Warning: this review is also a recap, meaning it contains spoilers for the episode
Did someone call for a Doctor? What about two Doctors? Amid intergalactic levels of hype over the unveiling of 15th Doctor Ncuti Gatwa, returning showrunner Russell T Davies did the impossible and bamboozled Time Lord fans young, old and in-between with the mother of all twists. Gatwa has taken his first bows as the new Doctor. But David Tennant will be hanging around as the… old Doctor?
How is this possible? Until now, it wasn’t. Davies has, however, cheekily reconfigured Time Lord lore by turning the traditional regeneration into “bi-generation”. “That is completely nuts,” says Donna Noble, speaking on behalf of the entire universe.
The Time Lord twist arrives at the end of “The Giggle”, the third of Tennant’s victory lap forays marking the programme’s 60th anniversary. Blitzed by a ray gun wielded by Neil Patrick Harris’s mega-baddy the Toymaker, Tennant turns a “regeneration” shade of orange. And then up pops Gatwa, lacking trousers for some reason. He’s charming, confident – a spaceman with swagger and exactly what you’d want of the latest custodian of the Tardis.
But hang on – Tennant is still around? He and Gatwa are joined literally at the hip and giving off weird levels of physical chemistry – they don’t snog but it feels like they might have. Pulled in two, they separate. “Bi-generation is supposed to be a myth,” gasps Tennant’s Doctor. Gatwa’s Doctor smiles devilishly. Myth has become reality.
The Tardis splits in two, as well – for the first time in TV history, we’ll have to devise a plural for time-hopping police boxes. Tardaux? Tardee? Tardisissss? I have only one brain and I think it’s melting.
The big question is what it all means for Gatwa’s stint as the Doctor. Tennant’s 14th Doctor has gone off to recuperate with Donna and her family, having apparently come down with interstellar PTSD. Yet he’s very much around and could come charging back at any moment – intriguing and very, very Marvel (no coincidence perhaps that the shift in lore comes as Disney + acquires global distribution rites for the franchise).
Yet it also implies that the BBC doesn’t quite trust Gatwa enough to hand him sole custodianship of the sci-fi flagship. Not that the Sex Education star seems too bothered, though. Even without trousers, he’s devilishly good fun – the Doctor we know and love but with enough charm to put his stamp on the character. He’s great – in the meantime, let’s give Davies and Tennant the benefit of the doubt and see how this Double Doctor strategy plays out.
Up to this point, “The Giggle” has been a mishmash of deranged cartoon and Freudian frolic through the Doctor’s psyche. It swings from silly to chilly, from schlock to shock – supporting Davies’s claim the episode is “nuts, completely mad, frightening”.
Fun and fright factor are both down to Neil Patrick Harris’s Toymaker– a notorious nemesis of the Time Lords introduced all the way back in the era of First Doctor William Hartnell. Patrick Harris updates the antagonist– to a point. His take on the manipulative sci-fi Willy Wonka is rooted unapologetically in the 1990s school of big-screen gurning. Harris has seemingly patterned his performance on Jim Carrey circa The Mask. Meanwhile, his big action set-piece is a violent song-and-dance routine to the Spice Girls.
Amid the regeneration, the return of the Toymaker and the general mayhem, there is also, somehow, a plot. When the previous excursion, “Wild Blue Yonder”, ended, the Doctor and returning companion, Donna (Catherine Tate), were back in London and surrounded by unfolding anarchy.
A psychological contagion has unleashed the real-world equivalent of social media on the world. Everybody is convinced they are right and more interested in shouting down people with the opposite view than engaging with them. Cancel culture exists – a monster run amok on the streets of London.
The mania is all part of the Toymaker’s great game. In a flashback to the 1920s, an assistant of Scottish inventor John Logie Baird visits a toy shop adjoining his Soho workshop. He’s there to purchase a ventriloquist’s dummy. But because the toy seller is also the Toymaker, the helper comes away with Stooky Bill, a creepy marionette with a twist.
Stooky Bill was a real person – or a real dummy – and featured in Baird’s pioneering experiments into TV. He was, in other words, history’s first television star. A century on, the Doctor and Donna discover that the signal sending everyone bonkers is Stooky’s deranged laugh – buried inside our TV screens for the past hundred years (don’t think about it too deeply – it will drive you as mad as Stooky Bill).
So it’s off to Soho 1925 to work out what happened to the dummy – an excursion that culminates in a memorable encounter with Stooky Bill’s terrifying widow and their three feral babies.
But before that, Donna has a few questions. Back at Unit HQ, she was introduced to another of the Doctor’s helpers – Bonnie Langford’s Melanie Bush. The Doctor is delighted to see Mel again after so many years. Donna, though, is puzzled. In all their time together, The Doctor never mentioned Mel – though he obviously cared for her.
“You talk about no one ever – you just keep charging on,” she says, half-accusingly as they take the Tardis to Soho. That reluctance to confront his past is why he has regenerated as the 10th Doctor, she suggests. “It’s like you’re staggering, along. Maybe that’s why your old face came back. Maybe you’re wearing yourself out.”
He shrugs her words off. Still, they have stung. When the Toymaker later traps him in his infinite toy shop, he falls apart. “I’m always so certain. I’m all Sonic, Tardis and Time Lord. Take away the toys – what am I now?”
It’s an impressively vexed performance by Tennant and a clue to where the episode is headed. The Toymaker is an old foe, but the Doctor has new woes – such as no longer knowing who he is at a metaphysical level.
With his “bi-generation” as the 15th Doctor, Tennant has moved on to the next part of that journey as Doctor-in-emeritus. On Christmas Day, Whovians will meanwhile catch up with Gatwa for his first solo adventure. What a weird and wonderful – okay, mostly weird – time to be a Doctor Who fan.
