BTW how do the bits put in this series jive with Jenny being out there somewhere (The Doctor’s Daughter)?
The best speculation I’ve read (Reddit) is that she is The Tardis.
The “hello” is not a recognition of the old face as she has not seen it or even felt it yet. It is more consistent with The Tardis recognizing it is outside in a body.
Rose was until this ep the last one to look into the heart of The Tardis, so a face the heart of The Tardis “knows”.
Not mentioned there: The Doctor just looked into the heart himself. At great risk per fourteen of destroying everything.
And The Tardis has been very odd this whole series.
It sets up a brief transition bit of Billie as the lead but not as The Doctor for a few eps before turning the reigns to a new Doctor.
And it leaves a chance to return to past clues as things done like Bad Wolf did, for reasons yet to be made clear, including explaining the last companion mysteries of Ruby’s special aspects, and Beinda in the distant future.
Of course more likely RTD has no plan and is hoping to have some inspiration hit. Maybe he will crib from best of ideas of fan speculations!
ETA in a Bad Wolf way it could bigenerate and be left as The Timeless Child itself …
Hrm. I wouldn’t mind this if it was one episode, or even part of one. But several? This whole season had, what, six or seven episodes? I don’t want to watch Piper mugging around for half of them before the “real” Doctor finally turns up for two or three eps and then another three-year hiatus before we get new ones.
I really don’t like this “only a few episodes and then a huge wait” paradigm they’ve started lately. Especially when combined with a lot of the lackluster scripts, it really makes it hard to remain a fan. I still haven’t watched the whole “Flux” season because, even though I liked Fourteen as a Doctor, I didn’t like her terrible and convoluted storylines, nor did I like her TARDIS full of boring “fam” taking the attention away from her.
I’m thinking like Tenant’s return, as a two part special before the next season. Then a regular season.
I ran across this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-XluUJrdCI
The short of it is that there are clues that the series ending was done last minute. Ruby’s hair style change, last minute shoots, and unseen footage shots are used to show that this change came late. It came off as reasonable to me but I haven’t confirmed in other places.
I also don’t like fewer episodes. With RTD, I have liked all but one, maybe two, a season. That hasn’t changed even as the episode count goes down.
I wonder if they let Disney’s wallet go to their head? I mean, I don’t know how much they got from Disney but the Tardis interior alone, even as a static set, had to be expensive. Sometimes having to do things “on the cheap” creates great things! I don’t know enough about the BBC and their budget to know how much Disney was helping. I thought someone said without Disney’s funding, the BBC wouldn’t have been able to do it? Pure speculation, sorry about that.
If Billie is the Tardis, and Tennant does come back, it could setup the Rani’s return as well. Or at least show how it could be done.
Having said that, I would rather have a two year, three year, or maybe four year hiatus and then come back strong with a full twelve episode series than have it end as it did.
Thanks for the conversation!
I’ve read (from a leaker that got lots of things right about this season) that the season 3 scripts had already been written for Gatwa’s version. (Even the leaker doesn’t know what the plan is with Rose.)
We have 5 more episodes of Whoniverse Disney content yet to air: the UNIT vs fishpeople miniseries.
Shortly before Saturday’s finale, scooper Daniel Richtman shared a small description of what should have happened in the season closer before reshoots changed the story. He wrote, “The original ending of [Doctor] Who S2 (before the reshoots) was The Doctor, Ruby, Belinda, etc. are all having a big party (think Amy [and] Rory’s wedding) everyone’s dancing [and] The Vlinx is a DJ. Susan is seen watching them from afar, which would’ve been the cliffhanger leading into a [season 3].”
“Susan would have appeared in a Five Doctors-esque look (grey trenchcoat) overlooking the party that the Doctor [and company] are at. She [would] have been standing with Poppy to…Susan says, ‘Let’s go Mum,’ and then we cut to the credits. This was to be explored next season but was shelved once [season 3] was then not to go ahead as planned, and [Davies] wanted to give the Poppy storyline an ending instead of having to pick it up in a later season with a new Doctor.”
Well that was a direction that some of us were hoping for!
Wasn’t that one of the earlier episodes this season? The one in Africa I think? They met Poppy in an alleyway?
This finale was bad. Wow. Doctor Who is at its best when it does quiet self-contained stories. All this lasers shooting/splodey/technobabble/cgi fights crap just bogs it down. Couldn’t follow what was happening at UNIT and didn’t give a crap because it doesn’t matter. The Doctor will wave his hand and everything is fixed, no real stakes. Why are we supposed to care about Poppy, a kid that doesn’t really exist?
Who was the hotel woman with the magic doors? No memory of her whatsoever. Gee what a super power piece of deus ex machina those doors are. 
I have not been keeping up with any news about the show so I didn’t know Ncuti was going to regenerate and I certainly didn’t expect Billie Piper? The hell? She wasn’t credited as The Doctor so I don’t expect her to actually be the next one, thankfully.
The Time Hotel is from the most recent Christmas special “Joy to the World” and IMHO one of the few things that actually worked in the episode.
Belinda did see a glimpse of Poppy in “The Story and the Engine” the “Africa” episode. Captain Poppy was in “Space Babies” — understood why you may have forgot that one….
Brian
Christmas this year was a pretty good episode.
Are…getting no holiday specials this winter?
That was Belinda, not Ruby. That’s why I thought it was a continuity error.
The Unleashed behind the scenes show made a big deal about the actress who played Poppy. They showed how funny and animated she was and yet very little of that made it to the screen. She mainly just stared blankly.
Oh wow. I don’t think I ever saw that one! It’s not listed in the episodes list on Disney+. Hmmm I’ll check it out later and see if I remember that. The synopsis doesn’t sound familiar.
That’s the 2024 Christmas episode.
Belinda just saw her as a spooky kid briefly in the alley … for no apparent narrative reason. Didn’t know a name. Ruby had met her as Captain Poppy in Space Babies. Knew the name. Not a continuity error.
Finale was a complicated mess, yes. And the fact that it appeared to have been rushed explains a lot of that. I was also hoping they’d resolve this “mavity” idiocy".
I agree that Whitaker was shortchanged on writing (her second episode with the death race across a planet was excellent, but a lot of the other eps were just dumb and they made her a babbling exposition machine. I also agree that there were too many companions, but OTOH Bradley Walsh acted the bejeezus out of Graham and Yaz definitely needed to stay. It was Ryan and his togglable dyspraxia they should have left out.
We’ve seen some of them come and go (including Rassilon) and some of them were represented as “little boxes” (i.e. confirmed deaded) in the Matt Smith era. I’m not going to go back to check which ones.
She’s a cute baby. Nothing more than that.
Capaldi’s Doctor had a throwaway line in one episode about “choosing that face”, referencing why he (the Doctor) looked like Lobus Caecilius. And of course we had the return of David Tennant’s face (about which there was an amusing nod in the finale here). So a Doctor with Rose’s face isn’t inconsistent with previous practice, although the point about the credits is noted.
Speaking of returning faces, Russell Tovey doesn’t seem to be reprising his Space Titanic character Alonso Frame (last seen flirting with Captain Jack), and on his Wiki page is credited as “Barclay” for the upcoming episode.
That was the Magic Wish Baby, no?
For reference:
Saw him in his recent turn in “The Importance of Being Ernest” at the National Theatre. The camp is dialed up to 37 but it was a lot of fun.
I thought “no.”
The Rani finding a magical seventh son of a seventh son of a … that they had no idea she’d do … who grants the wishes of others in order to release a powerful entity … did not fit that to me anyway.
Starting with Ruby, it occurred to me that a couple of the writers had just had children of their own and were letting that colour their judgement as to how fascinating babies really are in TV sci-fi narratives.
Remove all the babies, patch up the plots, and things improve dramatically.
I thought Poppy was cute, but also that it was weird that Belinda talked incessantly about getting back to her parents while simultaneously failing to mention that she had a child.
According to the final edit, she was mentioning Poppy constantly and it was edited out.