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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
