The Latest Doctor Who Finale Has The Wildest Ending Reveal Yet

This post contains spoilers for the "Doctor Who" season finale, "The Reality War."

If a show goes on long enough, it'll inevitably reach a point where it just starts getting weird with it. Such is the case with the last few seasons of "Doctor Who," which have marketed themselves as seasons 1 and 2 of a new show but have still basically functioned as seasons 14 and 15 of the 2005 "Doctor Who" revival. The sense of fatigue is hard to fight, especially since the "Doctor Who" revival is a continuation of a show that went on for 26 seasons. 

You can see the fight against audience fatigue most clearly with the show's recent handling of regenerations. Since showrunner Russell T Davies has returned to the show, we've seen the Doctor regenerate into a previous Doctor for the first ever time. Then we saw him bi-generate for the first time, a concept that was never mentioned once in the show's first sixty years. In this latest finale, "The Reality War," we're seeing the first proper surprise regeneration in decades. Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor has regenerated after a mere two-season run, and this time he's regenerated into ... previous companion Rose Tyler?

Well, more accurately he's regenerated into Billie Piper, who will apparently now be playing the Doctor the next time the show returns. How much will Billie Piper's Doctor be reminiscent of Rose? And why has the Doctor regenerated into a former companion's face for the first time ever? The obvious answer is that it's all a ratings ploy, but perhaps RTD has something more meaningful in store. 

Either way, this ending is unprecedented. Thanks to the internet, it's been impossible for most of modern "Who" to keep an upcoming regeneration secret, so the production team has always leaned into this and done a big event hyping up the new Doctor before the current Doctor even leaves. The fact that the show kept this Doctor/Rose reveal under wraps is either a testament to how competently the production now handles secrets, or it's a sign of how much the show's cultural impact has faded. If the "Doctor Who" fandom today was as popular and engaged as it was in 2009, I don't think the show could've gotten away with hiding a development this big.

The obvious question the finale leaves us with is whether or not this reveal is even real. The season 13 finale's twist of David Tennant as the next Doctor, for instance, did not lead to several seasons of Tennant exploring time and space again. Rather, it led to three event episodes, which ended with the arrival of the actual next Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa. So, will Billie Piper be playing the Doctor for a special or two, or will she be around long-term?

Honestly, either way's pretty intriguing. If nothing else, this is certainly one method of bringing in another female Doctor without angering the right-wing trolls too much. They might have to pause their complaints about the show being too woke, so they can first try to make sense of the sheer logistics of a Billie Piper return.

More seriously, Piper as the Doctor means we'll get to see what a female Doctor looks like with someone other than Chris Chibnall running the show. I was always bitter that the first female Doctor was stuck with the worst showrunner of the revival series, so it'll be nice to see a female Doctor combined with a showrunner who's mildly competent. RTD has many flaws as a showrunner, but he's great at establishing fun Doctor/companion dynamics. I want to see what "Doctor Who" looks like when it's a female Doctor matched up with one male companion in the TARDIS, a dynamic that the Chibnall/Whittaker oddly never gave us. 

One thing that sours me on the Billie Piper reveal is that the events leading up to it were a total mess. Most of "The Reality War" is overly-convoluted, with so much meaningless spectacle that it all blurs together. There's a point where the Doctor's flying at a giant skeleton ghost dinosaur that's stomping through London, and instead of exciting me it just made me sigh and wonder what I was doing with my life. Although fans have made clear at this point that they think Russell T Davies is better at giving us smaller-scale stories, RTD never seems to get the hint. He always has to make things as high-stakes as possible, even though that's clearly not his forte. 

Lost in the meaningless chaos of this finale was companion Belinda (Verada Sethu). Belinda was great in her first few episodes because she established strong boundaries with the Doctor, promising a companion who'd put the Doctor to task for his constant lying and general flakiness. But in the two-part finale it was easy to forget that Belinda even was this season's companion, because it was Ruby who got all the interesting material. Belinda's entire finale storyline was based around her new daughter Poppy, and the Doctor ultimately regenerated himself to save Poppy.

I'm reluctant to see Gatwa's Doctor leave at this point because, well, it feels like he just got here. But if he's going to leave, it shouldn't be due to him saving a character who was never mentioned at all until last week. "The Reality War" says goodbye to both the Fifteenth Doctor and Belinda, but it does so in a way that feels messy and premature. Belinda deserved more than just eight episodes to make her mark on the series, and Gatwa deserved more than two eight-episode seasons. 

But hey, maybe this isn't the end for them. As fans on social media have pointed out already, the end credits don't specify that Billie Piper is playing the Doctor. (Even though that's the natural conclusion you'd take from those final moments.) It's possible this is all some big convoluted fake-out, and next year Gatwa and Belinda will be back on our TV screens once again. That idea might seem weird and far-fetched, but that's never stopped modern "Doctor Who" before.