Doctor Who Social Club

As per his Substack-newsletter:

I’ve thought about approaching the BBC again about Doctor Who but they’ve never taken me seriously before, so I’m not convinced they’ll start. It’s probably worth a try.

I would open cold as if the show is new. Strange and eccentric young ‘inventor’, amnesiac, with an odd TARDIS machine that can go anywhere and is bigger on the inside. That’s all you need to get started.

I expect they’ll opt for the young Doctor full reboot, which would be a mistake. You have a universe. You have lore in the bank. That’s good to have as long as you don’t rely on it. In fact, barely even mention it. It’s so easy to do a young ‘Doctor Who?’ showing up in a field where he’s found by some kids who think he’s Jesus. Amnesiac…TARDIS stolen…whodunnit…etc… Kids who get into the show will be excited to discover there’s a huge back story to get into – but who am I to say?

As far as being saddled with a lot of dangling threads goes, ‘they’ could just reveal that Gatwa’s Doctor was an unstable bi-regeneration who tried to make the most of his brief mayfly existence but just sort of flickered along, barely there. When he glitched out, he reached for a familiar face and got Billie Piper off the telly. She then tracks down David Tennant’s Doctor, going mad with his earthbound ordinary life round at Donna’s. He can’t stop attracting terrifying, vengeful enemies from space so he’s on the run when they meet – and fuse back together with a lovely Rose and the Doctor scene to wrap the whole RTD era in a neat bow, while the Doctor’s understanding family cheer them on – then it all goes wrong – and new-new-Who picks up from there with nary a backward glance.

You don’t even need to show any of that – but it’s all there for a Big Finish.

Edit: Grant Morrison is a Scottish writer. Their work includes New X-Men, which many consider one of the defining runs of that team and All-Star Superman (which inspired the 2025 Superman movie). They have also written for Doctor Who before, mostly comics for DW Magazine.

They also created the SYFY TV show Happy!

Now that Old Nu Who is available to stream in the US again, do we have the numbers to resume our retrospective journey?

I'm thinking I'd stick with the Sunday schedule, and pick up where we left off, with "The Christmas Invasion".

Who's on board? Do we have enough interest to make it worthwhile?

Carole Ann Ford, who played the Doctor's granddaughter Susan in the early seasons of the show, and cameoed again in the most recent series, offers her thoughts on the current hiatus.

She's a cheerful lady, but it's hard not to read some disappointment between the lines that her historical return to the show was all but cut, with slim chances for a do-over. Ford turned 86 on 16 June.

BBC director-general Matt Brittin has announced that 550 of the planned 1,800 to 2,000 job cuts at the corporation will be taken from BBC News and TV and radio-related roles.

The 57-year-old has also announced the BBC is to axe programmes and cut content spending by £80 million, and added it would “review our broadcast TV channels and radio network portfolio” as more of its audience moves online, while attempting to sustain “output” and “audience value and impact”.

The BBC has not indicated which programmes would be axed under the plans.

[…]

In response to the announcement, head of media and entertainment union, Bectu, Philippa Childs, said it is “far from ideal” that the cuts are taking place at the same time as the BBC’s charter renewal.

She said: “I’m not sure how you can make informed decisions about the long-term future of the organisation when it will be in a substantially diminished place at the end of the process than the beginning.

[…]

“The charter renewal must put the BBC’s funding on a secure, long-term pathway or it risks death by a thousand cuts.”

So that's fairly dire for anybody hoping the BBC can shoulder a show like Doctor Who without substantial external funding.

Big caveat up front, I have no illusion that this was ever planned out, or that it's ever going to be made. I just connected some dots from Eccleston's season to our current mess. I do think that if the BBC had Pete McTighe make a 15 minute special along these lines and put it on Youtube, the fans could rest easier and the next production team might start on a blank slate.

To summarise, the last couple of seasons had a convoluted arc concerning a companion's parent issues. She was saved as a baby through time travel intervention, but not without a lot of temporal disturbance in the process. In fact, babies have been a throughline in both Ncuti Gatwa's seasons, a pattern that culminates in the Doctor rupturing the Time Vortex in order to save one child's existence. For just a probable moment there, that child is his own. Succeeding in his mission, the Doctor is then replaced by somebody looking suspiciously like Rose Tyler.

• Church.
• Baby.
• Rose.
• Temporal paradox.
• On what could be considered the Doctor's Father's Day.

Bring on the Time Reapers to sterilise the wound in time! That's why the Doctor regenerated into this face, à la 12 looking like Caecilius from "The fires of Pompeii". She needs to channel Rose as a catalyst to heal the reset 15 did to save Poppy. Besides, where Pete sacrificed himself to sort the timestream out, this time around the Reapers are attacking the Doctor and their police box. And the Doctor's current face has a very special relation to the TARDIS' living heart.

To be fair, the rest of the story doesn't really matter, this is only meant to resolve the Billie Piper twist of "The reality war". It doesn't fix fan quibbles over the Timeless Child or the Doctor being half human on their mother's side for a hot minute in 1996. Pretty much everything other than that latest regeneration cliffhanger can be ignored or picked up upon by future writers. So end this minisode on a regeneration without showing what happens next, or just leave it open ended.

Now, would I love for Susan to pop up for no other reason than to ease her "grandfather" into the credits crawl, and a future season where neither actress are seen again? Maybe an exchange to echo the Seventh's exit monologue to Ace at the end of "Survival"? Absolutely, but this could well be a one hander between Piper, some 2005 archive footage, and the janky old low-poly CGI monsters from back then.

[made a few edits for clarity(?)]

When the show continues, it's definitely not going to pick up from the Disney season numbering, and for another soft reboot they may want to start at 1 again.

So going by season ones, it'll be "New New New Who”.

Some sticklers might want to go by showrunners instead of formal seasons, which would make it "New New New New New Who". (I'm starting at 2005 for this because the show didn't have showrunners as such before that).

But of course, you could argue every (numbered) Doctor is a fresh start, so it was really "New Who" ever since Troughton. This would make the next series "New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New Who".

Anybody up for a "New Earth" rewatch party?

This past year since the show was last on the air, I've been rewatching a bunch of classic serials, and quite enjoying the longer format. It's delightful to have big chunks of story developing over several episodes, not unlike the double (or rare triple) whammys we've had in the modern show.

It's got me thinking, given the difficulties the BBC seem to have shouldering the expense of producing Doctor Who these days — wouldn't it be feasible to release one or two multi-episode "event" series per year, one finished story each, plus a holiday special?

Altogether they could land at eight or less episodes a year, with lower production costs (say, locations and casting) across each serial. I'm sure there are still quarries and stately manors that weren't used during Tom Baker's stint, or deserve a revisit...

Maybe it will even be more realistic to fit a few blocks of shooting in between the main cast's other engagements, and we could have a steady TARDIS team for (gasp!) three years or more?

Yeah, I'm reaching. Anything would be better than this current "hurry up and wait" BS.

So, this is really only a blip in the current vacuum of Doctor Who news. We're down to ~~second~~ ~~third~~ fourth hand gossip, but at least this is via Rich Johnston of Bleeding Cool. Except it didn't seem to meet BC newsworthy criteria, so he posted it to his substack instead. Probably because it's the sort of hearsay redditors tend to spin into wild conjecture.

The basic premise is that somehow, the show runner and production company have already selected the next Doctor, and are in full swing producing the holiday special, scheduled to air on christmas day. And the reason nobody knows about this is, it's all being done in secrecy.

Bear in mind, these are the same powers that be who had huge swathes of the past two seasons' plot points leaked before airing, so how they suddenly became masters of covert production is the main question.

Until we hear otherwise from official channels, though, this is at least a positivist antidote to the inevitable "Doctor Who is DEAD" theorising that has filled online channels for the past year...

Okay, "announcements of announcements" are dumb and bad, but this is what we're working with at this point. At least we know something's coming.

You will get an announcement. There is a press release lumbering through the BBC which, as you know, is like the Jurassic period and 57 people have to sign off on every single word. I promise you in about a week, two weeks, there will be some sort of press release, and yet I can hear the gears slowing down even as I say that. You know this place!

Direct link to the monologue

I'm not crazy about purported leaks and rumours, but this one has a whiff of truthiness?