Who Is That Big Returning Doctor Who Star Playing?

Warning: major spoilers for the Doctor Who series 15 finale “The Reality War”.

Spoiler alert! Except, no, sorry, if you’ve not seen “Wish World” yet you have already been spoiled by newspaper headlines, your Facebook feed, and all the Doctor Who fans on social media screaming “This is the stupidest thing ever!” (derogatory) or “This is the stupidest thing ever!” (complimentary).

After a gauntlet of dramatic reveals, up to and including the Doctor beating the villain by shooting it with a big laser gun, a surprise Jodie Whittaker appearance, the Doctor stands at the threshold of the TARDIS after directly addressing the Biblical Star of Bethlehem, and his body is consumed by regeneration energy, finally fading to reveal… Billie Piper, the actor who played Doctor Who companion Rose Tyler!

But as we were screaming ourselves hoarse over that reveal, the closing credits were lining up one hell of a chaser.

NCUTI GATWA AS THE DOCTOR

JODIE WHITTAKER AS THE DOCTOR

And then…

AND INTRODUCING BILLIE PIPER

The simple omission of an “AS THE DOCTOR” there is already enough to send us all scrabbling for our conspiracy theory cork boards, but just in case that wasn’t enough, Billie Piper released a statement after the show saying, “It’s no secret how much I love this show, and I have always said I would love to return to the Whoniverse as I have some of my best memories there, so to be given the opportunity to step back on that TARDIS one more time was just something I couldn’t refuse, but who, how, why and when, you’ll just have to wait and see.”

There it is. “Who, how, why and when, you’ll just have to wait and see.”

Sure, we could wait and see, OR we could engage in some wild and completely unfounded speculation about who Billie Piper is going to be playing in Doctor Who.

You know which one we’re going to pick.

The Doctor

Let’s deal with the most obvious option first. She is the Doctor. The Doctor is no stranger to taking on familiar faces, whether that’s Maxil the commander of the Gallifreyan Chancellery Guard, Roman marble salesman Lobus Caecilius, recycling one of his faces as the Fourteenth Doctor, or doing that again when eventually becomes The Curator. We’ve even already got a whole article of wild conspiracy theories about why David Tennant’s incarnation came back, and most of these theories could still work for Billie.

But perhaps the best argument for why Piper might have finally taken the Big Scarf, is that she would be damn good at it. She was great as Rose, with all the wide-eyed wonder and plucky determination needed to make a good companion. But since then, she has built up 20 years of acting experience, she has carried multiple TV series as the lead, and there is a lot more she can do.

Watch her as Cassandra in Netflix’s KAOS, and you will see someone with all the otherworldly and timey wimey perspective needed to pilot a TARDIS or wander into the middle of a megalomaniac’s lair as if she was looking for the loos and came in here by mistake.

We’ve got some other theories here, but I’m going to lay my cards on the table – I’m going to be a bit disappointed if Billie Piper doesn’t get the big “Sixteen” title.

Rose Tyler

Right, suspect number two. Billie Piper is returning to her old role. Somehow, perhaps by “moving time one degree” (that’s the technical term) the barriers between universes have been nudged enough for Rose to come back. Maybe she’s switched places and the next episode will see Ncuti and David Tennant team up again on Pete’s world? (It’s not that)

But the theory that Rose is back is made all the more likely thanks to this cryptic Instagram post. Billie Piper, holding a rose, saying “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Russell T Davies replying “Forever! (Heart emoji)” These are clues that are so subtle they could only have been written by Russell T Davies.

Also, while behind-the-scenes gossip is boring, the show is in a questionable position right now. We are still waiting for concrete news about when the next season will happen and if Disney+ will be involved, and if Billie Piper is not the Doctor, we don’t know who is.

The last time the show was in this precarious a position was the 50th anniversary, with Matt Smith’s contract coming to an end and Capaldi not yet signed, and Moffat briefly considered a version of that Special starring Clara in a universe where the Doctor never existed. Maybe that’s an idea whose time has come?

The Moment

You know who else was in the 50th anniversary special? Billie Piper! Playing someone who wasn’t Rose Tyler! (We sussed that out ahead of time.) The Moment is a sentient user interface to the most powerful weapon in the universe, taken from the Omega archive (the same Omega we just saw turn into a giant skeleton baby and get blasted by the Doctor). The Doctor brought that weapon out to end the Time War, and there has just been a Reality War (if you can call three dinosaur skeletons attacking the Avengers tower a “war”).

Watching Billie Piper as The Moment was fun partly because she was showing off all her cryptic and knowing performance skills, with the Doctor(s) being the ones who have to catch up. And if The Moment is back, that speaks to some pretty high universal stakes. We could even go broader than that…

Bad Wolf

Okay, technically this is Rose Tyler again, but Bad Wolf is a bit different. At the end of the first season of Nu Who, Rose scatters the message “Bad Wolf” across the universe, so that her past self would have the idea of opening up the TARDIS’s innards and observing the time vortex, allowing her to see everything that would, will or might happen. It last minutes before Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor kissed the time energy out of her and regenerated into David Tennant, but that was only from our perspective. She was outside of space and time! Who knows what she could have done in those few minutes? Including jumping into the spot of a regenerating Fifteenth Doctor to take his place for a couple of specials.

The Valeyard

The Valeyard, a composite of the darker parts of the Doctor’s natures created “some time” between his “Twelfth and final incarnations”. First appearing the Sixth Doctor mega-arc, “The Trial of a Time Lord”, this is one of those bits of lore that is pretty much a footnote to mainstream viewers, but which fans have been champing at the bit for.

This one is far-fetched. “Billie Piper returns to play the Valeyard” sounds like a parody of a Big Finish boxed set. The Valeyard is almost a joke returning character suggestion, but then, so were the Rani and Omega, and Omega just ate the Rani, so let’s not take anything off the table.

The Doctor’s Daughter

We’ve just had a great big episode about the Doctor having and then losing a daughter, not for the first time. Billie Piper returning to Doctor Who is significant because her character, Rose, was last seen in one of Doctor Who’s many attempts to give its lead character a happy ending. The Metacrisis Doctor (a half-human clone grown from the Tenth Doctor’s dismembered hand in “Journey’s End”, and one of many incarnations to be played by David Tennant) went off to a parallel universe to live with Rose Tyler and do kissing and generally have the kind of settled down life the Doctor could never have (apart from when he does).

Maybe they had kids! Maybe one of those kids got their looks from their mum and some Time Lord-ish qualities from their dad, and then she grew up and hopped back to her parents’ old universe to check it out?

With all the clues around a returning Susan Foreman, it might make sense!

Cassandra

Not the woman cursed by the gods to be able to see the future but not have anyone believe her! The ill-fated prophet of KAOS was not the first Cassandra Billie Piper has played. In the first episode of Nu Who’s second season, Rose Tyler and the Tenth Doctor ran into another Cassandra, a trampoline of human skin played by Zoë Wanamaker who claimed to be the last surviving “pure” human. But this Cassandra, sensing her old trampoline was wearing a bit thin, decided to body swap with Rose.

Now, everything is put back to normal by the end of the episode, but if he wanted, I’m sure Russell T Davies could find an unexplained gap in the episode where Cassandra snuck back to the TARDIS and teleported off to a future version of the TARDIS for an adventure.

Is it likely? Is likely even a metric we can measure Doctor Who plotlines by anymore?

The Rani

The Rani teleports away with her time ring, then decides to steal the Master’s plan from “The Power of the Doctor” by posing as the Doctor, teleporting into his place during a regeneration ala the “Fake Doctor” theory we had when David Tennant returned.

Deciding to change her appearance to look like an existing incarnation of the Doctor, she goes through UNIT’s old photo albums, finds a picture of Rose stepping out of the TARDIS, and jumps to the wrong conclusion.

So, Billie Piper is playing the Rani pretending to be the Doctor but disguised as Rose because she thought Rose was the Doctor.

You know, I think we’ve nailed it.

Of course, if Billie Piper isn’t the Doctor, that leaves the far more concerning question – “Where is the Doctor?”

Doctor Who series 15 is available to stream on BBC iPlayer in the UK, and on Disney+ around the world.

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