LogFAQs > #968575866

16. Metacrisis Doctor (David Tennant)

There have been some questionable decisions with regards to the Doctor's regeneration cycle over the years...particularly under Moffat/Chibnall's tenures as showrunner. But at least some of those weird, one-off choices are given a genuine chance to shine in their single-episode (or few-episode) runs. This one, however, is inexcusable. First off, I feel like this was a retroactive choice by Steven Moffat, on top of his casting of the War Doctor, in order to make a big, flashy spectacle when Matt Smith regenerated into Peter Capaldi. The established lore was that a Time Lord only gets 12 regenerations, so in theory, the Doctor should have had two more after Matt Smith...but then the War Doctor happened, so there was only one more. But THEN this one-off plot point from the series 4 finale came back and it was the DUMBEST thing.

Don't get me wrong...making a weird, regenerated human/Time Lord hybrid was interesting, and David Tennant got to be a bit quirkier than usual opposite Donna...but this was just pointless. It made Tennant's Doctor feel extremely vain, and it felt like a cop-out so Rose could get a happy ending. I never cared much for the romantic plotline between Rose and the Doctor, so her getting her own Doctor replacement (with a mortal lifespan) was SO cheap and cheesy (and it makes Donna's ending sting THAT much more, since she got fucked harder than ANYONE else). But yeah, the Metacrisis Doctor didn't really do anything other than genociding a fuckton of Daleks and taking heat for it (oh right, that's another thing: the real Doctor doesn't have to have that PARTICULAR genocide on his conscience), and then he left to be with Rose. Whatever.

Hint for #15: Another Doctor from the reboot.