Doctor Who: The Giggle Review - 8 Ups And 4 Downs

…because it just might be. The bigeneration is getting a down as well.

Narratively, this was a chef’s kiss moment, but out here in the real world, there’s a slightly cynical undercurrent. You see, now, we have the fan-adored Tennant Doctor, sitting there with a very open-ended, dare we say sequel-teasing ‘finale’. For the first time, it seems we might have a backup Doctor waiting in the wings in case things go south, a get out of jail free card to wave about should audience interest start to wane. We really hope that this isn’t the case, and that RTD’s reasons for this are purely narrative, but given he’s the man who let David Tennant play the Doctor twice, and there’s a lot of talk of Earth-bound spin-offs… yikes. At best, this is an unfortunate false impression, at worst, it’s a dangerous precedent and frankly, a bit of a middle finger to Ncuti Gatwa, who may be competing with the most popular incarnation of The Doctor during his own run.

As much as we loved the scenes of Fourteen and Fifteen interacting with eachother, it did feel like Fifteen didn’t really get his centre-stage moment (luckily, he had the charisma to steal the show anyway).

If it turns out that the Fourteenth Doctor’s rehab happens entirely off screen, and we never hear from him again, then we’ll happily retract this ‘down’, but, let’s be honest, I think we know that we’ve not seen the back Doctor Who’s ‘golden boy’ quite yet.