a preschool-aimed show. It's not even going to turn itself into a different show: DW didn't become "Torchwood", SJA, or "Class", and "The War Between the Land and the Sea" is not continuing the main storyline of DW. And the news doesn't even have any bearing on whether or not DW will continue or be canceled.