Former Doctor Who showrunner, Chris Chibnall, has reflected on the sort of love story between Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor and Mandip Gill’s Yasmin Khan.

Instead of seeing it as an “unrequited” story, Chibnall claims it was “unconsummated”, seeing as the Doctor essentially told Yaz that she couldn’t enter into a relationship with a human. He explains:

“It’s now sometimes spoken about as an unrequited love story. But it’s not unrequited; it’s unconsummated. I think: a) it’s the most romantic and heartbreaking version of that story; and b) we’ve all had those people in our lives.

“And perhaps you go, ‘Okay. Another day or another week and that might have been something else…’ What’s been incredible is how meaningful it’s clearly been to a lot of people. That’s one of the biggest things that people write to me about, and I’ve had people coming up to me with tattoos of dialogue on their arms.”

Chris says that he thinks the cast and crew “took it exactly to the place I wanted to take it to” — to me, however, that’s a bit of nonsense.

The so-called “Thasmin” thing only grew because fandom saw something in Whittaker and Gill’s friendship and wanted it to mean more, especially as that Doctor in particular kept pushing her companions away. Any hint of a love story only came about very, very late on, around Flux, aka Series 13; from there, there was no time to develop anything meaningful as all parties were due to leave Doctor Who.

Still, I think it’s fair to say that he’s right in that their relationship was unconsummated; humans fall away and die, whereas Time Lords carry on and on and on, meaning perhaps the only long-term meaningful relationship the character could have was with River Song.