Robert Shearman, who wrote 2005’s Dalek, has said that Doctor Who “is probably as dead as we’ve ever known it.”
The writer told Doctor Who Magazine:
“I go through phases. I have a real push/pull thing with the show. At the moment, I’m in a ‘pull’ phase. It’s weird because the show is probably as dead as we’ve ever known it.
“After 1989, we had, for years, a current Doctor. Now, everything that is ever going to be produced in Doctor Who terms is going to feel retrogressive. At least with the New Adventures and then the BBC Books, you thought, ‘It’s the current Doctor – [Seventh Doctor, Sylvester] McCoy or [Eighth Doctor, Paul] McGann’. No one’s going to start writing Doctor Who books with a Billie Piper Doctor, because no one knows what that means. In a funny way, the closing moments of The Reality War seem to put a full stop on things. We didn’t have that before.”
It’s hard to argue with that. The franchise is pretty up in the air right now, with Disney+ still not confirming whether or not it’ll pick up the programme for another season — though it seems unlikely at the moment.
And heck, even showrunner, Russell T Davies, has said that he’s not sure whether Billie Piper really is the next Doctor; this might be subterfuge because, in the time since Series 15 aired, with Ncuti Gatwa departing the role of the Fifteenth Doctor, a rough plan must surely have been sketched out.
The BBC has assured fans that Doctor Who does have a future, fortunately, so something will happen at some point in the future.
Nonetheless, Shearman has pretty accurately summed up the current mood of Who fandom!
