Doctor Who: The David Tennant Questions

More than a month has passed since the final Doctor Who episode of the Jodie Whittaker era aired. The dust has settled. Jodie got a better farewell than many fans expected, and we have a new Doctor. Confounding the expectations of most people who watch the show, that new current Doctor is not Ncuti Gatwa, even though he was announced as the new Doctor long before Jodie’s era ended. It is, in fact, David Tennant.

The return of one of the most popular actors ever to play the famous Time Lord shocked the world, but we’ve had a little time to get used to it. Now that we have, we’ve got a few questions. The biggest of those questions are “how” and “why,” or as Tennant’s Doctor is so fond of saying, “What? What? What?” – but let’s see if we can be more nuanced about it and find a few answers. We’re going to be waiting almost an entire year until the next episode airs in November 2023, so we may as well fill in at least some of that time by speculating.

How is the Tenth Doctor back?

This is an easy question to answer. David Tennant might be back, but the Tenth Doctor is not. There are some clues to that, and we’re not just talking about Tennant being visibly older than he was when he first played the role or even when he first reprised it for the show’s fiftieth anniversary in 2013. The first clue is that his outfit is different. Tennant’s wearing a similar outfit to the one he wore between 2005 and 2010, but with a waistcoat rather than a jacket and with an entirely different coat. The second is that in the short trailer that aired at the end of “The Power of the Doctor,” we heard Tennant say aloud (in character, of course) that he “doesn’t know who he is anymore.” If he were the Tenth Doctor, he’d have no such identity issues.

Canonical media has confirmed that Tennant is playing the Fourteenth Doctor. This isn’t the Doctor degenerating into a previous form (despite degeneration being a core plot point of “The Power of the Doctor.” The Doctor has regenerated into a new body, but his new body looks exactly like his old body. Ncuti Gatwa will play the Fifteenth Doctor. The question isn’t whether the Doctor has gone backwards – it’s why he’s returned to a previous form.

Did the Doctor subconsciously choose this form?

The show’s canon has never quite made its mind up about the regeneration process. There have been times when it’s been suggested that a regenerating Time Lord has almost total control over what their next body looks like (see: Romana I regenerating into Romana II), and there have been times when regeneration has been described as a random process (see: the Fourth Doctor regenerating into the Fifth Doctor). In the latter version, the Doctor has no more control over the process than someone spinning reels at an online casino – they can hope they have some control over the outcome, but they’re really in the lap of fate. This is, in fact, the factor at the core of how casino operators keep players coming back to their websites. That’s all well and good for a casino trying to attract and keep players and also underlines why a Doctor Who-themed casino game would probably be popular, but it makes less sense in the context of an all-powerful being trying to maintain control of their autonomy and future.

Metaphors and canon confusion aside, there are two reasons to think the Doctor might have subconsciously chosen this form. The first is the Twelfth Doctor’s on-screen realisation that he chose the face of Caecilius from “The Fires of Pompeii” – he did it as a reminder that sometimes he has to save people and deal with the consequences later. It was a clever way of explaining why both roles were played by Peter Capaldi, but it also confirmed that the Doctor could control his or her regeneration process to a degree whether they’re aware of it or not.

The second reason comes from “The Day of the Doctor” in 2013, in which the Fourth Doctor actor Tom Baker appears in the closing moments as “The Curator” and subtly implies that he’s a future incarnation of the Doctor, “revisiting a few faces.” That scene set a precedent. The Doctor has already been told that he’ll revisit a few of his former faces in years to come. Now it seems like it may finally have happened.

Is it a trick?

At the risk of giving away minor spoilers, we know that the Fourteenth Doctor won’t last long. Tennant is around for three specials, after which he’ll hand over to Gatwa for the next full series. We’ve seen such a short on-screen run for a full incarnation of a Doctor before – hello, Paul McGann – but the abrupt tenancy (forgive the pun) makes us think that something else might be afoot – something that might possibly be connected to some rumours about who and what the character played by Neil Patrick Harris in next year’s anniversary specials is.

It’s been speculated that Harris’ character might be a long-overdue return for a trickster character known as the Celestial Toymaker, last seen during William Hartnell’s tenure as the First Doctor in the 1960s. Existing lore says that the Toymaker is a powerful entity, but the nature and limitations of his powers are undefined. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that the Fourteenth Doctor is a “trick” regeneration and ultimately won’t be the Doctor’s true form. That might even explain why we saw the Doctor’s clothes regenerate along with their body as the Thirteenth Doctor became the Fourteenth. The Doctor’s clothes have only changed as part of a regeneration once before – between the First and Second Doctors – and that was a production error rather than something done deliberately.

Like we said at the beginning of this article, it’s fun to speculate, but we’re not going to get any answers any time soon. We’ve got a long wait before the next episode airs, and we might get a few more hints between now and then. Until that happens, our money’s on Tennant’s Fourteenth Doctor being a trick of some kind, and Gatwi eventually being revealed as the “true” Fourteenth Doctor rather than the Fifteenth.