Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children

Chapter the 325th, in which the Doctor fought the lore, and the lore won.

Plot:

The far future; an intergalactic war rages between humans and Cybermen. Ko Sharmus is one of a resistance group that sends the Cyberium (wibbly energy glob that is the Cyber's battle AI and database) back in time, where it ends up at Villa Diodati. Semi-Cybernised zealot Ashad returns from the past having recovered the Cyberium. He and the remaining Cybermen hunt the few remaining humans. Ko Sharmus stations himself on a planet on which there's a portal to far off worlds, and helps humans to escape. Two time travellers, the Doctor and Ryan, accompanied by a surviving human, arrive at the planet. Ko Sharmus shows them the portal, but it's now continuously linked to the planet Gallifrey. The Master emerges and takes the Doctor back through. A Cyber ship arrives, and Cybermen attack. The three left on the planet defend themselves, and are saved by some Cybermen who turn out to be two more time travellers, Yaz and Graham, and two other surviving humans, disguised in Cyber suits. All seven walk through the barrier to Gallifrey to find the Doctor. The Cybermen also travel there in their ship. The Master shrinks Ashad with his Tissue Compression Eliminator, and takes the Cyberium. Sharmus and Co blow up the Cyber ship. The Master uses dead bodies of Time Lords to create a new group of Cybermen with the ability to regenerate: the Cyber-Masters. The Doctor finds the miniaturised Ashad; there is a superweapon still inside Ashad's Cyber suit that will destroy the Cyber-Masters. The Doctor takes it and confronts the Master, after having put everyone else in a TARDIS back to 21st century Earth. Ko Sharmus doesn't go with the others, and follows the Doctor. When she cannot bring herself to use the superweapon, he takes it from her and sacrifices himself. She just manages to escape before everything blows up. Suddenly, Judoon appear, arrest her and imprison her.

Parallel to this, there is the incongruous tale of Brendan, who lives in rural Ireland in the 20th century; he joins the police, miraculously survives a fall, retires many years later, and then has his memories wiped by some sort of electro-convulsion therapy machine. The Master had previously plugged the Doctor into the Matrix on Gallifrey and set off on some lengthy, lengthy exposition: the Doctor was a foundling taken in by Tecteun, a Gallifreyan; by chance, Tecteun discovered that her adopted child had the ability to regenerate, and extracted the genetic material controlling this, putting it into generations of Gallifreyans, who then became Time Lords. Brendan's story is part of the Doctor's history that has been wiped from her memory, adjusted in the matrix with a Ballykissangel filter.

Context:

There are very few stories left to blog now; I'm eking the last few out to allow for some to be shuffled in amongst the stories from Ncuti Gatwa's second run (still a couple of weeks away at the time of writing). The randomiser picked this story next, the most recently aired of those remaining, leaving only one other story to blog after this from the first phase of the new series from 2005 to 2022. I watched it from the iplayer over a couple of nights in March 2025. Slipback (a story from the mid-1980s) was still fresh in my mind, which was handy as I saw some parallels (more on this in the Reaction section below).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of another Doctor's televisual era; Jodie Whittaker's thirteenth Doctor joins the first, third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors, making ten completed to date. This also marks the completion of another season, the 36th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

Jodie Whittaker's second run, the 12th series after the relaunch of Doctor Who in 2005, aired each Sunday from the beginning of 2020. Its two part finale was broadcast on the 23rd February and the 1st March 2020, and I watched them both live accompanied by all the family. In between, on leap day, Saturday 29th February, I was at the BFI watching the animated version of The Faceless Ones (as blogged about in the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post. Perhaps because the revelations hadn't yet come (all that was in the second part), I don't remember much discussion that day of the story currently being broadcast on the telly.

Reaction:

When he got the job as Doctor Who showrunner, I commented here that it wouldn't be too long before online wags highlighted Chris Chibnall's past appearance on a BBC TV programme, where he criticised mid-1980s Doctor Who, as an example of long-term karma. In this final blog post for a story from his tenure, I'm going to have to hark back to that. In 1986, Chibnall was one of a number of teenage fans on Open Air, a discussion programme about other BBC programmes; he couldn't know that many years later he'd be on the receiving end of similar criticism, so dished it out without compunction. I don't reference it to snipe, just to point out that - however critical he might have been of it - mid-1980s Who had clearly made a formative impression. I can't think of any other reason why so many years later, he wrote an Eric Saward script as the two-part finale of his second series in charge. Let's look at some of the evidence from Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (which is a long-winded title that I'm tempted to abbreviate to just 'Ass'): a Doctor who doesn't drive the narrative, but is buffeted by overly bleak and violent action? Check. A mercenary character who is a more effective presence than the Doctor, in whom the writer seems much more interested than the nominal star of the show? Check. An unhealthy obsession with Time Lords and Cybermen? Check. It's like we've been pulled through a portal to another time and place. Just like Saward giving all the best lines in Revelation of the Daleks to his own character Orcini, so Chibnall allows Ko Sharmus to do all the fun stuff. Even minor points are similar: when Cybermen attack near the start, the fam get split up because they can't make it back to the TARDIS. Parking far away from the main action is something done in many a Saward story, including Revelation; at least Chibnall didn't have the Doctor spend the whole first episode walking to where all the other characters were.

There's a scene early on where the Doctor arrives with the fam with lots of gadgets to help the humans defend themselves against the Cybermen. All the devices are set up, named, discussed, and it sounds jolly impressive; then, they're blown up in an instant. The intention is clearly to up the ante by making the situation seem bleak, but that only works if the protagonist overcomes the bigger obstacles later; unfortunately, Jodie Whittaker's Doctor doesn't do this, as she's whisked off by the Master to her own subplot before she can do anything more in the Cyberman plot. Ko Sharmus, though, gets a very similar scene in the second episode but all his hardware is effective. It's not a one-off, either: the Doctor boasts about her ability to hotwire spaceships, but then some rando human can do it better than her. I found myself inwardly screaming 'It's her show, give her a win!' the longer things went on. There's nothing much that the Doctor gets to do other than receive information (this is harder to see on first watch as the surprise revelations about the Doctor's hitherto unknown past make it seem significant, but it's still exposition not plot). The only actual act that the Doctor does that's effective is using the power of her memories to break out of the Master's prison (a nice scene with lots of archive clips). The ending, though, has Ko Sharmus sacrificing himself to save the day, and the Doctor letting him do so with not much more than a shrug. This sort of scene is not unique to Doctor Who; the Doctor needs to survive to the next episode, so often someone else has to do the dirty work. The Doctor usually (and heroically) fights against this: the problem here is that the script and direction don't put her under sufficient pressure to make a decision, or have it made for her: Ko Sharmus needs to knock her out or lock her out of the room, or something along those lines.

The Doctor not being an active protagonist is far from the only problem; the surviving humans - only seven of them (who at first are presented as the only humans left, which later turns out not to be the case, an unnecessary extra confusion) - are a dull and featureless lot who don't speak like anyone you might have met. The script is also a bit contradictory about them: dialogue suggests that they are still very linked to their old lives ("We've got a childminder, a driver, a builder") but they are still able to act like expert soldiers, spies or saboteurs when the need arises. Additionally, a character who's presented as an older teenager confirms that he's been fighting Cybermen since he was four years old. Given the destruction this war is shown to have wreaked, is it feasible that people would still be as connected with their old lives after more than a decade, or indeed that there would be any civilisation left at all? Ashad's a dull villain with a tendency towards portentous speechifying; with the Doctor sidelined and the too many companions not having enough between them to do, this leaves only the Master. It's a great performance by Sacha Dhawan despite his character's motivation being hard to understand. Ian McElhinney as Ko Sharmus is solid too. There are some great visuals, but they often seem sterile (the beginning sequence with a cyber head floating towards the screen) or not aligned with the central premise (how is there still a big spaceship full of lots of dormant Cybermen, if they've been all but defeated?).

The most successful moments are those set in Ireland. The disconcertingly out of context interruptions depicting the life of the mysterious Brendan intrigue the audience precisely because they are disconcerting and out of context. It's almost a shame when they are explained as visions the Master has beamed into the Doctor's head (particularly as there's none of the traditional TV grammar that would normally be applied if a character was having visions - sometimes the Brendan cutaways happen when the Doctor isn't even on screen - so it feels like a cheat). The most controversial aspect of this story, the revelation of the Doctor's Timeless Child backstory, also works well. Many people dislike such a massive realignment of Doctor Who mythology, but it's clever and engaging, and is something that can be built on in future stories (as it was in Chibnall's Flux or in Russell T Davies' early Ncuti stories) without overwhelming the show. It has to be seen as something of a triumph in a nearly 60-year old show, to find a new take on the main character that was surprising but nonetheless broadly consistent with what had gone before. More analysis of this aspect of this story can be found in the Deeper Thoughts section of a blog post from close to the original transmission. It's just a shame that the delivery mechanism of these revelations is a fairly flat Cyberman versus humans story. 

Connectivity:

Both Slipback and Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children see the Doctor on a spaceship, and both stories feature aggressive law enforcement officers. In both stories, the Doctor is passive, not driving the story forward much or at all, with another Time Lord appearing partway through to explain things to them. The resolution sees a character other than the Doctor blow themselves up to save the day.

 

Deeper Thoughts:

Hand in hand through our... Arc life! Series and serials: Doctor Who fans who obsess over the details of its production and history (so, pretty much all of us) hear these terms all the time, but maybe don't think about them too much. When Doctor Who was first developed in 1963, there was a big difference between series (ongoing weekly adventures of a set of characters, plus new guest cast, that were one and done every week) and serials (bounded stories with mostly the same characters told over multiple weeks, with each episode forming only a part of an overall narrative that comes to a definite conclusion in the final episode). If there are antecedents, I'm not aware of them, so I think Doctor Who was the first, the mold-breaker, to be shaped as a series of serials. The challenges that the Doctor faces are not completed in a single episode, they take four or six or seven weeks, and the guest characters - and writer and director - stay more or less the same in that time; but then, once that challenge is resolved and a story comes to a firm conclusion, the fun doesn't end and there's a new story, new guest cast and different people involved behind the camera, following over multiple weeks. It's a very unusual approach; the televisual orthodoxy - particularly of that time in the 20th century - would dictate that if one is going to sacrifice the appeal of anyone being able to drop in at any particular point to engage with a clean slate, then it should only be for a short run; if one misses the first episode of a serial, then one is free to make a decision to watch something else for a few weeks, and then when another serial comes along it will be completely new with no baggage. With Doctor Who, there would be an unknown number of weeks before the next jumping-on point, and there would be at least some continuity between the serials.

This is probably why not many shows since have adopted the same format, and those that did - Sapphire and Steel, Timeslip, The Tomorrow People - were fantasy shows consciously modelling themselves on Doctor Who to a lesser or greater extent. What's curious, though, is that it worked: Doctor Who was a hit from that first series onwards, and in its 20th century run nobody considered changing the format. In the 1960s, production teams leant into it even more: there would be cliffhangers in between the serials too, making it one long adventure - singular - in space and time. One thing that probably helped it work is that the arcing narrative (that baggage that I mentioned earlier) was kept to a minimum: the Doctor was trying to get the two schoolteachers Ian and Barbara back home. That was it. Once those characters left, there was no arc plot at all, just a shared set of characters between the serials, and usually a cliffhanger to lead in to the next one. When Doctor Who was made in colour for the first time in the 1970s, the show was on for fewer weeks of the year, and those lead-in cliffhangers disappeared. For the rest of Jon Pertwee's years, the serials were not directly interlinked. A bit of arc plot came back in at this stage: mainly based on character dynamics (Jo Grant's growth as a person, Mike Yates's allying with the bad guys and the aftermath of that). This was the first time in Who's history when the final story of a run became a season finale, tying up some of those characters' plots, but it was still fairly loose. When Tom Baker took over, the new producer and script editor who came in with him got rid of even that. The last story of any particular run was usually the six-parter of that year, but the stories could have been shuffled into any order, and it wouldn't have made any difference.

A couple of times in the 1970s and 80s, the series experimented with linking all the stories under an umbrella theme - a quest to find the six pieces of the key to time, the Doctor on trial; but the last stories of those runs were the only other season finales of 20th century Who. It was probably a good decision; a year after the key to time season, a strike meant that the final story of the run, Shada, was not completed. With the potential disruption of industrial action always present (it killed off a story again in 1983), it was wise not to saddle any one serial with tying up a long-running narrative, just in case it never made it to screens. As the classic series of Doctor Who came to an end in the late 1980s, a pilot for a TV series being made in America was going to change the nature of things. David Lynch's Twin Peaks was influential in setting up a new standard: the detectives would not solve the murder at the show's heart in one week, the same investigation would continue the following week, and thereafter. Lynch, in his art school terrorist way, never wanted the case to get solved ever, but the network (and to a large extent the viewers too) disagreed. Since that experiment, the default has been established that one has to have a significant pay-off -  even if it isn't revealing everything - at the end of every season. It's more unusual for TV detectives to get a new case every week now than it is for them to get a new one every year. Series and serials have essentially become the same. Fantasy series have a bit more variety: the X-Files (probably the first major SF show to be influenced by Twin Peaks) was still in the story of the week mode, but with significant season or multi-season arcs. At the other end of the scale, Lost (whose creators have cited Twin Peaks as a significant influence) had minimal pay-offs from one year to the next, and frustrated many viewers.

When Doctor Who returned (an event celebrating its 20 year anniversary as I write this) it followed the X-files approach via Buffy. It was mostly single stories (though there were 2-parters in the mix too, as Doctor Who was felt to require cliffhangers) but with season-long arc plots, based both on developing character dynamics and also fantasy elements (usually a build up to the Big Bad confrontation in the season finale). Sometimes, showrunners planned their arcs over multiple years: Chris Chibnall sneaks in a reference to the Timeless Child within Jodie Whittaker's second story, long before it would be fully explained. Even to this day, though, there are still some echoes of Doctor Who's 20th century approaches too. The newly announced (at time of writing) episode titles, and writer and director credits, for Ncuti Gatwa's second season seem to confirm that its shape will be the same as the season in 2024: most stories the same length, but with one longer story at the end, just like Tom Baker used to do it. Pre-publicity has also suggested that the Doctor's aim throughout the run will be to get his new companion back home, just like he was trying to do with Ian and Barbara more than six decades earlier. Plus ça change...

In Summary:

The game changing exposition is actually quite interesting, and a neat idea, but it's surrounded by a bunch of ass -cension of the Cybermen.

Slipback

Chapter the 324th, which covers a Hiatus Hitch-Hiker homage.

Plot:

The Doctor and Peri arrive on a space freighter, the Vipod Mor, as the TARDIS has picked up evidence of dangerous time experiments happening aboard. The experiments are the work of the ship's computer, which has decided that humanity is evil and must be rebooted; it has lured the Doctor to the ship deliberately to get his help. Peri gets split up from the Doctor and meets two undercover police officers searching for an art thief (who turns out to be one of the ship's officers, and nothing to do with the main plot). The captain of the ship has the ability to deliberately generate illnesses in himself that he can then pass on to other people; he gets very depressed at not being able to meet Peri, and incubates an incurable disease that could wipe out the crew; this doesn't happen in the end, and also has nothing to do with the main plot. Reaching out mentally to the Doctor has caused the computer to develop a split personality. It defeats itself, with its good side taking the ship far back in time and setting it to self-destruct. The Doctor is about to avert the explosion, when a Time Lord instructs him not to as it will be the big bang that creates the universe. The Doctor dwells on his meddling behaviour. Presumably, all the crew of the ship are therefore killed.

Context:

Another journey off the straight and narrow of official canon requires answering my standard set of questions of Slipback. Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. Does it have pictures? Ah. Without that last hurdle cleared, the choice was either not to blog it, or to relax the rule. I don't want to open the floodgates for every Big Finish audio there's ever been or I'll never ever be finished. On the other hand, some of the missing TV stories already blogged were experienced with no visuals, and some webcasts and recons had barely more than a still image changing every so often. After some thought, I decided to remove that question from the set; I doubt I'll make a habit of covering audio-only stories, but one or two won't hurt. It's also nice to boost Colin Baker's total, as he made so few stories for TV. As I was considering all this, I realised that it must be getting on for the 40 year anniversary of the announcement that Colin's Doctor was going to be taken off TV for 18 months, a period later known as the Hiatus. Slipback originally aired during that period. When I checked it out, I found the exact date of the announcement was the 27th February 1985. On the day I checked it out, it was the 26th February 2025. On the anniversary the next day, I commemorated the event that still lives in the psyche of many who were fans at the time (see Deeper Thoughts below for more details) by listening to Slipback from CD, all in one sitting.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. To put that point off a bit, just so the blog doesn't have a period where I just cover a succession of Ncuti Gatwa stories, I am throwing in a few spin-offs and oddities like Slipback. Beyond those, I have completed nine Doctors' televisual eras proper (the first, third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors) and 35 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

It was 1986 before my family got either a video player or a stereo with radio and tape-deck built in; so, Slipback, broadcast in July and August 1995, was officially the last Doctor Who I couldn't record for posterity. It disappeared into the ether, only persisting in my memory. Not even persisting in my memory, to be honest, because I only listened to the first two episodes. The mechanics of catching it were just too much of an - and I'll use a technical radio term here - absolute ball-ache. It was broadcast in the UK on BBC Radio 4, but not as a programme in its own right; instead, it formed two short segments of a long magazine show called Pirate Radio 4. This ran on three Thursday mornings in the school holidays from 9am to midday, and contained no other segments of interest to this teenager; plus, there weren't separate times for the different segments given in listings. So, I'd have to get up early and stay by the radio for anywhere up to the whole three hours to be absolutely sure I could catch twenty minutes of Doctor Who. After the first time, it didn't seem worth the effort. The story was released on cassette and vinyl in 1988, but I didn't buy it then. I first got to hear the latter two-thirds of the story in 2001, when it was re-released on CD. In between, it was novelised as part of the Target Doctor Who books range. I bought that book, and read it a few times. As I'll touch on in the Reaction section below, Slipback was trying very hard to be like Douglas Adams's work. Maybe it was falling short, but I was young enough not to have discernment, and Adams books didn't exactly get published at an urgent frequency. As such, I fell upon the book with more enthusiasm than it deserved, just because of an aching withdrawal from the real thing. It was like Hitch Hiker methadone.

Reaction:

It's a sci-fi show on the radio in the 1980s, so it was very likely it would ape Douglas Adams's work. The initial radio version of The Hitch Hiker's Guide of the Galaxy in the late 1970s was such a big hit, spawning a TV series and four best-selling novels in the first half of the 1980s, that in 1985 it would have been the first place anyone's imagination went to if creating a relatively light-hearted audio sci-fi story. Eric Saward, writer of Slipback, should possibly have taken time enough to think of a different approach and come out from under the long shadow that Adams was casting; but, I don't want to judge too harshly, as I don't know how long he had. I get the impression that Slipback may have been a rush commission. So, the audience gets some quite familiar moments, such as computers and robots with irritatingly inappropriate personalities, a couple of aggressive space policemen, someone doing a voice like Sandra Dickinson's while reciting probabilities (as Dickinson did as Trillian in the TV version of Hitch Hiker), the captain of a spaceship in a bath, the Doctor talking about going to parties and drinking in a way that's out of character for him but wholly within the character of Ford Prefect, and the weaponisation of awful poetry. What the script struggles to do is find the level of cosmic absurdity in its jokes that Adams's best work has. The most original concept is the Captain's ability to make his psychosomatic illnesses real, and then pass them on to other people, but it isn't integrated into the plot very well. The Doctor only finds out about the threat second-hand without meeting the captain, and never resolves that subplot before the end.

Also at the cosmic scale, of course, is the revelation that the Vipod Mor's time-travel self-destruct is the cause of the big bang that created the universe. This doesn't count in the script's favour, however, as it is such a hackneyed plot device from many a science fiction story before and after Slipback. One instance of such a reveal was in the Doctor Who story Terminus from only two years earlier, which one would think Saward would have remembered as he worked on the story as script editor. Apart from a few homages to Hitch Hiker, and this twist at the end - the resolution of which creates a significant problem of protagonist passivity that I'll touch on in a moment - there's not much here. There are a handful of characters who aren't great company for the listener (and this includes the Doctor and Peri who are still in their bickering mode from season 22 rather than the more friendly relationship the actors insisted on in the next season). These characters mill about, not fully interacting with one another or with the main plot. At the climax, after doing some investigation but not really influencing the events taking place, the Doctor leaps into action to stop the Vipod Mor's explosion. Then, an almost literal Deux ex Machina ending occurs: a Time Lord appears and decides how the story will end, ticking the Doctor off for almost averting the creation of the universe. The Doctor backs down, defeated and chastened. This doesn't sit right with me for the character or the genre: couldn't the Doctor have still worked to save the crew of the Vipod Mor? The way it plays out, it looks like he leaves them to their fate, but nobody needs to be on the ship when it explodes (the computer is controlling the ship, after all).

This means that the Doctor doesn't really do anything in the story. Okay, his personality being imprinted on the computer causes a battle within the machine for control by the two sides of its split personality, which the good, Doctor-influenced side eventually wins. It nonetheless leaves Colin Baker as a bystander in his own show. It's even more evidence backing up my theory that Eric Saward, maybe subconsciously, maybe not, hates the Doctor and Doctor Who. The Time Lords are supposed to be the dull, rigid forces of conformism that inhibit the Doctor's ability to make a difference in his adventuring; yet, in this story the Time Lord has the moral victory. Questioning the central morality of the series and its protagonist might be a good topic for a story, but only if it formed one small part of a series where the rest of the time the Doctor is portrayed as a positive force for good. Otherwise, what is the audience left with: the adventures of a bungling interventionist who needs a schoolmaster lecture any time he tries to do anything? Why would anyone want to watch or listen to that show? It certainly couldn't be covered adequately in a tossed-off little trifle for kids on the radio. Saward had another crack at it; the following season that the viewers would have the long wait to see also focussed a majority of its time on explicitly criticising the Doctor's behaviour, rather than just letting him have fun adventures. Like that next season, Slipback also has ridiculously overblown cliffhangers with the Doctor saying things like "Peri! Nooooooooooo!!!!!", but that's quite fun to be honest. Concentrate on that, and doing the I-Spy book of Douglas Adams references, and you can just about get through the hour of Slipback. Just about.

Connectivity:

Like last time, there's a great link to The Savages (the antagonist attempting to use the Doctor inadvertently picks up some of his personality); unfortunately, The Savages wasn't the last story blogged (though the Deeper Thoughts section covered the animation of it). The Romans and Slipback at least have in common that both feature the Doctor and alcohol (he sips wine on the TV, and on the radio he's recovering from a night where he drank three bottles of fictional tipple Voxnic).

Deeper Thoughts:

The 40 Year-Old Hiatus. Slipback probably got more attention from fans than it would have done, had it not been the only small trickle of new Who action available during an 18 month drought. The announcement and news stories came before Colin Baker's first full run in 1985 had even finished: the show had come close to cancellation, but instead it would be off screens for substantially longer than usual before it returned in 1986. This has been documented extensively elsewhere, but I don't know how easy it is for someone who wasn't a fan at the time to appreciate from that documentation how it felt. In the 1970s, Doctor Who would be on for half of the year, off for half the year, with six month gaps between runs. In the Peter Davison and Colin Baker eras (first because of episodes being shown twice weekly, then because of double-length episodes) the seasons were got through in three months, and the gaps between stretched to nine. From the start of April 1985, fans faced a wait double that length, and three weeks of short radio episodes four months in to that wait didn't do too much to soften the blow. Don't get me wrong, though; the blow wasn't about the length of the wait; this wasn't about a lot of spoilt people petulantly stamping their feet and demanding their Who fix now, now now! Some felt like that, I'm sure, but for them (even if they didn't realise it) and for everyone else, the real blow was the forced realisation that Doctor Who being on the TV in any calendar year was optional. I don't think that had penetrated fan psyches before; they could - and did - slag off the show's quality ad nauseum in the knowledge that it would always come back, always evolve. Now, it looked vulnerable, it looked like, on any particular day, it could just stop and not come back for a long time, or at all.

The Sun 1985 Doctor Who speculation

If this had a greater impact anywhere than in the minds of fans, it was in the UK's tabloid media landscape. Doctor Who always made for good press, with all those photo splashes of Daleks and Cybermen queueing for buses, and speculations on whom the new Doctor Who would be, and whatnot. From 28th February 1985 - when stubbornly popular red-top the Sun's front page headline was "Dr Who is Axed in a BBC Plot" - a new seam opened up which has been mined every since: speculations on if the new Doctor Who would be. It's no exaggeration that ever since then stories of the cancellation versus the continuation of Doctor Who have been a constant back and forth on the inky pages, and latterly online websites, of the simpler wing of the fourth estate. In February and March 2025, 40 years on, this phenomenon was again witnessed in a high concentration of speculative articles. These suggested, amongst other things, the following: Ncuti Gatwa was thinking of leaving, or had already left having filmed his regeneration scene; this was because he wanted to go and work in Hollywood, or that he felt that the programme's quality was reflecting badly on him; Doctor Who was facing cancellation because of low ratings, or because of poor management; David Tennant was coming back to play the Doctor again; there had been lots of lay offs in the production team, etc. etc. Some of this was contradictory. If Doctor Who was being cancelled, Ncuti Gatwa would be free to do whatever he wanted and wouldn't have to make a big deal of leaving. If Doctor Who's future was in any doubt, would a regeneration scene really have been filmed (who would they regenerate Ncuti into, if the show wasn't necessarily going to carry on)? The mention of lay offs smacked of dodgy reporting. Almost all the people working on Doctor Who will be freelancers, just because of the nature of the industry, and wouldn't be laid off, just would not have their contracts renewed. This has almost certainly happened.

The 2025 version: an image from The Sun's website

Putting aside speculation, and taking the consistent official statements made on the subject at face value, it is known that Disney+ have not made a decision yet on whether they will continue to co-fund Doctor Who beyond their initial commitment of two series and one spin-off. They will make this decision after Ncuti's second series drops. The production team would no doubt have wanted the decision to be earlier than this. The date for the first episode of the series becoming available has been confirmed as 12th April 2025. In March 2025, post production would be very close to completion for that series, and well underway for the spin-off too (it finished production at the end of December 2024). If a positive decision had been made by Disney+ before, then everyone engaged on the production could have rolled on to a third series (for which Russell T Davies has already written scripts, in order to be ready) without any break. As it is, it would be expensive to keep a lot of contracted crew benched awaiting a decision. So, of course, people will have had their contracts come to end. Perhaps a disgruntled one of their number was a source of the story. Perhaps it was just some rabid Doctor Who fan on social media speculating. Or perhaps there's no source at all, as anyone following things closely could have knocked up such a piece, as long as they weren't too bothered about the truth. For example, all the stuff about bad ratings was disingenuous. First, the most recent story broadcast Joy to the World was in the top ten for Christmas Day and the whole Christmas week, which is hardly cause for concern. Second, that positive rating, and any less positive figures for the series preceding it, mean nothing to Disney+; they will only be interested in their own metrics, which don't include the UK screenings.

Series '2' is coming soon...

Usually streamers keep such things closely guarded, but surprisingly, in the midst of all the negativity, some detail was released, and it was very positive: Doctor Who was in the Disney+ global top 5 for every week when the episodes first became available. If the next series fares as well, is this enough for the House of Mouse to say 'Yes', and for the series to be recommissioned? Only they know for sure. If they don't invest, is the show's UK performance sufficient for the BBC to continue alone, or at least to try to find another source of co-production funds? Only they know for sure. There's every reason for optimism; but, it does seem likely that, if production can only resume in May 2025 at the very earliest, then there will be another hiatus before we get a new season. But we fans have coped with that before, and we can again. In the mean time, there's a brand new series of Doctor Who coming soon to enjoy.

In Summary:

Just about tolerable at an hour's length; but, obviously, real Douglas Adams is better.

The Romans

Chapter the 323rd, which features a bit of a carry on, but no Cleo. 

Plot:

Rome, 64AD. The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki have a holiday for a few weeks in somebody else's vacated villa near the city, before the Doctor gets bored and goes off to Rome with Vicki. On route, he finds a dead body by the side of the road, and is mistaken for the dead man, Corinthian lyre player Maximus Pettulian. Ian and Barbara are captured by slave traders. Ian becomes a galley slave on a ship; Barbara is sold at auction in Rome, to work in Nero's court. Ian's ship is destroyed in a storm, and with help from fellow slave Dedos makes his way to dry land; they both journey to Rome. The Doctor and Vicki meet Nero, but manage to miss bumping into Barbara. Nero takes a shine to Barbara, and spends a lot of time chasing after her - literally - much to the displeasure of his wife. Barbara survives her own assassination attempt, as she drinks from the wrong cup, avoiding a poisoned one. The Doctor discovers that Petullian's plan before he was killed was to assassinate Nero. After a rapturous reception for the Doctor's lyre playing, Nero plans to feed the Doctor to the lions in the arena. Nero visits the Gladiator school, taking Barbara with him. Ian and Dedos are forced to fight to the death for Nero's amusement, but instead turn their swords on the guards and escape, Ian telling Barbara that he'll come to find her. The Doctor inadvertently gives Nero the idea to burn Rome to the ground, and is spared death by lions. Nero invites the Roman hoi polloi to his palace and instructs them to set fires in the city; this allows Ian and Dedos to sneak in and rescue Barbara. The Doctor and Vicki also slip out. As Rome burns, all of them travel separately to the villa and meet back there.

Context:

The Romans will probably be the last ever purely historical story I cover, unless there's a surprise change of direction in the new series. The recent post for Day of the Daleks may have been the last Dalek story I ever write about. I've got at least one more story each left for the Sontarans, Master and Cybermen, but nothing more for Skaro's finest. It seems likely that any or all of those could appear versus Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor or a future Doctor (if there is one), though. A 21st century story set in Earth's past with no alien antagonists is much less likely. I enjoyed all the historicals watched for the blog over the years, but must admit that when The Romans came up, as the only Willian Hartnell story remaining to align with the write-up for a Hartnell-related BFI event (see Deeper Thoughts below), I wasn't 100% enthusiastic. It felt like only yesterday that I last watched the story, when the second season came out on Blu-ray. In fact, that was more than two years ago. Rightly or wrongly, I still felt a bit fatigued with it; to get over this, I watched the story one episode a week (on Sundays) during February and March 2025. It was enjoyable when watched in that way. The Better Half joined me at the start, and agreed with me that Ian and Barbara are definitely doing it by now (witnessing their relaxed, and possibly post-coital, scenes alone with each other in that first episode, and at end). This wasn't enough to keep her interested for the remaining three parts, though, and I watched them on my own.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of yet another Doctor's televisual era; William Hartnell's first Doctor joins the third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors, making nine completed to date. This also marks the completion of another season, the 35th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

I didn't start keeping a diary until the first of January the following year, so I can't be 100% sure, but I believe that the purchase of The Romans on VHS (in a double pack with preceding story The Rescue) was the first Doctor Who product I ever bought with money from post-education employment. I'd finished university in the spring of 1994, dossed around for most of the Summer, then got a temp job. I was working at Griffin Factors (now part of HSBC) in Worthing, in an office a little out of town near the hospital. On the 5th September, or thereabouts, I would have walked into the main shopping area in Montague Street after work, and used my hard earned cash at Volume One. This independent book and video shop was my usual supplier of Doctor Who videos for most of the 1990s, and as such looms large in my memory of Doctor Who stories first watched on video. [I was pleased to find when googling about Volume One, curious to know when it ceased trading, that the author of a couple of excellent non-fiction books about Doctor Who that came out in the last few years, Paul Hayes, was bought his first ever Doctor Who book in the store - see here for the full interview.] My memory of the time is more than hazy, but I would likely have then travelled home on the bus and watched both stories straight away in one sitting.

Reaction:

This blog has been a nearly ten year long experiment into the random. I believed it was much more common, for fans or more casual viewers alike, to encounter Doctor Who stories in no particular order: people watch on TV every so often but not regularly, say, or pick up one or two or all of the books, videos, DVDs or Blu-rays (which have always come out in a haphazard non-chronological order). As such, my hypothesis was that watching the entirety of Who in a shuffled way would garner more insight than starting with An Unearthly Child and progressing in a linear fashion. In the main, I think the hypothesis has held, but on occasion one misses out by not seeing a story in the context of those around it. The Romans is such a case. This was the 12th Doctor Who story, and - though there had been the odd bit of humorous business in the first 11 - was the show's first foray into outright comedy. How jarring would it have been to those watching as it first went out? It's hard to say watching it in isolation, but it would probably be hard to say anyway. Humour is notoriously subjective, but tastes in humour also evolve. The story is 60 years old, and different boundaries existed for what was funny back then, particularly the delicately balanced humour seen here which - though much more prevalent than in other Doctor Who stories - still has to hang on the skeleton of an action adventure narrative. It's so hard to know whether writer Dennis Spooner and director Christopher Barry were just intending it to raise a smile, or to be laugh out loud funny. If it was the latter, I think they failed (at least for this viewer many years later). Perhaps the weight of expectation of this being the first 'funny one' only exists because of the history and the looking back; at the time, perhaps there were no expectation, and that helped to make it more easily enjoyable.

Watching in 2025, when The Romans can't help but seem at a distant historical remove, this translates into some disconcertingly jarring tonal swerves. There's a slapstick fight where Barbara accidentally brains Ian smashing a vase on his head when she was trying to immobilise an enemy. Ho ho. That act, though, condemns them to capture to be sold as chattels, which mere minutes later the characters and the script treat sombrely. Ho ho... slavery? Nero chasing Barbara around is treated like a Benny Hill sequence without the Yakety Sax; but, if he catches her it is clear that he is going to force himself on her, with her consent not a consideration. Ho ho... sexual assault? Okay, it may be unfair to blame The Romans for every bedroom farce that looks tasteless in a different light. The trouble is that in the Doctor Who story the light keeps changing, back and forth. A stage farce would be able to fully commit, anyway, whereas Doctor Who can't. There can't be overt references to sex in the programme, and the regulars have to play to their existing characters (or else the whole dramatic edifice collapses, for this and any subsequent stories). One might just think that they shouldn't have tried it, but Doctor Who and the Hartnell period in particular thrives on experimentation. Besides, a lot of the material in The Romans lands, usually when the script is not trying so hard. For the most part it's sprightly and / or charming. The scenes mentioned above (in the Context section) with Ian and Barbara hanging out and goofing around in the villa are lovely. Some of the Doctor's material is fun. The guest characters are nicely played. Excepting Nero, who's written by Spooner and performed by Derek Francis quite broadly, everyone else has some detail and dimensions to their characterisation provided in the script.

All the near misses where the different members of the TARDIS team just manage to avoid bumping into each other are fun (and reminiscent of the beginning of new series story Partners in Crime). There's a few nice dramatic plot beats, including the moment where Dedos and Ian realise they have to fight each other to the death, the reveal at the end that Tavius's actions have been directed by his Christianity (he's an early adopter), and the shocking moment where it looks like Nero has stabbed Barbara to death, but instead has killed the guard behind her. The Doctor managing to get through a public performance despite not being able to play the lyre by using an Emperor's New Clothes gambit (Nero and all his hangers-on pretend they can hear his 'delicate music' - actually miming - because they don't want to appear unsophisticated) is nice. Ian has a great line of dialogue about the Doctor "I've got a friend who specialises in trouble - he dives in and usually finds a way". Everyone's trying to kill everybody else in the story - it's pretty bloodthirsty for a light comedy - but there's a lot of energy in the scenes where the Doctor's trying to work out in what type of conspiracy the person whose place he's taken was involved. The most interesting part for fans is probably the Doctor inadvertently starting a fire, his glasses magnifying the sun's rays onto some parchment, and giving Nero the idea to burn down the city; it's the first time that our heroes are shown to be able to create recorded history by their own actions. All the following sequences regarding the great fire of Rome are played for laughs, of course: ho ho... destruction and death?!

Connectivity:

The Savages (subject of Deeper Thoughts section below, but not the main focus of this blog post) has a great connection to the last story blogged, Death Comes to Time, as both include vampiric characters attempting to extract something from the Doctor and it backfiring on them. The Romans has diddly squat in common with the webcast story, bar the irritating folksy music played in the latter being a little like the lyre music of Maximus Petullian.

Deeper Thoughts:

From the ancient to the elders: BFI screening of The Savages animation + Q&A, 28th February. This was the first Doctor Who BFI event to take place on a Friday evening, a fact that hosts Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy mined for a few jokes. When Johnson made some mistakes on stage (including having the wrong answer to one of the quiz questions, and getting schooled by the expert fan audience), Fiddy said "We won't do this on a Friday again ... it's his drinking day". In honour of the change of slot, the quiz saw the audience shouting "Richard" rather than "Dick" if they wanted to attract Fiddy's roaming mic. "It's the PG Version" said Fiddy; "We've gone woke!" said Johnson. Both were on good form: later on in the quiz, Johnson asked a comic, fake question playing on the tabloid stories about Doctor Who's possible cancellation: "The Savages is from season three of the original series, will there be a season three of the new show?". Fiddy highlighted the contemporary relevance of The Savages, it being a story about "A rich and powerful elite sucking the lifeblood out of the poor". After musing on whether episode hunter Philip Morris might have the film reels of The Savages "up his sleeve", Johnson said he should probably stop making this "12-year old joke" (Morris returned nine episodes to the archives in 2013, but rumours got out of control that there were more found that had not been returned). As usual, Johnson read out some tweets; it was someone's birthday, it was someone's first ever Doctor Who event at the BFI, someone got a plug in for their podcast. One fan tweeted that they were happy with the event being on a Friday as they find "Doctor Who fans more tolerable when I've had a drink". There was also the obligatory cheeky tweet from a gay fan pretending to be trolling at the event, saying that they - like the city dwellers in the story - would like to "drain some fit men of their vitality too".

Johnson (L) and Fiddy (R)

The first person to be invited up on stage was Mark Ayres, who did sound restoration on the audio that is the basis for the animation. The sources he used for this were the late Graham Strong's recordings of parts one to three, and the 'Randolph' tapes for part four. Strong was described by Ayres as "The first person to take the back off his telly and risk death" by soldering in a direct link from the audio output into his recording device. The latter source is a set of tapes found in a skip; it's unknown who made the recordings, but their labels have the name Randolph on them. These tapes have only just started to be used on Doctor Who releases recently after their discovery a few years back. That new source, plus improvements in technology, skill and experience since, mean that Ayres feels better equipped to tackle some of the challenges yet to come. He mentioned that he'd previously dreaded cleaning up The Myth Makers, as well as one Patrick Troughton story that he left unnamed; now, though, he believes that whichever stories are selected they'll be brought up to an acceptable standard. He echoed Fiddy's comments about the contemporary relevance of the storyline, and also championed the incidental score by Raymond Jones (a link to The Romans, the only story other than The Savages for which Jones wrote music). After that, the first two episodes of The Savages were shown. The animation is in the 2D style and made by the same team that previously did The Underwater Menace and The Evil of the Daleks, and other stories before that. It is an efficient but enjoyable way to visualise the story, with good use of colour to mark out the different worlds inhabited by the city dwellers versus the savages. The likenesses of the Doctor and Steven weren't perfect, but Dodo was spot on.

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Ayres

As ever when watching with a large group, the humour is more apparent. The Doctor's reference to the machine he uses in the first episode, the Reacting Vibrator, inevitably got a huge laugh from the audience. Beyond that, it was hard to tell as a couple of fellows sitting directly behind us found everything - and I mean everything - side-splittingly hilarious and guffawed all the way through. I suspect some alcoholic lubrication had occurred. Anyway, my original thoughts on the story, written during the first month of the Covid-19 pandemic, are here; one thing that I noticed this time that I didn't in 2020 was the possibly loose way that characters refer to the unnamed planet's inhabitants, savages and city dwellers alike, as human beings. Were they supposed to be colonists, or was this just a shorthand for 'higher sentient beings'? The animation can't do anything about that, but it can erase the possibly dubious use in the original of make-up to darken some characters complexions. According to the panel afterwards, Jano is probably wearing gold face paint, but this doesn't come out very well in the black and white photos from the production. This panel, in a break at the midpoint of the story, focussed on the new pictures and featured animation director and producer AnneMarie Walsh, colourist Vinny Payne, animator Thomas Bland, and executive Paul Hembury. Walsh and Hembury both celebrated the work of the team to achieve what we'd seen on the big screen that day, highlighting the small number of people involved (from six to eight members at different points of an approximately nine month project). Walsh described some of the design choices made: an imaginative jumping off point for the look of the city was a proboscis, to subtly show the blood-sucking nature of those that live there.

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Walsh, Payne, Bland, Hembury

Payne presented an interesting clip showing his work in colour grading the episodes, though the loud music on it overpowered most of his commentary (at least from my seat). Bland said that his greatest challenge this time was animating William Hartnell's facial expressions. This is the first Hartnell story that this particular team has worked on. Walsh commended its cerebral script, but added that "Pat Troughton's still my favourite Doctor". Hembury humorously pointed out how much of a Doctor Who expert Walsh had become after starting work on the animations many years ago as a newcomer to the Doctor's world; "I've gone over to the dark side," she quipped back. Hembury went a little into the executive decisions and deals forming the background to the creative work, as he'd done in the panel for the BFI screening of the team's last animation for The Underwater Menace (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post). Again, he jokingly gave a politician's "I'm glad you asked me that question" reply on one occasion, but again he was forthcoming on some details. He no longer works for the BBC but is continuing in his exec producer role, and is currently in the process of doing a deal to accelerate the rate that this team can produce animations by getting commitments up front for more than one story at a time. When asked if he could imagine a world where all 1960s seasons of Doctor Who had Blu-ray box sets with their archive gaps plugged by animations, he replied "I can definitely imagine that world, I imagine it on a daily basis". He confirmed that is indeed the intention, but again made clear that no deal is finalised as yet.

There was time for a few audience questions; one was about the possibility of crowd-funding (this isn't something that would be explored while BBC Studios still provide budget), and if there were concerns about replicating the original production's make-up (they decided to avoid it altogether). There was also an interesting question about whether there's a risk that anything they animate might impact the age certification of a disc release. Walsh explained that the biggest thing that had come up was not about sex or violence but smoking. In The Evil of the Daleks' animation, the character of Maxtible could hold a cigar, as long as he wasn't seen to light or puff on it. Beyond that, it was more likely to be the special features on a disc that impacted its certification. With audience questions over, the panel members left the stage and the final two episodes were shown. My overall impression is a very positive one, though I should declare that I went in with quite low expectations. Moving visuals make everything in the story so much better: Frederick Jaeger's impression of William Hartnell is more fun, and there are moments of honest to goodness emotion (including Steven's farewell scene, though it's still abrupt). The destruction of the laboratory at the climax probably posed the most challenges to animate, but it works well. After the story was the final onstage interview, this time with Peter Purves who played Steven in the story. Johnson greeted him onstage with "It's nice to see you in 3D", and once sat down Purves said to the audience "You just witnessed the end of my acting career". Very early on in the interview Purves mentioned something that would become a theme for the chat, that his recall of this story and a lot of Doctor Who in general is minimal: "I remember... forgetting all about The Savages".

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Purves

The interview started by focussing on Purves's leaving the show in the story, part of more widespread cast changes by new producer Innes Lloyd that would eventually see the leading man replaced also. Purves described it as "an uneasy time". William Hartnell, who as usual got a warm and positive but not uncritical personality appraisal from Purves, tried to get the producer to change his mind about ending Purves's time on Doctor Who. Back then, though, stars had less power than they would now, and it came to nothing. Once he'd left, Purves didn't think much about Doctor Who ("I've never been a nostalgic person... never looked back... never kept diaries") until joining the convention circuit. His first attendance of an event was in 1996, thirty years after leaving Who. After that, doing work on the narrated audio releases brought back a lot of memories, though he conceded some of those memories might well be wrong: "I enjoy talking about [Doctor Who], and some of it will be true". There was a question about his regular anecdote about making a story revisiting the planet of The Savages only to find that Steven had become an awful despot of a leader. He explained that it was never a pitched idea, but that Simon Guerrier had done a trilogy of plays that covered Steven's later adventures for audio company Big Finish. He delivered another frequently told anecdote about William Emms, writer of the third story Steven appeared in, Galaxy 4; Emms had built the story around Ian and Barbara's presence before they were written out, and did a hasty rewrite job meaning Purves's futuristic space pilot got the dialogue and action of a 1960s schoolmistress, much to the actor's chagrin. When asked if he met any of the show's writers during production, he replied "Unfortunately yeah, I met William Emms".

Purves confirmed in answer to an audience question that he never saw The Savages when it first went out, and - just like most in the audience - was seeing it for the first time with pictures that day. He thought the animation captured Jackie Lane as Dodo particularly well in both look and movement; "I was going to say the voice was good," he added, "But it was her!". Towards the end, he comically admonished the animation team for the spoiler they had shown everyone: the video they'd played after the episode two cliffhanger, where the Doctor is in danger, included a clip from the third episode where he's alive: "Naughty!". And that was that: it was time to go to the bar and have a drink and a nice chat with friends Chris, Dave and Tim, and say hello to a few others. It's uncertain when the next BFI event will take place; it will only be when there is a tie-in product (box set or animation) coming out with which the session can align; another box set is expected this year, and potentially another animation too, but they will likely not be until late in 2025 after the new series has been broadcast. As such, I don't know whether I'll still have any stories left to blog to which I can attach any future write-ups; with the new queuing system on the BFI's website (see Context section of this blog post) I don't know if I'll even get tickets in future. If this is the last event of this type that I cover on the blog, it was definitely an interesting one to go out on.

In Summary:

Ho ho! Carry On Slavery, Sexual Assault, Destruction and Death. Erm...

Death Comes to Time

Chapter the 322nd, is like an alternative universe version of a favourite science fantasy franchise (but probably not the one you're expecting). 

Plot:

The Doctor and an android companion he's made for himself, Antimony, are sent a message (in a weird way) by another Time Lord, the Minister of Chance. Two Time Lords (the Time Lords don't seem to live on Gallifrey anymore and are only a few in number scattered around the universe) have been killed on Earth, and the Minister wants the Doctor to investigate. The Minister in turn will return to the planet Santine where the Doctor was previously, and help its people against the invading General Tannis, an evil Time Lord. Ace is a prisoner of Tannis but another Time Lord Casmus rescues her, and trains her to become a Time Lord. The Doctor and Antimony work with a UNIT operative Speedwell on Earth, discovering that two vampires are behind the killings of the Time Lords and some other massacres of innocent people in London. The Doctor kills one vampire by allowing it to drink a little of his blood after secretly eating some garlic (yes, really). The other is killed by Speedwell. The Doctor and the Minister then both separately help the rebels of Santine; well, that's the plan, but neither are very effective. Tannis is a step ahead of the Doctor and kills Antimony. The Minister in anger at the rebel leader getting killed lets rip with his superpowers (the Time Lords have superpowers now), destroying many of the invading troops. Tannis has already left, though; he's planning to invade Earth. Tannis finds and kills Casmus. Ace has been given a TARDIS to travel to a planet where she faces a test. She fails, but this is all part of her training. The Doctor meets her and they travel to Earth. The Brig, Speedwell and UNIT have spaceships now and are ready for the invasion. Tannis confronts the Doctor near Stonehenge. The Doctor uses his superpowers (see above) to destroy Tannis at the cost of his own life.

Context:

So, the blog is again veering away from the resolutely canonical, and therefore I must ask some questions of the next story up for consideration: Does it star the Doctor? Yes, he's a little bit sidelined but he's definitely there. Does it have visuals? Yes, they may be basic, but they are present. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or official spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. With a full house of correct answers, Death Comes to Time was cleared for viewing. I watched from youtube where all the audio episodes are presented with Lee Sullivan's accompanying art. This was over the course of a week in February 2025. I didn't try to get anyone else from the family to watch with me; the story is a bit too niche for that.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially (which also might be the end of Doctor Who if you believe what you read in the tabloids!). Beyond the handful of blog posts like this one that cover notable spin-offs, I have completed eight Doctors' televisual eras proper (the third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors) and 34 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

In 2001, I was an enthusiastic reader of and contributor to Doctor Who online message boards (see the Deeper Thoughts section of my 2024 blog post on The Scream of the Shalka for more details). The news that a pilot for a new Doctor Who radio series was being made was much discussed there (the driving force behind Death Comes to Time Dan Freedman who produced, wrote, and directed it, as well as his script editor Nev Fountain, were regular presences on the boards at that time). The news was received with much excitement and anticipation. The disappointment when BBC Radio 4 made the decision not to develop a series was short lived, if I remember correctly, as the announcement that it instead would be developed into a webcast on the BBC's Doctor Who website came very soon afterwards. In July of 2001, I struggled with the realplayer software and my dial-up connection and managed to watch all of the first episode. I thought it was okay; nothing that blew my socks off, but I held out on forming an opinion as it was incomplete. The rest of the story landed between February and May 2002, with chunks of episodes two to five becoming available weekly. The real player often crashed, or timed out; again, I may be misremembering, but I believe I then tried an option aimed at those like me with bandwidth challenges to stream the story audio-only. I found the story difficult to follow without the pictures, and I wasn't particularly enjoying what I was able to see or hear; so, I bailed on the webcast version. I tried again with the audio version when it came out on CD in October 2002. It was still a bit hard to follow everything that was going on, but I made it to the end on that go. I have not listened to or watched the story again until now.

Reaction:

At one point during Death Comes to Time, the words of Tim (as played by Simon Pegg) in the TV comedy Spaced where he says "Jar Jar Binks makes the Ewoks look like Shaft" came to my mind, which led to me thinking the following: Death Comes to Time makes The Phantom Menace look like The Empire Strikes Back. Unfair? Maybe a tad, but the comparison wouldn't leave my mind. This is probably because every moment of Death Comes to Time made it clearer and clearer to me that the mythology of Star Wars was its blueprint. The story is replete with space battles, rebels fighting invading troops and the like; those genre trappings are plentiful in many a Doctor Who story before and after Star Wars was invented, of course; Death Comes to Time, though, builds that material into the tale of the dying days of the final few Time Lords (Jedi), who have magical powers because of their connection to time (the Force), with one of their number Tannis (Vader) having turned to the dark side, but there is hope for a future generation as Ace (Skywalker) is being trained to become a Time Lord (Jedi) by old, beardy mentor Casmus (Obi Wan). There is no equivalent to Ewoks included, but this is a con not a a pro, I think, as some additional levity might have better offset the rather doomy tone. The story emerged from plans for a new Doctor Who radio series; as such, it should and did have free rein to be its own thing and not slavishly follow how Doctor Who had been done before. I've tried to bear that in mind when watching. It's complicated, though, by the inclusion of Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred as the Doctor and Ace. They are a direct link back to a version of Doctor Who that came before with wholly different continuity, set-up, rules and tone.

Another complication is that rather than being on the radio for a mass audience where this break from the past might not have mattered so much, it ended up as a webcast on a website made for fans. Fans want Doctor Who to be like Doctor Who, because they like Doctor Who. It's disconcerting as a fan viewer therefore when Time Lords are depicted as a few nomadic souls wandering the universe, bound by a code that prevents them using magical powers; Time Lords were never ever like that. It's mildly irritating when the Doctor and other Time Lords use those magical powers to resolve plot complications rather than their ingenuity, because one key aspect of the Doctor's appeal is his ingenuity. The Doctor does a bit of investigating in the second episode, but at its denouement the villain essentially gives themself up. He does a bit of planning to rescue a child later in the story, but that comes to nothing as the tables are turned on him. The climax of the story and defeat of the Big Bad just involves the Doctor using a magic off-switch to end the plot; it's imbued with a significance that it doesn't deserve, as it's essentially a cheat, by the Doctor sacrificing his life with that action. This ending is another source of discombobulation to the fan viewer, as it means they have to mentally edit out the Paul McGann TV movie from existence. A lot of those fans didn't like the Paul McGann TV movie, and have likely been trying to mentally edit it out of existence since they first saw it; if it were an easy thing to do they would have done it long before. All this adds up to make Death Comes to Time difficult to watch; and, as mentioned above, the technology already presented something of a barrier, so the difficulties are compounded.

It's fascinating in its way too, looking at an alternate universe take on the show; but. it would only be worth the effort if this new take was truly original, or at least engaging. Unfortunately, it's neither. Breaking with the past sets up the expectation that we'll get something new not just a tired spin on Star Wars, and engagement is undermined by there being too much going on. The action is split between the Doctor and Antimony's bits, the Minister of Chance's bits, and Ace and Casmus's bits. The first two of those are populated with far too many characters, most of whom have silly names that aren't enunciated well as dialogue is usually in haste or with explosions happening over the top of it. The battle that's depicted through most of the story's running time is between the Saltines and the Canestens - is that right? That's what it sounds like, but they are a type of savoury biscuit and a brand of thrush cream respectively, so probably not. The third set of bits with Ace's training is terribly dull; nothing happens in that subplot until the final episode, but that doesn't stop the other action from being interrupted through the first four episodes to cut to another sequence of Casmus being gnomic and irritating. Sometimes, often when they were just getting interesting, a subplot disappears for a long period while the others become the focus; elsewhere, though, there are sequences that restlessly cut back and forth between them after only one or two lines of dialogue (this kind of intercutting is a tell tale sign that someone on the production was trying to make two dull sequences seem interesting by chopping them up). Unnecessary cameos by good actors (Jaqueline Pearce, Anthony Head and David Soul each pop up at different points, say a line, then disappear) further muddle things.

Reportedly, Freedman had planned a 13 episode season for radio; perhaps trying to condense down all the ideas he had for that length of run to five parts created some of the problems I've described. The best section is probably the majority of the second part set on Earth with the Doctor hunting vampires. It has no superfluity of characters (arguably, it has too few as it is very clear who will secretly turn out to be undead given that there are no other suspects); it has a nice, grounded character in Speedwell (he's one of a small number of characters in the whole story that's not a Time Lord, alien, vampire or robot). It sees an honest to goodness mystery, albeit a bit of a gory one, that the Doctor has to use his wiles to investigate and address. If it was standalone, was tweaked a bit to make the Doctor more active in the denouement, had Ace swapped in for Antimony, and didn't have such an overpowering tone of pretentious ennui, it would make a great pilot for new Doctor Who for either radio or online webcast. What actually got made is neither fish nor fowl, a duck-billed platypus of a story. If one wanted to avoid doing something traditional, then it should not have starred Sylv and Sophie. It could potentially have worked if it just had the Minister as protagonist, but changed his name: a story with Stephen Fry playing the Doctor is better than one with him playing someone a bit like the Doctor. It also might just have worked if Paul McGann had starred in it, and died handing the baton over to a newly appointed Time Lord companion or the Minister or both (I can't see McGann wanting to star as the Doctor once more just to get killed off, mind). Anyway, time has passed, Doctor Who's back on TV and Death Comes to Time is what it is. It's probably worth it existing just to have the late great John Sessions in Doctor Who. He is having so much fun, unlike any of the others in the doomy cast of characters, and many of his lines are deliciously evil.

Connectivity:

Death Comes to Time and Day of the Daleks both have titles of four words starting with a 'D', and both feature Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier, plus other UNIT personnel who report into him. Both see significant elements of the series return after five years away from viewers' screens. Sylvester McCoy returned as the Doctor in 2001 after last having been in the series in the TV Movie in 1996, the Daleks returned in the 1972 story after last having been seen in Doctor Who in 1967.

Deeper Thoughts:

Seriously? After being an early adopter of online social communication (see First Time Round section above) I have now, as mentioned in posts passim, given up social media altogether. I occasionally google "Doctor Who" just to check I'm not missing any news about the show, and that recently led me to see an online article published in February 2025 on the Spectator's site, titled "Doctor Who fans - and its writers - need to grow up". Prepare your Max Max Fury Road GIFs because obviously 'That's bait', but I clicked on it anyway. It was a very slightly more thoughtful piece than the usual clickbait; it also wasn't banging on about Doctor Who being woke, as I'd half expected (for those unaware or outside the UK, the Spectator is a weekly news and reviews magazine that's aimed at a highly conservative segment of the market). The writer can't resist a mention of the programme's "woke agenda" but at least has rectitude enough to put the phrase in distancing quotation marks. Mostly, though, the comment piece is a rant about "trash TV" or "pulp TV" (the writer uses both phrases) being taken too seriously. It was prompted by interviews done for the announcement of new writers that worked on scripts for Ncuti Gatwa's second season due to air in spring 2025. One of these writers, Juno Dawson, was quoted saying "Scripting the best TV show of all time is truly a dream come true"; another, Inua Ellams that "[Doctor Who] invited me to dream, to live beyond my reality" and added, "Getting to write for the show felt like touching God". Without social media, I don't know if there was a backlash from the online fan community to the Spectator article (as might have been the intention, at least of the sub-editor creating the headline), but the piece doesn't talk much about fans, anyway. Blame is reserved for the BBC.

Long-term Doctor Who fans are used to articles written by people who don't understand why anyone would like Doctor Who. I don't agree with the editorial slant of the Spectator, but I at least have empathy enough to understand other people might enjoy reading it. There is a nice line in the piece where the writer says "Part of the art of living... lies in knowing what to ignore". He couldn't manage that in this instance, though, because he feels that the BBC as "our national broadcaster" should not present Doctor Who as "a pinnacle of contemporary culture" or "a major artistic achievement" instead of the "mediocre kids' TV show" he feels it actually is. "Not everything need be high culture" he adds. As is often the case, though, he doesn't give examples of high culture, or even of any TV that is not trash; he gives examples instead of children's TV, Top Gear and moments in an old Doctor Who story that are nicely irreverent, not falling into the trap of taking themselves seriously. He also states that "Entertainment is low culture" damning everything on the box, because who is making anything for broadcast - even in news and documentaries - that doesn't aim to entertain the audience at some level? If all TV, including expensive scripted drama like Doctor Who, is trash, then  - guess what - it's all of a level, so comparisons are pointless, a kind of lively arts communism that I didn't expect to see espoused in the Spectator. One could put one's head above the parapet and make an argument that Dickens or Shakespeare are high culture even though they were the popular entertainments of their day, but someone can always disagree and set the culture bar higher. Qualifying high culture becomes such a vanishingly small selection that it ceases to have significance. High and low culture labels therefore have no utility, and the discussion boils down to things that one likes, and things that one doesn't like.

That leaves the question about whether the BBC is right or wrong to hype up the quality of Doctor Who beyond its natural limits. The criticism here I think makes two fundamental errors. The first is to imagine that the content of a single BBC Media Centre press release (let alone the comments of a couple of excitable freelance writers commissioned to work on a series) is in anyway representative of the views or approach of the BBC as an entity, or the people who make Doctor Who as a team. It's a press release, hyperbole is de rigueur. If they could have found a Doctor Who writer willing to say for the press release that they were very excited to be hired to write for a mediocre kids' TV show as they needed the money, I think the Spectator wouldn't hesitate to use that as a different stick to bash the BBC. The second error is in imagining that the content of any TV story, or any dramatic work, is in any way consistent with the process of its making. Creating a comedy requires exactly the same level of seriousness and graft, perhaps more, than making a tragedy. Doctor Who stories (even Death Comes to Time, which was tonally quite dour overall) contain moments of levity and even frivolity. But the people making them can't be frivolous; the massive budget for Doctor Who (a big give-away to those in the know that it's not just a kids' show) and the sheer number of people involved mean everything needs careful, sober management. There's probably moments of fun involved, but never frivolity. One could make up one's own clickbait headlines like 'Overpaid Doctor Who production team needs to take things more seriously' that would spring up over right-wing media if there was ever evidence to the contrary.

  

An instructive example of this was also written about online in February 2025: the Doctor Who story Fear Her had a voice role rerecorded, so it could be returned to the corporation's streaming service, the iplayer. This was because the original voice over was done by disgraced news presenter Huw Edwards, who pleaded guilty in 2024 to three counts of making indecent images of children. The decision to do this was no doubt treated with as much seriousness by those behind the scenes of Doctor Who as any considerations by those looking at any one item of BBC news and documentary archive where Edwards was a presence. Arguably, though, a more delicate job needs to be done by the entertainers. As mentioned above in relation to Death Comes to Time, metatextual distractions that impact an audience's engagement with a drama risk killing the drama altogether. Factual archive will at least have the distance of time and eventually history to potentially ease the sting of what is currently a raw issue. Taking out one acting performance and replacing it with another is risky; the situation with Fear Her was at least made easier by Edwards's performance being rubbish (the new voiceover is better) but it wasn't something that could be done in an offhand manner. In summary: Doctor Who's content should be - and is - relatively light and occasionally irreverent, but that can only be achieved if the people who make it treat it very seriously indeed.

In Summary:

A duck-billed platypus of a story, but not as fun as that sounds.