“A long goodbye”
Halfway through typing my last journal entry, I had a couple of thoughts about “Journey’s End.” They’re surplus to requirements, since I’m still handwaving the past three seasons. But I wanted to see if they made any sense outside of my own head.
I think that when the duplicate Doctor whispered in Rose’s ear, what he said was something like, “Have a fantastic life.” In other words, I think she was kissing him goodbye. That’s the only way I can see her kissing one Doctor while the other was still there. If she’d been planning to stay in Pete’s World, I think she’d’ve said goodbye to the original Doctor and Donna, and then waited till they were gone before she kissed the duplicate. (And I think that kiss would’ve looked more like the one in the Confidential.)
I also think that the duplicate Doctor died shortly after the Tardis dematerialized. That’s partly because I can’t bring myself to ship Ten II/Rose. But it’s also the only way I can accept what happened to Donna. They were both Human-Time Lord metacrises - “part Time Lord, part human.” And when the original Doctor brought Donna home, he told Wilf, “All that knowledge - it was killing her.” A Time Lord brain couldn’t exist inside a human body. He probably thought that the rules would be different for his duplicate, but… well, “it’s not the first time he’s been wrong.”
Don’t get me wrong - I don’t hate the duplicate Doctor. In some ways, I like him better than the original. I think he did what the original never could - he loved Rose enough to set her free. (And I’d like to believe that he gave her the piece of coral that’s mentioned on the BBC’s website.)