Doctor Who writer and actor Mark Gatiss has suggested that Doctor Who should resolve the cliffhanger from The Reality War by… ignoring it! Or shrugging it off at least.
Gatiss, whose credits include The Unquiet Dead, The Crimson Horror, and Robot of Sherwood, said:
“When Dallas came back, to use a strange example… the last episode of Dallas, Larry Hagman is visited by a strange man, played by Joel Grey, who turns out to be the devil. It’s like a strange version of It’s a Wonderful Life, where he shows him life without him, where Cliff becomes president and all these things. And then he turns out to be the Devil at the end, and it ends with the bang of JR shooting himself. That’s the end of Dallas. It came back 15, 20 years later and JR says: ‘I saw a lot of crazy s*** that night.’ Because he’d been drinking.
“So in the future, if someone wants to explain why the Doctor turns into Billie Piper, it’s easy. But equally easy is not to bother because it doesn’t really matter. Of course, it doesn’t. There’s always an explanation. I’ve already thought of 18 of them.
“But the crucial thing, and the reason why The TV Movie stumbles immediately, is they try and make it for all the audiences at once. Whereas the crucial audience was the brand-new audience. If you start an episode of Doctor Who inside the TARDIS, talking about the Master and the Daleks, lost – why would you not be?”
And he’s right.
The Reality War ended with Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor apparently regenerating into Billie Piper; it was likely a way for then-showrunner Russell T Davies to get his contract extended to wrap up the era, but that didn’t work, seeing as Davies has departed the series alongside production team Bad Wolf.
So that was a big cliffhanger that could have a solution, but should it? It largely depends on when it’s picked up (not to mention the low figures for those who watched The Reality War), and as the programme is going out to tender later this year, we’re probably in for quite a wait. Would a new audience, somewhere down the line, care about resolving something that’s best left ignored? Especially when it didn’t have a massive audience in the first place? Nah. It’d cause some headaches for continuity-obsessed fans perhaps, but Big Finish might step in and offer some sort of resolution.
