It’s no secret that I’ve loved Doctor Who since I first discovered it back in 1980. The concept itself, the character of the Doctor, the TARDIS, the companions, the monsters, and the villains… It truly is unlike anything else out there in the sci-fi entertainment world. It had already been going for 17 years and was an institution when I first saw it. In its now-62 years of existence, it’s had some incredible highs and some very unfortunate lows. We’ve just ended an eight-year period where things have got very, very low. 

So much so that at this moment in time, I’m going to err on the side of the show being dead. Oh, it could come back, as the show is all about regeneration. It just needs the right “push”.  But that’s easier said than done, especially in this day and age. After all, there’s less and less scripted TV out there, it seems. No idea what it’ll be like in 10 years.

Around 2022, when the BBC partnered with Bad Wolf Studio productions and streaming platform Disney+, they all gathered behind Russell T Davies, the man who brought Who back in 2005, gave him complete creative control, and sat back to watch the triumphant return.

Many fans (including me) were happy to see Davies return, hoping for, at the very least, a step up in quality from the previous Chris Chibnall/ Thirteenth Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) era run. This would, most assumed, be better. 

Disappointment followed.

Davies engineered his new version of Who to appeal to what he thought modern-day audiences wanted. Also, to what he thought Disney wanted. Russell was a big fan of Pixar stories and thought he’d bring some of that into the mix. Davies also tried to appease the world stage, to please everyone, everywhere. He also decided to lay on some heavy messaging, wag his finger a bit, get meta, and shift the show’s focus from science fiction to gods and fantasy. He dragged beloved, classic villains into the current series and made watered-down mockeries of them. He’d also ignored or somehow forgotten any number of facts from previous eras, and changed canon to suit his own personal fan service. The fans weren’t crazy about a lot of this.

Oh, and he took several opportunities to circle back to divisive storylines by his friend and former showrunner, Chris Chibnall, and reinforce those. This, too, did not go over well with fandom.

The first real big red flag: Davies started his new reign (RTD2) in anniversary year 2023 by making some proclamations. 

Russell announced that Daleks creator Davros’ withered form would no longer be sequestered in his Dalek travel base because, according to Davies, it seemed like a wheelchair, and that associated wheelchairs with evil (?), so he transformed Davros into a middle-aged guy who could walk (at least for a Children in Need skit, though Davies doubled down and said that that’s what Davros would look like in the future anyway). A once fascinating character transformed into “some guy”. This shocked, bewildered, and angered many, including those Who fans in wheelchairs who loved the character and cosplayed as him. What would this mean for the Daleks themselves, who all travel around in the same “wheelchair” bases? Would Russell turn them all into a bunch of run-of-the-mill Nazis? Because that’s what they are at heart — it’s the globbiness, weapons, and travel bases that make them so popular. It’s very possible that Davies didn’t think it through.

For the 60th anniversary, Russell decided the new Fourteenth Doctor would be David Tennant, coming back for a few specials. The first rehashed, recycled Doctor, along with Catherine Tate, back as Donna Noble. Things went pretty well at first. At the end of the third special, Russell decided to not do a traditional regeneration, but a bi-generation, splitting the Doctor in two. Old Doctor Tennant was then supposed to go off and retire with his TARDIS (a scenario no one believes in the slightest). The new Fifteenth Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, took out a cartoon mallet, banged out a second TARDIS, and off he went. 

This was a bombastic, joyous, gay Doctor that had a tendency to start crying in every story, and a tendency to call everyone “babes”. Davies also reintegrated romance into the programme, just as he did during his first tenure as showrunner years ago. It was Russell’s preference that the Doctor be more of a sexual being, more into human relationships, than the asexual alien being he’d been in the past. But although NuWho fans who didn’t know any better and bought into the earlier relationship between Tennant and Piper, the sexualized version of the Doctor never sat well with the fan base who rememberd what the first incarnations were like. The Gatwa version fared even worse with fans.

It must be said though that Ncuti’s a great actor. I bear him no ill will at all. He’s an actor doing a job. And there were a few good eps through his two seasons. Overall, it was slightly better than the Chibnall era. It’s how Gatwa had been written as the Doctor that’s been the problem. Davies has been the problem. 

Davies’ even decreed the sonic screwdriver would change shape to look more like a hand massager or remote control, because, says Russell, all the other past sonics “looked like guns”. (None of the sonics ever even remotely resembled guns. They looked a lot more like screwdrivers, because yes, they were slim and cylindrical. It’s in the name. But the decree was made.)

Russell also had characters speaking and winking to camera, and the show veered wildly into meta territory, plainly stating that this was, in fact, a TV show. It was all fiction. Worse, the impression was given that it was not only just a TV show, but more of a lark, not something to be taken at all seriously; just silliness. But… if Davies didn’t respect his material, why should we?

Many of Davies’ choices were met with derision, but Russell would usually shrug it off or respond “tough” to critics, prompting many to believe that his all-encompassing creative control prompted a higher level of arrogance from the showrunner. 

At some point, these bizarre, nonsensical, fairy tale developments got many fans thinking that this couldn’t possibly be where Davies was really going with the show. Something was off — surely these were red herrings. Some strange, dream-like adventure, and at some point, reality would come crashing back in, and some old foe like the Master of The Land of Fiction (From Patrick Troughton’s The Mind Robber) would turn out to be behind all this meta insanity… right?

It turns out that, no, Russell was just having fun, being experimental, and doing whatever he wanted. 

Disney was not pleased; fans were not pleased; Disney subscribers bailed. Russell just naturally assumed from the very beginning that all his choices and stories would be a resounding success and that Disney would immediately renew, and Who would go on, year after year, with no gaps, a triumph. Didn’t happen. 

Rumours have it that there have been discussions between Disney and the BBC, and that for Disney to renew the agreement going forward, Davies would have to go, and Disney would need creative control. The BBC stuck by Russell. 

Disney has not renewed as of writing this, months after the previous season ended. Everything has ground to a halt, and the show is dead in the water. Currently, it’s Disney and the BBC in the room negotiating, presumably, about creative control and the massive Doctor Who back catalogue.

Gatwa has moved on to other projects. Many months ago, he appeared on The Graham Norton Show, saying they were going to start filming “Season 3” at the beginning of 2025. The comment was later edited out.

But in recent interviews, Ncuti now says that the plan was always going to be doing only two short seasons. He then shifted to explaining that he left because he was just getting too old to play the part. Too much physical and mental stress. Bad knee. It should be pointed out that he’s 32, one of the youngest to ever play the role, and he seems pretty vibrant in rehearsals for upcoming play, Born With Teeth.

Davies has also repainted history, now claiming that it was always the case that Disney would make no decision on green-lighting another season until after Season 2 aired. Yet he originally scheduled filming of Season 3 to begin several months before Season 2 aired. Back in 2022, he said from the very beginning that he’d planned it so there’d be a new season of Who every year, with no gap years. Huzzah!

Russell simply assumed that things would go so spectacularly, that Disney would okay a third season immediately after Season 1 aired. 

But…

Although Davies had total control on Who, he was dealing with Disney, who controls the approval process, the money, and the fate of the show. So Russell wrongly planned this whole Who schedule — and talked about it at great length — ignoring the reality of the situation. And now, we’ve got no show, and a big old gap coming. No one knows how long it will be.

So either he was lying at the start and being naïve to boot, or lying now about how all this was always the plan. Russell seems to think if he reinvents history enough, it’ll become true and people will just accept the new narrative. He seems to ignore reality a lot. 

I’ve glossed over a couple things, such as the bland search for Ruby Sunday’s mom in Season 1, and the very unfortunate Rise, Fall, and Marginalization of poor Belinda Chandra in Season 2. Anyway, Davies’ last act as showrunner was to end the series by regenerating Gatwa into Billie Piper, who originally played Rose Tyler. She’s not credited as the Doctor, though, and Davies claims even he doesn’t know who she’s supposed to be — even though he arranged it. 

Just the latest gimmick with another returning actor from RTD1, just like when he brought back Tennant and Tate in 2023. The Piper gag was a last minute decision by Davies, filmed at the eleventh hour. 

Instead of ending with the Doctor traveling off into the sunset, or an open-ended regeneration, Russell just left a mess for whoever might come after him. Or this might have been him saying, “Now you’ve got to bring me back to fix this!”

This, surprisingly, led to even BBC shows mocking what Davies was doing with the series. Davies didn’t mind laughing at Who’s expense, and now people are laughing at him.

Going forwards, the BBC is seemingly unwilling to produce the show itself because the corporation prefers having a streaming partner who will foot the majority of the expenses. So they still need a money man, be it Disney or whoever else they can hook.

Both Davies and the BBC also felt that to be successful now, Doctor Who needed to compete with the special effects and budgets of all the other franchises, such as Star Wars, Marvel, Game of Thrones, etc., and that’s why they need the extra cash injection. Special effects.

Unfortunately, they lost sight of the fact that Doctor Who became legendary in the classic era, specifically the 1960s and ‘70s, when they didn’t have a big budget for special effects. 

Doctor Who made its bones on stories, characters, and acting. They weren’t entirely dependent on SFX like Star Wars and other franchises, but times change and evidently there’s less importance put on quality writing these days.

No one knows how long this gap will last, and even then, should it return, what the next iteration of the show might be, or if future audiences will even still be interested in what used to be known as “TV shows”, if and when they happen to look up from their phones.

So, until a new deal is struck, somewhere, some when… For now, R.I.P. Doctor Who.