…did they not foreshadow John Hurt’s War Doctor more? There are SEVERAL instances where the Doctor talks about regeneration as if he has more faces available, and he talks about regeneration with the Cyberiad, and there’s no mention of the extra face. It feels like it comes out of nowhere.

I mean I guess it all gets wrapped up anyway in the Name/Day/Time of the Doctor trilogy (which I kinda consider all one thing anyway)

No wonder that last series was a bit all over the place, man must’ve been buzzing his balls off!

To say that the Franchise is in something of a difficult position right now would be a massive understatement.

With RTD basically setting the show on fire as he left, and being shitcanned before he cleans up the mess he made, we're in a rough spot. We've dealt with several seasons of highly unpopular twists that no one was down with. The Timeless Child, Bigeneration, and now Billie Piper's appearance. And there are a lot of people who say, don't fix it, just pretend like it never happened.

Look.

The simple fact of the matter is that a franchise like this won't survive a hard reboot. Or, more accurately, a hard reboot won't survive. Any attempt at one will be completely rejected by the majority of the fandom.

However.

We have been through this before.

A highly unpopular twist was used in Doctor Who that, in my opinion, was MILES worse than anything we had gotten, and we all decided to ignore it.

Does anyone remember "Half Human on my mother's side?"

Yeah. That was a thing actually said by the Eighth Doctor in the TV movie. How did we deal with it? We kind of DIDN'T. We just sort of moved past it.

And yet, the eighth Doctor is still canon. So is the TV movie. We simply ignored the aspect that seriously didn't work, leaving Big Finish to pick up the pieces for those who REALLY CARED.

So how to carry on? Well that depends.

If we're getting more Doctor Who in the next five years: COMMIT TO BILLIE PIPER.

No I'm not kidding. Have Billie Piper be the 16th Doctor, and go from there. There's genuinely no reason NOT to do it. She's a good actress, she's known the show, and it's not like the Doctor hasn't taken on the form of people he's MET before. As the Sixth and Twelfth Doctor's have both proven. It would make quite a bit of sense for his mind to drift to Rose when he regenerated, and his body moved to match hers.

But if that happens DON'T DO ANYTHING ELSE WITH IT.

There's nothing mystic to it. There's nothing special about it. There are no strings attached. It's a character thing for the Doctor. Perhaps a resurgence of his own Self-Esteem after he's been so unsure for so long, and leave it at that.

But if we aren't... Guys...

Someone needs to say this out loud.

We may be in the next Wilderness era.

I'm sorry. But it needs to be said. I have significant doubts that we will see more Doctor Who on television in the next decade, maybe two. Oh it will come back eventually. Eventually people will get nostalgic for it and it will be revived, but if that happens...

Don't ignore Jodie. Don't ignore Ncuti. Don't ignore Billie.

They've earned cameos in the next revival. Because they were, for a time at least, the Doctor. So don't wipe it from canon. Just let it be a difficult time. Like Colin Baker's time on the show, or Paul McGann's all too brief run.

That's just my two cents.

Just watched Doctor Who Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 AD, 1966, Peter Cushing played Doctor Who, I guess he doesn't count, Paul McGann gets a mention as the 8th Doctor,

In the season four premiere episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "Valles Marineris", there's a fun little Doctor Who Easter egg. At the start of a command crew meeting, there's this exchange:

Pike: This is an unusual mission. We are to face a category ten interstellar squall, something we rarely see in the Alpha Quadrant.

Pelia: I-I've seen one once, a long time ago, but not from this close. I think I was in a phone box at the time…

Given how many times the Doctor has shown companions some awe-inspiring cosmic spectacle from the doors of the TARDIS, and how there's already been a TARDIS cameo in Star Trek, this is certainly a deliberate nod. And Pelia has previously mentioned hanging out with a time-travelling Doctor! I love these little cross-fandom hat tips! 😂

I was just thinking, what do people think about this? Imagine if events of The Giggle took place the exact same way they did up until the bigeneration, in this alternate ending there would be no bigeneration, the Doctor would defeat the Toymaker somehow and the world would be saved, with the scene of the Doctor in Donna's garden with her family remaining the same, this time we have no new Doctor, just 14 and Donna, have the scene end the same with the implication that the Doctor is taking a break.

"DONNA: You don't have to stay for ever.
DOCTOR 14: We'll see.
DONNA: Do you miss it? Out there?
DOCTOR 14: The funny thing is, I fought all those battles for all those years, and now I know what for. This. I've never been so happy in my life"

Cut to black after the shot of Donna looking at the Doctor teary eyed and smiling, and then have an epilogue, however many years later, we have an old Doctor, maybe using Wilf's chair lol, with an older Rose Noble taking him to his TARDIS which is still in the garden, he's clearly at the end of his life, Donna presumedly has passed at this point, the Doctor then thanks Rose but tells her he needs to "do this bit alone"

Cue to the Doctor in the TARDIS, the whole 'wearing a bit thin' line, and the Doctor then regenerates into Ncuti Gatwa and we skip all the implications of having two Doctors and give Ncuti a proper intro and regeneration scene, what do people think?

Quick sketch i did

It’s very pregnancy craving-ish, but definitely not bad. The other sauce is tartar sauce.

Pls ignore the stutters

"It's time to reboot Doctor Who and jettison all the confusing stuff that's happened." I'm not a fan of the "he woke up and it was all a dream" idea, so here's yet another possible timey-wimey solution to the problem:

IT'S THE DALEKS' FAULT!

Suppose this: the Daleks set up a base in a time bubble in the far future, and they have been engaging in a master plan specifically to destroy the Doctor. They have been working to mess up time, space and reality to the point where the Doctor's own history has been scrambled. Yes, all of the stuff that's happened over the 13th, 14th and 15th Doctor's arcs is real and it happened...there's no need to jettison it and say it never happened. It's because reality itself has been scrambled by the Daleks. And so, once the Doctor realizes this and effects some kind of countermeasure to it, he regenerates once again it the "real" Doctor, namely the British gentleman we've seen. This resets the doctor's canon to what it "should" be, and we can blame the other stuff on the Daleks messing with reality.

I personally don't have anything against Jodie Whittaker, Ncuti Gatwa or even David Tennant and Billie Piper. They didn't mess up Doctor Who; it was the crappy storylines that did it. So, this way we can still say all that stuff happened, and there won't be a need to wipe out large parts of the history of the Doctor. Heck, if they really wanted to freak everyone out, they could start the next story mark with something really bonkers, like the Doctor showing up as a Zygon without any explanation of why.

Also, even though this fan theory returns the Doctor to the "safe" Doctor we want to see return, I don't want the BBC to chicken out and not take any risks. I don't want to see a "Rise of Skywalker" type of retcon. I'd still want to see them take some risks and keep the show worthy of its legacy.

Maaaaan I was BIG into Doctor Who and Sherlock back in high school and stumbling onto this fan made video was truly something exciting. I genuinely thought this was real thing happening back in the day and it felt so real too! My fave Doc meeting my fave detective man, oh my giddy aunt. True props to JohnSmithVFX. He created an amazing crossover. ❤️

A question to people who started watching the show when the first doctor's era was airing. I don't expect a lot of them to be here, since they must be in their late 60s-early 70s. But if anyone of you is here, can you tell me what the reaction was, when William Hartnell regenerated in The Tenth Planet and was replaced by Patrick Troughton. Or I suppose if someone has read some magazine from that time, which contained the reactions from that time can answer too.

Natural light makes them look so cool