Although it’s not the first time a Doctor Who episode hasn’t aired on Christmas Day itself, Christmas 2025 will mark the first time in two decades that there’s not a special broadcast at all over the festive period—a final lump of coal in the stocking for what has been a very weird year for the Whoniverse. But maybe we should use the opportunity to revisit the episode that started the tradition off two decades ago because, really, it remains Doctor Who‘s actual best attempt at a Christmas story.
Twenty years ago tomorrow, “The Christmas Invasion”—technically the second Doctor Who Christmas broadcast after 1965’s “The Feast of Steven,” a bizarre story that is both not really a Christmas special and is now lost to time as one of Who‘s many remaining missing episodes—hit screens as the first full-episode debut of David Tennant’s 10th Doctor. Seeing the Doctor bedbound in a post-regenerative coma amid an invasion of Earth by the Sycorax, the episode is perhaps most fondly remembered now for Tennant’s immediate charm in taking on the Doctor, the modern era’s first chance to overcome the dramatic hurdle of a new actor taking on the mantle (and how easily he did it despite spending most of the runtime asleep in bed), setting the stage for a cultural dominance and interpretation of the Time Lord that neither the mainstream audience nor the show itself has ever really moved on from.
But beside that broader importance in the show’s legacy, “The Christmas Invasion” still charms because it is the first time that Doctor Who itself actually engaged with the idea of doing a Christmas story—and it went all the way in, in a manner that the show never really did again after it established this new tradition of the TARDIS showing up every holiday season. It’s an episode that is unabashedly “a Christmas episode of Doctor Who,” mashing together the show’s finest tropes with festive flair. Robots dressed as Santa marching through London streets playing carols before revealing their brass instruments as explosive weapons evoke the Autons (a fitting parallel, considering Doctor Whoreturned to screens with the plastic automatons) and a killer Christmas tree that is ripped right out of Doctor Who‘s playbook of turning the everyday into something ludicrous and yet still chilling: this is not Doctor Who with a tinselled set dressing, but one that unequivocally and gleefully roots itself in the spirit of the season.
And it’s not just the visual festivity, either. Thematically, “The Christmas Invasion” is similarly a wholehearted embrace of values and ideas we cherish during the holidays: the importance of family and community (even if, as was the case with the Doctor and Jackie Tyler, you don’t really have a history of getting along too well) and a faith in the hope that we can welcome others with open arms. It’s an episode about big emotions, from the Doctor grappling with his new sense of identity to Rose having to shoulder his recovery and the impending threat of the Sycorax—the kind of unwariness for the future we often find ourselves reflecting on amid the more joyous elements of Christmas—things that get to a cathartic climax not really with the aliens’ defeat, but in the embrace of the new Doctor and the Tyler residence’s Christmas dinner.
There are grander Doctor Who festive specials. There are stories that are arguably stronger, episodes that are great Doctor Who first and festive specials second. There are stories that go about connecting to the holidays in more interesting ways than the admittedly cheesy track that “Christmas Invasion” takes (but then again, isn’t a little cheese part of both the festive season and Doctor Who‘s charm?). But for the past 20 years, and arguably for more years to come after the show returns next Christmas, it’s still the Doctor Who seasonal special to live up to. It set the gold standard of what Who could do with the trappings and themes of the period, wholeheartedly embracing them instead of treating them as an afterthought demanded by a broadcast slot.
“The Christmas Invasion” is a story that could only be told on Christmas and one that would be lessened if it was transposed to any other time of the year—and in the process of marrying Doctor Who with the holidays for whole generations of fans, it created a wonderful tradition that has strived to endure all these years later, even as the broader show itself has its own setbacks.
When we took a look at the opening episodes of the new Doctor Who spinoffThe War Between the Land and the Sea a few weeks ago, there were a few nuggets of potential swimming beneath its otherwise largely murky surface. But now that the show has come to an end, we know for a fact: that potential is dead and buried and has only sunk further into the depths the longer the show went on.
The remaining three episodes of War Between, after its premiere spent a great deal of time playing up the political relationship between the revived Sea Devils—reborn as “Homo Aqua”—and humanity, spending their time squandering the distinctly unsubtle, yet still intriguing, climate change messaging that sat at that plot’s core in order to focus on establishing a rapidly burgeoning romantic relationship between Salt (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Barclay (Russell Tovey).
Sparked by the former saving the latter after a diplomatic mission to Homo Aqua’s territory beneath the waves was disrupted by a double agent unleashing a bomb to kill the human and aquakind attendees alike, in spite of Mbatha-Raw and Tovey’s chemistry, the romance that suddenly becomes the primary driving subject of War Between comes off as a Great Value Shape of Water. Barclay’s infatuation with Salt above anything else is not really given any time to develop, putting him on an instantaneous 0-100 escalation, but it’s Salt who suffers the most ignominies in the process, no longer presented as Barclay’s political equal and the advocate of War Between‘s most radicalized notions of the climate crisis, and instead flattened into a walking embodiment of the “born sexy yesterday” trope, thematically and narratively taken out of the picture for much of the show’s middle act once Barclay rescues her from UNIT detention.
This jarring pivot in focus is broadly emblematic of War Between‘s most damning of issues: the series simply cannot commit, from moment to moment, on every level, to an idea of what it wants to be or say, rendering it completely inconsequential from both a thematic point of view and a narratively logistical one in its broader place in the Doctor Who universe. In some ways, this was a poison pill baked into the show’s very premise—more often than not, a Doctor Who story about the Doctor’s absence ultimately has to result in very little impact outside of that particular story, both because it calls into question what it takes for the Doctor to involve themself in a given crisis and because it calls into question just how much a spinoff series can feel supposedly “mandatory” to Doctor Who‘s status quo going forward.
The War Between could never deliver on the idea of aqua and humankind negotiating an amicable, symbiotic approach to their shared existence on earth, because it would shunt Doctor Who‘s depiction of the “real” Earth a step even further beyond our own reality. But instead of playing within that tight constraint to tell a contained but still interesting story, War Between tried to go big, only to be unable to deliver on that scale in a satisfactory way, abandoning anything that gave it weight as it hobbled towards a muddled end.
Multiple times in the series, both sides declare to each other that the titular war is coming, that it’s here, that it’s over, but we never really get to see that conflict, because Homo Aqua, after raising uncomfortably true concerns about humanity’s role in climate change, has to be first rendered unforgivably villainous—which is done in the bizarre opening sequence of the final episode that depicts a retaliatory act by Homo Aqua summoning, capturing, and eating every dog on the planet, a scenario that is raised within a matter of minutes and then never touched again—and then effectively eliminated as an ongoing concern, done so via an ill-explained engineered virus, dubbed “Severance,” that ultimately kills all but 10% of aquakind as quickly as it’s introduced in the back half of the show’s final episode.
Humanity’s explicit genocide of Homo Aqua would be a fascinatingly dark point to end the show on, but War Between doesn’t actually care. The extermination and capitulation of Homo Aqua are executed and resolved in the back half of the show’s final episode, giving War Between very little time to have its human players wrestle with the moral cost of what it’s done (a few brief, awkwardly inserted flashforwards imply that what remains of Homo Aqua will get its comeuppance on the direct individuals responsible for Severance’s deployment, but that’s about it). Instead, it continues to focus on Barclay and Salt, the former rewarded for his allyship with what is now a minority species by being slowly transformed into an aquakind/human hybrid, the sole person allowed to live among the remnants of Homo Aqua at the expense of leaving his human life behind.
This lack of care extends across all of War Between‘s narrative threads. The impact of Homo Aqua’s radical attempts to shift humanity into action are dropped as quickly as they’re introduced. Episode two climaxes with Salt dumping every piece of water-bound waste onto land, effectively burying the planet in rubbish and severely disrupting the logistical bedrocks of society, but by episode five, that issue has been cleaned up in the background, never to be touched again. The series’ continued failure to interrogate UNIT’s role as an organization that is seemingly gleefully obsessed with weaponizing a surveillance state only compounds the issues raised by series co-creator Pete McTighe in his 2025 Doctor Who episode “Lucky Day,” climaxing not with a self-reckoning, but with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart threatening her private therapist with the exposure of her husband’s infidelity (why does UNIT have access to that kind of individual surveillance? The show doesn’t care; it’s just cool hero spy stuff) if she doesn’t let her keep having a role in the ongoing negotiations, a win for our hero, and by the show’s end, it’s consistent enough that Kate just starts threatening gross invasions of privacy as a jokey aside.
It’s Kate that War Between actually ends on, in a truly bizarre scene that is emblematic of War Between‘s incomprehensible idea of tone or message. Having seen off Barclay and Salt to live their new underwater life together, she comes across a runner on the beach who casually tosses his water bottle as litter beside her. The final shots of War Between—the final shots of Doctor Who‘s Disney era, the final shots of the franchise until this time next year—have an increasingly angry and manic Kate pull her gun on the runner, repeatedly screaming that he pick up the bottle as her finger inches closer to the trigger.
Tonally it immediately follows up an extended, dialogueless sequence of Barclay and Salt’s reunion set to a Goldfrapp cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes,” so it’d be almost funny if the show wasn’t suddenly trying to treat it as a serious, dark moment. It’s a bizarre end note on Kate’s character (for now, at least), introduced 13 years ago as the level-headed, “science leads” future stepping away from UNIT’s militarized past. But it’s also the literal last minutes of the show suddenly lurching back to an idea it had broadly abandoned for most of its runtime, as if it finally remembered that it once yearned to be a show that actually had a point to make, and that by addressing it in its dying gasps, the journey to get there meant something.
It’s a symbolic note for Doctor Who‘s awful year to go out on, reflecting the end of an era that had so much promise and potential when it began just two years ago only to get bogged down in an aimless malaise that muddled the series’ ability to really commit to commentary and reflection of the world we live in through its sci-fi lens. It’s fitting, perhaps then, that the less-than-amicable breakup between Disney and the BBC has resulted in much of the world not legally being able to see War Between until some nebulous point next year, when it’ll likely be dropped in its entirety with little in the way of fanfare: a show with nothing to say, buried in the deep to never be thought of again.
The War Between the Land and the Sea is now streaming in its entirety in the UK on BBC iPlayer. The series will stream on Disney+ internationally some time in 2026.
We already could tell just from the way things went from the last few months that Disney and the BBC’s two-year partnership for Doctor Who‘s latest era wasn’t going great—and that was before we really started getting a picture of just how messy things were behind the scenes. But now we’ve just got our latest example of just how bad things seemingly broke between the two studios: the last few episodes of Doctor Who material commissioned as part of Disney’s era will actually air on the BBC well before they hit Disney+.
Although the BBC’s initial statement on the conclusion of its deal with Disney already noted that The War Between the Land and the Seawould release on BBC broadcast channels and the iPlayer streaming service this December, today the corporation confirmed that the series will officially launch December 7 with a two-part premiere in the UK, before rolling out the remaining episodes weekly throughout the remainder of the month. It also further reiterated that War Between will not see a simultaneous broadcast outside of the UK on Disney+, with the series still set to release on the streamer at a currently undisclosed point in 2026.
io9 has reached out to Disney for clarification on War Between‘s international release, with a spokesperson for the streamer only reaffirming that the series will broadcast on Disney+ in 2026.
Regardless of whether international audiences are left waiting weeks or months for the miniseries—which follows UNIT dealing with the return of the Sea Devils, a race of ancient precursor beings who have lived in Earth’s oceans since before the dawn of humanity—the current exclusive release of War Between in the UK strikes a broad contrast with how the past few years of Doctor Who have been broadcast both there and abroad on Disney+.
Controversially for UK fans, Doctor Who‘s broadcast times for the past two seasons were switched to favor streaming-first releases to accommodate better premiere times for US audiences watching on Disney+—a decision that likely contributed to the past two seasons’ diminished audience figures, which was repeatedly noted by Disney as a crucial factor in its consideration over whether or not to renew its partnership with the BBC.
Now the BBC is taking its proverbial TARDIS-shaped ball and going home, and while every Doctor Who fan now has eyes on Christmas 2026 to see just what the future of the main show looks like, international audiences will be left waiting a little longer for any slice of the Whoniverse they can get.
When Mrs. Flood first popped up in Doctor Who as Ruby Sunday’s quirky neighbor, Mrs. Flood, it felt like a small role, only slightly more than a cameo. But there was something about the elderly lady that caught viewers’ attention, especially when her debut in “The Church on Ruby Road” included a fourth-wall break showing off her TARDIS knowledge.
By the end of Ncuti Gatwa’s run as the Fifteenth Doctor, Mrs. Flood had not only appeared several times, but she’d also been revealed as a major Doctor Who antagonist in disguise: the Rani. The Mrs. Flood version of the Rani eventually bi-generated, bringing a bitchier, more stylish take on the Rani (played by Archie Panjabi) into the climactic face-off with the Doctor and his friends.
As fans will recall, “The Reality War” saw the Panjabi Rani getting devoured by Omega, the monstrously transformed first Time Lord. The Mrs. Flood Rani? The one who became subservient to the other, younger Rani she’d just brought into existence? Well, she seized the moment and just… got the hell out of there. In other words, the surviving Time Lady could return to cause more trouble in the future.
Speaking to the Radio Times, Dobson said even she didn’t realize who Mrs. Flood would turn out to be when she first joined Doctor Who.
“For the first series, I was oblivious and just really enjoyed all the little character things and mannerisms that [showrunner and writer] Russell [T Davies] was throwing at me. Then, when he asked me back for another series, my curiosity was piqued as to who she was… But it wasn’t until I read the last few scripts of that series that I found out, and I was completely shocked.”
Of course, Dobson can’t comment on what could happen when the show returns for Christmas 2026, with Davies still running the show, albeit this time without Disney in tow.
However, she’s willing to give it another go: “Anything is possible. And if Russell asked me now, I’d be out that door so quick,” she told the Radio Times.
Fans have no idea what’s in store for Doctor Who, including but not limited to what Billie Piper’s role will be or who will actually be embodying the Doctor moving forward. And Dobson seems like a lovely person; we enjoyed how Doctor Who cracked a Queen joke that winked at her real-life marriage to musician Brian May.
But unfortunately, Mrs. Flood wasn’t all that exciting of a character. And between the two Ranis, she was the far less thrilling version. Maybe it’d be best to leave her in the past with the rest of the disappointing events of “The Reality War” and move on to some new villains instead?
With yesterday’s news that the BBC would be continuing Doctor Who‘s future after the termination of its partnership with Disney starting with a new Christmas special in 2026, the series now has an equally as important task to deal with beyond its continued survival: just who the hell is Billie Piper meant to have been playing in those closing moments of “The Reality War”, anyway?
Even before the future of the series was stuck in limbo for months, creatives involved in the series, from Piper herself to showrunner Russell T Davies, wanted to suggest that the returning actress was not necessarily playing the 16th incarnation of the Doctor, despite her regenerating out of departing star Ncuti Gatwa. Piper was not credited in “Reality War” as appearing as the Doctor, as has traditionally been the case for new Doctors, and there was enough going on with Gatwa’s regeneration and the reasoning process for it to suggest that not everything was as it seemed. And since then, any willing commentary that has been made about the decision is purely speculative, other than to indicate that there was not a clear plan in place as to how the outcome would play out, with no guaranteed future for the series.
But now that future is at least guaranteed. So while we now have a long wait until Christmas 2026 to actually see who Piper is playing, we have some suggestions… admittedly only mostly silly ones.
The climax of “The Reality War” was meant to be about the use of regeneration energy to shunt reality itself… but what if it didn’t just affect Doctor Who‘s prime reality and translocated noted reality hopper Rose Tyler into the Doctor’s place, and now she has to figure out how to get whoever they’ve become back?
The last time we saw the Master, we did see him attempt to violently take over the Doctor’s body during the regeneration process. What better way to mess with the mind of your oldest frenemy than by forcing them to have the face of one of their closest former companions while also being you?
The 15th Doctor’s regeneration centered the TARDIS in such a way that it feels like it’s going to play an important factor in just whoever Piper is meant to be (if not the Doctor, that is). The Doctor blasted the console with all that energy, we cut to that ominous shot of it darkened and lit only by the regeneration process itself… and we know the ship’s heart is already familiar with using Rose Tyler’s face as an agent of its will. What if the TARDIS feels that’s necessary once more?
It’s probably too late for the show to use whatever plans it had for Carole Ann Ford at this point after whatever was cut from “The Reality War”—and we don’t know yet if Russell T Davies is going to carry on writing Doctor Who after this 2026 special. Given that Susan was brought up multiple times during the 15th Doctor’s era even before she made those mental appearances (depicted in the TARDIS console room; for some reason, again, the TARDIS is key!), what if whatever she was trying to warn the Doctor about was so dire that this shifting of reality allowed her to somehow transpose herself onto the Doctor’s being, and we tie it all up here?
And now she looks like Billie Piper because she regenerated. For some reason. Time Lord stuff!
It was never actually used to destroy Gallifrey, after all. If the veil between the nature of reality itself was so thin after whatever the Doctor did to change it, did something activate the Moment, a weapon capable of consuming galaxies in its devastation?
Plus, a familiar interface would just be a logical solution for a massive temporal weapon that now has a lot of history with the Doctor to take.
In the 2025 season’s “Lux,” one of the many bizarre things that happen to the 15th Doctor and Belinda while battling the reality-warping Mr. Ring-A-Ding is that they briefly get pulled through a television into a reality where the Doctor’s adventures with their many companions are the subject of a long-running hit TV show named Doctor Who. See where I’m going with this? Don’t have to think about who Billie is; she simply is Billie! Who doesn’t love an existential crisis at the holidays?
We’ve already had one instance of the TARDIS itself embodying a physical form. Given how intrinsic it was to the 15th Doctor’s process of “death,” maybe the TARDIS is trying to save her pilot by taking over their body for a bit, to sustain it until an actual regeneration can occur?
And then you can blame the Rose Tyler of it all on the Bad Wolf stuff again, or something. Hey, I’m not the one making the show.
This is just because everyone always says whenever there’s some mysterious regeneration stuff happening, it simply must be the Valeyard, a strangely sinister emanation of the Doctor introduced in “The Trial of a Time Lord” meant to reflect a future, malicious incarnation that could only be postponed and never truly avoided. Choosing the moment the Doctor’s just sacrificed themselves to move all of reality enough to let baby Poppy exist in some form or another seems like a suitably sinister thing for the Valeyard to do.
Or maybe we just skip all this nonsense, and Billie Piper is a one-off Doctor like David Tennant was for the 60th anniversary specials? This era of the show has been very much about trying to repeat the old hits—maybe 2023 will be old enough by Christmas 2026 to be considered for dipping back into the same bag of tricks.
It’s no secret at this point that the latest season of Doctor Who ended with an almighty mess—leaving the series in a state of limbo that has only continued to get messier as time has gone on. One of the first initial signs of that messiness, beyond the content of “The Reality War” itself, was when Disney+ promoted the episode with a promotional image of a scene that was not actually in the final episode, leading fans to wonder if Ncuti Gatwa’s shock exit from the show was not originally intended to be.
Now, a surprising source has seemingly confirmed that that was the case: the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan, aka actress Carole Ann Ford. Speaking recently in conversation with fellow Doctor Who companion Katy Manning at Club Parramatta in Sydney, Australia (via Cultbox), Ford revealed new details about the scene glimpsed in that promotional image of the still-alive 15th Doctor dancing in a club with his seemingly still-current companion, Belinda Chandra.
“You didn’t see the episode, which was to sort of introduce my coming back, where I was holding hands with a little—beautiful little tiny Black child, three years old. And we were watching through the window somewhere where the audience wasn’t supposed to know where we were supposed to be,” Ford explained “And we were watching my newly embodied grandfather, who was now Ncuti [Gatwa], and watching him have a wonderful time singing and dancing in a party in a shop opposite where we were. And obviously I, my character Susan, was longing to just go there and fling her arms around her grandfather and say, ‘Grandfather, how lovely to see you after all this time and how did you survive your floating about in space… and why have you changed?’”
The child in question appears to be Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps, the actress who played Poppy—initially introduced as a standalone character in Gatwa’s first season in the episode “Space Babies,” Poppy became a central figure in the 2025 season’s two-part finale “Wish World” and “The Reality War,” where she was wished into being by an alternate reality earth as the Human-Time Lord child of a married Doctor and Belinda.
In the version of “The Reality War” that was broadcast, Susan didn’t appear at all, and Poppy, who was in danger of being erased entirely with the reset of reality, was saved by the 15th Doctor’s sacrifice, kickstarting his regeneration process to change reality enough to allow Poppy to continue to exist as Belinda’s completely human daughter and retroactively establish Belinda’s arc across the prior season as really being about needing to get home to a child that she previously did not have.
Where the arc would’ve gone now seems to be thrown into doubt, given not just that Doctor Who has still yet to be announced as getting a new season any time soon, but also due to the significant changes made to this storyline as eventually broadcast. As to how things would’ve played out, Ford declined to say.
“Anyway, that was unfortunately not to be—for reasons I know and will not disclose,” the actress concluded. Ford’s sole appearance in the season—the first time she had appeared on-screen in Doctor Who since the 1993 charity special Dimensions In Time—would remain as a nebulous vision seen by the 15th Doctor during the events of “The Interstellar Song Contest.”
While whatever Doctor Who had planned for either Susan or Poppy remains unclear, the only thing with any clarity that has emerged from this season is that things did not go as they were originally planned.
Millie Gibson has spoken out about being unable to respond to a series of reports made by British tabloids about her time on Doctor Who—out of concerns from the BBC that doing so could potentially jeopardize revealing then-upcoming storylines from the show.
Speaking to the I Paper, Gibson touched on a series of reports from British newspapers in 2023 that claimed that she had been dismissed from the series before she had even debuted as the Doctor’s then-latest companion, Ruby Sunday, alleging that the then-19-year-old star behaved like a “diva” on set.
Gibson’s first full season of Doctor Who wouldn’t premiere until spring 2024, at the climax of which Ruby chose to leave the TARDIS behind to spend time with her family, but she would continue to be a part of the Doctor’s life back on Earth by joining up with UNIT. By that point, however, set pictures and early reporting had confirmed that Andor star Varada Sethu had joined the series as its next companion, Belinda Chandra, and it wouldn’t be officially revealed by the BBC until April 2024, a month before Gibson’s debut season began, that she would continue to appear in the following season in 2025, in an irregular capacity alongside Ncuti Gatwa and Sethu.
All that time, however, the BBC never formally acknowledged or denied the reports, leaving fans confused and Gibson at the mercy of public opinion even before she’d yet to really step foot out of the TARDIS. “I couldn’t be like, ‘It’s a lie!’ [because] they’d be like, ‘Well, that’s spoilers,’” Gibson told the I Paper. “It was quite hard to stand up for myself without ruining the show. I was like, ‘Oh, this is horrific because it just looks like it’s true.’”
“Oh, it was awful. What was frustrating was the amount of people that were like, ‘Oh, sorry, this has happened mate,’” Gibson continued, “and I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s not [happened], but thank you.’”
Without the BBC publicly defending her, Gibson turned to her co-star in Gatwa for advice on how to deal with the scrutiny. “He’s had his time with that,” Gibson added, “and it’s just about just being able to try and shut it out.”
Is a Doctor Who spoiler worth keeping if it means an actress as young as Gibson is left defenseless from incorrect reporting? Perhaps the formal announcement of her part in season two, alongside Sethu’s arrival, was seen by the BBC as a response to the allegations. But it’s not like the BBC doesn’t respond to reports it considers factually incorrect, and all this still created more confusion that could have possibly been worth it without some kind of pushback to the rumors, which could’ve easily been done while still preserving Ruby’s wider arc on the show.
But then again, the BBC does seem to love creating confusion over Doctor Whofor little reason as of late.
Jane Tranter, the executive producer of Doctor Who, has bristled at the suggestion that the iconic sci-fi series is “as dead as we’ve ever known it.”
The claim was made by Robert Shearman, who wrote Christopher Eccleston episode Dalek in 2005 and has penned several Doctor Who novels. Commenting in Doctor Who Magazine, he argued that Season 15’s ambiguous ending, when Ncuti Gatwa regenerated into Billie Piper’s Rose Tyler, had “put a full stop on things” in a way previous season finales have avoided.
The remarks also captured a mood of uncertainty around Doctor Who, with many unanswered questions over whether Disney will continue to co-produce the series, and if Russell T Davies and Tranter’s Bad Wolf will remain involved in the BBC Studios-owned show.
Tranter mounted a spirited defense of the Time Lord when confronted with Shearman’s quote. “‘As dead as we’ve ever known.’ That’s really rude, actually. And really untrue,” Tranter said during an interview with BBC Radio Wales on Friday.
“The plans for Doctor Who are really simply this: the BBC and BBC Studios had a partnership with Disney+ for 26 episodes. We are currently 21 episodes down into that 26-episode run. We have got another five episodes of [spin-off series] The War Between The Land And The Sea to come. At some point after that, decisions will be made together with all of us about what the future of Doctor Who entails,” Tranter said in the interview, marking the 10th anniversary of Bad Wolf.
“It’s a 60-year-old franchise. It’s been going for 20 years nonstop since we brought it back in 2005 [when I worked at the BBC]. You would expect it to change, wouldn’t you? Nothing continues the same always, or it shouldn’t continue the same always. So it will change in some form or another. But the one thing we can all be really clear of is that the Doctor will be back and everyone, including me, including all of us, just has to wait patiently to see when — and who.”
Tranter’s comments echo those of BBC content chief Kate Phillips, who told the Edinburgh TV Festival in August: “Rest assured, Doctor Who is going nowhere. Disney has been a great partnership — and it continues with The War Between The Land And The Sea next year — but going forward, with or without Disney, Doctor Who will still be on the BBC … The Tardis is going nowhere.”
Despite the confidence in Doctor Who’s future, Season 15’s seven-day ratings did suffer. The season averaged 3.2M viewers over its eight episodes, which was half a million viewers down from Gatwa’s first season, and 1.7M below Jodie Whittaker’s final outing as the Time Lord.
Doctor Who‘s peculiar limbo is going to stick around for a good while yet, it seems, as no one is too keen to definitively put a point to the show’s future beyond a general, hopeful desire that one day it will return. That’s meant that ever since the show’s bizarro mess of a season finale earlier this year, Doctor Who fans have been left clinging to scraps to indicate that the show is not staring down the Dalek raygun barrel of total extermination. The latest scrap? His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales.
Well, mostly the set he’s standing on. But Prince William was at least the avenue to remind us that that set—a very important one indeed at that, the latest TARDIS console room—is still ready and available for filming.
Radio Times reports that Prince William recently visited Bad Wolf Studios in Cardiff, where Doctor Who has been filmed in recent years, in his capacity as the president of the British Academy of Television and Film Arts, a position the Prince of Wales has held since 2010. Pictures of the royal visit were released today, along with the news that Prince William recorded a message at the studio that was released during tonight’s BAFTA Cymru Awards ceremony (where Who showrunner Russell T Davies accepted an award for Outstanding Contribution to Television), promoting the local film and television industry in Wales… which of course included British royalty stepping inside the TARDIS.
Putting aside Doctor Who‘s own storied history with the royal family—including that time the show nearly dropped a Titanic-shaped starship on top of Buckingham Palace (and then actually did, in an alternate timeline)—the news here is mostly heartening to fans still waiting to hear more definitive news about the show’s future, with the BBC and Disney alike remaining vaguely noncommittal but hopeful about an eventual return to adventures in time and space. And that news is that simply the TARDIS set itself, one of the most important standing sets of the series, is, well, still standing.
There had been some errant rumors that the set could be potentially broken down—i.e., dismantling the set entirely to open up the occupied studio space for other sets—if Doctor Who wasn’t planning a return any time soon (or at all). But the fact that the set has at least been maintained, even if only for the occasional visit, does at least indicate Doctor Who‘s on-screen future isn’t totally done and dusted. It leaves fans in pretty much the same place they’ve been since the broadcast of “The Reality War”—eying a 2027 return at the earliest, decreasing in likeliness the longer it goes without the BBC making any announcement—but a glimmer of hope is better than no hope at all.
Even a Time Lord (or a guy who’s spent a great deal of his career wrangling Time Lords) can’t confirm when Doctor Who will return. But the BBC has made assurances we’ll see the TARDIS again, with or without Disney assistance, and while viewers may have had mixed feelings about the Fifteenth Doctor’s farewell, there’s still a ton of goodwill for Doctor Who as a franchise. Fans want to see it succeed, and two of the show’s most beloved stars have an idea of what might be the way forward.
As the Radio Times reports, David Tennant (the Tenth and Fourteenth Doctor) and Billie Piper (who played Rose Tyler and was last seen regenerating out of Ncuti Gatwa, somehow) were at the recent Los Angeles Comic Con and agreed they’d love to do a Doctor Who movie.
“I always was pitching for that,” Piper said. “Where’s the film? … I loved it that people went to see the last Doctor Who episode [‘The Reality War’] in the cinema. I just loved that. I would love the Doctor Who experience on the big screen. They’re sort of like films anyway. But yeah, I’d do that. Wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, for sure, yeah,” Tennant said. “We’re available!”
You can’t tell from that brief exchange if the stars had a TV movie in mind—or an actual Peter Cushing-style theatrical production. It does make a certain amount of sense, though, to shake up the formula as a sort of reset before Doctor Who returns to its episodic roots. You can almost see the Dalek and TARDIS-shaped popcorn buckets.
While we ponder Doctor Who‘s uncertain future on screens, it lives on in comics—as well as a five-episode spin-off series, The War Between Land and Sea, coming to the BBC and Disney+ sometime next year.
It’s going to be a good while yet before whenever, wherever, or even howeverDoctor Who returns to our screens—and whenever it does, it will be with a new face at the TARDIS’ controls (whether it’s Billie Piper’s or otherwise). But if you’re already missing the days of the 15th Doctor and Belinda Chandra running around time and space, then good news: they’re back!
Bad news: they’re in prison.
io9 has your first look inside the pages of Doctor Who‘s latest comic series from Titan, The Prison Paradox. Written by Dan Watters and with art by Sami Kivelä, the new four-issue miniseries is set during the events of this year’s season of the show, as the Doctor and Belinda unfortunately find themselves trapped aboard Panoptopolis: an orbital space station prison facility monitored by the Shadow Proclamation in a forgotten part of the universe and host to all sorts of very unsavory creatures.
Infiltrating the facility, the dynamic duo will find themselves having to work with a ragtag team of nefarious beings to make it out alive, including familiar aliens like Annie, a parasitic Adipose like the ones seen in the season four classic “Partners in Crime,” and a piratical Slitheen named Felik, a fun throwback to mark 20 years since the skinsuit-wearing aliens farted their way through an attempt to plummet Earth into nuclear war when they debuted during Doctor Who‘s 2005 return. But also fun new friends, like a giant tentacled monster and H-8, the living weapon who adores all violence!
Take a look at the first lettered previews looking inside The Prison Paradox below, making their debut here on io9—as well as a few of the covers from the new miniseries.
Doctor Who: The Prison Paradox Preview
The first issue of The Prison Paradox is set to hit shelves November 5.
Jodie Whittaker’s run as the Thirteenth Doctor is considered pretty weak overall. That wasn’t Whittaker’s fault, as she was fantastic (yes, she was). No, it was because of the scripts.
There are plenty of good episodes in Whittaker’s run (I like “Demons of the Punjab” and “The Power of the Doctor,” for example) but when her episodes were bad, they were so very bad. And one in particular isn’t just bad, it’s offensive.
That episode is “Spyfall Part 2.” It comes just after the season 12 opener, “Spyfall Part 1,” where a mysterious man named “O” reveals himself as the Doctor’s old enemy, the Master. This Master is played by Sacha Dhawan, a British-Indian actor.
As part of the Master’s plan to wipe out humanity, he time-travels to 1943 and teams up with the Nazis, pursuing the Doctor and her temporary companions Ada Lovelace (Sylvie Briggs) and Noor Inayat Khan (Aurora Marion). The Master is a being of pure evil and has no problem working with fascists. The Doctor intercepts the Master at the top of the Eiffel Tower, and that’s when everything goes horribly sideways.
The Doctor points out that the Master is presenting himself as a non-white man and so doesn’t fit the white supremacist ideals of the Nazis. The Master doesn’t care and tells the Doctor he’s using a perception filter so the Nazis see him as white.
The Doctor and the Master have an intense conversation where the Master tells his former friend that Gallifrey, thought to be safe in its bubble universe, has gone once more. But there’s no time to ponder that because the Master must be stopped. The Doctor has asked Noor Inayat Khan to send a message to the Nazis outing the Master as a spy, and they’re coming to get him. As they approach, the Doctor does something else—she disables the perception filter so the Master looks like a person of color once more. “Now they’ll see the real you,” she tells the Master before escaping.
In other words, the Doctor weaponized someone’s race to turn them over to the Nazis. It is, without a doubt, the most shockingly tone-deaf, poorly thought-out moment in Doctor Who’s entire modern run. Yes, the Doctor and the Master aren’t real people, but the Nazis were very real, and to use them in such a way is, to put it mildly, poor taste.
There was also no need for the Doctor to deactivate the Master’s perception filter in the first place since the Nazis were already coming for him. Why would a being meant to represent all things good do something so cruel to an already defeated enemy?
There are other problems with the episode; the complete waste of Sir Lenny Henry, the fact that Gallifrey is wiped out again after so much effort went into bringing it back—but they pale in comparison to that one moment. The Doctor uses another being’s race to punish them, an act that has horrifying real-world parallels. It was so bitterly disappointing.
Plenty of people have said that Jodie Whittaker deserved better than Doctor Who season 12, but Sacha Dhawan deserved much better.
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Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins star John Barrowman was riding high back in the 2000s – but his career was rocked by revelations he exposed himself to co-stars while on the set of his TV shows.
Actor John shot to fame playing Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who, and in the spin-off show, Torchwood which began in 2005.
However, John – who is back on screens tonight (September 22) for Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins – came under fire in 2021 after historic claims of his behaviour resurfaced.
John’s had a dramatic few years (Credit: ITV)
Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins star John Barrowman: Scandal explained
John’s career was left in tatters after historic reports of his behaviour on the sets of Doctor Who and Torchwood resurfaced. The 57-year-old actor was accused of repeatedly exposing himself behind the scenes of the hit shows.
The claims came to light when actor Noel Clarke was seen in an old video from 2015 joking about Barrowman tapping his penis on the shoulder of female colleagues on the set of Doctor Who.
John has previously apologised for his behaviour, saying it was nothing more than “tomfoolery”. He claimed it was “only ever intended in good humour to entertain colleagues on set and backstage”. He denied it was sexual harassment.
John added: “With the benefit of hindsight, I understand that upset may have been caused by my exuberant behaviour and I have apologised for this previously.”
But the apology wasn’t enough, and his career came crashing down.
His appearance at a Doctor Who immersive experience was cancelled. Torchwood audio dramas featuring him were also canned.
And his contract at Dancing on Ice – where he was a judge – wasn’t renewed. ITV issued a statement saying he wouldn’t be part of the 2022 series. John was replaced by former Strictly pro Oti Mabuse.
The Torchwood star was also forced to cancel his UK tour, scheduled for 2023, due to “slow ticket sales”. He said it was the toughest period of his life.
The star opened up about the scandal earlier this year (Credit: YouTube)
John had ‘suicidal thoughts’
Recently, John spoke to NZ Herald and opened up about the scandal, revealing it was the hate he faced online that “destroyed” his career. The star also candidly shared how he had “suicidal thoughts and suicidal attempts”.
“It was judge and jury by social media were people who had no right to comment on it because it had nothing to do with them,” he shared.
John went on: “But they destroyed my career and my life for about two years. And it led to me having suicidal thoughts and suicidal attempts that I had to go to therapy about because it was devastating,” he shared, before adding: “I was at my lowest.”
John was dropped as a judge from Dancing on Ice (Credit: ITV)
‘They don’t like seeing a gay man being successful’
However John, who is openly gay, reckons his sexuality played a big part in what happened. He told the NZ Herald: “I think it was an attack on me. They couldn’t get me for being gay. So they attacked me in another way. They wanted to destroy me because they don’t like seeing a gay man being successful.
“And I say that with a bit of salt in the wound because there’s a lot of other gay men and women out there now who are doing wonderfully well. But I just always say, you know, you’ve got a past, watch your back.”
Starting the interview, Lorraine asked John if he “crossed the line” with his past actions. He responded: “I think that if it was now it would be crossing the line. I think something that happened 15 years ago is silly behaviour. It was being done in the confines of the set and we were like a family working together.
“It was stories I’ve already told and I’ve been telling for years. They’ve been exaggerated and trying to turn them into sexual harassment – which it’s absolutely not.” John then hit back at the tabloids, adding: “They weren’t there and they don’t know the context in which things were done.”
John Barrowman set for early exit on SAS?
The actor is due to start his TV comeback this weekend. However, it might be a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment.
It’s been reported that John was filming the first episode in New Zealand. But walked off after less than 30 minutes.
Speaking to The Sun, a source claimed: “John’s exit from Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins will go down in the show’s history as the fastest ever. They’d all got kitted up in their uniforms and had started filming in New Zealand when he chose to walk out. It is an incredibly mentally and physically challenging television show. The task they were facing was difficult.”
In addition, the source added: “Most of the stars were shocked when after 30 minutes John said he did not want to take part any longer. He left pretty much then and there. It was all a bit strange. And naturally, the producers who make the show didn’t feel best impressed to see one of their biggest stars turning on their heel and quitting before an hour was up.”
However, John later took to Twitter to clear things up. He said, hitting out at one publication: “Watch the show and see the truth stop spreading [bleep] to grab a headline. You have unsubstantiated information and don’t know the facts.”
Watch John on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins on Sunday (September 22) at 9pm on Channel 4.
San Diego Comic-Con is counter-Olympic programming for nerds everywhere. Running the same weekend as the 2024 Games opened, SDCC features panels from the stars and creators of our favorite IP-driven projects — including Transformers, the Marvel cinematic universe, Lord of the Rings, The Walking Dead, and more — all for the sake of giving fans what they want: a few crumbs or even a whole new detail about releases in postproduction, newly green-lit shows, and maybe a spicy spoiler a panelist spilled, to the horror of press people the world over. Aside from all the trailers, what are we getting? Let’s dive into the Olympic swimming-pool-size highlights out of San Diego Comic-Con 2024, including a surprise virtual appearance from Kamala Harris, plus major news from Dexter, Doctor Who, Star Trek, The Boys, and more.
A July 27 Star Trek panel doubled as an info dump about several differentprojects. The two-episode premiere of the upcoming final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks got a date: October 24. But if the show ending makes you sad, you can rest assured that the franchise still other content in the works. For example, Alex Kurtzman is co-writing a live-action, half-hour comedy with Justin Simien (Dear White People) and Star Trek: Lower Decks star Tawny Newsome. Currently in development at Paramount+, the show will follow Federation outsiders who are serving on a gleaming resort planet — and having their day-to-day “exploits” broadcast to the entire quadrant.
It also seems like some sort of Star Trek musical, in the vein of the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds musical episode “Substance Rhapsody,” might be on the way. Per Deadline, EP Akiva Goldsman told a fan who asked if there would be any similar episodes in the future, “We’re in the very early stages of figuring out whether we can bring a version of that to the stage.” Meanwhile, Cillian O’Sullivan has joined the cast of the upcoming season of Strange New Worlds and will recur as the legacy character Dr. Roger Korby.
Show creator Matt Groening surprised the audience by playing a clip of Kamala Harris during a July 27 panel, introducing her as a Simpsons “super fan.” Quoting the 1996 episode ‘Treehouse of Horror VII,” Harris said, “We must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.” Per The Hollywood Reporter, this is a resurfaced video message that was taken years ago, so it wasn’t recorded specifically for Comic-Con. Still, after a presidential campaign that has included Brat summer memes and an appearance on Drag Race, it doesn’t seem like Harris would mind an opportunity to keep courting the stan vote.
IFC Films and Shudder had Johnny make a surprise appearance in a July 26 panel to help announce that we’re getting In a Violent Nature 2. Chris Nash will return as screenwriter for the slasher sequel.
Michael C. Hall made a surprise appearance in a July 26 panel where Showtime announced that he would return as Dexter in the new series Dexter: Resurrection, a present-day follow-up to 2021’s Dexter: New Blood. It is set to premiere in summer 2025. Hall will also narrate the inner voice of young Dexter in the previously-announced origin story Dexter: Original Sin, which is expected to launch in Decemeber 2024.
The Who-niverse is expanding. Russell Tovey and Gugu Mbatha-Raw will lead the cast of The War Between the Land and the Sea, a five-part spinoff from Russell T Davies ordered by the BBC and Disney+. The news was announced in Hall H on July 26. Per an official description, the show will see a “fearsome and ancient species” emerging from the ocean to trigger an international crisis. It sounds like UNIT — including Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) and Colonel Ibrahim (Alexander Devrient) — will have to do their best to save humanity without the Doctor.
We also got some casting news for the main show. A preview of the Christmas special showed Nicola Coughlan’s character, Joy, coming face to face with a Silurian and the Fifteenth Doctor. Meanwhile The Little Mermaid star Jonah Hauer-King was confirmed to star in Doctor Who’s next season as part of Ruby Sunday’s story.
Haven’t had enough of The Boys? Don’t fret; there’s more coming even after the series concludes with season five. Prime Video has green-litVought Rising, a prequel following the rise of the franchise’s New York–based evil media empire in the 1950s. Aya Cash and Jensen Ackles reprise their roles from the original series, while Boys writer and executive producer Paul Grellong will serve as showrunner, Prime Video confirmed. The news was announced at a July 26 panel featuring Boys creator Eric Kripke and cast members Anthony Starr, Jessie T. Usher, Jack Quaid, Erin Moriarty, Karen Fukuhara, Claudia Doumit, Susan Heyward, Valorie Curry, Laz Alonso, Tomer Capone, Nathan Mitchell, and Chace Crawford. It’s the series’ second spinoff after the college drama, Gen V.
Comic-Con is where people of all fandoms can come together, including the stars and creatives of big genre shows brushing shoulders at panels. San Diego Comic-Con’s a few weeks away, and the schedule for the annual convention will unite the showrunners behind Star Trek and DoctorWho—Alex Kurtzman and Russell T. Davies–to talk shop for anyone who’ll listen.
The two men will headline a panel for SDCC’s “Friendship is Universal” experience on Saturday, July 27 ahead of International Friendship Day on July 30. The aim is for the chat to bring together fans of either (or both) franchises and foster a greater sense of community between them. Trek and Who are also going to be the stars of a gallery experience with original props and costumes from both series, and there’ll be a special Doctor Who x Star Trek poster from artist Dusty Abell given to attendeees of Kurtzman and Davies’ panel. (Like friendship bracelets? They’ll be given away at the event!)
Doctor Who and Star Trek have been in each other’s orbits for a long time. Along with their respective debuts in the mid-60s, they’ve tackled similar themes of race, gender, and war, referenced each other, and become multimedia giants. They even crossed over in the pages of IDW’s Trek comics back in 2012, and Davies spoke in 2009 about his desires to do a TV crossover between them. His dreams died when Star Trek pivoted to film with the reboot movies, and it doesn’t seem like that could happen these days. But the panel may be worthwhile, if only to see Davies and Kurtzman talk about their approaches to the material and to make a connection with someone else in the crowd.
The “Friendship is Universal” panel will run on Saturday, July 27 5:30-6:30 pm PT in room 6A. The larger gallery will take place at 226 and 230 5th Avenue in the Gaslamp for all of San Diego Comic-Con.
Last year, one of the best aspects of celebrating Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary—aside from the pretty great specials themselves—was Tales of the TARDIS, the special anthology-format retelling of classic Doctor Who episodes with newly recorded interstitials from classic Doctors and companions. Now, the series is coming back: with a twist and a pretty big clue as to what to expect from Doctor Who’s current season.
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The BBC has confirmed (via the Radio Times) that Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson will appear as the 15th Doctor and Ruby Sunday in a special Tales of the TARDIS episode set to broadcast in the UK on both BBC Four and the iPlayer streaming service on Thursday, June 20—the day before the final episode of the current season of Doctor Who, titled “The Empire of Death,” will air. No further details about the broadcast have been announced beyond Gatwa and Gibson’s appearance in newly created material.
However, there is a lot to speculate about thanks to the announcement. So far, Tales of the TARDIS has been used to broadcast cut-down versions of classic Doctor Who serials, winnowing multi-episode stories into a more digestible omnibus format through the interstitial material. And considering this time the interstitials will feature the 15th Doctor and Ruby rather than a classic Doctor and companion, why else would this new Tales episode exist if their story in the current season of Doctor Who didn’t have links to a classic storyline from years past?
There’s been a persistent rumor running up to this season that the classic Who villain Sutekh—the dog-like member of the alien race known as the Osirans that, in Doctor Who, would inspire the gods of Ancient Egyptian mythology—would return as a major antagonist. Sutekh has only previously appeared in one Doctor Who story, the 1975 4th Doctor and Sarah-Jane Smith story “Pyramids of Mars,” but has been fleshed out several times since in audio dramas by Big Finish. If Sutekh was indeed somehow going to play a role in the final episode, a Tales of the TARDIS dedicated to “Pyramids of Mars” that essentially acts as the Doctor filling in Ruby on his history with the insidious Osiran would make sense, especially to give audiences who’ve jumped aboard with the new era of the show some extra background info, too.
But that could apply to any classic villain or character that could appear in the new season—after all, in “The Devil’s Chord” the Doctor already mentioned his past life living in London as the First Doctor, with his granddaughter Susan, to Ruby. Does that mean a long-rumored Carole Ann Ford return is on the cards? Not necessarily.
Whatever it all means, we won’t have long to find out: Tales of the TARDIS returns on June 20.
Doctor Who, like all science fiction, has always rooted its storytelling in allegory—raising ideas to challenge its contemporary audience through stories of the past, the future, of monsters, and running down hallways. It always makes the moments the show wants to step away from an allegorical message and explicitly discuss a societal agenda tricky to navigate: what can be left to audience interpretation, what has to be made clear, what is the moment to make your break and be explicit about your message?
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“Dot and Bubble” is an episode that thinks about this a lot—but whether it’s an episode that really succeeds in effectively conveying its real message makes for what is one of the most difficult episodes to talk about the series has done in a very long time.
So why is “Dot and Bubble” so difficult to discuss? It’s an episode that is, ostensibly, about one allegory—the influence of social media on our lives, filtered through a society of futuristic Not-TikTok (the title is in fact the device/platform, a holographic bubble that projects a hemisphere of social media screens around a user’s head) influencers in a seemingly idyllic community called Finetime. But what the episode actually is, like “73 Yards” was before it, is a mystery box, structured around a final-scene reveal that radically realigns the rest of the episode you’ve just been served for 40 minutes.
What you are served, on the surface, is a perhaps well meaning, but clunky warning about the perils of social media usage. “Dot and Bubble” largely follows the story of Lindy Pepper-Bean (Callie Cooke, a guest star in a role that, as we’ll get into, becomes incredibly fraught), one of Finetime’s ditzy inhabitants. Endlessly scrolling through video feeds of her friends from the moment she gets up, Lindy is a walking, talking embodiment of the worse kind of assumptions people make about chronically online social media addicts—airheaded, rude, young, and inexperienced with the reality of the world beyond her metaphorical and literal bubble. All her screen friends are the same: loud, garish, petulantly ignorant, and annoying, and all Lindy does is natter back at them from her own screen, complaining how hard it is that they have to work doing mindless data inputting for two hours a day before they can get back to endlessly scrolling through videos of vapid person after vapid person, regurgitating endless, empty content back at each other.
Image: BBC/Disney
So when it turns out that Finetime is actually being attacked by an army of giant alien slugs—picking off one resident after the next, devouring them because they’re so controlled and addicted to their Dot and Bubbles they can’t see the threat staring them in the face until it’s eating them alive—Lindy, at the behest of the Doctor and Ruby digitally sliding into her social feed to warn her of the threat to her life, becomes our increasingly unlikeable protagonist. Barely stumbling her way through our actual heroes’ advice, she tries to escape the giant slugs that, push comes to shove, you ultimately begin to feel like should actually get to eat her. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Ruby try to figure out just how Finetime has turned into a Giant Slug Buffet. And if this was what “Dot and Bubble” was actually about, it would perhaps be fine, if a little rote—a heavy handed admonishment of the kids these days with their apps and their viral videos, but one that plays with Doctor Who’s messages of empathy and understanding to have us, and the Doctor and Ruby, support a distinctly unlikable protagonist as they face certain doom. Maybe there’s a version of “Dot and Bubble” where Lindy learns to touch grass or use social media for good instead of just endless sycophancy, and the day is saved, and we all move on to the next adventure.
But “Dot and Bubble” isn’t that episode at all. In its final moments—after Lindy has managed to survive and make her way out of Finetime, after cruelly and casually sacrificing a fellow resident and her social media idol, faux-internet celebrity Ricky September (Tom Rhys Harries)—the episode reveals its actual intent and the nature of Finetime’s society. Now that she’s finally met the Doctor and Ruby outside of her Bubble’s feed, Lindy and her fellow survivors are offered a safe way off world on the TARDIS—but they reject the Doctor, choosing to go beyond Finetime’s protective shielding and attempt to adapt to the wild on their own, because the Doctor is a Black man. “You, sir, are not one of us,” Lindy spits at him, admonishing the Doctor for daring to make in-person contact with her. Another survivor tells her to step back from him, lest they be “contaminated.” Finetime’s society is not just a social media-driven nightmare, it turns out, it is a white supremacist, colonial structure, dropped down onto an alien world by its presumably similarly racist home civilization to create what it envisions as mono-race haven for young, rich, white people who believe they have a god-given right to do whatever they want because of their race.
Image: BBC/Disney
In the moment, it’s horrifying and hits you like a ton of bricks. Ncuti Gatwa delivers an incredible, tortured performance in just a single, brief scene, howling at first in baffled confusion, and then rage, that Finetime’s survivors are so catastrophically bigoted they’d choose certain death over being saved by a Black person. The episode ends in this moment of clarity, as Lindy and her racist friends go off in one direction, and the Doctor and Ruby, in tears, walk back towards the TARDIS. But for as effectively jarring as it is as a twist, this one single, final scene—a handful of minutes’ runtime at the very end of the episode—it’s also a moment that takes an incredibly serious message, and fumbles making it because instead of it being the dramatic crux of the episode, it is exactly that: a last-minute twist.
Treating the existence of white supremacy as a “gotcha” in this manner is an incredibly fraught idea, and it’s a topic that needs to be more than a revelation in the final minutes of an episode if Doctor Who is actually going to tackle it as a direct idea, rather than through layers of allegory. “Dot and Bubble” is structured in such a way that it can never do that, and support the bite of its final scene. Lindy is a caricature of an unlikable character even before just how vile she is becomes explicit in the final scene, but “Dot and Bubble” still asks you to root for her for the vast majority of its episode—even at what initially appears to be the depths of her selfish cruelty when she deliberately gets Ricky killed so she can escape—because the vast majority of the episode is not really directly about Finetime being “Planet of the Racist TikTokers,” and Doctor Who is a TV series that makes asking us to be empathetic without judgment one of its key values. Even when the character is, on the surface, extremely annoying as Lindy appears to be, Doctor Who wants us to have empathy for its focal perspectives, because that is what the Doctor would do. You can’t just take that idea, and then twist it by going “Whoops, it was a racist all along!”
Image: BBC/Disney
You can’t ever watch “Dot and Bubble” again for the first time. You can’t watch any mystery or plot-twist driven narrative again the way you did for the first time—every viewing after that is fundamentally altered by your knowledge of whatever the mystery or reveal actually is. Every further engagement with the text after that becomes about being able to examine and identify clues with in its structure, to see how effectively that reveal is built towards. “Dot and Bubble” is no exception to this, but it is both an episode that is completely, radically reformed on re-watch by the knowledge the final scene lays out, and also one that has its crucial flaws exposed in doing so. In being set up in service of a mystery with a last-minute twist, everything about the episode’s actual intended allegory—the evils of white supremacy in our society and in online spaces, not just the idea that kids on social media are rotting their brains for non-racist reasons—is left up to the broad interpretation of what is likely a majority-white audience.
There are indeed plenty of “clues” throughout “Dot and Bubble” that click into place with the final reveal. It’s there in Lindy’s ceaseless annoyance whenever the Doctor tries to help her, but can grin and bear it when it’s Ruby that tells her what to do to escape the slugs instead. It’s there, too, in the background realization you make that everyone on the screens in Lindy’s bubble, everyone walking around Finetime, every glimpse we get of its administration, is a white face—that the Doctor is the only person of color in the entire episode. That last point, in particular, is the authorial intent that writer Russell T Davies hangs the episode’s “mystery” on. “What we can’t tell is how many people will have worked that out before the ending,” Davies notes in an interview for Doctor Who Unleashed, the BBC’s behind-the-scenes support series released after each episode of the series, “because they’ve seen white person after white person after white person [in the episode]… I wonder, will you be 10 minutes into it? Will you be 15? Will you be 20, before you start to think ‘everyone in this community is white,’ and if you don’t think that, why didn’t you?”
Image: BBC/Disney
But leaving that realization up to the assumption of a predominantly white audience to solve as a clue, rather than making it something explicitly addressed and engaged with by the narrative of the episode before its final scene, is not only an extremely neoliberal approach to handling the topic of white supremacy—that recognizing that it exists is the thing that should be rewarded, instead of actually saying or doing something about it, especially in the context of a series like Doctor Who, which has a 60-year record of predominantly casting white people in major and supporting roles—it also weakens what the episode itself can say about the evils of this ideology. The structure of the episode is designed as such is that the intent is you are keeping the reveal that Finetime is a bigoted enclave a secret until the final minutes of the episode. This is a struggle that the current season of Doctor Who has faced multiple times already—that its episodes leave, intentionally or otherwise, gaps in logic or exposition to ask of its audience their own interpretation for why something is the way it is in the story, for better or worse. That’s something you can do with, say, how the supernatural abilities of “73 Yards” and its time loop paradox works, or the computer logic that leads to the creation of the Boogeyman creature in “Space Babies.” It’s not something that should be done when what you want to ask the audience to interpret is the existence of white supremacy and its horrors: that is something you have to reckon with clearly in the text itself.
So let’s come back to that final scene with the Doctor and Lindy then, and examine how “Dot and Bubble” actually approaches being a story about the evils of white supremacy as its ending reveals. Isolating its choice to be explicit until its final minutes—and leaving every hint that Finetime is a racist society up to the audience divining it as a clue before the reveal—means that, structurally, “Dot and Bubble” can never give the Doctor a chance to be mindful of, or even address, the repeated microaggressions and discrimination he faces trying to find out what’s going on in Finetime, until he is explicitly told to his face that the reason Lindy and the survivors don’t want his help is because he is Black. He’s never given a chance to be frustrated about the fact that Lindy and the other Bubble users won’t listen to him, even as he’s trying to help them avoid being devoured alive, but will listen to Ruby—every moment of frustration along the way that he feels has to be made vague enough that it looks like he’s just annoyed that Lindy is unlikable and selfish, and for so many other reasons, because the episode is structurally treating her bigotry as a secret to be revealed later. “Dot and Bubble” wants its audience to interrogate the world of Finetime, and see how long it takes them to notice its structural racism, which means the Doctor himself is never allowed to comment on it along the way.
Image: BBC/Disney
For all the clues to pick up along the way, “Dot and Bubble” is not structured to allow itself to be “The Episode Where the Doctor Experiences White Supremacy as a Black Person” until its final scene—and in a scene that’s a handful of minutes long, that’s nowhere near enough time to unpack what the episode would possibly intend to say about what it means that the Doctor, who, for the vast majority of the series’ history, has been able to barge into any room and get what he wants from complete strangers because he is in the form of a heteronormative white man, to be confronted with a scenario where his physical form of a different minority background. There’s perhaps a comparison here to “The Witchfinders,” the rare episode of Jodie Whittaker’s run on Doctor Who that engages with the fact that the Doctor is presenting as female during its narrative. Was it a good episode? Not really, but at the very least it allowed the Doctor to realize that she was being discriminated against because of sexist ideology, and made it the crux of its dramatic conflict, because it allowed that moment of conflict to be revealed earlier than the final minutes of the episode.
Doctor Who can and should use the meta-narrative of it breaking boundaries with diverse casting to, within its text, comment on real world issues of prejudice and discrimination that can be confronted by making those casting choices: casting female Doctors, casting non-white Doctors, casting queer Doctors, and so on. Not only is that an important agenda for a series that is about a hero who prides themselves on empathy and understanding of the wide universe around them, it also opens Doctor Who up to more storytelling opportunities, to tell more stories about more kinds of people that have, historically up to this point, not been represented by having the Doctor’s default form from one incarnation to the other be that of a white man, and even have people from those backgrounds tell those stories, too. But when you choose to do so, you also have to reckon with the question of what it means to not just be treating the Doctor as “the Doctor” in that kind of story, but also explicitly treating them as a person existing in the body of a minority, and examining that minorities’ struggles in the real world—and what you then ask of the audience represented on screen to examine of those struggles in turn.
Image: BBC/Disney
That in and of itself becomes an issue in the final scene of “Dot and Bubble”, because part of the point of the Doctor’s anguished horror when Lindy and the other survivors reject his help is that his empathy—he practically begs them to let him save them from certain doom—does not work. The Doctor is allowed to be shocked at the revelation of Finetime’s white supremacist underpinnings, but his ultimate response is not about white supremacy’s existence in this society, but the grief that he cannot overcome that hateful ideology and save the people beholden to that ideology. Like we said, Doctor Who is a series about empathy—but in this moment the Doctor, in the body of a Black man, is asked to empathize for people who hate his very existence because of his skin color. The Doctor isn’t allowed to tell Lindy and her racist friends to fuck off and get eaten by giant slugs, for all he cares, because he’s the Doctor. He has to care about saving people, even when they are blinded to his help by their horrifyingly evil beliefs.
That’s an incredibly fraught message for Doctor Who to have to try and convey to its audience—either the assumptive broader white audience it has left clues for throughout “Dot and Bubble,” or the audience of people of color watching and seeing themselves in Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor. And even then, in this final moment, with “Dot and Bubble” and its intention to leave so much of it open to the interpretation of its audience, we never get to see Lindy and the other survivors face comeuppance for their racism. The episode ends with the exposure of white supremacy’s existence, and then can’t say or do anything more beyond that, because it’s saved that exposure for a handful of minutes before the end credits. Sure, it can be implied that after the credits roll, Lindy and her bigoted friends get into a boat to sail off into the wilds beyond Finetime and immediately die excruciating deaths, because they’re stupid bigots who have spent their entire lives up to that point living in the bubble of faux-TikTok, but the episode never actually tells us that that’s the case. It can never make the explicit jump that these people will face hubristic death for their racism, because it chooses to end on them sailing away and the Doctor leaving in tears. If anything, by leaving so much of the intended message of “Dot and Bubble” up to the audience to divine and interpret themselves, you make enough space for some of that audience to assume that Lindy and the others go on to survive and even thrive beyond Finetime’s boarders. After all, for most of the episode we see Lindy learned and adapt long enough to escape the slugs—there are as many clues that she could survive as there are clues to Finetime’s supremacist racial structure!
Image: BBC/Disney
I’m sure a series as progressively minded as Doctor Who doesn’t want any part of its audience to have a chance of thinking “well, did the racists come out okay, actually.” But if you don’t want that to be your message, you have to be crystal clear about your message, even if it’s one that on the surface is as simple as “white supremacy exists and is bad.” “Dot and Bubble” falters because it is structurally unequipped to be clear about that message until its final scene—and the point is that it is unclear about this, because its intent is to maintain the aspect of its twist ending for the majority of its audience. And even then, there’s is just not enough time for it to unpack and discuss the incredibly real topic it hopes to lay out to that audience. There is a version of “Dot and Bubble” that brings its racial allegory into the light much earlier, and much more explicitly, and makes it the crux of its story rather than the mystery of just what is happening in Finetime in the first place—and in turn, has the time to be much more full throated about the evils of white supremacy, instead of simply acknowledging that it still exists. Maybe that is, even, a story told by a writer of color, too.
But we are left to wonder all that, and what that episode might have been, for good or ill. Because whatever it might have ended up being, it was most certainly not the episode we ultimately got.
It wouldn’t be a season of Doctor Who if I wasn’t terrified of something. The latest episode, “Dot and Bubble,” gives us a glimpse into a world where we can hide behind technology. Oh … wait … that is kind of where we already are at. Oh no, are we Lindy?!
We are following Lindy Pepper-Bean (Callie Cooke) as she navigates her life in the virtual world. She relies heavily on her bubble system, which connects her with friends and even tells her how to walk to get to work. Slowly, she starts to see her friends offline and it takes the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) coming to her to try and get her to take down her bubble and see what is going on around her.
Aliens are killing everyone in alphabetical order and Lindy is low on the list given her last name. But what is really terrifying about this episode stems from the fact that Lindy literally lives in a bubble of technology. As much as we, as a society, pretend like that won’t apply to us, we are completely dependent on our technology working.
If the cell towers are down, what do we do? Wi-fi isn’t working? Well, you can’t watch anything or do anything with your free time. We’re so connected to the tech world that we’re not that far off from Lindy.
Even more than her blinders to the world around her, there is something else even more frightening about “Dot and Bubble” and it is how Lindy acts.
Lindy is also a villain
(BBC/Disney+)
There have been fears about the technology generations. How will they function in society if all they’ve known is friendship through a device? Lindy, who seemingly is worried about her friends the entire episode, shows her true colors in the final moments when it counts the most.
It is clear that Lindy has a crush on Ricky September (Tom Rhys Harries) when she sees him in the bubble. One of his many followers, she is shocked when she has to take down her device to run and save herself but comes into contact with her “celebrity crush.” Ricky September is willing to help keep her safe and the two discover that the aliens are killing in alphabetical order.
In a flash of fear, Lindy tells her Dot (which is her system targeting these people) and says that Ricky September’s real last name is Coomes. Despite the fact that Ricky was trying to save her, she threw him under the bus and let Dot kill him without an ounce of regret.
To me, that is what frightens me about technology. Through it, we could lose our sense of humanity. She tried nothing else to fight back, she just knew that she could use Ricky to free herself and it makes her a villain. Especially since she then told the Doctor and Ruby that they were essentially outsiders and it was their “duty” to save her.
Lindy is a perfect example of how bad things can get and it’s horrifying to watch.
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Russell T. Davies admits his writing eschews narrative formalism in favor of things that just feel right. Two decades ago, his critics pointed to his use of deus ex machina endings as a stick to beat his reputation with. But we’re in a different era now, where vibes matter just as much as logic — both inside the show’s new more fantastic skew, and in the real world. “73 Yards” is the vibiest episode of new Doctor Who so far, but I even found it easy to sit back and enjoy what it was doing.
Doctor Who is a complicated show to make, and some series have started production on Day 1 a week or more behind schedule. To combat this, the show started making “-lite” episodes that didn’t need the leads to be as involved. There are “Doctor-lite” episodes like “Love and Monsters” and “Blink,” and even “companion-lite” episodes like “Midnight.” This production process enables the star, or stars, to be off shooting Episode A while a guest cast takes the spotlight for the bulk of Episode B.
Production of the new series began while star Ncuti Gatwa was still finishing the last of his work on Netflix’s Sex Education. So while he appears in the opening and closing moments of “73 Yards”, he’s otherwise absent as the Doctor has been erased from history. It gives us the chance to see what a modern companion would do if left stranded in uncertain territory without her alien ally. The episode takes hard turns from folk and rural horror to kitchen-sink drama before becoming a light homage to Taxi Driver. Suffice to say, this is another episode you wouldn’t watch with small kids.
Bad Wolf / BBC Studios
The TARDIS lands on a cliff edge in Wales, with the Doctor pointing out it’s another liminal space where magic is allowed to creep in. He even mentions the war between the “land and the sea,” name-checking a rumored spin-off fans discovered after scouring production documents. The Doctor talks about how great a country Wales is, except for Roger ap Gwillam, a Welsh politician who, two decades hence, will lead the UK to the brink of nuclear armageddon. He then steps into a fairy ring, disturbing its web, and disappears while Ruby reads the paper notes tied to it. The notes mention a Mad Jack, a scary figure that sounds like a villain from folklore.
Suddenly, Ruby is alone on the cliff but can now see the blurry figure of an old woman waving her arms at her in the distance. Ruby tries to approach her but the figure remains the same distance away (the titular 73 yards) no matter where she goes. Believing the Doctor has ghosted her, she tries to solve the quandary of this figure on her own. Ruby approaches a hiker (Susan Twist) and tries to work out where she’s seen her before (every episode thus far), but can’t quite put her finger on it. She asks the hiker if she’d be willing to speak to the old woman who is following her, but when the hitchhiker gets there, whatever she says is so horrifying that she sprints away from the scene in terror.
Ruby heads to a pub in the nearby town where the locals mock her — mistaking her hesitancy for condescension. She asks one of the patrons to go speak to the woman and, when he does, the same thing happens. Ruby gets home and asks her mum to try, this time holding a phone so Ruby can hear what she’s saying. But the phone call is disrupted and her mum is similarly horrified by what she hears — locking Ruby out of her home soon after. Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT are next to offer aid, right up until they encounter the woman, when they all abandon her.
Bad Wolf / BBC Studios
All the time, the old woman remains 73 yards away from wherever Ruby is, unnoticed by everyone else unless Ruby directs their attention to her. She can’t photograph the woman’s face — it’s blurry — and can’t get close enough to hear her ominous warning. In fact, even to the end of the episode, there’s a lot of unknowns that are never resolved.
Ruby’s strangely resilient, and once she’s gotten beyond the abandonment, she looks to build a new life for herself. She treats her stalker as a friend, wishing her well as we cycle through a montage of the next chapter of Ruby’s life. She gets a job, moves into her own flat and goes through a series of breakups as she gently ages past 30, and then 40. Then, on the TV, she sees Roger ap Gwillam on the TV, who even mentions Mad Jack, and remembers both the Doctor’s warning and the messages in the fairy ring. It takes Ruby no time at all to be sure that her purpose in life is to save the world, and to avert Gwillam’s nuclear catastrophe.
She signs up to Gwillam’s fascist political party as a volunteer and eventually reaches a position where she’s close to the top. Gwillam’s rise is quick and it’s not long before he’s promising to secede from NATO and put his itchy trigger finger on the UK’s nuclear arsenal, ready to wage war on the rest of the world. Gwillam’s inauguration will take place at Cardiff City Stadium, while Ruby follows the politician along, lurking in the crowd.
Bad Wolf / BBC Studios
Ruby then starts to approach Gwillam, walking across the off-limits pitch at the stadium, and you expect her to pull out a weapon. But instead, she whips out her phone and starts measuring the distance between her and Roger until she reaches 73 yards. When she does, she gestures to the villain to notice the woman, and when he notices her, he hears the horrifying thing she says. The shock is enough to send Gwillam racing out of the stadium, resigning from the role of Prime Minister and preventing nuclear armageddon.
But while Ruby hoped that would be the end of it, the figure remains with her for the rest of her life. It’s only on her deathbed she realizes she can project herself back in time to act as a warning for the Doctor to not step in the fairy ring. She does so, preventing the accident in the first place and paradoxically nullifying the entire time stream in the process. History carries on its merry way and all is well… for now. But given the risks of paradoxes in Doctor Who, and the general sense that history is unraveling, it might not augur too well for what’s going to happen in the future.
Bad Wolf / BBC Studios
“73 Yards” is an exercise in putting your character in a hostile world and seeing what they’ll do to deal with it. It’s an episode that, when written down, doesn’t feel like a lot happens, because so much of its runtime is an exploration of Ruby as a character. Doctor Who thrives when the companion role is occupied by someone who wants to grab a fistful of narrative for themselves. And Ruby Sunday seems almost too perfect in her ability to draw out the logic from what she’s experienced and work within it.
Much as you can draw narrative and thematic parallels between the new series and Davies’ original tenure, this episode pulls from “Turn Left.” Both tell the story of what happens to a companion when the Doctor is withdrawn from the narrative and what they do to fix that wrong. And it’s no surprise both suggest that the UK, without the intervention of the Doctor, is only a few days away from tipping over into fascism.
Ruby’s humanity shines, even to the point where she’s trying to treat her tormentor with care. She refuses to fly, or travel by boat, lest she endanger the life of the apparition that’s following her, despite how much damage it causes to her life. And when she sees Roger ap Gwillam on the TV, she’s certain that her destiny is to prevent the nuclear armageddon the Doctor warned her about. This is another useful thread — the idea that Ruby has an instinctive grasp of the genre she exists in — much as she did in “Space Babies.”
As for the ending, it’s probably best we talk about those “vibes,” or the sort of slightly skewed associations in the show’s logic. Ruby, at the end of her life, realizes that she’s able to travel, or project herself somehow, through time to avert the Doctor’s fall. There’s nothing in the episode that points to it, no hint that the ghostly figure is Ruby, or if this is tied to the snow or anything else. But perhaps, the trick to an episode like this is simply to let yourself relax and enjoy seeing the character evolve, rather than anything more.
Susan Twist Corner
Obviously, Susan Twist plays the hiker that Ruby first encounters after the Doctor disappears and, for the first time, Ruby notices the familiarity. In the materials that Disney sends along that Susan Twist’s character is named the “mystery woman.”
And on the subject of twists, you’ll recall at the end of “Church on Ruby Road” that, in the post-credits, Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson) breaks the fourth wall. The annoying neighbor character, who lives next to Ruby’s mum’s flat, turns to the camera and asks if we’ve “Never seen a TARDIS before?” (Given her surprise at seeing it earlier in the episode, it’s clear her history may have been changed during the course of the show.) When Ruby heads back to her mum’s house, Anita Dobson’s Mrs Flood is back sitting on her step with her deckchair out. Interestingly, when she notices the ghostly figure — and Ruby and her Mum’s attempts to deal with it, she declares that it’s “nothing to do with me” and goes inside. Which, again, feels like a hint that Mrs Flood and the mystery woman are separate
The following includes spoilers for “The Devil’s Chord.”
For a show about time (and space) travel interwoven with British pop culture since its start in 1963, a trip to visit the Beatles is an obvious premise. So obvious that this is the second time we’ve had a “what if” episode hinging on the Fab Four’s cultural impact. After all, both the Beatles and Doctor Who became global cultural exports as Britain flexed its post-imperial soft power. But while there’s plenty of material to mine in that premise, this isn’t an episode that’s interested in doing that, relegating the Beatles to little more than window dressing.
This has always been a trick in Doctor Who’s toolbox, especially when Russell T. Davies is in charge. He loves dangling an idea, or eye-catching visual, to lure in an audience before moving the focus to something else. I’m reminded of the kung-fu monks from “Tooth and Claw” which looked great in the trailers but had no real impact on the story. It’s “Tooth and Claw” that “The Devil’s Chord” feels similar to — an early season one episode that doesn’t quite work in and of itself, but does spend a lot of its time gesturing to this year’s recurring themes. (FilmStories reported from a recent Q&A, where Davies said that this episode lacked a central plot and was, instead, “Just some subplots.”)
James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios
But to understand that, and my stance, we’re going to have to take a little look at The Context before we get to examining the meat. You see, during its history, Doctor Who has bent itself to fit the vision of its primary creative figure and Davies is a voracious watcher of TV. He’s obsessed with the form and format of TV as much as its content, and this is reflected in his work. His episodes often develop with news reports, CCTV clips and deeper forms of exposition revealed through screens. “Bad Wolf” is a great example, where the show lands at a TV studio that’s making sci-fi versions of the then-current pantheon of British reality TV.
Davies also trusts his audience to instinctively know the unspoken rules of TV even if they can’t name them. Which is why I think it’s worth looking at “The Devil’s Chord” as an episode that is, for want of a better phrase, collapsing in on itself. When Mrs. Flood talks to the camera at the end of “Church on Ruby Road,” it felt Deliberately Wrong, especially after she was seemingly unaware of the TARDIS earlier in the episode. Here, the numerous fourth wall breaks and lapses in storytelling are similarly an intentional sign of How Wrong Things Are. What starts out as a by-the-numbers celebrity historical quickly collapses into a fever dream like Sam Lowry’s descent into madness at the end of Brazil.
James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios
We open in a concert hall in 1925 as a teacher outlines the basics of music theory for a young child. He shows off that he has “discovered” The Devil’s Chord and, by playing it, unleashes Maestro (Jinkx Monsoon), the embodiment of music. Maestro is a godlike elemental force and a child of the Toymaker – featured villain of the 60th Anniversary special episode “The Giggle.” After praising the musician for their genius, Maestro then sucks the music out of their heart and eats it like cotton candy before staring into the camera and playing the show’s theme tune on the piano.
When the titles end (notice the theme is playing out of the jukebox) it’s clear Ruby has been on the TARDIS for some time. She asks the Doctor if it would be possible to visit the recording of the Beatles’ first album at the EMI’s studios on Abbey Road. Before they open the doors, she asks if it might be worth them changing into less conspicuously modern clothes and they spring off to sample the delights of the TARDIS wardrobe, complete with a wig for the Doctor.
James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios
The pair sneak into George Martin’s producer’s booth but quickly spot something is wrong with the scene in front of them. Rather than playing any of Please Please Me’s big and recognizable hits, they’re turning out mop-top music about animals. The Doctor doesn’t know it yet but Maestro has spent the last few decades swallowing all of the music out of people’s hearts. It’s a genius way to get around the fact that, even with all the cash thrown at Get Back and Disney’s vast bank balance,Doctor Who still can’t readily afford to license Beatles songs.
Next door, (famous British singer / TV presenter / notorious diva) Cilla Black is similarly stricken with a case of the muzaks while a concert orchestra is just about mustering a version of Three Blind Mice. The Doctor and Ruby head to the canteen to corner John and Paul to try and find out what went wrong with history. They then head to the roof with a piano, where Ruby plays a tune she wrote to help a friend get over a breakup. But once the Doctor hears Maestro’s giggle, he sprints away, hiding in a nearby basement.
James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios
The Doctor explains that any villain who laughs is tied to the Toymaker and is a sign of the fractured universe. Fighting the Toymaker in “The Giggle” was sufficiently draining and difficult, especially given how powerful these elemental forces are, that he doesn’t want to do it again. Maestro is hunting for them, but the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to kill all of the sound in the area. (The Doctor knows just enough about how the form and format of TV works to turn the tables on their opponent.) Maestro works out how to undo the blocking – with some magnificent sound editing — but is then distracted from their pursuit of the Doctor by an older woman Ruby had inspired to play the piano.
The eagle-eyed among you will notice that this is the second time in two episodes that Ruby has inspired another person to be bold to their detriment. Her words were enough to encourage Eric to try and take on the bogeyman single-handed in “Space Babies,” nearly imperiling him. The older woman isn’t so lucky and gets consumed by Maestro
Because of how long Doctor Who has run, it’s often its own source material. Ruby, once they’ve escaped, assumes that everything is okay because she recalls listening to music as a child and so therefore Maestro can’t have won. So, in a scene pulled from “Pyramids of Mars,” the Doctor takes her to 2024 in the TARDIS to show the wreckage of the alternate future. Because while she’s protected from the ravages of continuity by the fact she’s traveling through time, the rest of the universe isn’t so lucky.
Natalie Seery/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios
But this flash-forward, in an echo of the meeting with the Toymaker, flips from a visage of a bombed-out London to a stagey set. Maestro arrives behind a white piano to outline their plan to rid the universe of music, leaving just the aeolian tones of the wind brushing against objects. But the Doctor says that a universe without music, unable to express joy or anger through art, turns sour and destroys itself. It’s a feeling I can relate to — like when love becomes so painful in its absence that you’d rather disappear into the void than keep going on. Davies is also a nihilist so many of his episodes have revolved around the dark face of humanity that reveals itself when denied Earthly pleasures.
Escaping back to the ‘60s, the Doctor and Ruby meet Maestro and find the walls of reality are collapsing. Murray Gold’s swirling soundtrack isn’t just the background music, it’s bled into the fabric of the show itself. The Doctor and Ruby start trying to find a chord that will bind Maestro with the Mrs. Mills piano, a (real) fixture of Abbey Road’s studio. As they play, the notes are rendered floating over the piano, but the pair fail to identify the final note before Maestro turns up.
Maestro begins attacking, throwing around musical scores as weapons and hurling the piano into the hall. It’s here that the episode’s coherence starts to sag, the scenes get longer and odder, a wonky version of a standard monster-of-the-week TV show conclusion. The tension builds, and all looks lost, until John and Paul stumble upon the piano in the hallway. They’re able to see the notes hanging in the air over the piano and with their, uh, innate musical nous, and complete the chord to bind the villain. But before they’re whisked away, Maestro has time to reveal they aren’t the only one of the Toymaker’s minions coming, and “the one who waits” is lurking in the background.
Out of nowhere, the episode ends with a big musical number that features the cast dancing through the Abbey Road sets, delighted at the return of music. Even the steps of the road crossing light up as the Doctor and Ruby cut a rug across them. I can’t work out if it’s simply an indulgent sequence, or another big sign that the show’s structure is breaking down. That the Doctor and Ruby are blind to the apparent Wrongness of it all hints at the latter, especially given the deeper context of the song’s title — see below.
James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios
There are other signs that Doctor Who is collapsing into its own TV series, including the casting decisions. The older woman who plays the piano is June Hudson, the show’s costume designer from 1978 to 1980 — who famously redesigned the fourth Doctor’s costume. The musician at the piano during the dance number is Murray Gold, while the figures the Doctor and Ruby dance with at the end are Strictly Come Dancing stars Shirley Ballas and Johannes Radebe. Maybe the big nemesis haunting the series will be some form that could threaten its existence as a TV show itself.
It’s worth saying that Doctor Who has an uneasy relationship with “big” villain performances which can turn hard into hamminess. But Jinkx Monsoon manages to pitch Maestro as just big and flamboyant enough to steal every scene they’re in, but never too silly. It’s also the right side of charming and magnetic, and while they don’t have anywhere near enough time to properly face off against Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor, it’s still a great match-up.
The problem of Susan Twist
As much as I don’t want to get into the weeds here, it’s possible this stuff is going to come up later that I need to flag it. Doctor Who has been running for more than 60 years with a revolving door of creative figures who paid little-to-no attention to consistency. A convenient way to justify these is by suggesting time travel, by its very nature, would always mess up your personal history. But, in latter days, the show has often preferred to overlook the thornier parts of its backstory, like the existence of the Doctor’s granddaughter, Susan.
When the show started, the Doctor was joined on his adventures by Susan and a pair of teachers who followed her home one night. Long before any mention of Time Lords or Gallifrey, she was just the kid figure who often wound up needing rescuing. Then, in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth,” the Doctor exiles her to 22nd century Earth because she wants to kiss a boy. His goodbye speech has been long since de-contextualized and made to sound noble. But it is essentially him going “yeah, you’re interested in boys now, so you go make babies (eww babies) and stay here while I go off running around the universe.” Yes, it is a bit yikes.
This ties in with a small body of writing about this trope in children’s literature about the way female characters are treated when reaching adulthood. In combination with a sexual awakening, this is often used as justification to dump them out of the narrative. It’s even called “The Problem of Susan,” albeit named after Neil Gaiman’s rebuttal of what happens to Susan at the end of The Chronicles of Narnia. If you’d like to learn more, you can read Elizabeth Sandifer’s essay on “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” which talks about this in some detail.
Why is this relevant? Because when Davies’ returned to Doctor Who, he cast the same actress in two different episodes. Susan Twist played Mrs. Merridew in “Wild Blue Yonder” and was seen again in “The Church on Ruby Road,” which sent keen-eyed fans into a frenzy. She pops up here as a tea lady and, on the roof of Abbey Road; the Doctor even talks about the fact another of his incarnations is living in Shoreditch in 1963 with his granddaughter. That the episode ends with a musical number called “There’s always a Twist at the end” with Ncuti Gatwa winking to camera is as big a neon sign as you could hope for.
Doctor Who fans — never ones to not scour the text, metatext and paratext of each episode — took Twist’s repeated casting as a signpost. They assumed, not unjustifiably, that this series would feature a twist about Susan, and that Davies was subtly signaling this to diehard fans. Given Twist’s appearance here, and that we get a song saying the quiet part out loud, seems to vindicate those theories. Unless, of course, it’s all a triple bluff, but I’m not sure how anyone could game that successfully. The only question that remains, of course, is what Davies’ plan is, and how exactly it’ll play out in the next six episodes.
