Sunday, 27 September 2026

Circuit Breaker (August 2026)

Chapter the 350th, the difficult middle part of a trilogy.

Plot:

[Spoiler alert: the Circuit Breaker epic is the nearest fans will get to a new season of Doctor Who in 2026; so, if you're planning to experience any part of it, best to do so before you read this.] The quest to return time-displaced objects from UNIT's Black Archive - and thereby save the world - continues. The Fugitive Doctor returns a Time Ring to the ancient past of the planet Skaro. She finds a group of Kaleds hiding out from the Daleks, living in a vast bunker with artificial sunlight and hothouse crops. The Daleks breach the defences and attack. The Doctor helps a few Kaleds get to the safety of another bunker that's not nearly so habitable. They won't let her take them to safety, wanting to stay on their planet. The Doctor returns to the present day, sad at these events and wanting to collaborate better with UNIT. She allows Osgood and Turner to join her on the next mission, returning a Sontaran helmet to the Shadow Proclamation. The Doctor has to avoid Judoon guards and attacking Sontarans. Although it appears the Sontarans have been defeated, they leave in a jubilant mood saying to themselves that everything is going as per the Conductor's plan. Back at UNIT HQ, Osgood finds evidence of sabotage. Martha Jones arrives to help advise UNIT about another time-displaced object, the Carrionite crystal orb. In the Black Archive, a captive Weeping Angel is released by someone. The Doctor, Martha and Osgood then hear Turner entering and go to help him. Just as the Angel is about to strike him, the Doctor holds up the orb and the Angel is trapped by its own reflection. Somehow the interaction between Angel and orb causes the Doctor to be trapped inside the dimension within the orb. Martha Jones follows her in using the Project Indigo transporter device. Together they confront the Carrionites and escape, but not before the space witches have taken a lock of hair, a sample of the Doctor's DNA for their co-conspirator, the Conductor. The Black Archive's memory dampers overload and our heroes are briefly unaware who they are or what they're doing. But they get better.

To be concluded...

Context:

I have decided to experience each and every part of the extended universe epic that is Circuit Breaker. This second of three blog posts covering the epic focusses on the five parts that became available in August 2026. A Titan Comics one-shot Dawn of the Daleks came out on the 4th. Next was an in-game story within the mobile app Doctor Who Lost in Time called Castling, which was available for a few days starting from the 6th. A short story on the official UNIT website called Don't Blink followed on the 17th. Three days later, Penguin's Doctor Who Children's Books imprint published another short story The Doctor and the Three Witches. This was a new story added to the paperback version of a book that had been out in hardback for almost a decade, Time Lord Fairy Tales. It was pre-ordered and arrived on publication day, the 20th. A week later on the 27th, the second of the Doctor Who Lost in Time in-game stories Memento Mori started. Early in September, I reread the comic and the two short stories in order. It doesn't seem possible (or at least I haven't found a way) to replay the cut scenes from Lost In Time, but an online fan wiki has been updated with detailed synopses for both Castling and Memento Mori, so I read those in the correct places to plug the gaps. As before, I also read the supplementary material provided on the UNIT website; these are epistolary pieces (faux emails and mission briefings and the like) that summarise and react to the ongoing action. They were uploaded around the dates that the main parts of the epic were released.

First Time Round:

As mentioned in the last blog post, I was slow in getting to grips with Circuit Breaker, and had to scramble to collect the first four parts released in June and July 2026 after things had got underway. I managed to experience them all before the next ones started coming out in August, so I was ready to obtain then watch and/or read each of the next five parts in order as they came out. Early in August, I read Titan Comics' second publication of the epic, Dawn of the Daleks (story by Dan Watters and Dulce Montoya, art by Sami Kivelä). Then, a few days later I played for the first time ever the Doctor Who mobile game Lost in Time, gradually getting to see in cut scenes the story Castling (by Mario Mentasti). I read the short story Don't Blink (by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson) on the UNIT website the day it was published there. A few days later the next part (written by Janelle McCurdy) arrived by post. I didn't get to read it straight away as the following day, the Better Half and I with the rest of the family (boys of 20 and 17, girl of 14) went on holiday to Corfu. The Time Lord Fairy Tales book containing this story was, for I think the first time ever since the blog began, a new Doctor Who product not purchased by me. My birthday fell within the week we were away and the BH desperately needed an idea for something light she could pack that I could open on the big day. I suggested the book, hence her ordering it rather than me. Happily, this meant that I took away on vacation a story that I would later cover for the blog, something I've done as an annual tradition every year since accidentally going on holiday to a Doctor Who filming location early on in the blog's life. We were still in Corfu on the 27th, when the second of the Doctor Who Lost in Time in-game stories Memento Mori (again by Mario Mentasti) started, so that was a holiday watch too.

Reaction:

To continue my musings from last time, I found the first batch of these stories not unappetising, but each was a relatively small and simple dish. If those were the starters, I was thinking that the main course would be on its way next. The five parts released in August, though, were all still relatively petite amuse bouches: a comic book, two short stories and two comic strips (I'll get into a bit more detail about the Lost In Time stories below, but they are definitely of the order of comic strip rather than comic book). Let's then just consider the stories of Circuit Breaker from June all the way through to the end of August as a lunch of tapas or dim sum, lots of different flavours but nothing too substantial on its own. September's releases, which I'll cover in the next blog post, comprise a full-length novel and two Big Finish audios - that will be the three course evening meal. We'll see if all of these added up equals a feast. Having made myself feel a bit peckish with all this food talk, I will abandon the metaphor now. There is still lots to enjoy in these shorter pieces. The key things are the development of both the overarching plot, and the emotional through-line. The significant development related to the former is Don't Blink's first hints that there's a saboteur in UNIT assisting the mysterious antagonists. Osgood suspects Andrew Turner briefly, but dismisses the thought after talking to him. It seems likely that it will turn out to be him, though, as he's the only new regular character that's been introduced for the epic (I haven't got to the finale of the epic at time of writing, so forgive me if this turns out to be clownishly wrong). On the 'feels' side, the Fugitive Doctor is gradually acclimatising to being the hero, and realising that she might need, or even want, to have companions alongside her.

Dawn of the Daleks has great artwork (lots of lovely pictures of Dalek attacks), but its depiction of Kaleds doesn't match with anything in the history of the show, which a long-term fan may find disconcerting. The surprise in the first few pages, that the idyllic world these people are living in is actually an underground bunker, is interesting but somewhat implausible given how the rest of Skaro is depicted. The bunker in which the last survivors later find refuge is so basic by comparison that one wonders why they would want to stay there rather than accept the Doctor's offer to leave the planet (what do they hope to achieve?). Additionally, the object being returned is so specific that I think it breaks the established logic of the epic. Isn't the point that each has to be returned to exactly from when and whence it was taken, to protect the timeline? If so, the Time Ring would need to be returned to some point during Genesis of the Daleks. Instead, it is left on Skaro many years after that (it's supposed to return to the Time Lords on Gallifrey, as seen at the start of Revenge of the Cybermen). The artwork for the Lost in Time game, though stylised and cartoon-like, is rather lovely too. It's an engaging game: one collects cards for Doctor Who characters and locations enough to power them up to different levels, which then generates in-app currency to allow one to do it some more. It's a Pokemon game, in other words, but one where one gets little segments of a Doctor Who story as rewards upon reaching in-game milestones.

The Lost in Time stories are basic (there's no character movement or lip sync, just speech bubbles and the odd onoematopoeic legend such as BOOM! or FA-FOOM! or VWORP VWORP). Not the most efficient story-delivery mechanism (getting to the story quicker tends to involve watching lots of ads), but if you're a Doctor Who fan and you like mobile game apps, you may as well play one that's going to give you brand new Doctor Who stories, however simple. Having sampled a few other stories in the game for research purposes around the time of the two Circuit Breaker events, their strength lies in putting different characters together in interesting permutations, some that wouldn't be possible elsewhere because of budget or mortality (the Doctor and Donna defeating the Anthony Ainley Master on the planet of the Ood as an example). The two Circuit Breaker stories are more focussed than that, as they must fit into the overall epic. So, we just get the Doctor, some Sontarans and some companions, and a lot of action happening off screen. The second story Memento Mori is more successful by concentrating not on the quest but the characters. An error in the Black Archive's amnesia inducing tech means the Doctor, Martha, Osgood and Turner's memory is wiped, and they have to rediscover and come to terms with who they are. This story, like each of the final three in this batch features Martha Jones as companion; it's a great idea to pair up the first ever black female Doctor with the first ever black female companion, and the two characters work well together.

It was a shame for me when Memento Mori ended with Martha deciding not to travel with the Doctor anymore, and them saying goodbye to each other. However, the cover of the Kaleidoscope novel that is the next part of the epic shows Martha, and pre-publicity confirmed that she is a major part of the narrative. A set of stories put together like this will inevitably be at risk of such overarching editing problems. Another is that Don't Blink is written as if Osgood and Turner didn't accompany her on the Castling adventure, which they did. Aside from that minor continuity error, the website short story is a breathless, exciting sequence ending on a nice cliffhanger with the Doctor trapped. The Doctor and the Three Witches is designed to emulate a fairy tale and consequently is bigger on atmosphere than incident. There's quite a few similarities to a story in the last batch, The Deadliest Weapon, with the Doctor trapped in a dream dimension being tortured by her memories, with help coming from a companion breaking into that dimension from without. Again, we can chalk that up to the difficulties of editing across the many parts of the epic. The story in of itself meets the fairy tale brief admirably, and doesn't overstay its welcome. Not a huge amount happens, beyond some running about, but it builds up the mystery of the Conductor, who is in league with the three Carrionites, as the epic moves closer to its finale. Best of all, there's the introduction of the Fugitive's sonic screwdriver (a prototype gifted to her by UNIT that had been teased a couple of times earlier in the epic). A prop was even made IRL, which is wielded by the Doctor on the aforementioned cover of the Kaleidoscope novel. Anyway, that's enough of lunch - it's time to move on the final and biggest meal of the Circuit Breaker epic. Mmm - I'm feeling peckish again...

Connectivity:

Like in the first batch, this second set - parts five to nine of Circuit Breaker - features a short story on the UNIT website, a comic book adventure with the Daleks, and a skirmish with the Sontarans. Both also have parts where the Doctor is trapped in an alternate reality (a relived memory last time; this time, a fantasy dreamscape within a crystal ball).

Deeper Thoughts:

Back to the Wilderness - 2 of 3: Back Catalogue Blues. Fate and timing conspired to make my grumbling about Doctor Who's new wilderness years look a bit foolish. Five days after the last blog post was published, replete with such whinges, the BBC only went and put Doctor Who officially out to tender. There was a call for applications from Commissioning on the website, with a deliciously imminent deadline of the 2nd October 2026 for submissions. Even better was the comment included in there that "The contract is for a multi-episodic series (including specials) for transmission in 2028/29, with an option to extend...". It's rare nowadays for a British series to run weekly but cross from one calendar year into another. Therefore, it's likely the plan is for a Christmas special at the end of 2028 and a full series in 2029. If the winner of the tender can keep to that schedule, it would mean new Doctor Who hitting screens only two years later than expected, after the previously announced Christmas Special for 2026 was canned. As mentioned last time, I could not fathom what anyone had hoped to achieve in announcing a Christmas special they seemingly didn't intend to make. Writing this down might have given a jolt to my cognition, perhaps, as I now find I have a realistic analysis. The spotlight on the tendering process in recent weeks has made everyone focus on the question of who will replace Bad Wolf Studios, and that's sidelined the question of who will replace Disney+. At the time when it became public that there would be no budget forthcoming from Disney as streaming distributor outside of the UK, Bad Wolf Studios were still engaged as the production company making Doctor Who for the BBC; Russell T Davies was still the showrunner. Bad Wolf still had what would end up being a hit show in The War Between the Land and the Sea, ready to go. There were also rumours that it might be possible for another streamer to take over.

In October 2025 when the BBC and Bad Wolf announced the stop-gap Christmas special for 2026, there was still presumably a chance that a backer could be found to match, or at least come close to matching, the expired Disney+ investment. To keep that chance alive, and to keep Bad Wolf in the frame as current producers of the show, the announcement was made - Doctor Who was officially continuing. That also explains some of the touchiness that was seen from the Bad Wolf execs whenever it was suggested in that period that Doctor Who was dead (Jane Tranter reacting to some off-hand comments from Rob Shearman - as discussed in the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post - is one example of this). If a deal was in the offing, though, it didn't come to fruition. I'm sure that someone will be found as a non-UK distribution partner for new episodes in future, but they doubtless won't be stumping up the kind of cash that came from the House of Mouse; and, without that sort of money, it wasn't economical for Bad Wolf Studios to make the sort of Doctor Who they were set up to make. Hence, the BBC put the show out for tender and Davies announced he was moving on (again). This might be a complete misreading, I'm aware, but it seems like the only plausible flow of events to me. We might never know for sure, but at least soon we shall have the announcement of the winner of the tender. If I'm right in one point, and there seem to be some indications that I am, that company will likely have the challenge of making Doctor Who on a more restrictive budget than from 2023 to 2025 (which might not be that bad a thing). In the meantime, though, will that reduced budget have any impact beyond any new series?

Rob Shearman's comment, as noted at the time, only referred to the scope for continuing the story of Doctor Who in other media during any hiatus. He felt the end of The Reality War was a cul-de-sac, and there couldn't be an ongoing narrative about the Doctor's adventures in the same way as the Virgin New Adventures novels carried on from Survival, or the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures novels carried on after the TV Movie. Circuit Breaker has shown that there are limited ways to progress things. UNIT Tower and all its characters (including Osgood, and even Andrew Turner if he survives the epic and doesn't turn out to be a traitor) are ripe for continuing adventures. A big UNIT spectacular was, after all, the last thing shown on TV. Kate Lethbridge-Stewart's violent litter patrol is the 21st century equivalent of Ace and the Doctor, or the Eighth Doctor, walking off into their respective metaphorical sunsets. Still, though, it does feel that it's mostly into the back catalogue that content creators will be a-dippin'. Doctor Who Magazine's long-running comic strip, usually a good bellwether, has already said goodbye to Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor. Their first post-Fifteenth strip was - rather cleverly - set between episodes during the early period of The Daleks' Master Plan, tying in to the recent recovery of a couple of its previously lost episodes. The next and latest strip at the time of writing features the popular combo of the Tenth Doctor and Rose. Circuit Breaker also has done its fair share of pilfering from the archives. As well as featuring returning foes in all of its parts, there was also an additional release in August 2026 as part of the epic that I didn't mention above. This was The Black Archive Files Blu-Ray that came out on the final day of the month.

The set comprised a selection of Doctor Who stories from across the show's history that provided background information related to the stories forming Circuit Breaker. It included Fugitive of the Judoon (the story that introduced the Fugitive Doctor) and many stories featuring those different alien foes encountered during the epic. I didn't buy the box set as I own each of these stories already; I'd love to say that I diligently watched each of them from the iplayer in order to get the full Circuit Breaker experience, but life's too short to let one's completionism extend that far. What's most striking about the box set is that it's the only new Doctor Who home video release in four months, and looks to be the only one released during the second half of 2026. The lack of a Collection box set release is rumoured to be related to an online backlash against the impact of using AI tools in picture restoration; if the rumour is true, the next planned season set has been postponed until early 2027 while the team involved reworks things without the use of such tools. The Collection box sets are relatively low budget, though, utilising small expert teams and not requiring too much funding to produce the high standard of value added material that comes with them. The lack of any announcement about animations of missing stories (the last one released was The Savages in March 2025) might be more worrying. Though I don't believe that any Disney+ money ever went into budgets for those animations, their funding has always been a bit more precarious. It could be that if the BBC has less Who budget, it might concentrate on the main show rather than the side projects. This is important as one of the key things that sustained fans through the first wilderness years was getting regular releases of lots of archive stories on VHS. Can we make it through another wilderness period (even if it only lasts two more years) without animations, and with a reduced number box sets? Well, yes, obviously - it's not the end of the world. It would be nicer if we didn't have to, though.

In Summary:

Circuit running...

Saturday, 12 September 2026

Circuit Breaker (June + July 2026)

Chapter the 349th, is a bit of a multimedia event. The first bit, in fact.

Plot:

[Spoiler alert: with our favourite Time Lord having been dematerialised from TV - more whinging about that later - the Circuit Breaker epic is the nearest fans will get to a new season of Doctor Who in 2026; so, if you're planning to experience any part of it, best to do so before you read this.] Petronella Osgood runs UNIT's black archive, aided by her assistant Andrew Turner. One evening, Osgood receives an emergency message from Turner, who is working late alone in the archive. He reports that a Dalek gunstick appeared from nowhere nearby where he was working, crackling with time energy. Soon, other time-displaced objects appear too, all connected to the Doctor's adventures. A mysterious someone appears to be using these to unravel the Doctor's timeline and create a time instability that could destroy the world. Osgood and Turner need to call in the Doctor, but it can only be a Doctor from before the time periods from which the different objects originate. There is only one candidate, the so-called Fugitive Doctor (who they know of from Yasmin Khan's testimony). They both talk to her on a space-time phone and she is persuaded to help. She arrives at UNIT HQ. Armed with the Resistor - a gizmo Turner built to neutralise time energy - she goes on a trial run. Then, on her first mission proper, she returns the Dalek gunstick.

This Doctor, of course, has never heard of the Daleks. The mission takes her to Ancient Greece, and involves the creation of a giant wooden Dalek, or Trojan Dalek if you will. It also involves the unfortunate massacre of a cute bunch of aliens called the Meliki. The Doctor accomplishes the mission and returns to UNIT. Next, the Doctor travels to rural Italy in 1894 to return a Sontaran mace and handcuffs. This time she has Turner in tow to keep an eye on her. They find a lone one of the militaristic Potato Heads running the local criminal brotherhood, wanting to set himself up as mayor. The Doctor stops him from sacrificing a villager (and narrowly avoids being sacrificed herself). The Sontaran, who gets away, appears to be working with a mysterious hooded figure. That figure monitors the Doctor from somewhere on the edge of the solar system. Back at UNIT HQ, another of the time-displaced objects, a memory worm, has started to metamorphosise. When the Doctor handles it, she is transported back in to a memory of her time working for the Division, dealing with a doomsday weapon, some Sontarans and a bunch of Cybermen. Through all these adventures, there is friction between the Doctor and her two UNIT handlers when she doesn't behave as they expect the Doctor should do.

To be continued...

Context:

I have decided to experience each and every part of the extended universe epic that is Circuit Breaker. If Doctor Who was on television in 2026 it no doubt wouldn't have occurred to me to do such a thing, let alone to post about it in chunks on the blog. Well, maybe. My entering a longer than originally anticipated period of uncertainty about when (if?) Doctor Who would return to TV was a factor, but it wasn't the only one. Long-term readers of the blog will have picked up a sizeable amount of skepticism at the time from me about Time Lord Victorious (2020), and Doom's Day (2023). Those previous two attempts to create one overarching story composed of multiple different tie-in tales (audios, novels, comics, etc.) had significant flaws regarding their appeal. Circuit Breaker has learned from those attempts and improved things. Time Lord Victorious was just too sprawling to fully grasp, let alone enjoy. Doom's Day simplified things by using the Aristotelian unity of time. The story featured a continuous 24 hours of a character's experience, with each part comprising one or more of those hours. The main issue, though, was the protagonist was an all-new character in which fans had minimal emotional engagement. For Circuit Breaker, two of the main characters are both existing fan favourites. One, Osgood, is a fairly known quantity. The other, though, is the Fugitive Doctor as played by Jo Martin, a character ripe for exploration. Getting to know this character a little better was a sufficient extra draw for me to put aside my previous skepticism.

It also helps that the format has been simplified even more - Circuit Breaker is a simple peripatetic quest narrative. In fact, it's the same idea as the Key to Time season (Doctor Who's first attempt at creating one overarching story composed of multiple self-contained parts, in a Tom Baker series of the late 1970s), but in reverse. In each of Baker's stories, an object needed to be be taken from a different planet to form part of a mysterious source of power. In Circuit Breaker, various objects must be returned to the planets they originated from in order to stop them forming part of a mysterious source of power. The first four stories of the epic were released in the summer of 2026. A short story, Calling the Doctor, became available for free on the official UNIT website on the 25th June. It was then followed by three other stories in July, all of them requiring one to put one's hand in one's pocket. Titan Comics published Adversary of the Daleks on the 8th, Panini gave away comic The Honourable Society alongside issue 632 of Doctor Who Magazine on the 23rd, and BBC Audio released The Deadliest Weapon on the 30th of the month. I re-read or re-listened to each of them in order early in August, after acquiring them in slightly the wrong sequence (see First Time Round section below). I also read the pretend messages between Osgood and Turner on the UNIT website's homepage (or, as it is styled, Inbox) that provide fun connective tissue between the adventures proper, and a useful way to keep up with the overall plot if you're not buying every part.

First Time Round:

I usually cover stories in random order here, but Circuit Breaker will be done serially. Each part of the epic stands alone, but many are too slight to cover individually. If I was having to batch them up (covering a month's worth of releases per post will, I believe, allow me to do them justice) shuffling them into random batches seemed just a bit too silly. I did obtain these first few parts in slightly the wrong order, though, retaining some of the blog's usual chaos. The first part, the scene-setting Calling The Doctor by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson, I read second. The first I read was the third one published, The Honourable Society (story by Jason Quinn, art by Anthony Williams). I subscribe to Doctor Who Magazine, so obtaining that part was frictionless: it literally fell into my lap as I emptied the delivery envelope. It was only on reading it that I decided to experience and blog each and every part of Circuit Breaker, and so went back to the beginning. Titan Comics were ultimately going to contribute two comic books to Circuit Breaker, and I didn't want to pay Forbidden Planet two postage and packing fees; as such, I waited a short while until early August when Titan released their second contribution and ordered that together with Adversary of the Daleks (story by Dan Watters and Dulce Montoya, art by Roberta Ingranata). By then, I had already downloaded The Deadliest Weapon (by Steve Lyons) using a spare credit on Audible. This meant that I got them in the order 3, 1, 4, 2, which is one way to represent Pi. That feels somewhat appropriate for an epic with the circular title of Circuit Breaker. Or maybe I just need to get out more.

Reaction:

As mentioned above, one strength of Circuit Breaker as a whole is that those planning and collating its different parts have kept the overall structure into which those parts fit as simple as possible. This probably has a slightly negative impact on some of the early parts in and of themselves, though. The scene-setting Calling the Doctor is nothing but a prologue, though it's nicely epistolary, comprising a collection of emails and transcripts of conversations between the key players at UNIT and the Fugitive Doctor. There's also a tiny bit of puzzle-solving required, with some hidden words to which the reader needs to pay attention. It ends without that much having happened, though. The comic books Adversary of the Daleks and The Honourable Society need to establish the structural conceit. So, they both involve the Doctor arriving somewhere, getting into a bit of bother with aliens, sorting that out (in a way that's a little too callous compared to the Doctor that we're used to) and replacing a time-displaced object. Given that these two were not going to deviate from that pattern, it might have been better to make sure they differed in the more superficial elements of window dressing (as in the usual trick of Doctor Who on television, following up an episode set in the past with one in the future, and so on). Alas, both stories involve travelling to a European country in historical times (Ancient Greece, 19th Century Italy) to find a lone member of a top tier Doctor Who monster race (Dalek, Sontaran) who is bullying the locals, and then confronting and defeating them.

It's not to say these parts don't have their moments, probably best amongst them is the Fugitive Doctor responding "What the heck is a Dalek?" near the start of Adversary, and then having her first conversation with a Dalek, oblivious of its nature. I also have to reserve a small percentage of my judgement given that I don't know how things will fully pan out (the final parts of the epic have not been released at the time of writing); for all I know, any small moment in any of these parts might turn out to be an essential set-up for the finale. The only moments that felt like that were the brief scenes included in each of the latter three of these first four parts of the mysterious figure spying on the Doctor from afar. Who is this Machiavellian manipulator? No, really, that's not rhetorical: I don't have a Scooby as at this current moment. As well as the plot easter egg arc elements, there's also an emotional through-line. Osgood and Turner are continually shocked at the Doctor's behaviour, expecting her to be more like the type of Doctor she will one day turn out to be. She in turn bristles at being so defined and confined. There's a hint, though, that she is turning gradually into something of a hero as the epic progresses. This feels as if it will be the most rewarding part of this epic, developing the Fugitive Doctor's character while no doubt retaining her cranky, sassy no-nonsense exterior. In these first few parts, there are only baby steps along that route, so it will be interesting to see how it continues in the later parts.

Only The Deadliest Weapon, fourth and final part of this first batch, gets to do something different and a bit more in depth. Because of an interaction with a memory worm, the Doctor gets to re-experience an adventure with Cybermen that she had before she became a fugitive. This is the Doctor when she was involved in a shady mission for the mysterious Division; hearing of this, we get to understand something of her buried trauma from those days. Meanwhile, Osgood tries to break through from the real world to snap her out of it, and this establishes a somewhat deeper relationship between the two of them. The story is also lifted by a great reading of the audiobook text by Jo Martin. The comics have great artwork and capture good likenesses, and the budget for the epic has stretched to a new set of photographs featuring the three principal cast of the epic with new costumes and props. But nothing beats performances, and Martin effortlessly breathes life into almost all of the guest characters (the Cyber Leader is the one exception, voiced as it is by 1980s who stalwart David Banks), making each distinct. It doesn't hurt either that there is a clever, timey-wimey plot reversal towards the end of the story. The initial set-up parts aside from The Deadliest Weapon don't really have room for plot reversals. In summary then, this first batch is a tasty enough set of hor d'ourves, but it would be nice to have something more substantial soon.

Connectivity:

Like the TV movie's 4K restoration, this first batch of Circuit Breaker features the Daleks; also, both tangentially feature the Cybermen (okay very tangentially in the TV movie's case, they are referenced with a bag of gold dust; in The Deadliest Weapon, they are just a memory from an old adventure). Circuit Breaker also features a mysterious figure manipulating events and observing the Fugitive Doctor from afar; that person could be the Master potentially. Though that would be a bit too obvious, I'd have thought.

Deeper Thoughts:

Back to the Wilderness - 1 of 3: Lost in the Dark Dimension. The BBC have announced that they aren't making any new series of Doctor Who imminently, but have assured fans that it still has a future with the corporation. The show will be back following a break, though nobody is willing to estimate how long that break might be. The Beeb are seeking an independent production company to make the show with them, and already some contenders for such a partnership have made their interest public. Okay. Please do me a small favour: read those sentences back and tell me whether I'm writing about 2026 or 1990? The similarities are so striking that - even though the circumstances aren't precisely the same - I hope we long-term fans can be forgiven for a certain amount of pessimism. After the final series of Doctor Who's original run finished in 1989, the situation was as outlined above, and yet it took sixteen more years before another series of the programme aired. This was despite much interest in making such a series being expressed by various parties through the early 1990s and then throughout the period that afterward has become known as the Wilderness Years. The phrase used in 2026 for seeking co-production partners for the series "put out to tender" is just a little too much like "put out to pasture" for comfort. Every fan of a certain age or certain outlook is united in believing we have now entered the Wilderness Years Mark 2 (or 3, depending on your numbering protocol, i.e. whether you think the blip that was the single Doctor Who story broadcast during the period held the wilderness at bay sufficiently to start a new epoch).

Looking back, perhaps it was a bad omen in March 2026 when the end became nigh for what previously seemed an unassailable edifice to Doctor Who's glory years, one that only months before had seemed to me to be something that would always be around (see the Deeper Thoughts of this blog post for more details). Once such a totem as Ianto's Shrine is destroyed, anything can happen. You may say I'm a doomsayer, but I'm not the only one. Doctor Who writer and performer Mark Gatiss was interviewed in August 2026 and was quoted as saying "We've been here before", drawing similar parallels to 36 years ago. He suggested the show is probably due a long break, such that the next showrunner can be someone "who grew up with David Tennant as the Doctor, rather than Tom Baker". I don't know if he's speaking here as an industry insider or a superfan, probably a bit of a both. I suspect that however much he says he's okay with the situation, his inner superfan is desperately wanting to be proved wrong, searching for any significant factor that's different in 2026 from how things were in 1990. There's the commissioned Cbeebies series that Blue Zoo are working on, which - if delivered - would be a sure sign of commitment to the franchise. Never mind pre-school animations, the first Wilderness Years saw a production company (variously called Daltenreys, Coast to Coast and Greenlight Productions) working on a blockbuster Doctor Who movie. That was never delivered, and the same fate could befall Blue Zoo's effort. Even the announced and then cancelled 2026 Christmas Special echoes the 30th anniversary special The Dark Dimension. This planned straight-to-video opus got many column inches in news-hungry 1993 before being canned. At least it had some kind of storyline before that happened, though, which is more than one can say for its 21st century counterpart.

Since the BBC's announcement about the future of Doctor Who in June, I have tried and failed to fathom what anyone hoped to achieve in announcing a Christmas special they seemingly didn't intend to make. Russell T Davies, in his Instagram post following up that June press release, said they had "cooked that up to guarantee a future when no one knew what would happen, but now we do know, there’s no need for it". But it guaranteed nothing, and neither did the June announcement. The only possible outcome was getting people's hopes up. The October 2025 announcement gave everyone a source of optimism that would only ever last if what was promised actually materialised. That's what happens when you make statements of intent and then backtrack a few months later. And if they can do that for a special, they can do the same for a series. It's extra annoying as it means we cannot move on (even for only an hour) from the weird Billie Piper cameo ending of the last broadcast Who episode. Having something a bit more open and less WTF might have better allowed Big Finish and Doctor Who Magazine and Titan Comics and all the rest to extrapolate into new extended universe offerings. As it is, they can only look backward. This doesn't mean it can't be interesting, of course. One of the only key differences between now and then is embodied in the Circuit Breaker epic: so many licensees producing new Doctor Who content in a coordinated and professional way. There was no 1990 equivalent (one can only imagine what would have been produced by Target books, BBC Video, Marvel and Dapol working together back then, but it wasn't a realistic prospect). So, as it's all we've got, bring on the next part of the epic. May it shine a light for us through this new wilderness...

In Summary:

Circuit activated...