Doctor Who: Redacted (series 1)

Chapter the 331st, features the adventures of three people who podcast about the Doctor.

Plot:

Three friends, Cleo, Abby and Shawna, host a podcast about a mysterious blue box, and all the various conspiracies that surround it (diet pills that create alien fat babies, hospitals disappearing and ending up on the moon, statues of angels that move when you're not looking at them, etc.). Abby is the Mulder-style believer, who puts this all down to alien activity. Shawna is the cynic who would rather assume they are man-made conspiracies. Cleo is the joker, just there to bring the sass (but underneath is fiercely loyal and brave). Some of their fellow bloggers and podcasters are disappearing, and files are being corrupted. The trio interview some key figures in the history of the blue box like Rani Chandra, as well as [Redacted] and [Redacted]. After talking to the trio, though, these people go missing, and then Abby and Shawna forget they ever existed. Some people they talk to mention a woman associated with the box called the Doctor, but again after a while only Cleo is able to retain knowledge of a person of that name. The three are arrested by UNIT, interrogated and meet [Redacted] and [Redacted]. Abby decides to help UNIT, much to the other two's chagrin. They leave her and come into contact with [Redacted]. More and more people are disappearing and being replaced by ghosts, redacted from existence. UNIT manage to rig up a device to keep the ghosts at bay, and Abby is reunited with her two friends at the Powell Estate (where Cleo grew up). When Cleo is the only one left not to have been turned into a ghost, she sees the blue box arrive, and meets the Doctor. An intergalactic thought virus has been spreading throughout humankind. Cleo was immune as her psyche had blocked out a traumatic childhood memory of the Doctor after a previous encounter, which inoculated her. Together, she and the Doctor reverse the virus and return everyone to normal.

Context:

I recently had a conversation with a Doctor Who fan of my acquaintance (and he's no slouch, he's had books published and does a Doctor Who podcast, and that sort of thing) and he surprised me by telling me that there are still Doctor Who stories he has not seen. He's holding them back, saving them for a rainy day. I long ago used up all the classic stories, and have kept up to date with the new series stories. So, everything Who-related that I view for the blog is a rewatch, days, months or years after first having seen the story in question. After the conversation, I took the challenge of finding my own 'rainy day Who', and remembered this BBC Sounds spin-off series. I would watch the first of the two series, leaving the second for that future rainy day's listening. But would it pass muster with my usual rigorous canon-checker questionnaire? Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. With a full house of correct answers, I started my listening. The first series of Redacted is fairly long, 10 episodes of between 20 and 30 minutes duration, and took me a good couple of weeks of June 2025 to finish, listening to an episode every day or two.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. When not going off piste with spin-offs like Redacted, I have completed 11 Doctors' televisual eras, Doctors 1-4, 7-9 and 11-14, which entailed completing 37 out of the 41 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

As mentioned above, this is my first time listening to Redacted. I do remember it being advertised online when it first became available, though. The first episode landed on the Sunday of the Easter weekend 2022, the same day that Legend of the Sea Devils was shown (and the same day I was writing it up frantically for the blog). I don't know why I didn't listen to it straight away, but probably I had too much in the 'to watch / listen' pile already at the time to commit to another long-running series. I always planned to get around to it sooner or later so I'm glad I've finally done so now.

Reaction:

As you'll see in the Deeper Thoughts section, I have not kept to my personal pledge to stay away from online news about Doctor Who. As such, I have further polluted my psyche with headlines like "Doctor Who Collapse: Woke Fans Join the Backlash", "Woke Doctor Who loses millions of viewers" and "Doctor Who’s ‘woke, boring rubbish’ storylines have caused staggering number of fans to turn off". I was momentarily amused by one site that had asked a surprisingly even-handed Mel Gibson to weigh in on the issue (reader, when I adjusted my glasses it turned out they were Millie Gibson's comments). Presumably the articles do represent some people's honestly held views. In all my many conversations IRL about Doctor Who, though, nobody's ever complained about it being too woke (however that's defined). It's usually positive (I was wearing my Van Gogh exploding TARDIS T-shirt on the tube the other day and a few young fans got talking to me about how much they enjoyed The Well); if there's any negatives it's usually about plot points or continuity. Nobody likes being preached at, of course, but I don't think Doctor Who does that too often. To pick a random example (but one that did create some annoyed articles at the time), 2025 season opener The Robot Revolution depicted a male character that was excessively controlling of his female partner. It gave that as a reason why the partner character stopped going out with him. Part of the story is some sci-fi shenanigans associated with this broken relationship being played out on a cosmic scale. The story never so much as hinted that all men are like the character, and didn't even paint him as a wholly bad person. Where is the room for anyone to feel targeted? If anything, it's too far the other way: he is presented in such a cartoonish way that nobody watching could possibly associate themselves with him, letting many off the hook.

The Burger King Kids' Club - selling burgers

It's not for me to dictate when people can take offence, of course. If people want to take offence about a negative representation, then they are of course free to do so. But what about taking offence at a positive representation? This gets a bit more tricky. As a BBC Sounds offering, Redacted was probably a little too niche to draw much attention. The Star Beast, though, the first 60th special in the year following Redacted series 1's broadcast, garnered 144 complaints from members of the public just because it, like Redacted, featured a trans character. That's not that many people, but it boggles my mind that even 144 people went to the effort to call in or use an online form to register their disgust that trans people exist and are being represented. What motivates anyone to do something like that? Stories are about people, and to be interesting they must be about a diverse range of people. Cleo Proctor, the protagonist of Redacted, is a great character, full stop - funny, dynamic and brave. That she's representative of a previously underrepresented group of people, some of whom would very likely be listening to the drama, is just a bonus. A cynic could see this as tokenistic. The band of heroes from UNIT and the TARDIS seen in Wish World and The Reality War thrillingly contains men and women, the young and the old, people of colour, cis and trans, queer and straight, and a wheelchair user. Someone tuning in that's not massively invested in the story might see this as the shallow box-ticking inclusivity of something like the Burger King Kids Club. But these characters don't exist to sell burgers, they exist to represent humanity versus the baddies. Besides, they're all great characters, as are the heroes of Redacted. Unlike the perhaps over-staffed UNIT of 2025, the three characters at the heart of the audio drama (who do form something of a cross section of LGBTQ+ women, one lesbian, one bisexual and one trans woman) all have a lot to do in the story.

The Doctor and friends - saving the world.

Head writer Juno Dawson and the other writers create a series that's a celebration of new Who. It was an obvious joke in the synopsis above to redact the names of some of the characters cameoing from Who's history, but I also did it for anyone who might be reading this and hasn't listened to Redacted yet: it would be much better to not know and be surprised by who shows up. Another cameo throughout the first nine episodes is Jodie Whittaker, occasionally leaving a voice message that gets scrubbed out by the burst of white noise that represents redaction. She is fully present for the final episode, with Cleo in the companion role. The revelation that Cleo has blocked out a traumatic memory from her childhood involving the death of a parent during a visitation of the David Tennant Doctor is exactly the same as a reveal in 2000s story Love & Monsters; it's so close a match that I'm chalking it up to homage rather than rip off. That the event in question is the "Red hatching" with Redacted building a backstory from a throwaway line from another 2000s Tennant story Blink backs that up. The use of our heroes' podcast recordings at the end as part of the plot resolution is a nice touch too. The only flaw - and it isn't that minor - is that 10 episodes is too long. After the first couple of episodes, the idea that people who have had any contact with the Doctor are gradually being erased is well understood by the audience, but it keeps happening for several more episodes, hammering the point home in a quite repetitive fashion. The beat where the trio are at their lowest ebb and split up acrimoniously seems to happen at least three times too. At the end, there's a step over the line into the overly preachy, comparing the impact of the redacting virus to online misinformation; mind you, a warning about steering clear of dodgy online content was one I could have done with, I suppose (see Deeper Thoughts for even more details).

Connectivity:

Both Redacted and Death of the Doctor feature a long section at the start where the Doctor is missing presumed dead, an appearance by Rani Chandra, and dubious behaviour by UNIT personnel.

Deeper Thoughts:

Out of the mouths of Beebies. Doctor Who has gone on hiatus three times before 2025. In 1985, it came back in 18 months; in 1989, it was back in seven years; in 1996, it took nine years. But it always came back. June 2025 is the first time since the return of 2005 that the programme is off the air without any commission in place for new episodes. This is similar to the situation of the latter two 21st century scenarios and so, just as it did in 1990 and 1997, speculation reigns. Unlike in the 1990s, though, this speculation is supercharged by website proliferation and social media. In the Deeper Thoughts section of the previous blog post I stated that this pause would be my opportunity to stop regularly googling 'Doctor Who' and looking at news articles. This turned out to be another prediction I made about Who that was wide of the mark. At the start of the year I speculated here that there would be a Christmas special aired in 2025, and that seems unlikely based on everything currently known. There is almost nothing that is currently known, though, so anything is possible. In this spirit, every news and entertainment site, both the big names and the smaller players, has indulged in flights of fancy based on almost nothing, and I haven't been able to resist reading them all. It is very like scouring fanzines in 1990 and messageboards in 1997, only more so. Doctor Who has no defined future, so it has any and every possible future. For example, recent rumours stated that the BBC were in discussions with Amazon, and that J. Michael Straczynski was involved (he apparently then posted in a reddit chat calling bullshit on all of this). Even the recent Doctor Who Magazine had no actual news about what was happening, and said as much (such were the restrictions of access to the finale, the magazine team were unaware of what happened at the end of The Reality War until it went out).

This didn't stop people reading meaning into the slightest mention or hint in the magazine's pages, though. Russell T Davies finished off his regular production notes column with a goodbye, his rationale being that a column about production of Doctor Who shouldn't be continuing when the production of Doctor Who was on hold. Many people immediately took this as a sign that he was no longer going to be running the show henceforth, and that there would be a long gap before the next series. It didn't really indicate either. The exact words he used were "Hopefully, we'll have news soon, and certainly, The War Between the Land and the Sea is about to break out, so there are great things ahead. Until then...". This suggests that the wait for that spin-off will not be too lengthy; indeed, elsewhere in the magazine it's confirmed it will be "broadcast on BBC One, BBC iPlayer and Disney+ later this year". Everybody else is doing it, so I too am going to speculate and risk seeing patterns in things that aren't there: the scheduling of TWBTLATS (using this initialism makes me wonder whether the show was ever titled The War Against the Sea at any point in development before someone realised that made a rude acronym) suggests to me that the Disney+ deal is dead, and they won't be contributing to any future episodes after the spin-off. If there were any chance that would happen, the spin-off would be held back to better bridge the gap between seasons. Showing it this year fits with getting the last Disney+ co-commissioned material out of the way to create a clean slate for a new production partner. It would also explain why no official announcement has been made yet: Disney will want to give the series they've paid for the best possible chance to bring in viewers / subscribers, so won't risk it being labelled a last hurrah (or lame duck) before it's been shown.

The one honest-to-goodness fact that has been reported about Doctor Who since the broadcast of The Reality War is a very positive sign, but certainly not one anyone predicted. Not even the most imaginative speculator nor the most informed 'insider' ever reported before the official announcement that Doctor Who was going to be made into an animated series for pre-schoolers on CBeebies. Whether or not you'll be planning to watch it should it get made (I am a completist, so will have to give it a viewing, even though my kids are far too old for it now), this has to be good news. Broadcasters don't tend to make pre-school spin-off versions of an intellectual property if they're not planning on continuing the main show. The Beeb, if not Disney, must have been happy enough with the last two years' performance. It doesn't mean that either the animation or further seasons of the main show will happen, of course - anyone watching the Who news closely from 1990 or 1997 saw many an article about projects in development that never got to a screen - but it indicates a strong motivation for the Whoniverse to endure. Some reporting on the press release and call for pitches mentioned that this series would have nothing to do with Disney+, though I haven't found an official source for that anywhere. If it's true, then it 100% would mean that the Disney+ deal was over: the House of Mouse's lawyers would almost certainly have drafted contracts such that the BBC couldn't make any spin-off of new Who without their go-ahead. If the BBC are proceeding with the Cbeebies show without Disney+ involvement, it suggests that any new Who of any kind will be made without Disney+ involvement. That would indicate that the popular general belief that the BBC is already shopping Who around other streamers is correct; we'll find out when we find out. I'm going to try to resist peeking at the internet until then...

In Summary:

It's another very enjoyable story that works as a celebration of all things Who, though it could do with being two episodes shorter. 

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Death of the Doctor

Chapter the 330th, in which Doctor Who appears to be dead, but returns before you know it (let's hope life imitates art).

Plot:

Sarah Jane, Clyde and Rani are invited to the funeral of the Doctor, held in a UNIT base within Mount Snowdon. Sarah Jane does not believe the Doctor is dead, which the others put down to denial. Another old friend of the Doctor, Jo Jones, attends with her grandson Santiago. She also doesn't believe the Doctor is dead. The funeral is arranged by the Shansheeth, an alien race that look a bit like vultures who act as undertakers across the galaxy. Clyde's body keeps crackling with energy that he absorbed from the TARDIS when he last met the Doctor: suddenly, he changes into Matt Smith. The Doctor has been stranded without the TARDIS on a planet, but has constructed a gizmo to let him switch places with Clyde temporarily. He takes Sarah Jane and Jo with him when he goes back to the planet, and they help him to cross back permanently. The Shansheeth and UNIT Colonel Karim conspired to strand the Doctor and steal his TARDIS, but they don't have the key. They capture Sarah Jane and Jo and wire them up to a device that will create a new key from their memories. The Doctor, the kids and a Groske that works for UNIT are trapped outside of the room when this is happening. Through the door, the Doctor encourages his two ex-companions to remember everything of their adventures. This overloads the machine. It explodes, killing the villains.

Context:

I gave this spin-off a pre-screening screening by asking the usual set of questions. Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes (it did end up being an extra on the Blu-ray collection season 10 box set disc, from where I viewed it this time, but it wasn't created to be so). Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. A full house of correct answers means that the story adheres to the - somewhat arbitrary, I grant you - rules of suitability for inclusion in this blog. I watched the episodes one a day on the last two days of May 2025.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. When not going off piste with stories like Death of the Doctor, I have completed 11 Doctor's televisual eras, Doctors 1-4, 7-9 and 11-14, which entailed completing 37 out of the 41 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

I can't remember the details, but I remember the feels. I watched this when it was first shown in October 2010, probably from a recording on the PVR later on each of the days of transmission. I was probably accompanied by the Better Half, but not by either of our only two children at the time as they were still a little too young. I enjoyed it immensely, as I did again on this recent watch, and for the same reasons: it's fun, well paced and celebratory. Whisper it, but it was probably the most enjoyable Matt Smith story of 2010 for me (I'm not as keen on Matt Smith's first season as many are).

Reaction:

What a difference a year makes. Death of the Doctor is a loose 2010 sequel to the last Sarah Jane Adventures story that featured a guest appearance from the Doctor in 2009. In that instance, as I mentioned when I blogged it in January 2025, the story scaffolding surrounding the guest casting was pretty flimsy. Just having David Tennant appear seemed enough, without having to construct a strong story in which he could feature. The writer of Death of the Doctor Russell T Davies puts a lot more into this and it's therefore much more rewarding to watch. The masterstroke is to have another guest star appear as well as Matt Smith. This is Katy Manning as Jo Jones née Grant, another companion from the same era as Sarah Jane. Manning gives every scene she's in a lift; Lis Sladen is very good within a narrow range, and can do the dynamic moments, but she's not so good at emotion. Manning can handle the emotional moments perfectly: witness the scene where she asks the Doctor why he never came back to see her again. This then leads into a wonderful revelation that Tennant's pre-regeneration victory lap towards the end of his last episode, where he visited lots of new series companions - which would have been relatively fresh in the audience's memory after its original broadcast on the 1st January of 2010 - extended to his catching up with every one of his companions. Obviously, on one level it's fanwank, but it's also lovely. The little moments talking about other companions (Liz Shaw working on a moonbase, Ian and Barbara having got married, Ace setting up her own charity, etc.) are also great. The story then climaxes with loads and loads of archive clips. What more could one ask for? Davies might never have written for the Doctor again after this story, and he clearly wants it to be a celebration of Doctor Who and the Doctor's positive impact on people.

Matt Smith gets some great gags, but also some more melancholy material like the line about regeneration "It always hurts" that he almost throws away, making it all the more powerful by doing so. The younger regulars are their usual good value. You could lift the Santiago Jones character out of proceedings and not impact the plot one jot, but it's great to have Rani and Clyde with their own sort-of companion, comparing their adventures with his life supporting family members in environmental protesting. Rani and Clyde have the benefit of always going back home after their escapades to normality and safety (a metaphor perhaps for the enjoyable but safe escapism of Doctor Who and associated Whoniverse shows). There's even time for the script to say a few simple but nonetheless true things about grief and loss. There's fun villains and monsters to provide some salt and avoid things becoming too saccharine. The Groske, friendly aliens who look like nastier cousins that the Bannerman Road gang have encountered before, are also pretty superfluous to proceedings; they do, though, provide a few nice moments of comic relief that it would be a shame to lose. For example, there's the sequence where a Groske encourages Rani, Clyde and Santiago to hurry along to its hidden sanctuary, only to reveal that it has no plan beyond hiding, and just wanted to hurry so its pizza wouldn't go cold. Laila Rouass has a lot of fun playing a UNIT officer gone rogue, tempted with the chance to leave Earth behind. The sneering delivery of her put-downs directed at Sarah Jane ("Frankly, I've never met anyone so staggeringly pious in all my life") are worth the price of admission on their own.

The Shansheeth are also a fun enemy race, if a little bit too Jim Henson in their look to be truly scary. Their motivation, though, is nicely original; tired of the ravages of mortality witnessed in their work as space undertakers, they want to prevent death in the universe. Davies mentioned in the commentary for the story that the Shansheeth's nefarious plan to nab the TARDIS broke his rule that the Doctor's time machine should never be the antagonists' prize (drawing attention to the power of the TARDIS too much would invite audiences to wonder why the villain every week didn't abandon whatever plan they had on hearing about it, as it would be more valuable than anything they'd previously had in their sights). It does help to up the ante at the end, though. The effects work to visualise a base in Mount Snowdon and a rocket ready for blast off are pretty good for the minimal budget of a CBBC show. There's great voice work from Jon Glover and David Bradley as the Shansheeth (the latter would be invited back a few times to appear in person in the main show). There's lots of fun continuity references for those that like that sort of thing (Jo mentions Karfel, tying up a loose end of continuity from the Sixth Doctor story Timelash, which sees the Doctor return to a planet that he'd previously visited with Jo in an unseen Jon Pertwee adventure). Beyond all of that, this is the story that depicts the first ever meeting of Sarah Jane and Jo Grant, and for that it gains special status and should always have a place in fans' hearts.

Connectivity:

Both Death of the Doctor and The Story and the Engine feature the Doctor as played by Matt Smith (he's in a blink and you'd miss it clip in the Ncuti Gatwa tale). Both stories involve the antagonists trapping the Doctor in another time- and space-zone away from other characters, but in both his companion(s) eventually join him to help him escape the trap. In a reasonably sizeable coincidence - Doctor Who doesn't do such a thing that often -  both stories climax with a sequence featuring lots of clips of Doctor Who representing the memories of characters being used to overload a machine.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Story is the Engine: Anniversaries and Endings - 2. [Spoilers follow for the end of Ncuti Gatwa's second season - don't read unless you've watched The Reality War.] In the first part of this musing in the Deeper Thoughts section of the previous blog post, I talked about blogging all remaining classic and new series stories before the end of year; but, of course, anything could happen between now and the end of the year. The world could end. There might suddenly and unexpectedly be so many new Doctor Who stories created and broadcast on TV in late 2025 that I couldn't possibly write them all up before the 31st December (sadly, the world ending seems more likely as things stand). As mentioned above, when Russell T Davies wrote Death of the Doctor it probably seemed to him that he was writing for the Doctor for the very last time. In the end, that didn't turn out to be the case. As I write this in early June 2025, in the twentieth anniversary year of the new series launch, the time has come again when Davies may have reached the end of his time writing for the Doctor. All is uncertainty as we wait for news. Stories are a tool that humans have created to help them deal with the uncertainties of the world. It therefore feels a little unfair that Doctor Who fans' favourite coping mechanism has been taken away, just as the world for us has got just a little bit less good. We've been lucky up to now, though: through those twenty years, there's never before been a period when a Doctor Who season ended before the next one had been commissioned (and usually had started production). We now have that situation, and don't know exactly how long it will endure. Things could change before these words are even read. After I publish, Disney+ could confirm funding for another season the next day, the next week, the next month. The smart money (with the caveat that there is no smart way to make such a prediction) is on it taking longer than that, though: to my mind, this explains decisions taken with The Reality War's ending.

There are two facts that are certain. First, Ncuti Gatwa decided to move on from the role of the Doctor. Second, Disney+ had not made a decision about continuing to fund the series - and therefore it was not known exactly how the series would continue - before Gatwa's last episode was due to be broadcast. We don't know exactly when the decision about Gatwa's departure took place. A large amount of material towards the end of The Reality War looks to be constructed around his self-sacrifice. Too much to have been created with hasty pick-up shots? Maybe. My feeling is that he probably would have done a third year if Disney+ had not prevaricated, but we'll probably never know for sure. However it came about, the situation created a challenge for Davies in the writing of the final seconds of The Reality War. Ncuti has to be seen to regenerate, or else he'll still be associated with the role while trying to make a name for himself with other work. This would probably be true even if the regeneration was seen to start but not finish: it would leave open the possibility that he could continue (as David Tennant did after seeming to regenerate at the end of The Stolen Earth, for example). Someone brand new couldn't appear at the end without the guarantee of future work, for the same reason of unfair association with and responsibility for the show. So, it had to be someone already associated with the show in a big enough capacity that further association would not hurt the brand, and successful enough in their own right that the association wouldn't hurt their career. Any of the actors who'd played the Doctor before could have been candidates, but unfortunately Davies had already pulled that trick when David Tennant took over from Jodie Whittaker in 2023. It therefore would have to be a companion actor.

Of the small number of candidates that fit the bill, the ones with a previous working relationship with Davies probably boiled down to two, Catherine Tate and Billie Piper. As Tate had already returned in 2023 too, there was only really one choice. This doesn't mean it's not genius, though: Piper's presence harks back to the relaunch, when she was arguably the most crucial cast member of the first two years of the new series. The credits of The Reality War and the BBC's press release are careful never to refer to Piper as playing the Doctor. This leaves Davies's (or someone else's?) options open for when (if?) things resume. A quick decision on the future of Doctor Who could just about make a Christmas special for December 25th 2025 a possibility; what's more likely is a special or specials in 2026, with Piper handing over to someone else to do a series in 2027. Or it could be the end of Doctor Who altogether. It would be a shame as there are lots of ends left deliberately loose still to be tied up (who exactly is "the Boss"?) and scripts have been written for the next season and beyond. Also, the last ever image of Doctor Who being Ncuti Gatwa turning into Billie Piper is not as fitting as the Doctor and Ace walking off into the sunset (which served as the final image from 1989 to 1996). It certainly feels like there's confidence that the wait won't be too long (but then, one might have thought that about a newly regenerated Paul McGann flying his TARDIS off to adventures new, which served as the final image from 1996 to 2005). We'll have to wait and see (just as we did, for quite lengthy periods after 1989 and 1996). If news does come, I might miss it, at least for a while. I went into my viewing of The Reality War knowing the rumours about Ncuti leaving and regenerating into Piper, and it would have been much better not to have known.

As I've mentioned on the blog before, I don't engage with any social media any more, and I get all my news (except Doctor Who news) offline. I'm much happier for doing this, and I would recommend the approach to anyone. The fear of missing out, though, tempts me to regularly google 'Doctor Who' and look at news articles. I'm going to stop that too now. With no stories being made I'm not likely to see any spoilers, but there are other dangers. Stories are ways to help us manage the uncertainty of life, but there's a different and uglier type of storytelling too. Whether just for clicks (negative stories attracting more attention), or as a stick with which certain other media outlets can beat the BBC, or because of a more general anti-woke agenda, whatever that means exactly, a narrative is already being pushed that Ncuti Gatwa's time as the Doctor was a "flop" with "plummeting" ratings. I'd just like to use a few words here to show how that's complete bollocks. The average consolidated 7-day ratings figure for the first six episodes of the second Gatwa season is 3.18 million viewers. This is a slight drop on the average for last year's season of 3.71 million, but it's a very small drop (not a plummet or a "nosedive"). It's likely that when the final two stories' figures are included, the drop will be even smaller, possibly non-existent. The figure of 3.71 is down on the average figure for Jodie Whittaker's last season too, but then almost every year since 2005 has seen Doctor Who's average ratings go down compared to the previous year. The only exceptions were David Tennant's final season and Jodie Whittaker's first, the averages for both of which were buoyed up by a single outlier rating, because an aspect of that episode snagged on to the public's curiosity (what's the first female Doctor going to be like, and is Tennant going to regenerate earlier than we thought?).

This year-on-year decline is no surprise as it's happened across the board to all other programmes too. As such, Doctor Who is holding its own, particularly when one considers that each episode is usually available to stream before it is broadcast on TV, meaning that overnight and even 7-day figures will never give the whole picture. As was seen with the bump in viewing figures for the 2025 Eurovision-themed episode - which formed part of a live viewing experience with the contest itself for those at home making a night of it - people will tune in live when there's a hook (this is also borne out for special episodes, which tend to perform better than episodes that form part of seasons, and always have). If people aren't motivated to watch live, they will still catch up with the story at some point, Doctor Who episodes on the iplayer have a 'long tail'. Isn't the point of the streaming age that people can watch whenever they want? I'm sure there will be many people who held off from watching any of the season until it was complete, so they could binge it as a box set. I will not be sorry to miss tabloid newspapers misreporting such statistics, and then assigning spurious explanations tied to their own agenda. None of this means that Doctor Who will necessarily come back to TV anytime soon, of course. If I'm disciplined and stick to avoiding any online Who news, the next I know about the future of Doctor Who will be in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine. For example, it will be interesting to see whether Billie Piper starts to appear in the magazine's comic strip, or whether they stick with Ncuti, or indeed do something different altogether. There will still be Big Finish audios too, of course, and probably some more original novels as well. What did I foolishly say earlier about losing our coping mechanism? You don't get rid of Doctor Who stories so easily: they'll likely run and run - and be a force of positivity, unlike some other stories out there - forever.

In Summary:

A very enjoyable story that works as a celebration of the Whoniverse.