Weird Dr. Who Thought - missing the bleeding obvious

[ffutures]

It occurs to me, stupidly late, that the Beeb's master plan for The Doctor is more cunning than I thought



I'm sure others have pointed this out. I'm just a bit slow sometimes...

One of the things we saw TWICE in S4 is that the Doctor can be cloned, once as Jenny (apparently a fully-fledged Gallifreyan with two hearts etc.), and once as a semi-human clone of himself, lacking the ability to regenerate but in other respects the same man.

So the next time they want to regenerate him (which takes us into "Contradicting earlier canon" territory, admittedly something they've never worried about too much) they can instead "discover" that there's traces of the Doctor's genetic material in that clone-o-mat, or open up the rift between the parallel worlds and yank back the semi-human version and give him an upgrade to full Time Lord status. Both of which reset the clock on his regenerations and give the BBC a lot more choice for future Doctors; for example, they could do the female Doctor thing for real if they wanted to.

Wonder what Joanna Lumley's up to these days...?

Comments

[mymatedave.livejournal.com]

Huh, never thought of that. Very cool

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Of course, if that rift gets opened up again it will just make this Doctor look even more of an idiot. They might as well run charabanc tours. Someone ought to teach these people not to use words like "for ever" unless you damn well mean it.

And I'm holding out for Jim Broadbent, playing the Doctor in the style of GKC. I'm not going to get it, but it's at least as plausible as anything else they've done, and it would finally put the lid on all that sexual tension stuff and let us get back to straightforward adventures. (Sonic swordstick, anyone?)

[vitruvian23.livejournal.com]

Well, Jenny was not *exactly* a clone; supposedly, what they did was split his DNA, then recombine it in a manner analogous to sexual reproduction. She's apparently what you would get if you had a clone of the Doctor where you somehow changed the Y chromosome to an X and made her female (assuming that sexual differentiation works the same way on Gallifrey, but probably a good bet given that the device worked), and the two Doctors mated and had a kid normally. The recombined genome would have the same components, but they could be rearranged pretty radically. Since she turned out pretty well, I presume that either Gallifreyans don't have many recessive genetic diseases, or (more likely, because it was used for humans and fish-people too) the device automatically screened to prevent such pairings.

Not sure what the genetics of the DonnaDoctor would be exactly; depends on the nature of the 'crisis' that resulted in him having human features such as one heart and no regenerations. Sure seems like Donna's human genes played a role in that somehow.

Anyway, given that the new series started off with Nine as the last Time Lord who had utterly destroyed all the Daleks, and by now the Daleks have been resurrected *how* many times, surely it's occurred to him that there all kinds of similar dodges that might work for his people. Perhaps it will occur to him that while the Reapers show up if you cause a paradox, the same may not apply if you deliberately set up a closed time loop ala Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" or the shenanigans of Bill and Ted. Since nobody ever recovered any Time Lord bodies from the Last Time War, and he was only sure about them being gone because he couldn't feel them in space-time, perhaps there's nothing stopping him from using the TARDIS to go back, retrieve any number of them from right before destruction/erasure, running them through a Chameleon Arch, and dropping them in some nice, safe spot for later retrieval and restoration.

Or perhaps somebody else already had the idea... somebody who even knows how to construct a device that holds back the backlash from a paradox.