Wednesday, 14 January 2026

[This is a brand new spin-off at time of writing, so beware spoilers ahead.] Present day. The aquatic earth reptiles from prehistoric times, who humans now erroneously refer to as Homo Aqua, are no longer dormant. They're pissed off at all the pollution humans have created in the sea. A UNIT mission investigates the initial signs that they've awakened, before their full appearance to the people of the world. The team includes a UNIT desk jockey, Barclay, because of an HR error. When he shows respect to a dead earth reptile that the team find, he is selected to be ambassador in peace negotiations on behalf of the Land. The ambassador for the Sea is Salt, a Homo Amphibia. Barclays and Salt are attracted to each other. Negotiations initially take place in a special water tank in a building in London, then in an environment created by the earth reptiles deep underwater. A show of strength early on by the forces of the Sea causes all the detritus from the oceans to be pulled up into the sky and rain down onto the land. This, plus threats to lose access to sea crossings, makes a shadowy cabal of rich businessmen, politicians and military folks hatch a plan codenamed Severance. One of the party who has descended to the deeps is part of the Severance conspiracy and lets off a sonic bomb, killing himself as well as the rest of the Land party and many of the earth reptiles. Only Barclay is saved, by Salt.

Severance conspirators try to assassinate Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. She is saved by her lover Colonel Ibrahim, who shields her from the bullet and is killed. A deepfake of Salt claiming responsibility for the underwater bombing goes viral, meaning she is enemy number one on the Land; she's also disowned by her people in the Sea too, branded as a traitor for saving Barclay. Barclay and Salt go on the run, and have an intimate moment when alone together. Soon, though, they are cornered by UNIT on a bridge. Salt escapes into the water. Over the next while, Barclay regularly tries to find her by calling out for her on the shore. When he finally finds her he's been secretly dosed with a virus engineered by the Severance conspirators. She is immune and survives, but most of the earth reptiles are killed. The survivors accept terms that they will restrict themselves to the deepest parts of the ocean and not threaten humans again (though it is shown in flashforwards that they will have revenge on the leaders of the Severance conspiracy). Kate drives Barclay to the sea where he is reunited with Salt and grows gills (yes, really); the two swim off together. Kate sees someone on the beach drop a plastic bottle, and pulls a gun on him.

Context:

My rewatch of the episodes of this spin-off from the iplayer over a few days during the Chrimbo limbo period between the 25th and 31st December 2025 marked the point when, after having been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, I finally caught up. I have covered all series and specials of 15 Doctors across 41 seasons, plus at least one story from every official spin-off like TWBTLATS. Doctor Who will return to TV for Christmas 2026, so this is a pause rather than an end.

First Time Round:

I watched both the new omnibus of The Sea Devils as a lead-in, and then the first two episodes of the spin-off, live on the BBC iplayer as they went out on Sunday 7th December 2025. The omnibus was fine, if a bit pointless as the creatures were so different in it that it didn't really work as backstory for the new show. Still, it flowed nicely and didn't have any excessively choppy moments. I felt a bit gaslighted when a line of 1972 dialogue was altered. A Sea Devil says "We shall be the victors in the war between the land and the sea" in the new omnibus, making it look like the cumbersome title (more whinging about that in the Reaction section below, by the way) is a quotation from classic Who. But in the original, the underwater reptile man is confident of winning a "war against mankind". It's seamlessly done, which seems to make it worse somehow. Anyway, the next two episodes episodes I caught up with on the Monday following the Sunday 14th broadcast as I'd been out the night before. Finally, I watched the fifth episode live again on the 21st December, when I was accompanied by the eldest, young man of 19 years of age. He'd watched the previous episodes of the series at university, but was back home for his Christmas hols by the time of the finale. Nobody else in the household could be tempted to watch, not even middle child, boy of 16, who's the biggest Who fan bar me in the family. He's much more interested in the final season of Stranger Things at the moment.

Reaction:

A note before I begin to cover this story proper: I'm sick to death of typing the overlong title in full, so will be abbreviating it as TWBTLATS throughout. Even that initialism is a bit cumbersome, mind (and somehow a bit rude-looking). In the Doctor Who Magazine that previewed the story and featured many interviews and articles about it, they used TWB. When you get the official magazine having to abbreviate the abbreviation, you'd think someone might have twigged that the title was too long. Sheesh! Having got that off my chest, I think the rest of this review will not veer too far into the negative. TWBTLATS was not without flaws, but was broadly very enjoyable, and in many places magnificent. It was also a relaxing watch as whether it was good or bad made not a jot of difference to the Whoniverse. Okay, tiny additional moan before I'm done: I know people wanting online engagement for their content have got to get their clicks somehow; but, if that's by going down the route 666 of devilish exaggeration or downright lying, it does tend to get on my wick. I saw many an article online around the broadcast of this spin-off talking about how it represented 'make or break time' for Doctor Who and the Whoniverse. Such bollocks! TWBTLATS represented the least consequential Whoniverse story ever in terms of its performance with an audience. It was made with funding from a coproduction partner who has already pulled out of making any more Doctor Who or spin-offs. Disney+ wouldn't really care about how it performed on their own platform (if they ever release it there) let alone how it fared on the BBC. And the Beeb had already decided to make more Doctor Who plus at least one more spin-off and announced both a good while before TWBTLATS aired.

It didn't matter how well it did, but in the end it did rather well. The overnight rating for the first episode did better than every episode of Ncuti Gatwa's two series, and its final consolidated rating was only beaten by one ep from them (2024 opener Space Babies). The final rating for the second episode beat most of those for Ncuti's most recent series too. It was on in a later slot at a different time of the year, and was released differently (premiering on TV and streaming simultaneously). On the other hand, the initial episodes held their own against stiff competition (the live final of I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, one of ITV's biggest hitters). The BBC will be pleased with that, and the makers should take a little pride in it too. It might have had something to do with having a lovable leading man in Russell Tovey, who is excellent throughout. Ncuti Gatwa is sexy and charismatic for sure, but maybe doesn't have the lovable quality that Tovey, or David Tennant say, bring to the screen. I have seen some fans online reporting that they find Gatwa's screen presence a little off-putting. In a mass audience there are probably also some people who sadly won't watch a programme with a black or gay lead character, which will also have impacted Gatwa's figures. I don't condone such small-mindedness of course, and hope that future casting of the Doctor continues to challenge those viewers - hopefully, they can be won round eventually. If not, fuck 'em quite frankly. Anyway, other than the white male cishet (or should that be fishhet) lead character, the rest of the spin-off story is populated by a diverse set of characters and actors. Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Salt, and Colin McFarlane as General Austin Pierce were both particular standouts for me.

UNIT regulars of recent years are present and correct, but more in the background. From commentary around the time of its broadcast, I sense that some fans were disappointed that this was not the pilot for a full UNIT spin-off series, but it should have been clear from all pre-publicity and trailers that this was more the story of Barclay and Salt. The only UNIT regular with a significant role is Jemma Redgrave as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. She gets some great material. Obviously, there are the harrowing scenes of her grief at the loss of Colonel Ibrahim; presumably neither of the characters are aware of the events of Torchwood's Children of Earth or Ibrahim would have taken a holiday: don't be the lover of the highest credited regular in a five-part Doctor Who spin-off, you'll never make it to part five alive! My favourite Kate moment is in the first episode when she's in the back of a car with Barclay. She jokes about having forgotten her gun before turning serious and revealing that she's done no such thing. Nice. Alexander Devrient as Ibrahim and Ruth Madeley as Shirley Bingham don't have as much to do, but get a few nice moments (not least being Devrient's self-sacrifice). Some actors in the large ensemble seem a bit wasted without much screen time (Vincent Franklin, for example), and some (like McFarlane or Patrick Baladi as the villainous Spears) feel like they're killed off too soon. Nonetheless, all performances are strong throughout whether small or larger role, regular or guest. Props to director Dylan Holmes Williams and the whole crew for that, and for the handsome, expensive look of the piece throughout.

The scripts by Russell T Davies and Pete McTighe are not subtle (the greedy villains are seen greedily tucking into a lavish spread in one early scene) but we've probably passed the point of subtlety for any story with an ecological theme. The environmental situation is such that some things need to be hammered home, as they are in well-visualised set pieces like the sequence of chaos where trash rains down on London. Foreign filming adds global scale to proceedings; as does Davies's standard approach, which McTighe adopts too as he did in Lucky Day, of cutting to various examples of world media during the action. This means that we get more scenes of Lachele Carl as Trinity Wells appearing in yet another Whoniverse show (she's appeared in almost every 21st century spin-off as well as the main show). Obviously TWBTLATS wasn't going to end with everyone living together in harmony, and neither was it going to solve the world's ecological problems at a stroke. It was therefore clear that at some point it would morph from eco thriller to love story. Though the romantic subplot is seeded in from the beginning and highlighted throughout, the gear change towards the end still feels clunky. I think it boils down to minor mistakes in the pacing of the last couple of episodes. If the earth reptiles are powerful enough to create the trash rain, which looms large in the imagination because of the impressive visuals achieved, why don't they retaliate quicker to the sonic bomb? Why piss about with stuff like kidnapping and eating pet dogs, leaving the humans time to develop their virus? A few script changes could have created more urgency. It's nonetheless a good fun story, and though it wasn't a UNIT series per se, it could lead to more spin-offs featuring UNIT in future. That's of course assuming that Kate Lethbridge-Stewart gets away with pulling a gun on a civilian for littering.

Connectivity:

Both The War between the Land and the Sea and Kinda feature reptilian adversaries that have something of a moment of intimacy with a lead character (if kissing was allowed on screen in Doctor Who in 1980s, I can definitely envisage the Mara being passed from victim to victim that way rather than by holding hands).

Deeper Thoughts:

Predictions for the gap year. It's been a tradition here in the last few years for the Deeper Thoughts of posts around New Year's to make predictions, and review how well - or how clownishly - the last ones panned out. My predictions for 2025 can be found in the Deeper Thoughts of the Joy to the World post from December 2024. Starting with my one prediction that was not about Doctor Who, I'm a tiny bit disappointed that Wham's Last Christmas hasn't proved to be the UK's Christmas number one forever. I thought it would take "a change in how the chart is put together" to stop it. In the end, it just took Amazon slightly gaming the system by pushing Kylie Minogue's song XMAS to anybody asking their Alexa to play Christmas music during the festive period. Still, XMAS is a good song, and Kylie's both a Doctor Who star and an (inter)national treasure, so it was a worthy winner. Last Christmas came very close to beating XMAS despite all that, so will probably achieve its hat trick of Yuletide top spots in 2026. Sticking with festive predictions, at the end of 2024 I believed that regardless of coproduction decisions Doctor Who would be on at least at Christmas every year including 2025. I was only a year out: without Disney money, the BBC have confirmed a Christmas special for 2026. TWBTLATS had a slightly odd compressed scheduling (two times two episodes per week, with a fifth and final episode on its own in a third and final week). I get the feeling that it was intended to air weekly in 2026. Its being somewhat tossed away in three short weeks may be because it was pulled forward to plug the Christmas 2025 gap.

It's hard to predict anything about the content of the 2026 Christmas special; Billie Piper will be in it, but maybe not as the Doctor. It's also rumoured that David Tennant could make an appearance. His fourteenth Doctor is still hanging around on Earth following the bi-generation, so I can definitely see a possible plot of him helping out Billie with some regeneration weirdness that's turned the Doctor temporarily into a Bad Wolf form. At the end of the special, he can send this interim Doctor on her way to regenerate into the new incumbent. Plus Daleks and/or Cybermen. Come back in a year to see if any of that is even remotely correct. Talking of those two august enemies, I predicted a year ago that at least one of them would feature in the show in 2025, "probably Skaro's finest". I was technically correct - the Daleks featured briefly in a flashback scene in The Reality War - but full deployment of those 'big guns' still feels overdue (and will feel even more so by December 2026). With Doctor Who absent from TV until Christmas, home video and other extended universe will have to suffice for eager fans. My predictions about Blu-ray box sets proved correct for the second year running (a sign, I think, of the ever dwindling number of choices rather than any increase in my powers of prognostication). In December 2024, the season 7 box set had already been announced. I guessed, and it so transpired, that season 13 would be next and that there wouldn't be another Doctor Who set in 2025, only Blakes 7 series B.

The first Blu-ray box set for 2026 has also already been announced. It's season 21 (where Peter Davison bows out and Colin Baker debuts). It's slated for March following a release of TWBTLATS on Blu-Ray in February. There will almost certainly be one more Doctor Who set released around six months later, with Blakes 7 series C then arriving towards the end of the year. The gap in Summer where a new series box set would normally be scheduled might mean that second set comes a little earlier, but I doubt it will mean an additional classic Doctor Who box set is squeezed in. The reason for that is the previously mentioned dwindling number of seasons to choose from, many with challenges around restoration or missing episodes. Once season 21 is released, there will be seven seasons of classic Who left, only two of them in colour. The biggest question when trying to predict which season will be next is whether it will be a black and white set. I think not, for the same reasons I touched on last year: it would be too messy to have a mixture of reconstruction and animation to replace missing episodes on any one set, so I think there will be a wait for the monochrome sets while their final story or stories are animated. As such, I predict that the second box set of 2026 will be the final Jon Pertwee set, season 11. I do think that there will be another animation released during the year too; my money's on The Space Pirates, as it would complete animation of the missing parts of season 6 and make that a contender for release in 2027.

What of the blog in 2026? I've covered all 15 Doctors' stories in random order now, so I can and will add in some indexes of the posts per Doctor in broadcast order (we Doctor Who fans love a list, after all). That'll keep me busy for a while. Then, when it gets closer to Doctor Who's December return - which I'm going to go out on a limb and say will not be a one-off, I predict an announcement about Doctor Who's future to be made before the end of the year - I will probably start blogging a few other bits and bobs. I've done every official spin-off, but there are many unofficial fan-made efforts out there. For now though, like for the show, there will be something of a hiatus... but we Doctor Who fans are used to such things.

In Summary:

Very enjoyable, but I'm glad it isn't the last Doctor Who-related story on the BBC, as it would have been an odd note to end on. Wishing you a Happy 2026 (with some Happy New Who at the end of it)!

Wednesday, 24 December 2025

Kinda

Chapter the 344th, is a gift for Christmas.

Plot:

The Doctor, Adric and Tegan explore the paradisiacal planet Deva Loka while Nyssa sleeps off a hangover in the TARDIS (a hangover from the end of the previous story where she fainted, I mean). Tegan falls asleep by some wind chimes and dreams of a mysterious figure who psychologically tortures her until she agrees to let him borrow her form: this is the Mara. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Adric come across a single-person armoured battle unit, the TSS. Operating autonomously, it escorts them to a dome set up by a survey party reviewing the planet for possible colonisation. Many of the survey team have gone missing outside the dome, leaving only three survivors. Commanding officer Sanders goes out to investigate, leaving the unstable Hindle in charge. Possessed by the Mara, Tegan finds Aris - one of the Kinda, indigenous people of Deva Loka - and the Mara transfers to him. Sanders returns to the dome a changed man, meek and smiley. He was given a wooden box by a Kinda, which he urges the others to open. It is a healing device for the mind, but Hindle refuses to open it. The Doctor and Todd escape and find that Aris is planning to attack the dome. The increasingly unhinged Hindle has wired the dome up with explosives, and an attack could mean the end of the world. Adric uses the TSS to stop the attack, but Aris escapes. The Doctor and Todd confront Hindle, who has regressed to childhood and is building a model city in the dome. Using reverse psychology, Todd gets Hindle to open the box, and his mind is healed. The Doctor disconnects the explosives. With the help of the Kinda, the Doctor traps Aris in a circle of mirrors. The Mara detaches itself from him in the shape of a red snake, and Aris is pulled free. The snake grows to massive size, but unable to face its reflection disappears. Tegan hopes she is free of the Mara's influence (she isn't, but that's another story).

Context:

Watched from the Blu-ray disc from the season 19 Collection box-set, a couple of episodes per night in mid-December 2025. I was accompanied for the whole thing by the eldest of my children, a young man of 19 years back from university for the Christmas hols. He enjoyed the story. I thought I'd adjusted the settings to select the version with enhanced effects, but when we got to the end it was the as-transmitted version. I had to pause the programme, go to the menu and flip the switch, so the eldest got to see the sequence of the Mara in the circle of mirrors both ways. He was very complimentary about Chris Petts's CGI work (as indeed he should be, it's magnificent).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm very, very close to catching up. This story completes a season (the 19th of the classic era) and another Doctor's era. Blogging Peter Davison's final remaining story makes it 15 out of 15 Doctors and 41 out of 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-26, and new series 1-15). None of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War are left, just the 5-episode The War Between the Land and the Sea spin-off remains to be blogged.

First Time Round:

This is one of a few key watershed moments in my early history of Doctor Who watching. The first episode of Doctor Who I ever saw in full was from An Unearthly Child, first ever Doctor Who story (thanks be to a 1981 season of archive repeats for that symmetry). The first full story I ever saw was The Krotons, and the first colour one was Carnival of Monsters (both were later in that same repeat season). The first episode of Doctor Who that I saw on its debut broadcast was the second part of Castrovalva, in January 1982, a few weeks after the repeat season ended late the previous year (sarcastic thanks be to the scheduling of my weekly Cub Scout session for my missing parts of Castrovalva). The first full story I saw on its debut broadcast was Kinda. I had to pretend to be sick for two consecutive Mondays to get out of cubs and watch it in full, and I was mesmerised by it. I should say exaggerate my sickness rather than pretend, for I was already somewhat sick... at heart: you see, I already had an immense crush on Tegan Jovanka. It was a definite moment for the prepubescent me seeing Janet Fielding playing the Mara-possessed Tegan, with the smallest smidge of sexuality that she felt she could get away with, but that wasn't the main reason for the story's appeal. It had something that the young me could sense but couldn't identify. I now know it to be nothing much more than well-written drama, but it was mysterious at the time. Kinda was the story of the year for me. I was out of step with the fandom of the time, though - Kinda came bottom of the Season Survey readers' poll in Doctor Who Magazine that year. People voted Four to Doomsday and Time-Flight higher. You can't trust people, can you?

Reaction:

Doctor Who didn't have any real competition for the affections of UK children until 1977. Star Trek was popular, sure, but back then comprised only three seasons played in endless rotation - it wasn't something new, which reduced the excitement quotient significantly. None of the other competitors (from Land of the Giants to Space:1999) even got close to Star Trek's level, let alone Who's. But then there came Star Wars. From that point on, there was a dividing line: once Star Wars was there as a good-looking, high budget option for the straight-laced kids, Doctor Who became the thing the strange kids loved. There had always been a certain strangeness in Who and its fan audience, but the programme seemed to embrace it increasingly as the 1970s ended and the 1980s began. Kinda might just mark the apotheosis of that process. It is downright weird in many places: the dream sequences where Tegan encounters mysterious characters in the landscape of her own mind, for example, are visually interesting and cryptic, but they're also abrupt. They have clearly been cut down from longer sequences as the episodes were overrunning, but this manages to make them even more unsettling. The climax of the third episode is a bravura sequence where an apocalypse is represented, simply but with devastating effect, by an alarm clock going off and an oversaturation of the picture leading to a white screen. A few stories later - with the same director - the show would begin a period starting with Earthshock (which then became a template for future stories) where it tried to ape sci-fi action movies. It was enjoyable, but it was also a bit safe. Maybe it would have been better to leave that sort of stuff to George Lucas: I don't think Lucas would or could ever produce something like Kinda.

The biggest action sequence in Kinda sees two people in wooden boxes dancing around each other for a minute or two in a cramped studio. It's all the better for that, in the opinion of this reviewer at least. The cliffhanger ending of episode two is one of the best in the history of Doctor Who, and all that it requires is a small box plus engagement with viewer imagination. The staginess on display in places somehow seems apt. Kinda is not aiming for naturalism: it is a didactic morality tale told using symbols and artifice. The irrepressible dynamism of director Peter Grimwade has to have an outlet, of course, and he creates Kinda's fireworks in character and performance. To do this he assembles one of the best guest casts ever put together for Who, and they all respond well to an excellent script from writer Christopher Bailey. Stalwart British stars Richard Todd and Mary Morris are as good as one might expect, but this is true of everyone down through the credits list, no matter what the size of the role or the experience of the performer. The stand-out performance is Simon Rouse as Hindle. I have seen the moment in the final episode where he holds up the broken cardboard figure of a man and says "You can't mend people" dozens and dozens of times over the years, but it never fails to be spine-tingling. Doctor Who has definitely been guilty in the past of egregious use of mental health issues for antagonist motivation. It can be an easy catch-all just to call a villain insane; but Hindle's nervous breakdown is played with sensitivity and is grounded in reality. The subplot of his worsening mental health and its eventual healing links thematically with Kinda's central idea about the power of the mind. Ultimately, the story champions the power of community and shared ideals in opposition to the individualistic thinking of the colonist, which was quietly radical at the time and remains so now.

The regular cast are also firing on all cylinders. The ones that are not written out, that is. I believe the reason Sarah Sutton's Nyssa does not appear for the majority of this story was contractual rather than dictated by the story, but reducing the number of regulars having to share out action and dialogue is a good move. Peter Davison, in some of his earliest work as the Doctor, is unshowy but strong. Janet Fielding gets an opportunity that's rare in Doctor Who to do challenging material as the companion, and she is pitch perfect. Her turn as the Mara-possessed Tegan casts a long shadow: Tegan's only possessed for two short scenes, but Fielding burns through the screen in both of them. It is no surprise that a sequel (Snakedance) was quickly commissioned that leans in more to the 'evil Tegan' premise, and lets Fielding play the antagonist throughout. Her earlier scenes where she struggles to keep her sanity through various nightmare scenarios are great as well. Even Matthew Waterhouse's turn as Adric isn't too bad in this story: the character's more adolescent immaturity is a nice counterpoint to Hindle's mental regression to a younger childhood. As if following a Doctor Who 'conservation of sexism' rule, Tegan being given more interesting material is balanced out by another female actor having to do the thankless scenes of wandering around with the Doctor asking questions. This falls to Nerys Hughes as Todd, but her more mature approach and the quality of the dialogue make it a rather nice guest performance, all in all. She does at least get to save the day by getting Hindle to look in the mysterious box and be healed.

Kinda has a little something extra beyond the good performances, good script and - for the most part - good visuals. The Discontinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping - a touchstone of fan opinion for those enthusiasts of the show that were around in the 1990s - is almost surprised to find that beneath the allusions and parallels Kinda is at heart "a very original piece of genuine SF". It is rare for Doctor Who (and Star Wars for that matter) to tackle science-fiction ideas head on; usually they're just used as set dressing for an adventure story. Not so here. So much careful thought and depth has been put into the society on Deva Loka and the legends of the Mara. No matter how bad you might find the final realisation of the snake in all its papier-mâché glory, this is a world and set of characters that seem real. There is so much clever world-building in every line and moment such that the story lives long in the imagination after a viewing. The Kinda, for example, refer to anyone who is not Kinda (a tribe that commune telepathically, let it not be forgotten) as the 'not-we'. This is just so beautifully right. It has also become a way that fans refer to the uninitiated in the real world (in a similar way that Harry Potter fans use 'muggle'). Little details are tossed lightly away like seeds in the breeze, but they take root: the box of Jhana, speech only being something that women can do, the consciousness of the tribe's wise woman passing to their young apprentice on death, etc. Depending on how the mood takes me, Kinda could well be the answer to the question of what is my favourite ever classic era Doctor Who story, so it was a good one to come up as the final classic story to blog. It's weird but it's wonderful. I don't know of any story in any big TV sci-fi franchise that has ever tackled similar material, nor done it so well. Take that Star Wars!

Connectivity:

Both Kinda and Wish World / The Reality War feature real world physical manifestations arising from the thoughts of humans; they also both feature an antagonist who is one of the Pantheon of Discord (The Mara is the Pantheon's "God of Beasts" according to Harriet Arbinger in The Legend of Ruby Sunday).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Christmas List. The shallow surface reading - and I've been very guilty of thinking this way myself, believe me - is that after only a single Christmas special in the entirety of the classic Doctor Who era, a Christmas special for our favourite programme then became a mainstay only when the series returned in a blaze of glory for the 21st Century. The smallest bit of research, though, gives the lie to this: Doctor Who had a presence in the Christmas TV schedules almost all the way through the classic era (and then triumphantly built on this once the show was back on TV from 2005 onwards). In the early days, Doctor Who was on almost all the year round, so couldn't avoid yuletide. Christmas TV was handled slightly different back then, though; the only day that really had any significance was 25th December; any broadcast on a day around the main one could go out as normal without the makers having to prepare anything different. This, though, proved to be a good thing for Who. On its third Christmas after staring in 1963, the regular Saturday broadcast of Doctor Who happened to fall on Christmas Day, the only time this happened in the 20th century. So, as seemed traditional with all types of programmes, an episode was broadcast that was much less good than usual. Instead of doing what Doctor Who normally did but being more epic or more accessible or both, the episode (The Feast of Steven, sixth episode of story The Daleks' Master Plan) broadcast on 25th December 1965 was composed of a string of lame gag-free sketches. Even worse, the Christmas Day episode of this Dalek story, didn't feature any Daleks. This was during the height of Dalekmania, when any episode featuring the metal meanies would have been perfect festive viewing for families.

This was doubly unfortunate, because every Doctor Who broadcast during the festive period up to The Feast of Steven had been a Dalek episode, but these ones with actual Daleks. In 1963, 28th December saw the broadcast of The Survivors, second episode of story The Daleks. The following year, Who went out on Boxing Day with Flashpoint, the sixth episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth. The timing was no doubt accidental, but they couldn't have been chosen better as a gift for viewers of the time: the poisonous pepperpots' first on-screen appearance, and the big finale of their return adventure. At least The Daleks' Master Plan's seventh instalment on New Year's Day 1966 saw the Daleks return to the show again. Each of the remaining 1960s seasons saw a story broadcast that bridged Christmas and New Year, but none were Dalek stories. At the end of 1966, Patrick Troughton's first story The Power of the Daleks was slightly earlier (starting on Bonfire Night) and so was done with before the end of December. Christmas Eve saw the second part of following story The Highlanders instead. The Enemy of the World's first two parts aired on the 23rd and 30th of December 1967, and The Krotons kicked off on 28th December 1968. None were Christmas themed, but any new Doctor Who episode has got to be better than none at Christmas time. December 1969 fell during the longer than usual gap between Patrick Troughton's last story and Jon Pertwee's first. For a few years from Pertwee's debut, though, the twelve days of Christmas period coincided with the excitement of the launch of a new series of Doctor Who. This was the case for six seasons, all of Jon Pertwee's five runs and Tom Baker's first set of episodes. Usually the seasons would start early in the New Year (with part one of Day of the Daleks airing on the 1st January 1972), though later on the seasons slipped forward a little to a start in the last days of December.

Simply starting new seasons of Doctor Who just after Christmas was clearly not sufficiently feeding the audience's festive need for Who: from December 1971, a new innovation came along. Omnibus Doctor Who repeats were made and shown around Christmas, and proved popular. A cut down version of The Daemons aired on 28th December 1971, an omnibus of The Sea Devils on 27th December 1972, The Green Death got similar treatment on 27th December 1973 (airing in the middle of new story The Time Warrior's weekly screenings). On 27th December 1974, a Planet of Spiders omnibus including Jon Pertwee's regeneration aired the day before the new season started with Tom Baker's debut Robot's episode one on the 28th. For Tom Baker's second season the launch shifted forward to the autumn, but seasons ran every week for six months and would still cross the festive period. Usually, omnibus repeats would also nestle in the schedules in a short gap between the stories broadcast in one year and the next. The Android Invasion finished its weekly airings on the 13th December 1975, but on 27th December that year an omnibus of Genesis of the Daleks aired before the season resumed with The Brain of Morbius from 3rd January 1976. Towards the end of that year, the season - plus another couple of omnibus repeats - had paused by the 4th December, though the new stories resumed with The Face of Evil on New Year's Day 1977. Mid-season story The Sun Makers completed by 17th December 1977. After that, The Robots of Death - which had first aired near the start of that year - aired in two stitched-together 50 minute repeats on New Year's Eve 1977 and New Year's Day 1978. A week later, new Who broadcasts resumed with Underworld part one. The Robots of Death would be the last regular Doctor Who repeat shown for Christmas; after this, repeats aired during the summer instead.

The weekly airing of new Doctor Who episodes still happened around Christmas, though. The 23rd and 30th December 1978 were the days for broadcasts of the first two parts of The Power of Kroll; the 22nd and 29th December 1979 saw the first two episodes of The Horns of Nimon. Nothing aired in late December 1980 (the last episode of State of Decay aired on 13th December) but the current Doctor Who run resumed on the 3rd January 1981 with Warrior's Gate's first episode. At the other end of that year, Doctor Who's first ever spin-off K9 and Company aired on BBC1 on 28th December; it was set at Christmas and had K9 singing a carol and everything. From 1982, each new season of Doctor Who shifted to a start in the first week of January again, in the first few days of the year before Twelfth Night. Peter Davison's first season (including Kinda) started on the 4th January 1982. Things remained the same until Michael Grade put Doctor Who on hiatus in 1985. December 1985 to January 1986 became the first twelve days of Christmas period since Doctor Who started devoid of a new episode or a special repeat. It was a 22-year unbroken record. Don't anybody tell Michael Grade this; he loves the role of panto villain, and would no doubt revel in being the man who cancelled Doctor Who's Christmas. A quirk of scheduling delaying the start of Doctor Who's season in 1988 meant a couple of episodes aired in the Christmas / New Year period, and during the 'wilderness years' a few BBC2 repeat showings happened in late December or early January, but these were slim pickings. The party was over.

The party came back with a bang in 2005, though: Doctor Who was on the cover of the Christmas Radio Times, Doctor Who toys were big sellers for the kids that year, and the show had a special episode airing on the big day, 25th December. Doctor Who has proved very popular at yuletide since. From 2005 to 2017, 13 Christmas specials specials were aired, one a year, all of them on the big day. From 2019 to 2022, four more festive specials aired on New Year's Day. The specials returned to Christmas day again for 2023 and 2024. Even though there was an embarrassment of riches in this time, it didn't quite end there. In 2015, BBC4 showed The Face of Evil in two stitched-together 50 minute chunks on the 28th and 29th December, and the story was chosen deliberately because it had originally aired around the Christmas period. On 23rd December 2024, a colourised, edited version of The War Games aired, also on BBC4. Even a couple of years before, the idea that such a thing could happen would have been laughed off. This breathless rundown of Christmas past has been a real education: we fans have been so lucky, and the gifts continue. At the time of writing this is 2025, we have just reached the end of December airings of a spanking new Whoniverse spin-off, which is available as a box set on iplayer for the Christmas period (this century's version of K9 and Company?!), and we've been promised a Doctor Who special for Christmas 2026. After that, who knows, but I think it would be foolish to put any money against such goodies continuing in years to come.

In Summary:

Incidentally, a groovy Kinda Christmas to all of you at home!

Monday, 8 December 2025

Wish World / The Reality War

Chapter the 343rd, features a world and society from wish.

Plot:

Just like a Doctor Who producer in an anniversary year, the Rani wants to bring back Omega. He can apparently help to restart the Time Lord race - the only known surviving Time lords (her two bi-generated selves plus the Doctor) having become sterile following a "genetic explosion". Omega is trapped in a dimension that can only be reached by trapping the Doctor on Earth and then destroying the fabric of reality on that planet, over and over until it wears thin, using the power of doubt. To facilitate this, she travels back to Bavaria in 1865 to collect a baby who is one of the pantheon, the god of wishes. She has freed Conrad Clark from prison (after the events of Lucky Day) and has him wishing an approximation of Earth society into existence, warping reality for humans, and repeatedly replaying the 23rd May 2025. [Just as an aside: the Rani once ridiculed the Master for his plotting of silly, labyrinthine schemes - what a hypocrite!] On this version of the world, the Doctor believes he is John Smith, with a wife called Belinda and a daughter called Poppy. Conrad can't imagine a whole world, so people's experiences are created from their warped memories; this includes Poppy, who looks like the baby of the same name from Space Babies. The world adheres to Conrad's old-fashioned and heteronormative values (women should be wives and mothers rather than have paid work, a man can't find another man beautiful, disabled people are kept out of sight, trans people don't exist). Conrad appears on every TV as a cross between a Cbeebies presenter and God, telling stories of Doctor Who and the Rani. Anyone with doubts about this reality is carted off by the police. There are also giant dinosaur skeletons called Bone Beasts roaming about (don't ask why).

Ruby Sunday knows that something is wrong with the world and doorsteps John Smith, but he doesn't remember her. Smith goes to work at a drastically changed UNIT HQ (UNIT is an insurance company in this reality) where everyone but Shirley and Rose has an office job (Susan Triad is the tea lady). Shirley lives in a urban camp with other disabled people, and Rose isn't around at all. On John Smith's TV, Rogue appears, breaking through Conrad's transmission, and explains something about the falseness of Smith's reality. The resultant doubt gets Smith and Belinda carted off to the Bone Palace, the Rani's lair. The Rani explains her plan, and the Doctor realises who he is. She locks him on a balcony as the collective doubt of the populace tears the world apart. The balcony crumbles and the Doctor is falling to his doom when a portal opens, and Anita pulls him through into the safety of the Time Hotel. The day resets again. Anita explains that she has been searching for the Doctor through time, and found him stuck in the Rani's trap. The day keeps repeating, ending with the destruction of the world, but each time reality is wearing thinner, and soon the Rani will be able to free Omega. Anita opens another Time Hotel door into UNIT HQ and keeps it open; this brings reality to everyone there, and they all realise their true identities. Rose appears. The Doctor has a plan to restore reality, but he's worried that it will mean Poppy, who might be his actual half-Time Lord daughter, will cease to exist. Susan Triad (very rapidly) builds a zero room, which Belinda and Poppy get in. The Rani gets the Bone Beasts to attack UNIT HQ and there's a big battle.

The Doctor confronts both the Ranis at the Bone Palace. They have located Omega and free him; he's become a giant ghoul; Omega eats one Rani, and the other one flees. Ruby uses a UNIT transmat to reach Conrad and the wish god baby. She makes a wish and ends Conrad's world. The Doctor fights off Omega with the vindicator, then rushes to find his TARDIS as the Bone Palace disappears. Everyone returns to UNIT HQ, and opens the zero room. Poppy's still in there with Bel. The Doctor leaves the wish god baby, his power removed by the Doctor wishing for no more wishes, with Carla and Cherry Sunday to look after. He and Belinda plan to travel with Poppy in the TARDIS, but they start to forget her as does everyone else except Ruby. Poppy vanishes. Ruby persuades the Doctor that Poppy should exist, and he knows there's only one way to get her back: to use his regeneration energy to adjust the timeline. He goes off alone in the TARDIS and sees his previous Jodie Whittaker incarnation, who gives him a pep talk then disappears. He forces a regeneration, but doesn't change yet - he floods the TARDIS with the energy streaming out of him, then finds himself in a garden (somehow). He finds Belinda and her daughter Poppy. In this timeline, Poppy is 100% human and is Belinda's child with an ex; she has been wanting to get back to Earth on the 24th May 2025 as Poppy needed looking after. The Doctor says goodbye, then materialises the TARDIS in space near to the star that used to be Joy Almondo, and his regeneration takes place: he changes into a body that looks exactly like Rose Tyler, "Oh hello!".

Context:

I watched both episodes back-to-back from the Blu-ray box set on an evening early in December 2025. I viewed it in this way to see how well, or how not so well, both parts cohered as one story, given the major reworking of the ending that I know about now, but didn't know to quite the same level of detail on first viewing (see the Reaction section below for more on that).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. This story completes a season (new series 15, as I call it) and another Doctor's era. Ncuti Gatwa makes it 14 Doctors whose televisual eras have been completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-15), and 40 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1-15). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, four now remain. There is also at the time of writing a new 5-episode spin-off that has begun broadcasting.

First Time Round:

I first watched Wish World on the BBC iplayer around 10am on Saturday 24th May 2025 (the day which the episode revolves around); I was accompanied, as I was for most of the series, by middle child (boy of 16, 15 at the time). The two of us also watched the second and final part The Reality War together, but not on the TV. We occupied two seats in a full house of people watching the episode in the Duke of York's cinema in Brighton. As for the previous year's finale, there were cinema showings across the UK. I couldn't interest either of the other children, though the eldest - back from university - joined his brother and I for a meal in the next door pub The Joker before the screening, then afterwards went out with mates for the evening rather than watch Doctor Who on the big screen. Once we'd said goodbye to him, the two of us went to the cinema and settled in our seats just as the introduction by Varada Sethu was starting. The crowd, including the two of us, made all the right noises of enjoyment throughout. We gasped in amazement at the surprise appearances (Anita from the Time Hotel! Rose Noble!), and were shrieking in amazement by the time we heard Jodie Whittaker's first line of dialogue. I think most people had lost their voices to amazement by the time Ncuti regenerated into Billie Piper at the end. One audience member still mustered decent projection, though. At the very end, as the lights came up - he had held it in through the full credit sequence and the teaser for The War Between the Land and the Sea - he very loudly and in heartfelt fashion exclaimed "What the f**k?!" to everyone in the cinema, and we all chuckled with understanding at his shellshock.

Reaction:

I obviously have to give my reaction to the version of this story that ended up on screen, but before that I'll briefly cover the version that didn't. For Who's 62nd anniversary, Sunday November 23rd 2025, deleted scenes from Ncuti Gatwa's second season were released online for fan appreciation. Not all the deleted scenes, though. As fans instantly pointed out, the clips package had an omission as big as an elephant in the room. Many of those involved had leaked the nature of The Reality War's original ending, but the production team still seemed to want to pretend it didn't happen. The Doctor and his friends were to have finished up in a club dancing in celebration and happiness (an accidentally uploaded promo picture showed a moment from this scene), watched from afar by the Doctor's granddaughter Susan played by Carole Ann Ford, accompanied by Poppy. Both observers would have then slunk away, with Susan saying to Poppy 'Come on, Mum'! It would have been a wonderful moment. The puzzle remains as to what connective story tissue would have joined that final scene to the earlier narrative. It's hard to tell exactly what's been added later, but I think there may be a hint from paying attention to the presence or absence of Rose Noble. The character appears once reality is reintroduced to UNIT HQ, to be emblematic of people of whom Conrad's narrow worldview can't conceive. The character isn't given enough to do, just as she wasn't in the previous year's finale; but, she's there, alongside the rest of the UNIT gang, helping to rescue Poppy (who might cease to exist). This is the first time that Poppy needs to be rescued after the first threat of non-existence. The second time this happens (this egregious double story beat is no doubt a side-effect of the rewrite), everyone else from the gang is still present at UNIT HQ, but Yasmin Finney obviously wasn't free and Rose is absent.

So, everything up to Poppy's miraculous survival in Susan Triad's zero room was probably material from before the rewrite. Then, perhaps, everyone forgot about Poppy in a similar way to how they do in the final version, but without Ruby as the lone dissenting voice. Poppy wouldn't have vanished, and would instead have met up with Susan for the original ending. This would explain loose ends in the final version; the cameo appearances of Susan earlier in the season, for example, end up going nowhere and linking to nothing, as does the stand-out line from 2024's finale where the Doctor explains that he has a grandchild but no children (as Time Lords tend to do things out of chronological order). A neat little tie-up that we did end up getting is Ruby's awareness of parallel realities because of her experiences in 73 Yards. This is used to good effect in Wish World to explain her distrust of Conrad, then used again in The Reality War as an explanation for why she alone still remembers Poppy. Unfortunately, this creates what for me is the most unfortunate impact of the rewrite. In the - rather wonderful, horror-inflected - scene of Bel and the Doctor passing Poppy's coat between them as it gets smaller and smaller, Ruby sees what is happening, and knows what they've forgotten. Was this scene in the original version? Could have been, but I think probably not. The next sequence can't have been, though: the Doctor arrives at UNIT HQ and - with persuasion from Ruby - goes off to realign the universe to bring Poppy back, with a hint that it will cost his life. The surprise of Jodie Whittaker's cameo, and the scene where the Doctor returns to normality and finds that everything has changed, with Bel always having had a child to whom she has been trying to get back all this time, distract one on first watch from the the devastating truth that the Ncuti Doctor never says goodbye to Ruby.

Millie Gibson might appear instantly that the Christmas special starts in 2026, of course, but the damage is done. Ruby was Gatwa's first and most important companion. She sends him on the mission to save Poppy, but by the end of The Reality War hasn't seen him again, and knows nothing of whether he's been successful or not. His sole goodbye scene is with more recent companion Bel, who - unlike Ruby - was blissfully unaware that anything was wrong before. If he had had the choice, I don't think writer and showrunner Russell T Davies would have structured the story like this. Wish World / The Reality War as a whole is therefore compromised, and doomed always to be seen more as a set of scenes than a story. Luckily, most of its individual scenes are great - imagine if they weren't? - but there will always be the lingering impression whenever one watches it that they don't quite fit together. The story has forced upon it the job of completing a Doctor's era thematically, and instead summarises the last two years of Doctor Who more as a highlights package. Everyone significant returns for at least a brief moment. All the many UNIT regulars are there, as mentioned, including Susan Triad and Mel, who hadn't returned earlier in the season. They are given fun alter egos in Conrad's world as employees of the Unified National Insurance Team. It's great to see Rogue appear on John Smith's TV to alert him to the inconsistencies of his current reality, and to say "I love you"; Ruby's mum and grandmother get to adopt the wish god baby at the end, which is a perfect fit and harks back to Ncuti's very first full story The Church on Ruby Road; best of all for me was the unexpected return of Anita from the time hotel, one of my favourite characters of recent years. The Doctor regenerates in the presence of the Joy star (like Anita, returning from the last Christmas special). Even the Giggle is heard from the story in which Ncuti first made an appearance.

Another regular guest star returning who's featured throughout Ncuti's two seasons is Anita Dobson as Mrs. Flood, one of the Two Ranis (Dobson's exit line doing a gag about The Two Ronnies got a good, groanful reception in the cinema where I first watched the story, though I'm sure a lot of the audience were too young to have got the reference). She's very good value as we've come to expect, and has great screen chemistry and interplay with Archie Panjabi as the lead Rani. Every scene with Panjabi is lifted by her presence, the costume is great and it's great to see her zooming about the sky on her space jet-ski. It's also great to have a brief flashback to Kate O'Mara playing the character, and to have a Mel-Rani face-off . It seems a shame for Panjabi to be killed off, but maybe she could survive being eaten by Omega and return one day. The Omega creature is nicely realised, but it does seem odd to bring him back not looking or acting anything like the character previously did. At least the difference is explained in the script, and it is hard to think what other Gallifreyan MacGuffin could be the Rani's goal. Also unfortunate is Gatwa's stressing of a different syllable when pronouncing Omega's name compared to everyone else in the story (and everyone through Doctor Who's history); but, he's a Time Lord, so can say things however he wants. The larger-than-life villainy on display somewhat overshadows Conrad Clark, but the script makes a virtue of this. Conrad finds some measure of goodness and humanity within himself in wishing his world (as Ruby says, it could have been a lot worse) and he gets a happy ending. There's freaky visual interest provided by the Seekers and the Bone Beasts, as well as a nice action set piece involving the latter when they attack UNIT HQ.

Varada Sethu gets less interesting, and less effective, material here than Millie Gibson: the moment where she runs from her house into the woods of Conrad's world and screams in despair is great. If she has such doubts, though, then the various moments where she seems disproportionately aggressive at the idea of Poppy not being her daughter don't ring true. Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps as Poppy is astonishingly good, though, and Sethu works well with her. With any time-travel story where history is altered, there is always uncertainty about whether things have been put back as they always should have been at the end, or have changed. Which was the prime timeline? Did Bel always have a daughter, and the initial timeline was the one that was out of whack? Maybe it doesn't matter, but personally I'd like to know one way or the other. Talking of the end, I'll finish by looking at the denouement as it finally ended up, rather than the one in a parallel universe of potential story energy. The accumulation of returning elements already there before the story had to become a regeneration story look difficult to top, but Davies pulls out all the stops such that the last 20 minutes or so achieve an operatically unhinged energy. With everything else seeming to leak, the production team's keeping Jodie Whittaker's appearance secret was a major coup. Every moment and every line of the scene of her and Gatwa is wonderful. She was always a more awkward Doctor when dealing with emotions than Gatwa's take on the Time Lord, and this is addressed in the final exchange where Whittaker feels she should tall Yaz that she loves her, and Gatwa replies "You never do... but she knows". Just when one might think that the surprise level has peaked, Gatwa regenerates into Billie flippin' Piper. As the man in the cinema suggested (see First Time Round section above) the story ends with the consummate WTF moment.

Connectivity:

This is irritating; the connection between Wish World / The Reality War and Redacted could have been the slam dunk that both have surprise appearances by Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor towards the end. Unfortunately, that's only true of Redacted series 1, not series 2. Oh well. Instead, it will have to suffice that both stories feature displaced people living in a makeshift community ruled over by a cruel female villain (the Rani, Honour Bray).

Deeper Thoughts:

Ncuti in summary. In the first month or two of 2025, it didn't feel (at least to me) like the year would see the end of an era. 2024's Christmas special Joy to the World was fresh in my mind, Doctor Who was gearing up for the second season of a bright, young and relatively new Doctor, paired with an intriguing new companion. At that point or thereabouts (the producers of Doctor Who are being a bit cagey about the exact timing), Ncuti Gatwa had already finished filming on the series. As mentioned in the Reaction section above, it's common knowledge that the ending originally planned for The Reality War would have seen some loose ends left to be tied up about the Doctor, his granddaughter and daughter; but, at the end of it, the Doctor would be unregenerated and celebrating with his friends. The next season, which was already at least partially scripted, would have picked up from there. It didn't come to pass: either Disney+ delayed too long in making a decision on whether to coproduce that next season, or they had already made a decision but it wasn't communicated publicly, and the BBC needed time to decide what to do next with Doctor Who. It doesn't really matter why or how, the important thing is that it was too much of a delay for Ncuti Gatwa and, no doubt, for his agent. Put yourself in the agent's place: your client is a hot property, and he's getting offers for movies. As I said on the blog back in 2023 (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the Boom Town post for more details), Gatwa was probably "the most up-and-coming" of any actor on taking up the Doctor role, "young and exciting, and clearly has the potential to move on to greater things". A man in a hurry, in other words (even if he hadn't had an agent pushing him onwards).

Ncuti was clearly up for doing a third year (likely no more than that) if and only if he could go straight into making it after his second season. The delay scuppered that, and so the finale needed to be rewritten and reshot to divest him of the baggage of association with a high-profile role, letting him move on. I can forgive showrunner Russell T Davies's white lies stating that Gatwa's two-year stint was "always the plan": hell hath no fury like a mass of Doctor Who fans scorned, after all; it's not Gatwa's fault the plan changed, and nobody sensible wants him to be hounded by those fans forever more. The pronouncement had some traces of truth, anyway: the plan probably always was for Gatwa to film his regeneration in 2025, but he was almost certainly expected to film another season's worth of episodes first. In that Boom Town post's Deeper Thoughts section, I drew parallels with Gatwa's and David Tennant's profiles when they were cast as the Doctor. It's an intriguing counterfactual to consider what might have happened if Tennant in 2007 had faced a delay before his third season went into production: would his fan love for Doctor Who have made him hang around for an extended period associated with but not playing the role of the Doctor? It's nice to think that fandom would conquer all, but Tennant too was a young actor with bags of promise, and he too would likely have bowed to pressure from his agent. The November 2025 comments from The Rest is Entertainment podcast (amidst an otherwise even-handed reaction to the Disney+ decision) that Gatwa wasn't sufficiently ambassadorial - with the hint that this was because he wasn't sufficiently invested in the hugeness of the role - were therefore a bit unfair. Could anything Ncuti have done in promoting the show have got more people subscribing or watching on Disney+? I doubt it.

I think the situation probably arose simply because the first few Gatwa stories didn't land with a lot of the audience. I didn't mind any of his opening three stories (The Church on Ruby Road, Space Babies and The Devil's Chord), but I nonetheless look back and think they are probably the weakest three stories of any that he did. Even when his first series hit its stride (with 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble, stories that were - for me at least - up there with some of the best that Doctor Who of any era has had to offer) Ncuti Gatwa was barely in it. With hindsight it's easy to suggest it was a bad move to cast someone who couldn't start straight away (Gatwa had commitments to Sex Education, the series that had first brought him to the public notice, that overlapped with the recording dates for those first Who stories made for his era, meaning they had to be 'Doctor lite'). I'm terribly conflicted on this: 73 Yards wouldn't work if the Doctor was in it throughout, and it's marvellous exactly how it is. Did the programme win that battle only to lose the war? People carp about the finale of that first year (I think both parts, The Legend of Ruby Sunday and Empire of Death, are cruelly underrated), but was its quality irrelevant? Had people already given up because the first part of the season featured stories that were either a bit naff, or didn't feature the Doctor, or both? We'll never know for sure. At the end of 2024, Joy to the World came along and was simply joyful (as mentioned above, the character of Anita from that story returning unexpectedly in The Reality War was a glorious high point for me, and I'm sure for others too). No matter how good any story was from then on, though, the series was a lame duck as far as the press was concerned.

If the first season was under-Doctored, the second was overshadowed. From months before its first episode aired, the tsunami of speculation about Doctor Who's future could only ever drown out anything positive about the 2025 run. By that time, those reshoots had been done to change the ending of the final episode, and some details of that had leaked. This was a shame as - despite some issues with script logic in a few of the stories, though nothing bad enough to impact their initial viewing - the series had corkers enough for everyone: if you liked action, there was The Well; if you liked quirkiness, there was Lux; if you liked camp splendour, there was The Interstellar Song Contest. As detailed above, the finale proved to be a bit lumpy and bumpy, with the story equivalent of crunching gear changes happening in a number of places towards the end of the second part. This was probably unavoidable given the behind-the-scenes reworking. I'm still fixated on just how extensive those reshoots were. Behind the scenes footage shows producer Vicki Delow paying tribute to Gatwa as he wrapped on the series. This takes place on the UNIT set, which is hosting a veritable gang show - not just the UNIT regulars who might have been around anyway then for production of The War Between the Land and the Sea, but also Steph De Whalley as Anita and Susan Twist as Susan Triad. That's a lot of people to pay, and they also got Jodie Whittaker in for a day too. Given time, maybe Andrew Pixley will get sufficient access to document the truth for posterity. Or maybe not (there are still details from Christopher Eccleston's turbulent time filming his single season of the show that are tantalisingly unclear over twenty years later). Anyway, I doubt they'd have faked Delow's tribute just for Doctor Who Unleashed. (Side note: Unleashed and its energetic presenter Steffan Powell are a highlight of this era; I hope both show and presenter return when the main show comes back in 2026).

Whatever else one thinks of the creative decisions of showrunner Russell T Davies, one has to concede that he made original choices during his second tenure regarding the use of returning elements from the show's history. If you truly had the Toymaker, Sutekh and the Rani on your returning foes bingo card before the Bad Wolf Studios era of Who began in November 2023, then I salute you. This desire to do something a bit different, though, leaves Gatwa as the only Doctor never to have stories fighting against any of the 'big three' forces of antagonism of the Whoniverse (the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master) and only the second not to have faced off against the Daleks. David Tennant's 14th Doctor at least got the Children in Need short with a Dalek (and, you know, he'd already played the part and had three full-on Dalek stories first time round). For Paul McGann, though, Skaro's finest only featured as off-camera voices. He only did the one story, though. It would be a shame if this dented Gatwa's legitimacy in anyone's eyes. Ncuti himself covered this in a The One Show interview in July 2025, saying "I never got to fight a Dalek. A Dalek or a Cyberman. I mean, just the crux of Doctor Who", then adding a tease: "So, might do that! Might go fight a Dalek!". He won't, of course. Even if he was serious, his agent wouldn't let him, much as I'd love to sit down on Christmas Day 2026 to a surprise reappearance of Gatwa allying himself with Billie Piper to defeat the dastardly dustbins. What about a few years after that? I suspect that Gatwa is going to be as busy in that time as Matt Smith - who has never returned to Doctor Who despite seeming quite enthusiastic about the idea. So, even if enough time passes to pacify an agent, it seems improbable. Nothing's impossible though, and Gatwa's Doctor clearly has unfinished business with his granddaughter Susan: one day, he could come back - yes, one day...

In Summary:

What the f**k?!