The official Doctor Who website has been updated with an odd message that might suggest Billie Piper won’t be playing the Sixteenth Doctor, but instead Rose Tyler again.

On the UNIT section of the site, Shirley-Anne Bingham, UNIT’s current Scientific Advisor, has supposedly given this update:

“Sure I’m not the only one who’s got this in their diary already, but today’s the 20th anniversary of the return of Rose Tyler, who went ‘missing’ for one year after Operation Mannequin. Time absolutely flies!

“As Rose Tyler is currently both missing from this universe and flagged as a complex space-time event, maybe keep an eye out. I’ve got the Vlinx scanning all media channels and the subwave network.”

Could this mean the upcoming Christmas special will link back to Piper’s time as the Ninth and Tenth Doctor companion?

Possibly — but equally, it could simply be that Rose is “missing from this universe” because she’s stuck in “Pete’s World”, i.e. the parallel dimension we saw in Army of Ghosts/ Doomsday and The Stolen Earth/ Journey’s End, where she was dropped off by the Tenth Doctor with a David Tennant clone.

Nonetheless, there are hints that Billie won’t be the Sixteenth Doctor, despite the audience seeing Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor regenerating into her at the conclusion of The Reality War. Notably, she wasn’t credited as the Doctor in the credits, and showrunner, Russell T Davies, admitted he didn’t know whether she was or not soon after the episode aired. He was probably fibbing, however.

And let’s face it, Davies likes bringing companions back, so maybe Rose’s return is inevitable.

Doctor Who returns this Christmastime.