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?!

The Two Doctors

Chapter the 336th, is a Doctor Who two for the price of one offer, a BOGOF with Bug-Eyed Monsters.

Plot:

The Doctor takes Peri fishing on an alien planet, then collapses in the TARDIS. He's somehow been linked across time to his second self. That Doctor, accompanied by Jamie, is on a mission for the Time Lords, just like he always wasn't. He is visiting Professor Dastari, who runs a research centre space station, trying to persuade him to stop some of his team doing time travel experiments that could endanger the universe. Dastari's own research is in genetic manipulation; he has augmented an Androgum (aggressive, food-obsessed aliens) called Chessene - she is planning an attack on the station, having allied herself with the Sontarans. The attack happens, Jamie escapes and the Doctor is apparently killed. Really, he's been taken to Earth by Chessene, with another Androgum called Shockeye plus Dastari (who's in on the conspiracy). They are joined by two Sontarans. The other Doctor and Peri arrive on the abandoned station to investigate, and find Jamie living wild in the ducts. The Doctor recreates the mental link with his former self and works out that he is being held in Seville. The three of them travel there in the TARDIS, and run into Oscar and Anita, who have just witnessed the Sontaran ship land. Oscar has been setting up moth-catching equipment for later that evening, but he and Anita need to go back to their jobs at a nearby restaurant.

The Doctor, Jamie and Peri attempt to sneak in to the hacienda where the other Doctor is being held. Chessene, Dastari and the Sontarans are trying to get that Doctor's help to get the experimental time capsule to work. He refuses. Chessene betrays the Sontarans, killing them with acid. Dastari operates on the Doctor turning him into a hybrid Androgum to make him more amenable, but he and Shockeye escape and go to the centre of Seville to have a meal at Oscar's restaurant. When he won't accept alien currency for the meal, Oscar is stabbed to death by Shockeye. Shockeye escapes; the second Doctor is left behind, and returns to normal. The sixth Doctor, Peri and Jamie arrive just in time to get him out of the restaurant before the policía arrive. Chessene captures them all and takes them back to the hacienda. The sixth Doctor pretends that he has made the capsule operational. Shockeye is going to cook a human (Jamie) for himself and Chessene to eat before they leave. When the sixth Doctor tries to free Jamie, Shockeye wounds him; the Doctor flees outside, with Shockeye pursuing him, following the blood trail. The Doctor stumbles across Oscar's cyanide jar and uses it to kill Shockeye. Chessene sees some of the Doctor's blood and licks it up, much to Dastari's disgust. He turns against her, so she kills him, and tries to escape in the capsule. It blows up, killing her. The second Doctor summons his TARDIS by remote control, and he and Jamie say goodbye. The sixth Doctor decides that he and Peri should become vegetarians.

Context:

It has become an annual tradition that I download a Doctor Who story to watch when I'm away on holiday. It's not always possible, but often the selected story is vaguely appropriate because it includes scenes filmed in my holiday destination, or just scenes filmed in a country other than the UK. Sometimes, the characters in the story themselves go on holiday. The Two Doctors has not been selected for any trips before; I was holding it back thinking the day would probably come when the family visited Seville. We came very close in 2025; a nice Airbnb was very nearly selected, but we decided instead that the kids would prefer somewhere with a beach. So, to Menorca we went and - with very few stories left to blog - The Two Doctors had to finally accompany us (well, me, anyway, I didn't try to get any of the rest of the family to watch with me). Menorca is at least Spanish territory, so there is something of a link. I downloaded the three episodes from the BBC iplayer and watched them on my phone over the course of the break. 

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 another season and another Doctor. The tally stands at 12 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-9 and 11-14), and 38 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 11 now remain.

First Time Round:

I have a clear memory of watching the first episode on its initial UK broadcast on BBC1 on Saturday 16th February 1985. My Mum had made me a 'boil in the bag' prawn curry (definitely not a Vesta, probably Birds Eye or Tesco's own brand) for my tea. I watched Doctor Who in the living room, with the plate of food on my lap. I remember seeing the scene where the Doctor lands a weird alien fish on screen, and this momentarily putting me off my food. It didn't last long, and the plateful was scarfed down soon afterwards. An underlying message of the story is a promotion of vegetarianism but this didn't take with me. I've no strong memories of the rest of that episode nor my first watch of the others on the following two Saturdays, but I do remember a general feeling - in my serious fan manner - that it was too early in Colin's era for him to be sharing the spotlight with a returning Doctor. Now a lot of time (more than 40 years) has gone by, would I feel the same way?

Reaction:

Robert Holmes, who penned The Two Doctors, was one of the writers most instrumental in the success of 20th Century Who. There's a run of stories through the 1970s that he was involved with, directly or indirectly, that is seen by a majority of fans as a golden period, a template for Doctor Who excellence. As I mentioned in the blog post for one of his two 1960s stories The Space Pirates, though, that golden period doesn't quite extend to everything he wrote for the show. His first two stories are not generally liked, and neither are his last two. The final one was The Trial of a Timelord, co-written with many other people, and with so much negative stuff happening behind the scenes (including Holmes' failing health and death before his scripts were realised) that it would be churlish to criticise him or any single contributor. What, though, of his penultimate story? The Two Doctors was commissioned and produced before the BBC had threatened Doctor Who with cancellation in 1985; the series was ostensibly in rude health. The story Holmes had written immediately before was The Caves of Androzani, one that forever after would be in the top tens of all-time Doctor Who story polls. He was on a hell of a high. Immediately before Caves, though, Robert Holmes had been the first writer commissioned to write 20th anniversary special The Five Doctors, and he could not manage it. He tried but failed to weave the excessive set of 'shopping list' demands of returning actors and plot elements into a coherent narrative. The Two Doctors is a similar challenge: it requires the inclusion of a returning Doctor, companion and monster, and the arbitrary locating of some sequences in a foreign country (originally planned to be New Orleans, but when filming there fell through changed to Seville).

Maybe Holmes wanted to prove that he could achieve a 'shopping list' story after all. Or, perhaps, he was chosen because the story slot was the equivalent length of an old six-parter. There hadn't been a story of such length broadcast since the late 1970s when Holmes was last regularly writing the show. Even then, though, he didn't often write those longer ones. Usually in the 1970s, Holmes would work with writers to shape such stories to have a "dogleg", a sharp turn of the plot to a new focus after the two or four episode mark, to feel like a new but linked story was starting, keeping audience interest from sagging. He eschews that approach for The Two Doctors. There's a more gradual move from the action set on the space station to the action in Seville. It might have worked better to confine the space station stuff to part one and concentrate on Seville for parts two and three, or maybe vice versa. Probably, Holmes thought he had enough elements to keep things interesting without such a structure, and to be fair he does almost pull it off. The sixth Doctor doesn't appear early enough at the beginning, and the Sontarans are dealt with too early before the end; with a couple of tweaks to resolve both those points, the story would flow pretty perfectly. The second point is more forgivable as his new creations the Androgums are conceptually strong and nasty enough to carry the climactic villainy on their own. The first point, though, is much more of a problem. Aside from his face in the beginning credits, Colin Baker doesn't appear for the first 10 minutes of his own show.

The story starts with Patrick Troughton (seen in black and white at first, and using an older TARDIS console prop, both nice touches), and that is okay; it's an intriguing hook. It then stays on him, and the minutes stretch out. At several moments, I was inwardly screaming "Cut away!" and not just because it would be polite to the leading man. I was right in my feeling in 1985 as mentioned in the First Time Round section above; it's too soon for Colin's Doctor to be sharing the spotlight, and being pushed so far out of it delegitimises him - it feels like Troughton is conferring official status on him, rather than the other way round. Cutting away, and then intercutting between the parallel action of Colin and Pat's exploits would additionally have given the story a boost to its dynamism. A restless intercutting approach, a combination of script and direction decisions, was one of the things that enlivened The Caves of Androzani, after all. That, though, was directed by one of the most dynamic Who directors of the time, Graeme Harper; The Two Doctors, on the other hand, is directed by Peter Moffat. He is a safe pair of hands, and known for getting all the needed material in the can efficiently, even sometimes ahead of schedule (almost unprecedented for Doctor Who with its complexities far exceeding its budgets); the material that ends up in the can, though, isn't usually energetically paced. There's a couple of major issues with how key story beats are revealed; these may have stemmed from the script rather than having been introduced by the director, but one can't help but believe that a different director would have seen the issues ahead of time, and nudged the more than competent writer or script editor to fix them. Alternatively, of course, they could very well have been introduced by the director.

The first reveal of a Sontaran, and the moment where it becomes clear that Dastari is a traitor who is allied to the bad guys, are both handled in the same way: the reveal is held back for a long time, then finally achieved in a pedestrian long shot that might usually be used just for establishing a location. In both instances, the long shot is from no character's POV, so the moments are robbed of any drama. It should be a big deal for the Doctor (either of them) to discover that his old enemies are involved in the plot, and his old friend allied with them. As it is, the moments are underwhelming, and the impression is given that there was no need to hold the revelations back at all. Moffat achieves better things in the quieter moments. Though not perfect, the interactions between the sixth Doctor and Peri are much warmer and wittier than elsewhere in the season, with the squabbling dialled down. The sixth Doctor's haunted monologue as he worries about the fate of the universe is one of Colin Baker's standout moments in the role. Troughton and Frazer Hines effortlessly recreate the second Doctor and Jamie, with many funny lines and bits of business. Moffat gets two compatible but interestingly different takes on villainy from the two actors playing Androgums, building on the script's efficient world-building, establishing the race's culture and attitudes. John Stratton gets the showier Androgum role, drooling over the prospect of eating many different members of the cast, the hissable panto baddie. Jacqueline Pearce gives a masterclass performance throughout of savagery suppressed and hidden behind a veneer of elegance. The shocking moment where she cannot control her animal impulses and licks up spilled blood from the ground is magnificent, even though it is again mostly filmed in a long shot. At least there's a cut to a reaction from Dastari watching in disgust (a medium shot).

This era of Doctor Who comes in for some flak for excessive violence; but, as shocking as Shockeye's actions are, I don't think anything here is gratuitous. The underlying theme of the piece is about the ethics of how we treat creatures we perceive as lesser than ourselves; Shockeye's sadism is therefore very much in keeping. His callously offhand murder of bumbling comic foil Oscar fits with character and theme, and ups the ante when he has the Doctor cornered towards the climax of the story. The Doctor's use of Oscar's abandoned cyanide jar on Shockeye comes in for a lot of criticism. Again, though, I think it's the direction that's the problem. It needs to be urgent: the Doctor is about to be killed, and stumbles across the only thing he can find with which to defend himself when his adversary is almost on him. Because what made it to screen is instead done at a much more leisurely pace, it makes the action seem too premeditated. People don't like the Doctor's quip afterwards "Your just desserts", but I think it's rather funny. The tone is consistently of a dark comedy. Given the theme, all the subplots about genetic manipulation also integrate rather well. As such, I'm not sure it needs the prototype time travel machine as the MacGuffin. The Sontarans could just want to weaponise the genetic augmentation process somehow, and Chessene could just be planning to upgrade her whole planet en masse. This would mean no need to feature machinations by the offscreen Time Lords - a plot idea already overused in the series at this point - and would also mean that the second Doctor doesn't need to be working on his people's behalf (which breaks the established continuity to such an extent that a lot of complicated backstory has needed to be reverse-engineered by fan writers over the decades since the story's broadcast).

Other points to note: there's very good lighting in the scenes of the sixth Doctor, Peri and Jamie in the space stations ducting; Colin's lighter, more summery version of his costume works much better than the usual version; Peter Howell's score is one of his best. Although there is no reason at all why the action has to take place in Seville, it's still interesting to get away from the usual visual textures on occasion. The story can't resist the insertion of some touristy moments in the chase scene, which does slow things down when they should be speeding up as the denouement approaches. The only truly heinous moment is when Dastari has a flower thrown to him from a woman on a balcony. The characterisation, costumes and masks for the Sontarans are different from what went before, but work well. All in all, it is not as bad as its reputation; Holmes script is pretty close to the quality of his 'golden period' work; with more dynamic direction, and a few tweaks, this could have been another classic.

Connectivity:

Both The Two Doctors and Search Out Space feature the current Doctor unexpectedly teaming up with at least one character from the show's past (Colin working with the second Doctor and Jamie, Sylv with K9).

Deeper Thoughts:

The joy between the land and the sea. Perhaps a summer holiday is not a conducive time for too much original thought; I'm undoubtedly not the first to notice it, but it struck me in a contemplative moment in the sun of Cala'n Forcat that travel is all about dwelling in liminal spaces. The hotel we stayed in appears in photos like it's sitting atop a rocky outcrop in the middle of the ocean. In fact, it's on a high cliff edge, and behind the hotel are paths and steps down to multiple small coves. This is Cala'n Forcat; though there weren't the huge expanses of sand that you might except on a Spanish beach, there were clear blue waters to swim in at the base of ravines, with tall rock walls either side. It was a dramatic landscape, similar to (but a lot warmer than) the Welsh cliffs featured in 2024 story 73 Yards. In the script for that story, its writer Russell T Davies highlights such areas at the edges of things as places of magic, but also of conflict. I half suspect he just introduced the line about the war between the land and the sea to be a reference to the planned spin-off series, but there is a truth there nonetheless. The Balearics have been of strategic importance in many wars, annexed and occupied multiple times. The nearest town to where we were staying was Ciutadella (literally, the Citadel), which has been a fortification since the times of Ancient Carthage. Obviously resorts don't tend to be warzones these days, but liminal spaces come with risks as well as potential; this is possibly why we are drawn to them. Even if one doesn't go for beaches, the act of travelling takes one to the liminal spaces that are airports and train stations. Even if one never leaves home, taking a break puts us in the liminal mental space of being between work and play.

Cala'n Forcat

Looking back at the first holiday trip I covered for the blog in 2016, we again stayed in a place on the boundary between one area and another, outside a castle on the edge of woods. I started the blog the previous year, but had fit my posts around holiday breaks in the summer of 2015. As this time we were staying at Leeds Castle, somewhere that was the location of a Tom Baker story, and said story could be brought with us to watch in the cottage, it seemed too good an opportunity to waste. This started an annual tradition. I took The Leisure Hive (a story where the Doctor goes on holiday) to Shanklin in 2017 (between land and sea again), but ended up watching the story when back home, much closer to the liminal space of the Brighton beach on which some of it was filmed. The following year was the first foreign trip for the blog, to Tenerife, and I took along a story that involved the production team taking a foreign trip (Vincent and the Doctor). In 2019, I visited a European location with It Takes You Away (in which the TARDIS fam visit a European location). After a couple of years' suspension of holidays away because of Covid and lockdowns, I took Hell Bent to watch on the island where it had been filmed, Fuerteventura, in 2022 (and stayed in a resort at the edge of sand dunes). The year after, I listened to Marco Polo (The Doctor and friends on a long trip) while on a short trip to Kos. In 2024, I revisited Fuerteventura, this time with The Ice Warriors (completely thematically divorced from the surroundings, but I did at least experience the Troughton era mainstay of a foam machine during that break). That brings things up to this year and The Two Doctors.

Ciutadella

Holmes's Sontaran story itself comes from a liminal space in Doctor Who's span. It was a watershed between celebration (the hoopla of 20th anniversary) and chaos (the hiatus and the aforementioned crises in the making of the subsequent Trial of a Time Lord season), between when the series was seen as an unassailable institution able to film abroad, and when it had to struggle to endure. The production team were adjusting to a new format of 50 minute episodes before circumstances dictated they revert back again to half that length. Given another year, someone might have realised that they could have had a one-part self contained story (or even more than one) rather than three part stories like The Two Doctors. Would that have made a difference to the programme's longer term survival? At the time of writing, Doctor Who is in another such uncertain space. Will it endure? As said above, liminal spaces contain risk, but they also contain potential. Recent announcements up to August 2025 have been of a new multimedia event for 2026 in the mould of previous years' Time Lord Victorious and Doom's Day, and a new fan show on the official Youtube channel. Neither are things that tend to happen for shows that have been cancelled. Even more positively, news reports on the 21st August 2025 quoted an interview with Kate Phillips, chief content officer at the BBC, at the Edinburgh TV Festival. She said that the series will remain on the BBC "with or without Disney". Comments from the Beeb in 1985 were nowhere near as friendly to the show. Amusingly, she summarised the position as "The TARDIS is going nowhere" which perfectly summarises both the potential and the risk of this liminal space. Anyway, I'm almost out of stories to blog, and they'll have to get their fingers out to have new ones before summer 2026, so I might have to vacation without a Doctor Who story next year. What a thought!

In Summary:

Not too bad, and quite a dark comedy for something filmed in such bright sunshine.

The Power of the Doctor

Chapter the 298th, where it's getting, it's getting, it's getting kind of hectic.

Plot:
All this written down in order is going to seem like the fitful dream of a kid who's gone to bed after eating too much sugar, but here goes anyway: The Doctor, Yaz and Dan battle against Cyber-Masters (regenerating Cybermen made from dead Timelords, with the collars and everything) on a floating train in space. The Cybermen kidnap the train's cargo - a wibbly energy creature disguised as a child. With this, the Master - allied with the Cybermen and the Daleks, and posing as Rasputin in the court of Tsar Nicholas II in 1916 - sets up a planet-sized Cyber conversion machine in orbit around Earth. Dan leaves to go back to his ordinary life, finding the Doctor's adventures a bit too dangerous after he nearly got killed on the space train. The Doctor's old friends Tegan and Ace have been recruited into UNIT by Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, and investigate some missing seismologists and missing paintings respectively. Tegan receives a package supposedly from the Doctor containing what looks like a toy Cyberman, labelled as a Russian doll. The TARDIS tracks the Cyber-Masters to the Cyber-planet in 1916, and finds the Master's TARDIS disguised as a police box. Kate calls in the Doctor; the Doctor and Yaz arrive at UNIT HQ and meet Tegan and Ace. The Doctor seems socially awkward meeting them, and somehow gives them both a static electric shock (which also happens later with Yaz). All the missing paintings have been altered to feature the Master as Rasputin, and the Master has sent a message inviting them to a location to attend his "keynote address" on seismology. When our heroes arrive, they find the missing seismologists all dead, shrunk by the Master's tissue compression eliminator.

Taken into custody and imprisoned in the UNIT building, the Master taunts Kate, Tegan and Ace. Following coordinates sent by a rogue Dalek, the Doctor takes the TARDIS to the inside of a Bolivian volcano. The Daleks capture her. In UNIT HQ, the Russian Doll Cyberman - which turns out to have been sent to Tegan by the Master - grows to full size and splits open, then troops of Cybermen emerge led by Ashad (a clone copy made by the Master before he killed the original). Kate is taken to be Cyber-converted, Tegan stays in the building to help Kate, and Ace escapes by parachuting from the roof. Vinder, on a mission to rescue the wibbly energy creature (remember that, from the beginning?) crashes onto the Cyber-planet. Yaz tracks the Doctor down in the TARDIS; she's been taken to Russia in 1916. After doing some disco dancing, the Master uses a process called forced regeneration to make the Doctor regenerate into a copy of him. Yaz arrives, and the Doctor-Master coerces her into joining him in the TARDIS. He goes off causing mischief, trying to ruin the Doctor's reputation. The Doctor (in her Jodie Whittaker persona) appears in a realm of consciousness and meets manifestations of old versions of herself - the Guardians of the Edge - who tell her there's a way she can reverse what the Master's done. Yaz manages to escape in the TARDIS, stranding the Doctor-Master on an asteroid somewhere in space. A holographic AI version of her Doctor appears before Yaz, implanted by the real Doctor earlier who passed it off as static electricity. With that guidance, Yaz is able to pick up Vinder and Ace. The latter is dropped off at the volcano to stop the Daleks, the former hides in the TARDIS as Yaz goes back to collect the Doctor-Master.

Holo-AI Doctors (looking like the Peter Davison and Sylvester McCoy versions) appear to Tegan and Ace too. Ace meets Graham, who's also investigating the volcano. The Daleks set the volcanoes all over the world to erupt. With help from Vinder and the holo-AI Doctor, now looking like the Fugitive Doctor that was hiding out in Gloucester, Yaz manages to reverse the forced regeneration process. Tegan rescues Kate and they both escape UNIT HQ, just before it is blown up (Tegan having sabotaged the Cybermen's equipment with help from her holo-AI Doctor). Ace and Graham set Nitro-9 charges in the volcano. The TARDIS comes and picks everyone up, and the Daleks are all blown up. With the extended fam's help, the Doctor stops the eruptions by Cyber-converting the lava, turning it into steel. She sends Vinder back home, and then asks the wibbly energy creature (it's still hanging around) to destroy the Cyber-planet. The dying Master is still on the planet, and uses the creature's power to zap the Doctor, fatally wounding her. Yaz returns everyone else home, and has one last moment with the Doctor, the two of them sitting on the TARDIS roof eating ice cream while it floats in orbit around planet Earth. The Doctor tells Yaz she has to do the next bit alone. After being dropped off, Yaz immediately bumps into Graham and Dan - they are on their way to a support group that Graham has set up for friends of the Doctor on Earth. The meeting includes Kate, Tegan and Ace as well as some other old friends Ian, Mel and Jo. The Doctor regenerates atop Durdle Door, regaining a familiar set of teeth...

Context:

In the 1980s, episodes that were longer than Doctor Who's usual 25 minute duration (The Five Doctors feature 20th anniversary length special, for example) were sometimes chopped up for repeat or overseas showings, with new credit sequences shoved in to make them fit the majority pattern. I'd had a passing thought when I was writing the Deeper Thoughts section of The Krotons blog post in 2023 about whether any fan had created such edits of new series shows. Remembering this, I decided to experiment with my watching of The Power of the Doctor. I watched it, on my own from the BBC iplayer, over four nights in April 2024, stopping at the end of each approximately 22-minute long quarter. Like those stories in the 1980s, the arbitrary cliffhangers were a little more pedestrian than usual, but none were as bad as the ones in The Five Doctors (the Master walks down a short staircase - woo!). My Power of the Doctor episode one ended with the Doctor seeing the defaced paintings and declaring "That's not Rasputin, that's the Master", the second ended just after the forced regeneration, with the Doctor now in the Master's form at the door of the TARDIS threatening Yaz; episode three ended with the eruption of the volcanoes around the world. That's not too bad, I don't think; each section fell into an episodic structure in line with those older Doctor Who stories: episode one is about the set up of the mystery, ending with the Doctor's discovery of the main adversary; episode two sees the plan develop and ends at the Doctor's lowest point; episode three throws in the curveball of the Guardians of the Edge; episode four wraps it all up.

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. As well as finishing 24 of the 39 seasons to date (at the time of writing), I have also watched almost all of the specials that came in between seasons for anniversaries, festive periods, etc. With The Power of the Doctor now covered, there is only one special left to blog (The Giggle from 2023), though there will be at least one more Christmas special shown in 2024, and - one hopes - another annually thereafter.

First Time Round:

There was a period of only approximately 18 months between my writing this blog post and originally watching The Power of the Doctor, but it seemed like a lot longer looking back. I outlined my initial reactions to the story in the Deeper Thoughts section of the contemporaneous blog post for Orphan 55, which I published two days after the Jodie Whittaker finale was first shown. It was a time of upheaval in the UK; we had in short order got ourselves a new monarch and a new Prime Minister (I'll touch a bit more on this in the Deeper Thoughts section below). The change of Doctor happening at the same time felt like it might destabilise us completely, but thankfully things have been a bit more static and calm for old Albion since then under the firm and strong leadership of David Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa.

Reaction:

Brace yourselves, but - as outlined in this story - the power of the Doctor is the friends she made along the way. Yaz has a line of dialogue that pretty much says this verbatim, and the action involves a lot of people coming together to save the day who all have in common that their lives have been touched by the Doctor. It then has a resolution scene at the end bringing even more of the Doctor's old friends together to look after each other, and most importantly to look after the latest in the long line of ex-companions Yaz, adjusting to her post-TARDIS life. The friends she made along the way - it's so hackneyed that its gone beyond cliche and into meme, but the story doesn't for a moment let the commitment to this theme slip. Even the antagonist is driven by the misguided desire that he wants to become the Doctor and travel the universe with a companion; like everything in the story, this is nicely aligned with the history of the series. There's always been something of the inferiority complex about the Master, living in the Doctor's shadow. The plan also involving mucking about with Daleks, Cybermen, volcanoes and paintings is less resonant to this theme of course, but is still in keeping with The Power of the Doctor's hectic style in trying to cram in as many returning characters and elements as possible. In total, and including the regenerated fourteenth Doctor with a new old face, there are seven returning Doctors. No less than six companions return, seven if you count Dan who leaves at the start of the story but returns at the end (three are cameos including one of the very first stars of the show from 1963, William Russell as Ian Chesterton).

There's two recurring guest characters (Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and Vinder) and the top three on the Doctor Who villainy chart are represented, including the latest incarnation of the Master and a recent recurring Cyberman villain, Ashad. It has clearly been written with an understanding of its place in the canon of multi-Doctor stories; weaving in all those Doctors, companions and foes almost out-Five Doctors The Five Doctors; the missing paintings and involvement of UNIT is reminiscent of The Day of the Doctor. The story was an extra commission from the BBC to form part of the Corporation's centenary celebrations (which aside from this special Doctor Who story were rather muted in the end), so perhaps it was irresistible to include a lot of the programme's history (it having endured for nearly 60 of the Beeb's 100 years by then). It's not just a multi-Doctor celebration story, though, it is the final send off for Jodie Whittaker's Doctor - was there not felt to be a risk that her swansong would be overshadowed by all these returning elements? I doubt writer and executive producer Chris Chibnall was planning to have Whittaker regenerate at the end of a Sea Devils story; Legend of the Sea Devils looks to be the story that had been hastily added to the schedule at the last minute to bump up the numbers. As far as I can see, though, it has never been confirmed exactly how much of Power's planning and scripting had been done before the request came in to provide a centenary special.

My guess is that nothing was forced upon him, and Chibnall always planned such a story to write out his Doctor; it's a bold move, and it pays off. The character of the thirteenth Doctor has always been one that surrounds herself with a large 'fam', so the gang show approach does not jar. Whittaker doesn't suffer too much from a lack of screentime, and her presence - and her absence - dominates. It's a story of what it's like to be with, or be without, the Doctor. Making it seem effortless, Whittaker embodies the Doctor in the abstract and the specific, and everything else in the story is in orbit around her. Considering all the disparate elements to be combined in the final narrative, the plotting hangs together well. The only bit I'm still scratching my head over is forced regeneration; I understand it conceptually, but the visual of it doesn't align with the intention of the character. If the Master wants to be the Doctor, shouldn't he force a regeneration on himself, making him become her, not the other way round? This would have given Whittaker a chance to do something different, playing the evil villain for a part of the running time, and would have upped the ante when the Master is trying to destroy the Doctor's reputation: anything evil he did would have been done by someone who looks like our Doctor. If he wants to travel the universe looking like Sacha Dhawan accompanied by Yaz, then he could just kill the Doctor and steal her TARDIS, after all. Of course, this story is the swansong of Sacha Dhawan's Master too, and depriving viewers of even a second of his colossal, fantastic, unhinged performance might seem like sacrilege. He'd still be indelibly stamped onto the history of Doctor Who just for the Boney M scene, mind: the Master throwing shapes and Cossack dance moves to the 1978 Euro-Disco hit Rasputin, while a Dalek and a Cyberman look on askance.

There's also the wonderful conceit of the Master using famous paintings as a calling card - the visual of a Rasputin-disguised Master in The Scream or Girl with a Pearl Earring is a joy to behold. Rasputin's historical reputation (mesmeric powers, can't be killed) makes him an obvious choice as a Master alias; what's startling and perhaps genius about this is that there is no need for him to be disguised at all (in fact it would make much more sense for all the action to happen in the present day rather than split between 1916 and 2022) - the Master presumably just thought it would be funny. Again, this is in keeping with the character's actions in the history of the show. Apart from the Master's unnecessary disguises, the other two major returns from 1980s Who are Tegan and Ace. For everyone like me, who first got into the show when Peter Davison became the Doctor, this is every bit as exciting and important as Sarah Jane Smith coming back in School Reunion, only double. The script nails the older versions of their characters perfectly. Any fan would have to have a heart of petrified steel lava not to get a bit emotional seeing both reunited with holographic versions of their Doctors. The Guardians of the Edge sequence allows some more fun cameos - David Bradley, Colin Baker, Paul McGann! Fans of a more recent vintage would be well served too; Vinder and Ashad come back, having appeared in recent seasons. Then Graham pops up. Seeing people from different eras working together is pure, distilled Five Doctors juice ("I'm Ace", "Yes, you are" says Graham). Just when you think the story might be cameo-ed out, there's Jo Martin being the Doctor one last time too. Once the story's almost over, you get another few for good luck: Katy Manning as Jo Jones, Bonnie Langford as Mel, and - I'm getting a bit emotional again - William Russell as Ian Chesterton.

With David Tennant appearing at the end, that's at least one returning face from every decade of Doctor Who's existence; if you aren't charitable enough to give it anything else, that's an almighty triumph of logistics at least. The story seems to me to be more of a piece with the three specials in 2023 than the ones preceding it in 2022. Taken together, the four stories from The Power of the Doctor to The Giggle are the ultimate celebration of the show's history and set-up for its future. Even small details like the blowing up of UNIT HQ ("I'd only just signed the lease") fit nicely, allowing Kate-Lethbridge Stewart to move into Tony Stark's Avengers Tower the following year. Also distancing The Power of the Doctor from the rest of 2022 is that there's nothing in there about Yaz's feelings for the Doctor, which had been highlighted in both of the previous two specials. I can just about buy that they've both made their peace with things after the conversation in Legend of the Sea Devils, but I still think that it should have been Yaz's decision to part from the Doctor before she changes into someone new, rather than the Doctor essentially telling her to sling her hook. The emotional arc of the piece is restored by the 'companion's anonymous' scenes at the end, though: we know Yaz's is going to be looked after. Finally, there's the most beautiful regeneration sequence in the history of the show thus far: the Doctor atop Durdle Door with energy shooting far, far out in every direction. Then, we're off again, zooming into a bright, shiny future...

Connectivity:

Despite their broadcasts being separated by 35 years both The Power of the Doctor and Paradise Towers feature the Doctor played by Sylvester McCoy, and Mel played by Bonnie Langford. Echoing the action in the 1980s story, the UNIT building escape in the 21st century story involves heroic characters travelling to the highest floor of a skyscraper building in order to escape metallic killers (these adversaries move a bit faster, though).

Deeper Thoughts:

Two Yorkshire women with blonde bobs leave their job in the same week: Fit the Second. (Note: for Fit the First, of which this is the late-following sequel, see the Deeper Thoughts section of the Orphan 55 post from October 2022  - link in the First Time Round section above.)

The UK's politics was so turbulent in 2022 that the wikipedia entry that comes up when one searches on 'UK government crisis October 2022' has a link at the top that says - I kid you not - "This article is about the crisis that ended Liz Truss's premiership. For the crisis that ended Boris Johnson's premiership, see July 2022 United Kingdom government crisis", emphasis mine. In the UK, it was the year of three prime ministers, and - with Whittaker turning to Tennant, and it being common knowledge that Gatwa was waiting in the wings - the year of three Doctors too. After Johnson and Truss came Rishi Sunak; it's not that Sunak was exactly competent, but just by not being a clown car on fire he managed to usher in a period of relative stability. Was that local political turbulence followed by relative calm echoed somehow in the world of Doctor Who at the time? A lot of fans are very critical of the run for which showrunner Chris Chibnall was responsible, the stories from 2018 up to 2022 and The Power of the Doctor. Putting aside any subjective judgements about the quality of the stories (and there were times in those years reading fan discussions on the internet that I hoped like hell that people would put aside their subjective judgements about the quality of the stories) the production of the show did face more challenges than at any other time in its history. For a start, the world outside the show, that at some level needed to be reflected in the stories - Doctor Who always counterpointing its far-out space action with the recognisable and the grounded - was changing very rapidly.

This can clearly be seen in the story Revolution of the Daleks, a festive special shown on the 1st January 2021. The story was made as part of the series that aired a year earlier, with filming happening in the autumn of 2019, and the script was presumably written a while before that. The character of politician Jo Patterson, played by Harriet Walter, is ruthlessly fixated on public order and then becomes prime minister, so has too many things in common with Theresa May to be coincidental. May, though, had been out of power for nearly 18 months by the time Revolution of the Daleks got to an audience. As we saw above, May was just one of three prime ministers during Chibnall's time (with only a hair's breadth from it being four), so it was hard for scripting to keep up with real life; perhaps connected to some of that governmental instability was the biggest impact to the making of the show in this period, the Covid-19 virus. No matter what else was depicted in the story, it couldn't have predicted lockdowns, mask-wearing, vaccines and Joe Wicks TV workouts. It feels a bit unfair of fate that Chibnall didn't get to make more Doctor Who when the restrictions were eased, but he left at a time of his own choosing, and went out with a bang with The Power of the Doctor. It's a story in which you'd be hard pressed to discern any compromises indicative of it having been made in the aftermath of a pandemic. That he made any Doctor Who at all after Revolution of the Daleks, let alone such bold and brash and visually impressive fare as Flux and the 2022 specials, is a source of wonder to me. Once he'd left and Russell T Davies had taken up the showrunner job again, though, the money really started to flow and even greater things became possible.

Imagine if Chibnall were to comment publicly during Davies's period in charge, talking loudly and constantly about how he could do better? He'd never do such a crass thing, of course, and probably never want to do it. The world of television production seems to be more polite and honourable than the world of politics, because no such restraint exists there. In April 2024, Liz Truss - one of those quick-changing 2022 prime ministers and architect of one of the aforementioned 2022 crises - published a book with her plan to "Save the West", and was on the interview circuit expounding on said plan. Liz Truss was prime minister for 50 days. For a chunk of that short time, party political activity was suspended because of the funeral of the monarch, otherwise it might have been even shorter. She crashed financial markets and lost control of her own MPs in the space of a very few weeks, and her tenure ended in utter failure. With that track record, for her to have the sheer gall to lecture anyone on how to run anything is another source of wonder to me. I'm not equating her dismal record in any way with Chibnall's; whatever you think of the quality of his work, though, you know and I know that he's never going to publish a book on his plan to save Doctor Who, and will only ever say positive things about his successor. I sense a part of online Doctor Who fandom wants the Truss approach, however; and that, base and lowest common denominator as it is, she's scratching a similar itch in politics fans on a certain stripe.

If you like one showrunner more than another, it can get pretty tribal in the rarefied atmosphere of social media sites. When Steven Moffat took over from Davies, I read a lot of posts by people who imagined that Moffat was sneaking in references in his stories that took pot shots at the previous house style. They were convinced that he was in some way critical of Davies, even though there was no evidence of this in any of his public pronouncements. Moffat has hopefully, finally, put that to bed by agreeing to come back as a hired hand (he's writing the third story in Davies's first Ncuti Gatwa season, Boom). For anyone that might be imagining that Davies has any issues with his immediate predecessor, I'd direct you to the comments he makes in Doctor Who Magazine issue 603 about the controversial Timeless Child plotline that Chibnall introduced to Who and which Davies is developing further in Gatwa's episodes: "That's a gift handed to me by my predecessor... it's an honour to take it on from him" and "There's so much story in it!". Maybe we could all take a lesson from this interconnected and respectful approach when it comes to Doctor Who and to politics. Liz Truss knows that she's unlikely ever to hold high office again, but she will have seen from certain UK populists of recent times, who have made a living of sniping from the sidelines while not having the responsibility of any direct power, that this doesn't mean she can't have influence. It is telling that a lot of the interviews she gave in April 2024 were aimed at the hyper-partisan US; without extreme polar opposite tribes, who possibly don't represent the nuanced reality that sits between the poles, many negative things - including online Doctor Who flame wars and Truss's book - might not need to exist.

In Summary:

The Power of the Doctor was inside of us all along!