6,513 words, 34 minutes read time.

Introduction

 It’s taken a while, but there’s a lot to say, so much that I’ve had to cut about half of what I said in my original draft. New information, rumours, gossip, speculation and leaked information from previously reliable sources, related to both the final episode of the season and the future/non-future of Doctor Whoin general, has been coming out almost by the hour. This hasn’t exactly made my task any easier. But you have to stop somewhere, and maybe I should stay away from Who-related YouTube podcasts for a while.

Anyway, here we go,

As I’m sure everybody who cares in the slightest knows by now, Billie Piper, formerly ‘Rose’, companion to Ecclestone’s Ninth and Tennant’s Tenth, is the next Doctor.

Or maybe she isn’t.

I’ll return to that.

Either way, having her appear at the end of Ncuti’s regeneration scene looks like the last gamble of a desperate man. We know Russell T Davis (henceforth RTD or, simply Davies), likes to generate online ‘content’. If that was his aim, then he has been successful in that, if little else. But the general fan reaction has been overwhelmingly negative, and can he seriously have expected anything different?

Conversely, if he intended to endDoctor Who there, then it might have made some sense to have Billie, a rightly much-loved figure among fandom, be both the first and last face seen in the modern, post-2005, incarnation of the show.

But even RTD can’t be so arrogant as to believe he alone can choose when the show should end? His big talk of having written season 3 and much of season 4 already suggests he believes he can and should continue in his present position, but that’s starting to look less and less likely.

Imagine the horror of scripts written for Ncuti repurposed for Billie?

To the episode itself, the climax to not just one but two seasons’ worth of work, a full twenty-one episodes over approximately eighteen months, including the specials, the whole of RTD 2 so far, or, hopefully, the end of RTD 2 Full Stop.

Overview

 The Reality War was a convoluted mess. If it is to be the end of RTD’s second coming, then it’s a fitting epitaph to the lowest point in the history of the show.

 It’s telling that even those (theShrills, as they are sometimes derisively known, and which would be a great name for Doctor Who monster) who’ve defended this period throughout have had to throw up their hands in a grudging signal of surrender as far as the finale is concerned. It’s been ages since anyone has claimed that I must be racist and/homophobic, or have it patiently explained to me online why being ‘woke’ is a good thing, because I’ve dared to criticise Gatwa’s incarnation of the Doctor and Davies’ determination to insert his political ideology into almost every episode.

Positives

The whole was such a disjointed, confused and credibility-stretching disaster that it seems wrong to single out individual elements that weren’t bad. Wong, and difficult.

Still, in the interest of balance…

• My first watch was in a surprisingly packed Liverpool cinema surrounded by an equally surprisingly young demographic. They seemed to enjoy it. This was my first time watching Doctor Who on a big screen, and as an experience, it was interesting and fun. Not that my critical faculties were neutralised sufficiently by the reactions of others for me to think at any point that the episode itself was good. 
• I liked some of the set design, most of which I mentioned in my review of the last episode,Wish World. In particular, I liked the Bone Palace, especially the Steampunk ‘Doubt Counter’ beings (I’ve forgotten what they were called). The big battle between UNIT and the Bone Beasts was visually striking, for the few minutes it lasted. The way the UNIT building turned into a sort of high-tech pirate ship reminded me of the Terry Gilliam -Monty Python shortThe Crimson Assurance, which was shown in cinemas prior toThe Meaning of Life. It was especially reminiscent when Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) was at the helm, twirling an old-fashioned battleship wheel. Unlike the Python film, I don’t think this was supposed to be funny. But it was.
• Millie Jackson as Ruby has been by far the most consistent actor of the two seasons, when she’s been around, and here she was no exception. More on Ruby/Millie later.
• This was Ncuti’s last appearance as the Doctor, and as somebody who has thought he was miscast from the off, and that he has never succeeded in portraying a believable Doctor for more than a few fleeting moments, it would make sense for me to see his departure as a positive in and of itself.
• I do, but I will qualify that sentiment.  As bad as this episode was, he himself was OK, mostly, and there’s been enough of those ‘fleeting moments’ over the last year-and-a-half, to make me suspect that there is an alternative universe, where the show was run by somebody who told him to play down rather than to enhance the camp flamboyance he was known for in Netflix’ Sex Education, and who provided him with cohesive scripts and a consistent character arc, in which he might have made a good Doctor.
• But we don’t live in that universe and that’s sad, for him and for fans of the show. Maybe one day he’ll have the opportunity to show he really can act, to build on the ‘Dark Doctor’ aspects of his characterisation by playing a villain in something decent and credible. Or perhaps he’ll turn up, older, wiser and better in a seventy-fifth anniversary multi-Doctor special.
• His Involvement in this will have done his career no favours, unfortunately.  I feel sorry for him, though, if he decides or is advised to go with the ‘racist/homophobic fans’ narrative as an explanation for his failure, then my sympathy will rapidly evaporate. if he does feel the need to apportion blame, then I suggest he looks closely at how he was written, by whom, and for what reason.
• There was one very clever and cool idea towards the end of the episode, when Poppy’s baby cover from her newly installed Tardis crib grew smaller and smaller as the Doctor and Belinda passed it back-and-forth between themselves, whilst simultaneously and slowly forgetting the little girl’s existence. It was a nice way of visually representing Poppy’s (temporary) erasure from reality. The best idea in the whole episode, maybe in the whole season.
• I’ve liked Jonah Hauer-King’s portrayal                                                                                                                                               of Conrad Clark since his first appearance in the otherwise abysmal fourth episode,Lucky Day. He again did what he could with what he was given here. I’ll come to the bizarre character arc he was given shortly.
• The same goes for Varada Sethru as Belinda. Enforced rewrites caused by behind-the-scenes problems we’re not fully privy to, made a big contribution to making this finale such a disaster. This adversely affected the characterisation of several characters, but none more so than Belinda. I’ll also get to that later. But purely from an acting perspective, Varanda has nothing to be ashamed of.
• I’ve liked Archie Punjabi since I first became aware of her inLife On Marstwo decades ago. She’s a fine actress with the ability to lift even the weakest material. But she wasn’t written as the Rani in any sense that those who were aware of that character’s existence from the classic era would recognise.  And almost as soon as she had presented her half-baked plan to resurrect the Time Lords in her own image, in a scene of laughably static exposition, she was eaten by Omega and gone, presumably forever. What a waste.
• Ditto Anita Dobson’s Rani 2, whose only good moment was her ‘Two Rani’s’ joke before she disappeared, again, probably never to return. Two seasons’ worth of the ‘Who is Mrs. Flood’ saga, during which she did nothing even vaguely Rani-like, for that.
• Steph de Whalley returned as Anita, the sole high point from December’sJoy to the WorldChristmas special. She was there primarily to resolve the last episode’s cliff-hanger by means of the Time Hotel, which we first encountered in that Moffatt-penned Christmas episode, and of which she is now the manager, a responsibility that provided her with a magic key that enables her to open a magic door anywhere in time and space. The Doctor thus saved, she spent most of the rest of the episode holding open doors, UNIT’s high-tech gadgetry not quite stretching to doorstops. She did at least show some nice comic timing in the few lines she was given.
• Jodie Whittaker’s three-minute appearance alongside Ncuti in the Tardis made this a multi-Doctor story, though the worst multi-Doctor story ever. This was apparently a late addition, and it made no narrative sense. Yet, strangely, alongside Ncuti, she actually seemed like the Doctor, or at least ‘a’ Doctor. I almost felt nostalgic for an era I’ve hardly watched, though that didn’t run to whooping and cheering her appearance, unlike many in the cinema. Sometimes, I despair of the youth of today. They cheered when Billie appeared as well.
• Early on in his tenure, Gatwa foolishly told fans who weren’t enjoying his version of the Doctor to stop watching, and to ‘go and touch grass’ instead. Shortly before his regeneration scene, we saw Ncuti crawling in a park, literally touching grass. It was another RTD fan-bait, but quite amusing and affectionate. It made me chuckle, anyway.
• Murray Gold’s soundtrack was decent enough. He’s been disappointing since he returned alongside Davies, recycling much of his old material, and with the sound sometimes mixed so loud that it obscured the dialogue. But he did his best to lift this.

Negatives

Where does one begin?

After the cinema, I headed straight for the Grapes, my favourite Liverpool one-time Beatles haunt, secured myself a rare but necessary alcoholic drink (£6.50 for a pint of Guiness!), found a seat, got out my notebook like a proper critic, and made a list of story threads from the two seasons that were left unresolved. After that, I moved on to plot holes and miscellaneous offences against scriptwriting from this particular episode. It was a very long list, which I’ve since added to through my enjoyable trawl through online reviews, and through the second watch I delayed until strictly necessary. It’s a very long list, so what follows are merely potted highlights. One day, I will write them all out on separate cards, throw them in the air, and write my own script based on the random order in which I pick them up, in the style of a William Burrough’s cut-up experiment. It would probably be an improvement on RTD’s effort.

• One criticism, among many, of last season’s finale,Empire of Death, was that not only was the reveal of Ruby’s mum as ‘just an ordinary woman’ a letdown, it was also never explained why she was wearing weird medieval style robes when she abandoned Ruby on the steps of the church, given that that she was supposed to be a teenage girl in living in London, 2005. I assumed that was something we’d come back to, but we never did.
• The whole ‘Pantheon of Gods’ thing went nowhere, and we never discovered who The Boss was, even though this ‘boss’ was refenced in the episode.
• And what became of the Toymaker’s ‘Legions’, who the dreadfully over-acted character Maestro (Jinx Monsoon) promised us, inThe Devil’s Chord, would soon be ‘coming?’ Nothing, and I still don’t even know if they and the Pantheon are one and the same or completely separate entities.
• Having said that these two seasons were to be an ideal ‘jumping on’ point for new fans, with no knowledge of anything that had gone before being necessary, as was the first season of RTD 1 back in 2005, Davies chose to climax last season with Sutekh, a character who appeared once in the classic series, inPyramids of Mars in 1975. For the climax to this season, he went with Omega, who appeared twice, inThe Three Doctors in 1973 andThe Arc of Infinity (notThe Ark in Space as I erroneously said in myWish World review) in 1983, and the Rani, who appeared twice in the 1980’s. Viewers basically needed an MA in show-lore to follow any of this.
• Omega was ‘re-imagined’ as a giant, generic, skeletal CGI monster, because he’d ‘become the thing everybody imagined him to have become’ according to the Doctor, and bore no relation to the classic Omega (who, if we insist on strict adherence to past continuity, had become a disembodied anti-matter being, anyway). At least last years’ Scooby Doo version of Sutekh was voiced by the same actor as the original, the legendary Gabriel Woolf.
• Having appeared from behind the Seal of Rassilon, ‘Omega’ ate Archie Punjab’s Rani, and was then killed by the Doctor using his Vindicator thing. The whole ‘climatic’ battle lasted less five minutes.
• The Vindicator, which had previously been used as a sort of tracking device to help get Belinda home, which, remember, was supposedly the focus of the season, now had the destructive power of a trillion supernovas, or something. I’m no expert, but wouldn’t something of that destructive power likely destroy whole galaxies, rather than one particular target in a closed environment?
• Before their Pythonesque battle with the Bone Beasts, UNIT did a sort of Avengers’ Assemble pastiche, though I don’t think it was intended as pastiche, complete with Shirley (Ruth Madely) burning up the pavementRoadrunnerstyle in her wheelchair and token legacy character Mel (Bonnie Langford) riding her motorbike into the control room at the top of UNIT tower, somehow, complaining that she’d been a ‘housewife’ in Conrad’s Wish World, as though such a thing is an almost unimaginable horror. This assembly of UNIT’s fearsome, battle-hardened force, was completed by the Doctor walking purposefully down the stairs, accompanied by Murray Gold giving it is all, and dramatically removing his jacket, looking like he really meant business. He ruined this effect somewhat by changing into a skirt. We’ve been assured by the powers-that-be that it was a kilt, but I’d like to see them try that one in the back streets of Glasgow.
• Actually, I’ve nothing in principle against a man wearing a skirt. David Beckham managed to pull off the sarong look back in the day, and aesthetically, Ncuti looks good in most anything, I should imagine, if you like that sot of thing. If he’d gone with this skirt ensemble from the beginning of his tenure, and stuck with it, it might even have become iconic, though, personally I preferred the fifties Traditional Britain pinstripe suit and bowler hat he wore when still trapped in the world Conrad. That and the long brown leather jacket he wore in his first full episode,The Church on Ruby Road. As I’ve said before, the decision to deprive him of a single identifiable Doctor costume, which I gather wasn’t his decision, was a big mistake. 
• ‘Dark Doctor’ went nowhere. What we are left with as the legacy of the Fifteenth is a Doctor who was mostly very upbeat, positive, camp and emotional (as in crying a lot), but also for no justifiable reason, occasionally took to torturing people (The Interstellar Song Contest), expressing delight at returning Al to the state of a ‘sperm and an egg’ (The Robot Revolution), travelling forward through time to watch Conrad die an early lonely death, and then back again to gloat about his impending fate to his face (Lucky Day). Coincidentally, these were all single, white, straight men, though he wasn’t very nice to Joy inJoy to the World or Anita in this episode either. His characterisation was a mess. Being easily ‘triggered’ through being the last of his people, doesn’t really cut it.  Apart from a brief period under the Moffatt regime, he’s been The Last of the Time Lords throughout most of the modern show. The Tenth Doctor’s Time Lord Victorious period was marked more by arrogance than cruelty and had an identifiable beginning and end. With this Doctor, the ‘dark turns’ were too random to make sense.  Put simply, there were too many times when he did things thatDoctor Who fans never want to see the Doctor do.

– Belinda’s ‘development’ was also odd, especially in this, her likely final appearance. From strong, career driven independent nurse, who wanted nothing more than to get home and continue to help people, to final contentment as the mother of Poppy, which, apparently, she’d been all the time. We even got clips from previous episodes were references to ‘getting home for Poppy’ were inserted, and, more weirdly, even from episodes we hadn’t seen where the same point was reinforced.

 The conclusion that Belinda’s life was made complete by the addition of a baby, actually made a mockery of the ‘progressive’ politics and ‘Queer friendly’ direction of the entire two seasons. I’d be all for this, if it was artfully done, deliberately, and gradually. But you can’t obliterate a tone that has been established over almost twenty-one episodes by embarking on an abrupt recon’ of the entire backstory of a major character in the last twenty minutes and expect the reaction to be anything but confused derision.

• Somebody could write a whole book on the bizarre characterisation and mixed, often contradictory motivations of Conrad. But, even now, it’s all way too much to get my head round. All I’ll say is that the ‘Wish World’ he created on behalf of the Rani, looked OK to me, with a few reservations, a sort of idealised version of a lost England, populated by happy, stable families (‘Traditional to the point of being wrong’, according to Davies in the relevantUnleashedepisode). Even Ruby said so herself, and used the ‘Wish Baby’ to wish him to be happy, which is apparently how he ended up, happily working in a restaurant, with no memory of the previous self who’d had a podcast with a hundred thousand followers, and then gone on to be a rather benevolent dictator of a whole world. That doesn’t sound like a happy ending to me. He was emasculated, not redeemed.
• Oh, and we discovered that UNIT implants microchips into the bodies of all of their employees, thus proving Conrad had a point inlucky Day concerning them being a malevolent force in the first place.
• My own description of UNIT in modern Who would not be ‘malevolent.’  It would be ‘shit.’ From their ludicrous tower in the centre of London – an easy target for hostile forces from within and withoutEarth[GC1] , to their ‘leader’ Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, to their ridiculous DEI and nepotistic employment policies (To her credit, Anita became perhaps the only character ever to refuse a job offer from UNIT) and pointless characters like young Rose Noble (Yasmin Finney), who was introduced in the very first sixtieth anniversary special, simply because RTD decided a trans character was needed, and then given no character and no role.

I hate everything about the modern version of UNIT. How much better was the old UNIT family of the Brigadier, Yates and Benton? And let us not forget Torchwood either in RTD 1. Torchwood made sense and spawned four seasons of a spin-off that, at its best, especially the five-part, single narrativeChildren of Earth contained some of the darkest and best Who related stories ever, despite Chris Chibnall being the showrunner.

• Ruby’s arc seemed to have concluded with her finding her ‘ordinary mum’ at the end of theEmpire of Death. But she re-appeared inLucky Day, and in this two-part finale she was suddenly the main companion again, before disappearing without even the opportunity of a final farewell to ‘her’ Doctor before his regeneration.  

As I’ve said, I like Millie Gibson as an actress, and Ruby was a character with promise, but why did she magically, by use of the Wish Baby, wish Conrad happiness, and then a few minutes later whine about the injustice of Conrad crossing over from ‘Wish World’ to the ‘real world’ but not Poppy? Strange.

• What even was the ‘Wish Baby’? I liked the scene when the baby was taken by the Rani from his parents in nineteenth-century Bavaria in the previous episode, but can anyone take seriously a story which relies on a magic baby’ to further the plot? And why didn’t the Rani, as she’d now ceased to be the amoral scientific genius she’d once been (Pip and Jane Baker, the creators of the character, will be spinning in their graves. I hope their estate was paid handsomely for the rights to the use of their finest character) use this baby magic to further her plan to resurrect the Time Lords, instead of relying on an, as it proved, highly unreliable Omega?
• And surely the Doctor could have found a better use of the magic baby than merely to stop it being used to make any more wishes come true?
• Time Lords are now, apparently, sterile, which I suppose makes some sense of bi-generation as an evolutionary adaptation, which was referenced in the episode, but not really when the ‘Last of the Time Lords’ trope is factored in.  ‘They’re all dead, except for the Doctor and the Rani, and briefly, Omega and they can no longer procreate.’
• The big one, for me, was Susan. I’ll say more about this below, but to have her appear briefly inThe Interstellar Contest, for the first time in over forty years, even having her mouth the words ‘Grandfather…find me’, and then nothing since, was unforgivable.   
• I’ve mentioned pacing problems in every review this season, but here they were writ large. In the cinema, I surreptitiously checked my phone when Omega was all too easily defeated. ‘Thirty-six minutes’, I thought. ‘What the Dickens are they going to do with the last half-hour, apart, probably, for Ncuti’s regeneration?’
• The answer was the Poppy story. This was the Poppy we’d seen inSpace Babies, then briefly at the end ofThe Interstellar Song Contest. Now she, apparently, became the key to the entire two seasons, this baby built on wishes and dreams, ‘like all babies’, according to the Doctor.
• Probably, there’ll be numerous novels and whole Big Finish audio boxsets produced to explain and develop Poppy-Lore. All I can really glean from the episode was that the Doctor and Belinda thought she was their daughter, somehow, for a bit, then forgot all about her. Only Ruby remembered, for some reason, and she managed to convince the Doctor and everybody at UNIT that she had indeed existed. The Doctor then realised he could use his ‘regeneration energy’ to put everything back as it should be, i.e. back to a world where Belinda was and always had been Poppy’s mother. This was a world which had at no point been foreshadowed all season. And wasn’t the real Poppy still on the space station with little baby friends?
• The breaking of the ‘fourth wall’ that began with Mrs Flood at the end ofThe Church On Ruby Road, and continued up until the point she revealed herself as the Rani, or rather two Rani’s after Archie Punjabi’s version emerged from within her inThe Interstellar Song Contest, was never explained. It also seemed to have no plausible connection to the character of the Rani as we, the small minority who’d ever heard of her, had known her. This makes me suspect that the Rani connection to Mrs. Flood was something RTD decided on at late notice.

When the Doctor and Belinda took this fourth wall breaking to the extreme of emerging from 1950s Miami, inLux, into a modern living room via a modern flat television screen to interact with a stereotypical but weirdly diverse trio ofDoctor Who ‘fans’, I thought we were about to go somewhere interesting, if probably misguided with the whole Meta angle. But no, yet another road to nowhere.

• In episode 6 of season 1,Rogue, the ‘Bridgerton’ episode, the Doctor met, lusted after, engaged in the most inappropriately sexual kiss in the show’s history with, and announced his undying love for the titular character. It seemed certain we’d be seeing Rogue (Jonathan Groff) again, though this wasn’t something I was exactly looking forward to. We did, briefly, via a video message, from within the ‘Hell Realm’ that existed in Conrad’s Wish World. One would have thought the Doctor might have tried to rescue this love of his life, especially when he got his hands on the magic Wish Baby. But no, his only comment concerned all cultures having a dark ‘Underverse’, such as theUpside Down (fromStranger Things, a decent enough modern Science Fiction show, not a culture),Narniaand Hell itself.  I’m not sure C.S. Lewis, who was not only a great writer of both Science Fiction and Fantasy, but also one of history’s most important Christian Apologists, would have been greatly pleased by this categorisation ofNarnia, his greatest creation, with Hell. I’m not sure, either, how or why Zoom or Skype calls from Hell would be an option in Conrad’s world, though I did say that his dictatorship seemed quite benevolent by some of the standards of our own world.
• Ncuti’s regeneration itself was OK, though him shouting ‘Joy to the World’ from the Tardis as it hovered in space, apparently visiting Joy who, it will be remembered, turned into a star at the end of the Christmas special of that name, was silly, and nor was I keen on the Christ on the Cross type pose he struck as the process properly kicked in. But, even leaving aside the silliness of ending with his transformation into Billie Piper, the way it was done was bad, with her face obviously superimposed onto Gatwa’s body.  
• Far better would have been to end with an ‘open regeneration,’ where we saw the process begin, fade to black, and let the future, if there is to be one, take it from there.
• Lastly, when Davies introduced the Bi-generation concept inThe Giggle, leaving not one but two Doctors existing simultaneously in the same timeline, he unnecessarily created a situation where fans would inevitably question what Tennant’s Fourteenth was doing while Sutekh, the various members of the Pantheon, the Rani, Omega et al where posing an existential threat to the universe: still sitting sipping cocktails with Donna and her family in their back garden, with his fully functional Tardis standing dormant by the back gate, perhaps being repurposed as the ultimate ‘dimensionally non-linear’ general storage unit?   

Conclusion

 The first thirty-six minutes were passably bad. Had it continued like that for the remainder of the episode, perhaps stretching it out to make the ‘battle’ between the Doctor, the Rani and this faux-Omega the climatic scene, then, with or without a regeneration, it would likely be regarded on about the same level asEmpire of Death, maybe even a little better. But, tacking on the Poppy story and retrospectively making that the focal point of two whole seasons was crazy.

Last-minute rewrites, forced upon writers for whatever reason, are always going to present problems, no matter how good the writer is. Milie quitting, or being fired, Ncuti quitting, or being fired, both clearly threw RTDs plans into disarray.

We also now know that some of the arcs he set up weren’t even intended to be resolved until season 3, or even 4. To write and record two seasons more or less in tandem, and still leave threads hanging, on the assumption that those first two seasons would be successful enough to ensure he would have the opportunity to resolve them at a later stage shows a lot of arrogance.

As I said in my last review, Belinda’s zig-zag characterisation only makes sense once you realise that much of her material was originally intended for Ruby.

We even now know, and have a still photograph as evidence, that an alternative ending toThe Reality War was shot. It should have ended happily in a nightclub, with the Doctor and Belinda dancing (Varada looking super-hot, by the way), and Susan, dressed in an outfit reminiscent of the one she wore inThe Five Doctors, taking Poppy by the hand, and saying ‘Let’s go mum…’

We even saw Carole Ann Ford wearing this outfit in herUnleashed interview. This suggests the alternative ending decision was made very late in the day.

 I know I’m not alone in feeling a sense of relief that we were spared the horror of Poppy as the Doctor’s daughter and Susan’s mum. Hopefully, that’s an idea that’s dead and buried now. But Carole Ann is now eighty-five-years-old, and it’s a shame she’ll now likely never get a proper, meaningful, valedictory appearance.

Forced late-stage changes notwithstanding, Davies could still have made other choices as regards the finale.

That he went with what he went with is perhaps an indication that there is nobody in a position of sufficient authority to say ‘no’ to him.

What is clear, is that RTD is now a pale shadow of the writer he used to be. This is the man who knocked outMidnight, one of the best episodes of the modern era, in a weekend because a planned script became unusable at the last minute.

He used to be good, and I have taken issue with certain podcasters who now, retrospectively, claim that there were always problems with Davies’ writing forDoctor Who.

Yes, some of the overt virtue-signalling that has been a big contributory factor to making this era as bad as it has been, was there from the beginning of the modern show. But, on the whole, the stories he wrote in his first era, were so good that this went unnoticed, or was quickly forgotten. Russell T Davies was a greatDoctor Who writer/showrunner, and his bookThe Writer’s Tale, which I’ve recently dipped back into for the first time in years, he gives some great insights into his writing processes back then, of how much time, effort, and love he put into his scripts. It’s also an inspiration work for anyone who writes, or has aspirations to write, similar material themselves.

As critical as I’ve been in this series of reviews, I won’t forget that Russell T Davies was above all else, a fan who was inspired to write by his love of the show, turned out to be very, very good at it, seized the opportunity to bring the show he loved  back from the dead, and put his heart and soul into making its return the success it was.

It’s a shame his legacy has been tarnished, but judging him purely on the evidence of the last year and a half, is akin to judging the career of Muhammad Ali on the basis of his last two fights.

And, who knows, his forthcoming Channel Four seriesTip Toe may prove to be good. Writing about his experiences within the LGBTQIA (apologies if I’ve missed anyone out) community is clearly where his real interest lies. That’s where he began, of course, withQueer as Folk, at a time when there were fewer letters of the Pride alphabet to remember.

But these are areas that should have, and should always be kept out ofDoctor Who, and Davies time as the showrunner and main writer needs to end here.     

The Future?

I should end where the episode ended, with Billie Piper. Clearly, her appearance at the end of Ncuti’s regeneration scene was a last-minute add-on, a stunt, a gimmick. It’s probably significant that the end credits said simply ‘Introducing Billie Piper’ without the customary suffix ‘as the Doctor.’ Frankly, I’d be amazed to see a season ofDoctor Who, with or without RTD, with Billy Piper as his Doctor. She might get a single special, written mainly as a means of explaining away this nonsense. Perhaps she’ll turn out to still be Rose, or the Moment, the personification of the super-weapon with which the Tenth, Eleventh and War Doctor brought an end to the Last Great Time War inThe Day of the Doctor fiftieth anniversary special. Or, as I’ve already suggested, the whole thing could be quietly forgotten.

We all like Billi, but the future must lie elsewhere.

Here’s a few ideas, off the top of my head:

Davies must go. He can no longer produce single cohesive episodes, let alone develop and resolve complex multi-season story arcs. As well as his clear creative regression, it’s often seemed that he’s come to regard the show as, at least in part, primarily a vehicle for the promotion of his rather intolerant brand of ultra-left-liberal politics, lashing out at those who disagree with him, whether it’s about particular political issues, or the general direction of the show. He forgot that the fans are the lifeblood ofDoctor Who, and he assumed that those who turned their back on its new itineration would be replaced by new, younger fans more in tune with his political and creative vision. That assumption was wrong, my experience at the cinema notwithstanding. BBC ratings have been poor, Disney have almost certainly seen enough and, finally, even his cheerleaders among establishment critics have deserted him.

The show was in a bad place when he returned to replace Chibnall in 2022, but it’s in an even worth place now. He’s left a mess, and he’s not the man to clean it. Nor do now long-ago past glories earn him the right to try.  

All that remains of his promised mighty, globe-spanningWhoniverse, is the bad smell of two series plus not very special ‘specials’ under his watch, and the still unseenThe War Between the Land and the Sea, a UNIT spin-off that’s been in the can for at least a year that very few expect good things of.     

There must be no return to Moffatt, or Chibnall either, nor anyone closely associated with them or Davies, though, anybody should have the right to submit individual ideas or scripts for consideration.

I’d dispense with the idea of all-powerful ‘showrunners’ completely. What’s needed is a skilled script editor with a large and varied pool of writers, established and new, to draw from. As a starting point, there are a great many Doctor Who novels and Big Finish audio dramas that could make the transition into becoming excellent television episodes.

I’m open to a full reboot, even with the possibility of remaking classic stories, if this is done tastefully and respectfully. Alternatively, you can write away the last few years in a single special or simply a few lines early in a re-imagined show. Blame the Master or consign the last eight years to a parallel universe, anything that allows us to move forward, unbound by ever more layers of impenetrable lore.

Thought must be given to episode length and format. The idea of forty-five-minute standalone stories which link to longer arcs looks tired and outdated. A few longer specials every couple of years, on something like the Black Mirror model, or a return to shorter episodes that combine into standalone serials in the fashion of the Classic era ere both options worthy of careful consideration.

Writers need to write within some form of guide, a ‘show bible’, an official canon. Franchises likeStar Wars andStar Trek have such a thing, and although it hasn’t saved them from Woke Hell in recent years, at least it prevents anyone from rewriting the whole backstory of the universe, and its key character on a whim, ala Chibnall and hisTimeless Children.

The First Doctor was played by William Hartnell. He stole a Tardis in his home planet of Gallifrey for reasons which are, and never need to be, made clear, and went on his travels. His Tardis can theoretically take on any form, but its Chameleon Circuit is broken and it got stuck in the form of an old English police box in London in the early nineteen-sixties. That’s how our story begins, and always will begin, now and forever.

That should be the staring point for a show ‘bible’, a guide that allows for change and evolution, but maintains core essence and continuity.

No more DEI casting. I’d start a new era with an older, male actor with the gravitas of a Hartnell, Ecclestone or Capaldi. Off the top of my head, I’d go for Simon Pegg. He’s proved through theMission Impossible series of films that he can do serious as well as comedy.  He’s also a fan and, at the time of writing, is the exact same age as Hartnell and Capaldi where when they were first cast.

 Paul McGann is now in the elder statesman category of Doctors, with a quarter of a century of experience of playing the role in Big Finish audio. It would be nice to see him finally get the series he got. Perhaps a six episode, thirty minutes per episode, single-story series to tide us over, and trial a new format?

I also recognise that the younger male Doctors, Tennant and Smith, brought to the role a certain ‘girl appeal’ that it had previously lacked and has lacked since, but that’s one of the beauties of the character, that, through the genius idea of regeneration, it can morph and change as the need arises.

But the casting needs to be on merit, not a tick-box exercise driven by ‘representation’ and ideology.

There is still an audience forDoctor Who, if it’s good. ‘Build it, and they will come,’ as someone once said.

 It doesn’t need a massive Disney-style budget to be good. For the $100M they apparently put into it, I don’t think the show looked any better than it had previously in the modern era. In some respects, it looked worse, with too much fake-looking CGI, and with sometimes the impression given of big money being spent simply for the sake of it. For all of its many faults, the Chibnall/Whittaker period was probably peak-Who, on a purely visual level, and that was funded by the BBC alone.

The key to rebirth is great Science Fiction (NOT Fantasy) storytelling, not hard cash, though it does make sense to reach out to an alternative high-level streaming service as a partner to the BBC, especially as the Zeitgeist now seems at last to be turning away from using entertainment as a form of ultra-liberal propagandising.

Doctor Who is a fabulous old show, a national institution that can still have a bright future.

All that’s needed is a decent rest and people of talent who care for it enough to make it, once again, relevant to new generations.

Anthony C Green, June 2025

After writing this, I discovered that in his monthly Doctor Who magazine column, Davies announced that his column was now being ‘put on hold’ until ‘we know what’s happening.’ Some are interpreting this as coded ‘Farewell.’ We’ll see

By Anthony C Green

Picture Credit: By Miguel Discart – 2019-03-03_12-08-44_ILCE-6500_DSC00368, CC BY-SA 2.0,https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=123599604

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