Circuit Breaker (June + July 2026)

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

Plot:

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

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

To be continued...

Context:

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

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

First Time Round:

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

Connectivity:

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

Deeper Thoughts:

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

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

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

In Summary:

Circuit activated...

The War Between the Land and the Sea

Chapter the 345th, serves up a generous portion of Surf and Turf.

Plot:

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

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

Context:

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

First Time Round:

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

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

Connectivity:

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

Deeper Thoughts:

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

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

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

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

In Summary:

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

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?!

Lucky Day

Chapter the 332nd, which features UNIT and dating.

Plot:

[A recent story of the streaming era, so beware of spoilers ahead.] Conrad Clark met the Doctor and Belinda Chandra when he was eight years old, and saw their magic blue box disappear into thin air. He then spotted the box again, years later, spying the Doctor and Ruby Sunday as they dealt with the Shreek, an alien hunting animal. Conrad is accidentally marked as its prey. A year later he has tracked Ruby down and interviews her for his blog on aliens and unexplained phenomena. After the recording, he asks her out for coffee. She explains about the Shreek, which returned to Earth the previous day but was captured by UNIT. She gives him an antidote, so he is no longer at risk of being hunted. Ruby and Conrad go out on a few dates, much to the keen interest of Carla, Cherry and Louise. Ruby has been finding it hard to adjust to life after travelling with the Doctor, and dating Conrad is just what they think she needs. Conrad invites Ruby to visit some of his friends in a village in England. It appears that the Shreek has come there to kill Conrad, who admits to Ruby that he never took the antidote. Ruby calls UNIT in, but it turns out to be a hoax: Conrad and his friends have deliberately - and elaborately - staged an alien attack so they could film UNIT and make them look stupid (or something). This creates a negative reaction against UNIT on new and old media. Conrad's organisation Think Tank publishes the details of all UNIT's employees, and - with the help of an inside contact within the organisation - infiltrates the UNIT tower. Kate Lethbridge-Stewart releases the real Shreek, which hunts a terrified Conrad until Ruby tasers it. Conrad is imprisoned. He is briefly transported from his cell to the TARDIS where the Doctor gives him a ticking off, before returning him. Mrs. Flood turns out to be the governor of the prison, and releases Conrad for her own mysterious purposes...

Context:

The random number generator has picked another story from the most recent run at time of writing, Ncuti Gatwa's second season from 2025. It was nearly two months on from when I first watched Lucky Day, and a good month on from the end of the season; nonetheless, it felt like I'd only just been watching that set of stories (probably because, in the interim, online 'news' hasn't ceased covering it - see Deeper Thoughts from the previous blog post for more details). As such, I chose to watch on my own, from the BBC iplayer, on an evening towards the end of June 2025. The eldest child (young man of 19) popped in to the living room and watched for a few minutes, but didn't stick around.

 

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: with this post, the tally stands at 11 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 7-9 and 11-14), and 37 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 15 now remain to be blogged.

First Time Round:

I first watched this story on the day it landed on the BBC iplayer, 3rd May 2025. As the season had progressed, I was watching the episodes earlier and earlier on each Saturday, but I never watched one as early as 8am (the time that episodes first became available this season). Lucky Day was watched just after lunch, around 1pm. As with most of the season, I was accompanied by middle child (boy of 15). A week or two later, the eldest caught up when back home from university. Finally, on the 1st of June 2025, the youngest (girl of 13) binged this amongst other selected episodes she hadn't yet watched from Joy to the World through to The Reality War. This was because we'd advised her to catch up before she got spoilered about the various revelations in the season finale, which were all over the internet a day after its broadcast).

Reaction:

I've never thought about the phrase 'more than the sum of its parts' quite as deeply as I have after this rewatch of Lucky Day. There's many a Doctor Who where things take a turn at the half-way point or thereabouts, sometimes for the worse, sometimes the better, sometimes just the different. Lucky Day certainly does that. These two halves, though are completely incompatible in terms of plot believability and character motivation. It's like the sum of Lucky Day's parts is adding b squared to c to a fridge freezer. And yet... The resulting story works as the sad but ultimately fierce tale of Ruby, who thinks she's found a way to move on after her travels with the Doctor, but is betrayed by a person she thought she could trust. She then finds her inner strength at the side of UNIT, fighting against the negative forces that want to destroy it. Through that, she inches a little closer to a way of living beyond the Doctor. A lot of why it works is Millie Gibson; the episode is presented as her nightmare, and she makes you feel every moment of that. Nightmares don't need to completely add up, of course, which also might explain why the story gets away with it. Or maybe Lucky Day is just having a lucky day. The twist when it comes is satisfying on first watch, but the slightest thought highlights that a massive, rickety scaffold of contrivance is required to hold it up. In the first part of the story, Ruby starts going out with the clumsy, lovable doe-eyed version of Conrad (an invention, we later find out). This version - very like the characters in Redacted, and others like the members of LINDA in Love & Monsters - is desperately seeking the Doctor and his blue box. He has this yearning because he had an encounter with the Doctor when a child that left him pondering mysteries (again exactly like the characters in those earlier stories).

Writer Pete McTighe is cleverly using these previously adopted tropes of Doctor Who as misdirection, so we don't see coming the twist that Conrad is a much nastier and more calculating character than his doe-eyed persona would indicate. But he's not an unreliable narrator: he did meet the Doctor in his childhood and then spot him again in 2024; he did see the TARDIS appear and disappear, and he did see evidence of an extra-terrestrial predator as an adult. Does he believe all of that was faked by UNIT (the theory he consistently espouses once he's shrugged off the doe-eyed persona)? UNIT weren't present at any of these events. Indeed, nobody else was; so, if it was faked, does he think it was faked just for him? Does he genuinely believe that theory or is he pretending just to incriminate UNIT? It doesn't seem like the latter. The events we see happen to Conrad in the first part don't align with his attitudes in the second. Perhaps the intervening rejection from UNIT is what caused the change. Let's play that out so I can get my head round it: Conrad becomes obsessed with the Doctor after a chance encounter; he starts a podcast to try to find out more, and at some point finds out about UNIT. He applies to UNIT and is rejected and this starts him thinking negatively about the organisation. Despite the evidence of his own experience, he starts to believe UNIT are faking aliens just to waste taxpayer money. Okay, that's plausible so far just about. He forms a group of like-minded conspiracy theorists, Think Tank, to bring UNIT down. Again, a little bit OTT, but still plausible. During all this time, he continues his more idealistic podcast because, erm ... I'm struggling. Perhaps he does it deliberately as a way of snagging someone like Ruby who can help him get closer to UNIT? It seems like a lot of effort, though (particularly as it's revealed later than he already has another insider in his pocket).

If Conrad's public media persona is the doe-eyed one, how is he covertly interacting with followers of Think Tank? Just on Whatsapp? Think Tank seem to have ready-made channels with many viewers when they are filming their UNIT gotcha, but perhaps other members of Think Tank maintained those and Conrad kept himself secret until his Shreek stunt had played out. A much more truthful narrative, of course, would be Conrad continuing with just one online media presence (without the second secret one) but gradually getting more and more radicalised. That, though, wouldn't give him any opportunity to fool Ruby. And he needs to fool Ruby, doesn't he? Doesn't he? For the emotional arc, yes, but for the logical plot arc it's again an excessive amount of effort. Why create this weird tableau in a rural village when he already has the means to doxx everyone in UNIT's employ and infiltrate their building? Why the theatrics? Also, isn't there an inherent flaw in his plan to show that UNIT are a waste of money by getting them to respond to what looks like a credible threat? Isn't them showing up in the village to capture the Shreek them behaving exactly as their remit dictates? Therefore, hasn't Conrad proved that the only one faking events and wasting taxpayers' money is he himself? Maybe the script is trying to say something about the credulity of online audiences, their stubborn belief over facts meaning they see UNIT as bad even though that's the opposite of what's being presented. Maybe. Giving Gemma Redgrave as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart something a little different to do, all simmering anger and crossing the line, is at least a plus (and according to comments from McTighe will be something picked up again in this year's UNIT spin-off The War Between the Land and the Sea).

I know I'm probably expected to just see Conrad's weird, disconnected and contradictory social media exploits as a high-level metaphor, and therefore not worry about the detail; there ought to be some internal logic, though. I'm not convinced that an online youth movement would come together over the taxpayer cost (a preoccupation of an older demographic) of an organisation that fights aliens (a nerdy niche interest); but, if it did, I can't see how the public mood would be suddenly changed just by footage of Conrad being mauled. The likely reality would be that people would grimly stick to their belief that it was all faked. This doesn't, though, stop the climactic scenes of the UNIT Conrad confrontation, and the released Shreek stalking its prey, being exciting. Jonah Hauer-King is great as Conrad despite the contradictions on the page. There's also a nice couple of quieter scenes of Redgrave and Gibson together. The sequence where Conrad is brought into the TARDIS control room is a bit odd; the thought that instantly popped into my head was that being allowed inside the TARDIS should be the privilege of a special few, and shouldn't be bestowed on the unrepentant Conrad. The Doctor then says as much, almost word for word; so, why is he indulging him? The Doctor's subsequent speech is a little too preachy, but is saved a little by the continuity link: Conrad mentions Belinda Chandra's name, meaning this scene is the lead in to the Doctor's initial appearance at the beginning of the season, tracking Belinda in The Robot Revolution. The final curve ball moment is Mrs. Flood turning up and releasing Conrad so he can feature in the series again. That later appearance doesn't really answer any of the questions raised above, but again it doesn't seem to matter.

Connectivity:

Both Lucky Day and Redacted prominently feature characters who have their own podcast show. Both stories include moments where UNIT are a bit heavy handed. Towards the end, both include a bit of preachy editorialising about online misinformation.

Alex Jones in The One Show in Doctor Who

Deeper Thoughts:

As Themselves. Lucky Day features quite a few cameos from people playing themselves. As part of the satirical montage of various news sources entertaining Conrad Clark's wild theories, newsreader Reeta Chakrabarti, presenter Alex Jones, and comedian Joel Dommett appear for short set-ups in amongst fictional media / social media stars. This emulation of a media round covering a topic within the Doctor Who universe is long-established. Showrunner of Lucky Day Russell T Davies particularly likes it. The first example from the new series era is in the fourth 2005 episode Aliens of London. During that episode, the Doctor - stuck outside the area where the action is happening - is reduced to following events on the television like everyone else. He channel hops between various news programmes where anchors and reporters (played by actors) cover the story of a spaceship that's seemingly crash landed in London. At one point, Matt Baker - then a children's TV presenter - is shown in the Blue Peter studio making a cake shaped like the spaceship. Baker was the first person to appear as himself in the new series, but he most certainly wasn't the last: indeed, later in the same episode political journalist Andrew Marr is seen reporting on the UK government reaction to the crisis. It's easy to see why such a thing would be done: it adds real world verisimilitude to the action, it provides fun moments for people who like celebrity spotting, and it gives lots of no doubt lovely non-actors (and Ann Widdecombe) the opportunity to brag to their sons, daughters, nieces or nephews that they've been in Doctor Who.

Andrew Marr in Aliens of London

Like most innovations in Doctor Who, this was first trialled in the laboratory conditions of the William Hartnell era. In 1966 story The War Machines, newsreader Kenneth Kendall is shown on a TV in a bar commenting on the sci-fi action in the capital. The scene and the person provide verisimilitude in exactly the same way as the scenes in Aliens of London would many years later. The 1972 story Day of The Daleks had reporter Alex MacIntosh reporting about the peace conference in Auderly House; it's probable that those making the 1970s story didn't remember The War Machines playing the same trick years before, and were experimenting anew. The approach didn't take hold: contemporary alien invasion stories fell out of favour, so the opportunities for such cameos were limited. There were only a couple more real life cameos, not connected with news broadcasting, in the remainder of the classic series. Near the start of the 1980s, Concorde - a slightly faded but nonetheless still pretty big star at the time - played itself in Time Flight. Later in the decade, Courtney Pine and his band appeared as themselves in Silver Nemesis. That was it until the show returned in 2005, when the approach took hold big time. After Aliens of London, memorable appearances were made by news presenter Jason Mohammad, who made a record-breaking six appearances in the Whoniverse (four in the main show, two in The Sarah Jane Adventures), TV medium Derek Acorah bemoaning his redundant status now that ghosts have become real in Army of Ghosts, daytime TV mainstay Trisha Goddard interviewing someone in a relationship with a ghost in the same story, and the aforementioned Ann Widdecombe endorsing politician Harold Saxon in The Sound of Drums. She certainly knows how to pick 'em (did the programme makers maybe not tell her that Saxon was evil personified?).

(L to R) Widdecombe, Saxon

In the remainder of Russell T Davies's first period as showrunner there were further appearances by people such as Richard Dawkins, Paul O'Grady, and Nicholas Witchell. Usually included in any montage was fictional US news anchor Trinity Wells. She proved so popular it was almost as if she became a real person. Up to 2010, the character appeared in two episodes apiece of spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, and nine times in the main show. After Davies, the other two new series showrunners also used the real life cameo approach, but less frequently, with scientist Brian Cox, game show host Alan Sugar and journalist Emily Maitlis making appearances. When Davies returned as showrunner, Trinity Wells came back too, first making an appearance in The Giggle, then Lucky Day. Alas, she is now an alt-right conspiracy theorist, but that must be more interesting for Lachele Carl to play (Carl, by the way, played an investigative journalist in 1987 BBC sci-fi series Star Cops, set in the futuristic year 2027, and I like to think her character there is a relative of Ms. Wells). It's only with Lucky Day that the cameo montage returned in full. It sounds like these segments are an odd thing to shoot, disjointed from the narrative. Alex Jones - the one from Wales, not the far-right American broadcaster who would probably have been a much more plausible interviewer of Conrad -  talked in an interview about a scene where she had to "interview a guy", which is all the context she would likely get. Mind you, even Jonah Hauer-King playing Conrad, who would have had a whole script, found it difficult to explain exactly what was going on (as mentioned in this video). Will this be the last instance of real world cameos appearing in Doctor Who? Well, first off Doctor Who itself has to endure in the real world, and nobody knows when - or if - any media round will confirm that.

In Summary:

Lucky Day is very lucky (blessed as it is with Millie Gibson's performance bringing it all together) and - like Conrad -  gets away with it in the end.