A solar wind sends an asteroid spinning through the Medusa Cascade like a tumbleweed. 

It’s quiet, out there, in the vacuum. Too quiet. 

No news, no announcement. When will Doctor Who be back? We don’t know. 

Timing-wise, consider this:

Even if the BBC got the green light right now to proceed with Season 3/16/42/Puddle-Dripper, they’d have to clear schedules, hire more crew, possibly build a new TARDIS set, continue, or rewrite scripts (either with or hopefully without Russell T Davies), find a new Doctor to take over from stunt-Billie Piper, address a hundred other things, film, do VFX, etc… 

So yes, even if they got the green light right this minute, the best case scenario, it’d be two years before Doctor Who would hit our screens again — at the earliest.

Some — many — say it’s time to rest the show. 

Give it time away, so maybe people will miss it eventually. Maybe even farther down the road, they’ll get excited enough to develop a new emoji about it returning, or do some insightful monologues on TikTok. 

I imagine the fan productions during the rest will multiply. A lot of fans think they have the right stuff to be “a” Doctor, not “the” Doctor, of course; the definite article, no. Celebrities will, unasked, throw their hat in the ring to get some cheap publicity. Danny Dyer’s already answered the call (that never came). 

So taking into account that best case scenario above, add two years onto this “rest”. 

How long does this regenerative period last, resulting in people clamouring for Who to return?

I suppose one metric might be the same length of time it spent dividing the audience, along with ratings slipping. The show’s been dividing fans since 2018, but Peter Capaldi’s numbers were slipping during his last season in 2017. 

His last season was much loved by those who watched it, but ratings were slipping, and of course Capaldi wasn’t a hot young Doctor, so modern audiences, only accustomed to hot, young Doctors weren’t interested. 2016 was a gap year, so we land on 2015. So Doctor Who has been on the ropes for a decade. One good decade, and then one not so good decade? Hmmm.

That’s half a generation of people tuning out for one reason or another. Ten years where kids who were around five, six, or seven, are now 15, 16, and 17, and that’s all the Who they’ve known. Then the rest should likely be another decade, so they can get that bad taste out of their mouths and maybe yearn for Who to come back. 

So maybe ten years from now, in the mid to late 2030s, the writers who grew up only with the Chris Chibnall era and Davies’ latest tenure will be ready to create an all-new Whoniverse, catching that lightning (?) in the bottle a third time. Maybe.

Most ties to the classic era have already long since been severed, or mangled, so I think it’s unlikely that the new blood will be studying the golden era from 60 years previous, but anything’s possible.  

There might very well be dedicated, talented professionals who are chomping at the bit to do Who right now! Whether they’ll still be willing, able, available, and/or alive in a decade or two is anyone’s guess. Because yes, the rest might be 20 years. We just don’t know. 

Those who scoff at a 20 year rest… Well, the Wilderness Years of the 1990s did span 16. 

The BBC, of course, loves money and is dedicated to supporting all the incoming money Who can muster. Unfortunately, we don’t know if the Beeb will even be around in 10 years, much less 20. 

It is almost impossible to tell on which devices people will even be watching in 10 or 20 years. 

It’s just as possible that Who will either be forgotten…

Or maybe get a light-hearted, wacky animated series for kids instead. In the entertainment landscape, the future is always changing.

Although, hey, people are so excited about the wonders and blunders of AI, and how they’ll eventually recreate all the missing episodes — well, in 10 years, they’ll be happy to get all new AI Doctor Who!

I apologise if this all comes off as negative, but as of writing, I don’t see a lot of likely positive outcomes. I would like to think something good will happen though. 

It’s possible that the BBC sells off the show to a competitor, who might take Who and run with it, giving it something the BBC hasn’t been able to do for the better part of a decade: a great creative team. 

To each his own on which of these scenarios are the most likely. It depends on how much faith you have in those future writers of the next generation that grew up with Jodie Whittaker and Ncuti Gatwa. 

I’m currently of the mind that they should at least clean up the mess over Billie Piper’s casting with a special, so at least the current incarnation of the show ends cleanly. Let Steven Moffat do it. He’s the only human Davies readily defers to anyway.

Honestly, with the way things are, I say they should just pull the plug. Yes, do the clean up special — which we shouldn’t have been forced to do anyway: have Billie and the Fourteenth Doctor (David Tennant) meld together to become someone… and cut to black. Boom. Done.

So if it’s really either rest or die, I guess sure, rest. The show has kind of already been dead for eight years. 

I guess whoever’s still around in 10 to 20 years will see what kind of resurrection will happen.