Doctor Who And Some Stray Thoughts About Bigeneration

I didn’t put this together immediately, but on the commentary track for “The Giggle”, RTD moots the theory that every regeneration to date was actually a bigeneration. It isn’t totally clear if he means that this rippled back retroactively, or that this always happened off screen in a parallel timeline or something. I guess this does a better job explaining “The Two Doctors” than Season 6B ever did? Or even better, the way Troughton and Pertwee play their Doctors as having come out of retirement for “The Five Doctors”.

But this also illuminates the intent behind what’s going on in Tales from the Tardis, the previous Doctors really are out there running around as older versions of themselves.

But to what end? There were much simpler ways to justify the multi-Doctor teamup in “The Giggle” or old actors returning for “Tales from the Tardis”. This feels like table-setting, but table setting for what, I wonder?

On the one hand, I believe them when they say they don’t have any plans to bring Tennant back again, but on the other hand, that’s a hell of an artillery piece to load and ostentatiously hang on the mantlepiece if you’re not planning to fire it.