Let's write!

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.