London’s Natural History Museum has used the Doctor Who 60th-anniversary celebrations as an excuse to give fourteen newly-discovered species of wasp a genus inspired by a classic Doctor Who villain.
Doctor Who blew its big handoff
11.12.2023 - 23:41 / polygon.com / David Tennant / Russell T.Davies
It’s Doctor Who tradition that one Doctor’s final episode is the next Doctor’s first. This handoff is one of the coolest things about the show. You never really know what you’re going to get, and everything feels new again. Last weekend, the guard changed once again, in another first for the series following Jodie Whittaker’s tenure as the first woman in the role. Unfortunately, the momentous occasion was marred by what seems like an incredibly boneheaded decision in how the transition was made.
The Fifteenth Doctor, however, is always going to have an asterisk by his name. A little footnote, denoting that his introduction — as actor Ncuti Gatwa takes his historic place as the first Black man to assume the role in Doctor Who’s 60-year history — is different from the rest. It makes the whole affair feel like an alarming step back right before what many still hope might be a great leap forward for the long-running series.
[Ed. note: Spoilers for the ending of “The Giggle” follow.]
As an episode, “The Giggle,” the last of Doctor Who’s three 60th-anniversary specials, is a hell of a ride, if a bit dense. The premise involves a subliminal message hidden in every screen, everywhere, driving the world mad, a heavy-handed metaphor that would drag the whole episode down if the story dwelled on it much. Thankfully, it doesn’t — writer Russell T. Davies mostly uses this plot for spectacle’s sake, to give the episode an apocalyptic scale. He puts much more energy into the episode’s villain, the Toymaker.
A deep pull from Doctor Who history, the Toymaker first appeared during William Hartnell’s (the very first Doctor!) tenure on the run. He’s not shown up on screen since, but still resurfaced in the odd Who novel or radio play through the years. In casting Neil Patrick Harris to resurrect the role, Davies finally gives the three specials a sense of history that this trilogy of specials has been lacking, one that stretches back to before the modern era of Doctor Who Davies kicked off in 2005.
The Toymaker also thrusts us into the new era of Doctor Who. A creature from beyond the universe who sees all of existence through an amoral lens of games and play, the Doctor’s plan for defeating him involves challenging him to a game — only, in the sort of logic loopholes Doctor Who is so fond of deploying, the Toymaker demands to play the next Doctor — and shoots a beam right through the Doctor’s chest.
This is where “The Giggle” falls apart. Instead of regenerating into Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor, something weird called “bigeneration” happens, and the Doctor splits in two: David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor and Gatwa’s Fifteenth. It’s not a temporary thing, either — as the special’s denouement plays out, it’s made very
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