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Spoilers for 'The Reality War,' the final episode of Doctor Who's 2025 season, follow. Proceed at your own risk.

Days after the season finale of Doctor Who’s 2025 season ended with a surprise regeneration — in the sense of the regeneration itself being a surprise, and the identity of the actor who came out the other side of the regeneration being another surprise, too — a thought occurs: what if there’s a third surprise waiting just around the corner?

Namely: what if Billie Piper’s return to the show isn’t what it seems? What if she isn’t the Doctor?

There are two notable signifiers that this might be the case, beyond the simple fact of showrunner Russell T. Davies liking to play with the audience, as evidenced by…. Well, basically everything that he’s been up to since returning to the series in 2023. Think about it: The Tenth Doctor returning as the Fourteenth? The 'bigeneration' gimmick that allowed the Fourteenth Doctor to continue to exist alongside the Fifteenth? Two consecutive seasons featuring the same gimmick of a mystery woman following the Doctor around in every episode? Reality being rewritten three times in two episodes in a row? He’s certainly feeling very playful since coming back… so why should this regeneration be any different?

But those two signifiers — firstly, there’s the fact that Billie Piper was explicitly not identified as playing the Doctor in the end credits; Ncuti Gatwa was, guest star Jodie Whittaker was, but Piper was simply credited with an “And introducing” credit, with no role attached.

Following that, both Piper and Davies released statements about her return — you can read them here — and neither one said that she was the Doctor. Indeed, both explicitly state that there’s something strange going on… and, notably, both raise the idea that Piper is not who we think she is.

“It’s an honor and a hoot to welcome her back to the TARDIS, but quite how and why and who is a story yet to be told,” Davies said, with our emphasis. Piper similarly says, “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.”

Again, emphasis ours.

So: there’s definitely the possibility that Billie Piper isn’t playing the sixteenth Doctor after all, which raises all manner of questions: Who is she, in that case? How did she end up replacing the Doctor during regeneration? And what happened to the Doctor, if that’s not who she is? As Piper says above, we’ll just have to wait and see. But with the show’s future still uncertain, how long and where we’ll be looking is as much a mystery as everything else surrounding Piper’s return to the series.

Doctor Who’s season finale is streaming on Disney+ now internationally, and on BBC iPlayer in the United Kingdom.

The season finale of Doctor Who reveals the future of Ncuti Gatwa on the show and a cliffhanger likely to excite and enrage fans in equal measure