Doctor Who – What The Fuck Is Going On?

Doctor Who is in a very strange place at the moment. Which is to say, it’s absolutely nowhere at all. Following the, er, unexpected conclusion to “The Reality War”, theories having been flying thick and fast. Is Billie Piper now the Doctor? The credits don’t list her as such (presumably as a get-out clause). Is she a midpoint between the Gatwa Doctor and whoever takes on the role permanently, like Tennant was between Whitaker and Gatwa? Is she a Watcher-like figure? Will she be in it for a few minutes, then regenerate again so whoever actually gets cast can then get on with it? You get the idea.

Because, for all that it seems unlikely that Piper is simply the next Doctor, sticking her at the end of “The Reality War” certainly generated a lot of publicity. But that’s also all it did. The theories have faded away. Interest has cooled. The Disney deal – never the smartest of moves but oh well, we are where we are – has ended and has yet to be replaced with anything, including much interest. The deal ended, it was pretty much as everyone expected with polite but final words on both sides, and the show lost its potential new home in America.

This was largely met with shrugs. The BBC and Disney weren’t an obvious fit? Whoever would have guessed? In this way, the Gatwa era, regardless of its individual merits, can only be adjudged a failure. It was meant to launch the show to a new audience, on a new streaming home, with a new budget, and it has demonstrably failed to do that. There are a number of reasons for this but Disney themselves never seemed more than half-hearted about the show, promoted it barely at all, and unsurprisingly it faded to nothing. There was just no support there. That the show itself, ready for a new launch and hungry for new audiences, then promptly turned in two of the worst seasons in its history, didn’t exactly help matters either.

This article is being written on the 31^st May 2026 and as yet no announcement as to who what’s going to follow the Disney deal has been made. Worse, no announcement as to who the new Doctor will be has been made (we’ll come back to this shortly). Rumours are currently swirling that the Christmas special is going to be pushed back to Easter. And while they are only rumours at this stage, it wouldn’t be wholly surprising either. There’s a vacuum of information from both Russell T Davies and the BBC themselves. The BBC say they’re committed to the long-term future of the show but have done nothing to actually confirm this or make it look like they’re doing anything. Filming hasn’t started, which by this point you’d think it would have for a Christmas transmission. RTD has lots of nice things to say, as always, but also has other shows he’s doing. So what is going on?

The truth is, nobody knows, but more importantly, the actual answer seems to be nothing. Maybe there are lots of moving parts behind the scenes as the BBC tries to put another deal together with the likes of HBO or Netflix. If so, there’s been remarkably few leaks about it. Nobody’s been cast yet but is that because there’s no future for the show or simply because we’re not quite at that stage yet? Some of the “they haven’t started filming yet” rumours might simply be because Piper has a busy schedule and perhaps that needs to be worked around, assuming she’s going to be in the whole special rather than just a few minutes.

The “nobody’s been cast yet” thing is interesting for another reason. Some people (by which I mean ill-informed rumour-mongers, wandering round the press like a drunk Sontaran) are insisting that this is because the BBC can’t find anyone to accept the role because it’s a poisoned chalice. This, frankly, reeks of bullshit. Playing the Doctor is a role of a lifetime in the longest-running sci-fi show of all time and one of the biggest global sci-fi franchises and you can’t find any British actor to fill the role? Not even for a season or two like Gatwa? Bull. Shit.

That “poisoned chalice” line tacitly allows those people to imply that Gawta – or the Gatwa era – has torpedoed the show below the waterline. However, that’s usually trotted out by racists and/or extreme right-wingers that can’t bear the idea of a black Doctor and want to lay the blame at his feet (or a female Doctor, for that matter, since Whitaker is often seen as the start of the problem around the idiocy of the culture wars). And the truth is, Gatwa’s Doctor probably is the weakest of the New Who era but not because he’s black or because there’s a problem with the show front-loading its politics but because he often doesn’t much feel like the character and is lumbered with some of the worst scripts this side of “Time and the Rani”. When he gets decent material – “The Well” seems like a good example – he can be a great Doctor but he’s too often just written as babes and tears and it gets old fast.

Added to which, Gatwa himself always seems a little… less than committed. It’s always been clear he viewed the role as a stepping stone in his career and while his post-Doctor Who career hasn’t exactly catapulted him to being a global A-lister, he’s worked solidly since. There’s been a couple of good theatre roles, including The Importance of Being Earnest, and some film work, like the remake of The Roses which starred Benedict Cumberbatch and the always brilliant Olivia Coleman (honestly, cast her! If we can’t get Emma Thompson as the Doctor, cast Coleman! Ahem. Anyway…). But his enthusiasm for the role, which has always been publicity-ready, felt a tad performative. Say what you like about Whitaker but she loves being the Doctor and is not shy about it. But for Gatwa, it always seemed like Just Another Role. He can turn on the charm and flash his big smile when discussing it but that’s the point – it feels like something he just turns on when he has to, rather than genuine enthusiasm. Still, it’s hardly his fault the scripts of his era turned out so poor.

So anyway, yes, the idea they can’t find anyone to play the Doctor is clearly bollocks and not the issue. So what else can it be? Was the second Gatwa series so wretched that there’s just no way back from it? In fact, this is worth spending some time on because the quality of the show, and its ability to continue, are one of the things that is definitely being touted around as the reason we don’t have any kind of news about what’s going on at the moment. But let’s look into this in more detail.

In fact, the general consensus is that the second series was an improvement over the first one, albeit not by a huge margin. For myself, I don’t think there’s much in it – both are weak but in different places. The start of Gatwa’s Season One (do we still have to call it that or can we just give up and admit it was Season Fourteen?) is dreadful, giving us the one-two punch of “Space Babies” and “The Devil’s Chord”. But it slowly, if shakily, rallies and at least “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” was a great episode, even if the season collapsed when it got to “Empire of Death” (and boy did it ever). Season 15 also starts badly with “The Robot Revolution” but it’s better than “Space Babies” (what isn’t?) and manages to be reasonably OK until “The Interstellar Song Contest”, at which point everything goes to absolute shit and we end with the vacuous, empty, pointless fanwank of “The Reality War”.

For what it’s worth, I actually went back and rewatched “The Reality War” in preparation for writing this article. After all, it’s easy to get swept up with things when you’re watching them for the first time and sometimes, with a bit of distance or perspective, things can look much better. I maintain this will be the case with the Whitaker era – absent from the stupid conversations around a woman being cast and the start of the culture war nonsense, and with a lot of hindsight, it’s virtues are much clearer now than they were at the time. Yes, Chibnall isn’t a very good writer and frequently falls short but a lot of the ideas and creative decisions are visibly good. It’s an era just aching for its redemption.

This, however, is not the case for “The Reality War”. If anything, it seems even worse now than it did at the time, which is no mean feat. I’m not going to re-review the episode here but so many of the decisions are just awful and it’s worth spending time to explain this. The casting of Anita Dobson as the Rani is the sort of stunt casting that JNT was looked down on for but actually she’s fine and the Panjabi Rani had real promise, squandered though it is. But pretty much everything else is largely terrible. The story is dull and no amount of bone-creatures and flash-bang UNIT nonsense can make up for that. And there’s something deeply wrong about the Doctor arriving on the UNIT bridge and getting reports like he’s the captain of a starship – it’s just not right, tonally, which is a major issue with this era.

The Rani’s Actual Plan is stupid beyond words and it’s frustrating because the Rani has real potential to be a different kind of Doctor Who villain in an era where trotting out the Master yet again isn’t really sustainable. An amoral scientist who’s only interested in her own experiments and doesn’t care about the fallout sounds like a great idea and Mel even describes her that way in the episode! But that’s not what we get. What we get is some rebuilding Gallifrey rubbish for… reasons. The character here might be the Rani in name but it’s as no real connection to the one we’ve actually met previously.

Ditto Omega, of course. He’s just a special effect and re-watching the episode now it’s incredible just how poor “the Doctor shoots him back into his own dimension” actually is. Because it’s terrible. The Doctor has nominally being charging up the Vindicator for just this moment but it doesn’t look like a clever plan that’s been bubbling away in the background at all, it just looks like an easy way for RTD to write himself out of a corner. I mean, it works in the sense that Omega (that’s O-mega, by the way, not O-me-ga, as everyone insists on inaccurately pronouncing it) is defeated but it’s honestly dreadful in a way RTD almost never is and Gatwa is deeply unconvincing as he sends Omega “back to hell” (sigh). Belinda getting stuck with a child doesn’t in any way feel like a satisfactory conclusion to her story and the whole saving-Poppy-with-regeneration-energy reeks of writerly desperation.

Of course, these days we know that there was some desperation. Gatwa decided at the last minute he wasn’t doing any more and the alleged story involving Susan had to be dropped and hastily written around to accommodate the regeneration. But this is still inelegant, clumsy, and ultimately doesn’t work. I’ve already commented that Belinda is wasted in this era – which she very much is – but her ending just feels plonked in there. The attempt to make one life matter feels like it should be the right one but because there’s so little to support it, it never does. We get a Whitaker cameo, presumably in place of Susan, which is lovely but doesn’t resolve the issue of Susan being in this season at all. Just edit her out of earlier episodes if you can’t make it work! She’s only on screen for about 90 seconds! But no, that whole story is simply dropped and we get Gawta trying to convince us that his time on the show has been a joy while not much looking like he believes a word of it.

Ultimately, the problem is that “The Reality War” is as hollow and empty as the bone-creatures UNIT have to half-heartedly defeat. It’s not actually about anything. It’s just the TV equivalent of playing with action figures, smashing them together in the hopes of a good story emerging. It doesn’t. You can’t get away with that any more. “The Timeless Children” was rubbish too but it was, at least, about something. The whole point of it is that, when the moment came, the Doctor chose to be the Doctor and that means something. All that stuff the Master lays out, about the Fugitive Doctor, about the origin of the Time Lords, about Division, all that stuff just doesn’t matter. He thinks it will break the Doctor because it’s the sort of thing that would break him but it doesn’t. She rejects it all, and with it is an implicit rejection of the sort of fanwank that “The Reality War” consists of. Because, again, with her memories taken away and no knowledge of her pre-Hartnell era, what matters is the choice that individual made, the choice to run away in a TARDIS with Susan to have adventures. “Ohh, the Doctor is the secret origin of the Time Lords!” just isn’t important. The choices we make as individuals are.

Now, could this have been better articulated in the episode itself? Unquestionably. The episode is crap and far too much of it consists of the Doctor standing about having stuff explained at her. But at least that stuff is rejected for a better way. In “The Reality War”, the stuff is the only way. Just more fanwank upon more fanwank. There’s no theme of “motherhood” running through it and there’s no sense whatsoever that this is what the story is about. The Rani wanting to create new Time Lords is just that – a normal villain plan that needs to be perfunctorily defeated. It doesn’t relate to, or connect to, the rest of the story in any way.

The hollowness at the core of much RTD’s second-go-around writing is laid bare here. It was in “Empire of Death” too, but at least it had a decent first episode then fell apart, which is kind of how almost all RTD finales work (with the exception of “The Parting of the Ways”). But usually, when the story faltered, the character work would be enough to carry things through. Dobbie Jesus Doctor in “Last of the Time Lords” is awful but the character work between the Doctor and the Master, and the great stuff Martha’s given to do, means the episode can get away with it. But the character work here is non-existent. Belinda is stuck in a box to get her out of the way. Ruby gets one great scene with Conrad but otherwise remains inconsequential to proceedings. The Rani is just some generic baddie. The Doctor sacrifices himself because of the demands of the script. It’s not that it’s empty calories, there’s barely even any calories at all.

The point of laying all this out is to say that, yes, this season of Doctor Who has been dreadful. Really, genuinely awful in a way that seems almost impossible for a writer of RTD’s skill, yet here it is. But also – so what? It’s a shit season of Doctor Who. Are we going to pretend that Season Six doesn’t exist? It’s shit too and the series carried right on. Or what about Season 22? Colin Baker’s horrific debut in “The Twin Dilemma” was of course Season 21 but his first full season isn’t exactly regarded as a lost classic and the show carried on for another four years. Bad seasons of Doctor Who happen. It’s a thing. It’s not the thing, however, that’s preventing the show’s return. It might have been the thing that ended the Disney deal – the show never picked up the viewers that either Disney or the BBC hoped and for all RTD’s protestations that he was reaching a newer, younger audience, there clearly wasn’t enough of them to keep things going.

But again, so what? The Disney deal ends, the BBC can make the show in house again if they need to, or find another deal if they need to. The much-vaunted big budget increase of the Gatwa era amounted to very little in the end. Maybe the bone creatures and UNIT’s Marvelesque headquarters aren’t something we’d have gotten in the Whitaker era or earlier but beyond that, the big budget made very little difference indeed. It’s telling that some of the most praised moments of the era – like the conversation in a tent in “Empire of Death” or the Doctor’s quiet terror in “The Well” – don’t require a big budget at all. They require good actors being given strong material. That’s always been the quintessence of Doctor Who. And it’s something the BBC can absolutely still do.

But that does actually require strong material and if there’s one thing that’s clear, RTD isn’t the person to produce that any more. He’s had two seasons to prove it and has done so, comprehensively. Whatever his magic touch was before, it’s deserted him. What Doctor Who needs is new writers, a new showrunner that isn’t RTD, Moffatt, or Chibnall, and a focus on what makes the show work. The show isn’t out of ideas and it doesn’t need to rest but it does need to change direction and it does need fresh impetus.

It’s too early to tell if the Gatwa seasons, combined with the hostility directed towards the Whitaker era, have sunk the show. it would be nice to think this isn’t the case. I will always want more Doctor Who but it needs to change. There’s nothing wrong with experimenting with the show but the Disney experiment hasn’t worked. Not because of “woke” or a black Doctor or any of that rubbish. It’s because the writing isn’t good enough so the experiment failed. That’s OK – we can acknowledge it and move on from it. But if there’s a lesson to be learned from this era, then it’s one that Doctor Who fans should already be familiar with. Back in the 80s, Doctor Who was made for an increasingly small group of people. Instead of being a show made for the general public, a subset of who were Doctor Who fans, it was instead made for Doctor Who fans first and the public second. This led to the show being cancelled. In the Gatwa era, it seems the show is being made for an audience even smaller – an audience of one, RTD. That’s not sustainable and it may indeed lead to the show being cancelled again. I hope not, but it’s possible. At the very least, it’s contributed to the strange interregnum we now find ourselves in.

Yet maybe this symbolically makes sense. The man who brought the show back from the dead might well turn out to be the person who kills it once more.