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shivverOkay, 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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-11 06:24 pm (UTC)… 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
no subject
Date: 2025-06-12 04:44 pm (UTC)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.)
no subject
Date: 2025-06-15 12:31 am (UTC)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
no subject
Date: 2025-06-15 12:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-21 08:43 pm (UTC)But anyway! I bring this up because I only recently found out that this past July , DWM actually had an article with. BP saying:
“ Billie Piper is the Doctor?” ( with question mark instead of exclamation mark)
They don’t even know! And that’s great 😃
no subject
Date: 2025-10-21 09:36 pm (UTC)Actually, there was a bit of "news" yesterday or the day before. Apparently, Rob Shearman was quoted as saying something about BP not being the Doctor, that she was returning as Rose Tyler, and it got reported in the media all over the place.
However, he didn't really say that -- the quote was taken out of context and misinterpreted.
He was talking about what it's like for expanded universe writers right now and comparing it to the Wilderness Years. He said that back then, the show was off the air but had ended with the Seventh Doctor still traveling with Ace, so the writers could continue on with that.
Then he said that this time, the show went out with a last shot of Rose Tyler and there's been no hint of who the Doctor actually is, so the writers don't have anything that they can work with. When he said "Rose Tyler", he had actually meant to say "Billie Piper" but said it like anyone often does, referring to the actress by the name of the character. He hadn't meant that he knew who BP was playing in that last shot; he just misspoke. He also wasn't meaning to imply that he knew that DW was off the air like it was in 1987, which is the other thing that everyone's misinterpreting.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-21 10:06 pm (UTC)The guy that made that mentions a promo picture that got leaked ( I don’t know how or where ) that had Fifteen & Belinda dancing. And that this was maybe going to be in the finale?
I don’t agree with the opinions on s2 ( it was pretty great), but there * is * a point that I didn’t expect but feels a little sad.
The thought of DW being cancelled is always kind of “ horror story “. But the real horror is where we are now. That there’s loads of people online who are fans ( or former fans) who would be fine with it.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-22 04:51 pm (UTC)That image wasn't leaked. You know on Disney+, when you're going to watch your show and you navigate to the episode, just before clicking "Play"? There's an image across the top of the screen that's either a screenshot from the episode or a promo pic of that particular episode. The image you're talking about was shown at the top of "Reality War" when it first appeared on Disney+.
The conjecture is that it was the original promo pic for the episode that was originally supposed to be aired, or perhaps a screenshot from it, but with the sudden changes, no one remembered to replace it before it aired. But, it shows that the original finale was very different from what we got, since at no point in "The Reality War" did anyone celebrate anything.
> The thought of DW being cancelled is always kind of “ horror story “. But the real horror is where we are now. That there’s loads of people online who are fans ( or former fans) who would be fine with it.
I never understand this attitude, the attitude of "Well, *I* don't like the current show, so fine, go ahead and cancel it." To me, that's so selfish: "I don't like it, so let's get rid of it for everybody." I spent three years hating the show, during Moffat's tenure (I don't blame Peter Capaldi or Jenna Coleman at all; I hated the stories and Clara herself, but I thought that both actors did a fantastic job with what they were given), and at no point did I ever want it to be canceled. I just wanted it to change.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-22 05:41 pm (UTC)I’m still wrapping my head around “ #chipgate” being an actual thing that happened.
But , yeah, I wasn’t that into Twelve’s first season ( I liked Clara, I felt bad for Danny, but Twelve had to grow on me big time). Series 9 was better, but I’m no fan of s10 personally. But like you I don’t blame the actors or writers or anybody if a story isn’t for me.
Now it legitimately feels like playing the blame game: Disney, RTD, Ncuti, Millie Gibson, Sethu, …
no subject
Date: 2025-10-22 07:33 pm (UTC)I actually really liked Twelve, taken completely out of context and also ignoring that contrived "Am I a good man?" angst. As you already know, I really hated Clara. In 7b, she was kind of a nothing, changing into whatever she needed to be for the episode she was in, but in s8, I really hated how she was manipulating Danny and the Doctor into fighting each other over her. And then the whole trying to be the Doctor thing in s9 was stupid.
I liked Bill well enough, except that Moffat had to make sure her race or orientation was pointed out in every single episode. The stories in s10, though, were just not good in general. I remember that I loved "Knock, Knock" until that stupid ending, and that I liked "Extremis".
no subject
Date: 2025-10-22 08:44 pm (UTC)I 100 percent agree the stories in s10 weren’t that good. I think it was meant to be” be a clean slate” after Clara and be a place to start, but it just didn’t land for me. The Twelve/ Bill/ Nardole team weren’t interesting enough. I’ve adopted the name “ Exposition and Comic Relief “ from WE&T for them. :P
no subject
Date: 2025-10-24 04:00 pm (UTC)A guy ( going by his name that I won’t shae ) said “ actually an animated series about her would work now, pls don’t want doctor who to end” .
( Side note- There was an animated Bernice Summerfield webcast once)
And this happened…
“ Are you talking about here or on the tv? If here, ( other user) is right that Big Finish is good until at least 2030. If you are talking about tv, don't get pulled into the doom spiralling. Both the BBC and the production company have confirmed that the show will be back, it just might take a little while as they have to wait for Disney to make a decision about whether to continue with them or not.”
Okay first, I love the phrase “ doom spiraling. “ :) And the initial guy brought up the hate and the fandom going away, to which someone brought up the Rob Shearman quote, including a screen cap. I read it and I can definitely see this being tajen out of context. ( Context always rules!)
I actually feel bad for Shearman saying there’s never been anything like this before: he’s right that at least in 1989 and then in 1996 ( with the TV movie) you had something to go on.
( First guy also mentioned “ a book called Rose” which he called “ a companion book” and someone clarified as the novelization. I still haven’t read that one)
no subject
Date: 2025-10-29 02:32 am (UTC)Still no clue about who BP is. And Radio Times even ended their article by saying “ Watch this space— and time!”