Shada (Webcast version)

Chapter the 333rd, Flash animation - ah-ah! And the Doctor saves the universe...

Plot:

The Eighth Doctor visits Romana and K9 on Gallifrey (she's now the president, it was a Big Finish thing, don't ask). He's wondering about a time when he was in his fourth body and she and he visited Cambridge. They were taken out of time (by the black triangle in The Five Doctors, continuity fans!) and so never got to answer the summons of the Doctor's old friend Professor Chronotis. They visit this retired Time Lord and old friend of the Doctor in his rooms in St. Cedd's College. He asks them to take a book he borrowed from Gallifrey back for him, as it has special powers and could be dangerous. But Chris Parsons, a young science postgrad, has already borrowed the book, and is examining it with his colleague Clare Keightley. Also, Skagra - a villainous clever-clogs, armed with a mind-stealing sphere and backed up by an army of Krarg creatures and an invisible ship with a sultry-voiced computer - wants to steal the book too. When he gets his hands on it, Skagra kidnaps Romana and steals the TARDIS, using the book as the key to take him to the Time Lord prison planet Shada. Skagra needs to steal the mind of an old Time Lord villain imprisoned there, Salyavin, to help him turn everyone in the universe into one connected mind, controlled by him.The Doctor stops him and saves the day, everyone has tea and biscuits, then gets arrested by a policeman.

Context:

This definitely has to be cheating, right? Well, let's see by answering my standard canon questionnaire for any spin-off or oddity I want to watch in between Ncuti episodes to try to keep up the random nature of the blog. Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)?  Yes - it did end up as an extra on a DVD eventually, but when it first came out, it was the main attraction. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? Hmm... I have covered the story Shada before in a post from 2017, and I did briefly mention the 2003 webcast then, but I didn't go into any detail. The 2003 version has an almost completely different cast, including a different lead actor playing the Doctor, and little bits of new material. That's variance enough, at least in my mind, to warrant a separate blogging. Anyway, to watch it at all required a lot of effort, so I felt I should write it up to make that effort worthwhile: I had to dig out the 2013 Shada DVD from storage, and download an open-source Flash emulator (Flash hasn't been supported in web browsers since 2021) to get the thing to play at all. I watched on my laptop an episode a night over six nights in July 2025.

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: aside from sideways trips into spin-offs like this, 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:

This was the third of four webcasts made available on the BBC's Doctor Who website in the early 2000s; stretching the rules of the blog for this one has allowed me to post about the full set. The BBC staff who worked on the website in those days, many of them fans, saw an opportunity to create something new. This started with the salvaging of a rejected radio pilot. For the follow-up, they turned to Big Finish who had been creating audio Doctor Who stories for a few years by that point. The images that accompanied the audio were animated in a rudimentary style, but they grew in sophistication with each attempt. Big Finish also produced Shada, and the fourth of four that followed later in 2003 was a fully animated story by Cosgrove Hall Studios. The technology of the time could not keep up with the ambition, so the technicalities of viewing each webcast were challenging. Shada was the first one I watched in full online; a story by Douglas Adams was rewarding enough to persevere with the lagging and stop-start nature of such an activity in those pre-broadband days.

Reaction:

The majority of what shapes this version of the story, for good or ill, comes from the original script. A Douglas Adams Doctor Who script is a hell of a gift, containing as it will so many original ideas, surprising plot reversals and witty dialogue. It doesn't come without flaws, though. There's a lot of to and fro between space stations and spaceships in the second half of the story, for example. This 2003 version uses backgrounds that help orient the viewer to where exactly in space each scene is taking place. This works better than does the 2017 version, which was hidebound by the need to be faithful to the original designs. There, the animation had to sit alongside the original footage; with no such restriction here, and no worries about budget, artist Lee Sullivan is able to go wild and create some striking new designs for the Think Tank, Skagra's ship, Shada, and - best of all - the Krargs. Despite the limited nature of the animation, Sullivan's Krargs are more dynamic and scary than the ones from 1979. Where the 2003 version is perhaps too faithful is in the words rather than the pictures. The one clever addition to the original is the prelude scene explaining why Paul McGann's Doctor is appearing instead of Tom Baker. This is classic Gary Russell (the writer who adapted the scripts for audio); often in his original work he creates imaginative connections from one piece of Doctor Who continuity to another: in the 2003 Shada, he takes the reuse of Shada footage in 1983 anniversary romp The Five Doctors and weaves it into the canon tapestry, twenty years on. When the fourth Doctor and Romana were taken out of time in the Peter Davison era story, it aborted the Shada adventure, and now McGann's Doctor wants to return and finish it. The fictional world mirrors the real world, with Shada incomplete in both, and being revisited and finally finished after many years. It's low-key genius.

The prelude's idea is so good that one almost wants to explore it through the rest of the story, but that can't be done: if the remainder deviates too much from the original script, then the viewer isn't getting Shada as conceived, but instead someone else's take on it. That would defeat the point. Unfortunately, in places the original script can't be made quite to fit: the porter at St Cedd's having recognised the McGann Doctor from various visits over the years doesn't work - it needs to be Tom Baker, as that is who originally intended to visit, and who was already a friend of the professor at that stage in his lives; as president of the Time Lords, Romana has much more authority, responsibility and power to recover the book than the Doctor, so shouldn't be letting him take the lead; indeed, she could call in any number of Time Lords to sort out the situation rather than go with the Doctor's more home-spun approach. One just has to let these go, and accept that the original dialogue had to be sacrosanct. There are but a few cursory mentions of Romana's status and the Doctor being pleased at being reunited with K9 to remind us that we're watching a slightly new take on the old tale. Other changes are because the story needs to act as both webcast and audio only. People whose bandwidth couldn't cope with the flash animations, or those who bought the story as a CD from Big Finish afterwards, need to have some things vocalised. This means some action is simplified with explanatory dialogue of the 'Look out for that sphere just behind you!' variety. It's mostly unobtrusive, but it does lead to an in-joke being smothered to death for webcast viewers. When Skagra gets a lift, the drawing shows the car is a Ford Prefect (a reference to a character from Adams's The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy). The drawing was only picking up on a gag in the audio, though, so the driver character then bangs on about how much he loves his Ford Prefect car, which belabours the point a bit.

The artist gets a couple of other visual Hitch Hiker in-jokes in later though: a drinks machine is labelled Nutrimat, and - this one a real freeze-frame job - a Shada background shows two convicts trapped inside their prison pods; one has two heads (Zaphod Beeblebrox) and the other is wearing a dressing gown (Arthur Dent). There are a few other minor changes: Think Tank scientist Caldera is a purple alien rather than an old bloke, and there's a minor subplot added where Claire worries about the bike that she lent the Doctor. There are a couple of Tom Baker ad-libs removed - calling Chris 'Bristol' and "What's it powered by K9?"/"Insufficient data"/"Aren't we all?!" - probably because they were too characteristic of the fourth Doctor's style. Mostly, though, change comes from the different performances by the new actors. Andrew Sachs is a good baddie, a more clipped and sneering version of Skagra than the TV version's more suave and aloof take by Christopher Neame; James Fox does a slightly different calibration of absent-minded professor in the role of Chronotis - he's not quite as doddery as Denis Carey in the original, which maybe takes a little away from later revelations of the plot; Melyvn Hayes and Hannah Gordon do very well in small comic roles - it was a coup to get such a strong cast together to give voice to this story. Sean Biggerstaff and Susannah Harker as the two students tagging along are both perhaps giving under-powered performances compared to the actors in 1979, but both of them feel more like postgrad students than did Daniel Hill and Victoria Burgoyne. They look more like students too (the animations are modelled throughout on the new actors' looks). McGann, Ward and Leeson are great, as usual. It all adds up a nice tribute to Adams (whose tragic premature death happened only two years before this webcast) and to 40 years of Doctor Who.

Connectivity:

Both Shada and Lucky Day have sequences set in contemporary UK places that are not London, Sheffield nor anywhere in Wales, which is fairly uncommon. They both contain an appearance from at least one other Time Lord besides the Doctor, and both feature an organisation called Think Tank.

Deeper Thoughts:

"You've looked into alternative time." It's less rare than you'd think that a Doctor Who story exists in more than one alternate version. For a start, every one of the classic series stories, and a growing number of the new series ones too, exist in prose form as Target novelisations. Often these were very close to transcripts of the TV episodes with added descriptions, but a great many diverged, often in significant ways. The first ever novelisation in the 1960s was Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, an adaptation of second ever Doctor Who story The Daleks from 1963/64. The book was published in 1964, whereas the very first story An Unearthly Child was not novelised for decades afterwards (as it only has cavemen and no Daleks). David Whittaker, the script editor of the first ever season that included both stories and the author of the Dalek book, created a brand new introduction for the main characters on the page. The aim was to make the book self-contained and get to the Dalek action as soon as possible, and Whittaker took quite a few liberties: Ian is a scientist rather than a science teacher, Barbara is Susan's private tutor rather than her school history teacher, Ian and Barbara don't know each other before the story's start, and they see the mysterious police box on Barnes Common rather than in Totter's Lane. For similar reasons, Jo Grant is given a completely new introduction in the 1974 book Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (an adaptation of TV story Colony in Space, Jo's fourth story). It's pretty much impossible to reconcile these different televisual and prose versions; of course, someone might have said the same about the 1979 and 2003 versions of Shada. I'm sure Gary Russell could give it a good go; parallel universes might well be involved.

Many Target book authors, particularly in the very early and in the much later years, either side of a lean middle period, fleshed out their TV work with new characters, subplots, motivations, dialogue. It wasn't one way travel, either. By the early 1990s when stories to novelise were running out, original stories started to be made as novels (as well as in comics, short stories and audios). When the new series started in 2005, there were therefore quite a few ready-made candidates to turn into television stories. 2005's Dalek is based on Robert Shearman's audio adventure Jubilee, and the following year's Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel is loosely based on Marc Platt's audio story Spare Parts. They were perhaps changed enough that the two different versions could co-exist without too much canonical musing; the same, though, cannot be said of Human Nature / The Family of Blood, which was a much more faithful - though still different - take on Paul Cornell's 1995 novel Human Nature: it's hard to reconcile why the Doctor would choose to hide out pretending to be a human in a boy's school just before the First World War twice, in both his seventh and tenth regenerations. Creating similar difficulty, he had to indulge in an odd couple flat share comedy twice (in the TV and comic strip version of The Lodger) and interacted with unlikely messages across time with someone called Sally Sparrow as both his ninth and tenth self (in Blink and the short story it was based upon, What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow).

Contemporaneous with the explosion of original stories that would one day act as the blueprints for TV episodes, VHS was becoming the showcase for new versions of classic stories, such as the extended editions of The Curse of Fenric or The Five Doctors. This was just the start, with many new versions of stories following on DVD and Blu-ray to this day, recut with new effects and extra scenes. The Five Doctors had another special edition made in the 21st century, meaning there are now three variants. Which of the available versions of any story is the definitive one? Is there any such thing? Shada is a narrative multiverse all on its own. It existed in at least three versions beyond any officially licensed product, with two fan edits of which I'm aware, as well as an unofficial novelisation written by Paul Scoones. Officially, there was the narrated version of the story with to-camera inserts of Tom Baker released on VHS in 1992, and the script book of the story that was sold in the same package. There was an official novelisation published in 2012 (don't imagine any of these versions were consistent, by the way), There was the 2003 animated webcast as described in this blog post; as mentioned, this was also available as an audio only version from Big Finish, and that was expanded with additional material, so was different again. There was a 2017 hybrid of live action and animation, formed as an omnibus version; then, when that was released on Blu-ray in 2021, it had minor changes, and episode starts and ends inserted. Added up, that's ten different versions, seven official, three unofficial. If one counts Dirk Gently's Detective Agency (an original novel by Adams that reused a lot of the Shada material), it's eleven. Shada, like Doctor Who, like life, is definitively infinite, and I can't help but feel that that's exactly as Douglas Adams would have wanted it.

In Summary:

Douglas Adams worked on so few Doctor Who stories that you can't blame anyone - including your humble blog author (who begs your indulgence) - from covering Shada over and over again. 

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. 

Doctor Who: Redacted (series 1)

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

Plot:

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

Context:

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

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

First Time Round:

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

Reaction:

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

The Burger King Kids' Club - selling burgers

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

The Doctor and friends - saving the world.

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

Connectivity:

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

Deeper Thoughts:

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

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

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

In Summary:

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

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Death of the Doctor

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

Plot:

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

Context:

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

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

First Time Round:

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

Connectivity:

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

Deeper Thoughts:

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

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

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

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

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

In Summary:

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