By its nature, Doctor Who is a show filled with gaps and holes — the series was off the air for 16 years between the time it was canceled in 1989 and revived for a modern audience in 2005 by Russell T. Davies. Even when it’s on the air, our favorite time-traveling alien is having countless off-screen adventures that we’ll never be privy to.
The mystery of Doctor Who has allowed fans to fill those gaps with their own imaginations, or with the hundreds of audio book stories released by Big Finish. But imagination can only take us so far, especially when that’s the only thing we’re stuck with in quarantine. So former showrunner Russell T. Davies and current showrunner Chris Chibnall are stepping in to fill in those gaps with never-before-seen prequels to their respective runs on Doctor Who.
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Jodie Whittaker has an important message for fans who are social distancing amid the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic: Be kind, and listen to science. She should know, after all, she’s the Doctor.
Doctor Who star Whittaker sent an “emergency transmission” to fans through the Doctor Who Twitter account, self-isolating herself to help curb the spread of coronavirus, or as she calls it, “hiding from an army of Sontarans.” It’s a sweet and funny video message that will be sure to brighten your day — as any episode of Doctor Who will do.
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15 years ago, Doctor Who returned to our screens after a 16-year hiatus. And it was like the time-traveling alien had never left. With its highly anticipated premiere episode “Rose,” Doctor Who reinvented itself for a new generation of sci-fi lovers and kick-started a whole new era that is still going strong today.
In celebration of the 15th anniversary of the premiere of “Rose,” former showrunner Russell T. Davies will share new Doctor Who material in a live-watch event held on Twitter.
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Team TARDIS might be going down two members this holiday season. According to a new report, Doctor Who stars Bradley Walsh and Tosin Cole — who have played Graham and Ryan, the traveling companions to Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor, for the past two seasons — are set to leave the series in this year’s upcoming holiday special. But while Walsh and Cole will leave Mandip Gill‘s Yaz to stay on as the main companion, their exit won’t be permanent, with the doors open for possible guest appearances in future episodes.
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“Everything is about to change.” Doctor Who‘s season 12 finale certainly lived up to the Master’s sinister promise, dropping a doozy on us about the identity of the Timeless Child that manages to be mind-blowing and deflating all at once. Because what does this mean? How will this change things? For a show like Doctor Who, which has always felt more comfortable as a casual sci-fi series on which you can drop in no questions asked, perhaps not at all.
The thing is, the big reveal in “The Timeless Children” will mostly be huge for longtime fans obsessed with the minutiae of the series — something that will inevitably happen when you have a lifelong Doctor Who fan like Chris Chibnall running the series. For fans who have been around since the Classic Who series, of course it matters that we’ve finally fixed a 44-year-old plot hole. Sure, it opens the doors for all kinds of possibilities and plots, but it also is a reveal that mostly deals with the past — something that the forward-looking Doctor Who has frequently brushed past. But it comes down to whether you care about that kind of pedantry or if you’re just here to see an immortal alien having adventures in time and space. If the latter, “The Timeless Children” was a mostly okay season finale of Doctor Who that answered some mysteries and loaded us up with even more — but at least we got some phenomenal performances from Jodie Whittaker and Sacha Dhawan.
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In a series that so frequently contradicts and corrects itself like Doctor Who, can there be any such thing as canon? Even the question of character development is up in the air, as a time-traveling protagonist who has been on and off the air for upwards of 50 years can only change so much before the story becomes untenable. All of this is leading up to me saying I’m intrigued by whatever showrunner Chris Chibnall is building up to in the penultimate episode of Doctor Who season 12. Because, despite the amorphous, ever-shifting nature of Doctor Who, it feels game-changing.
“Ascension of the Cybermen” picks up right after the events of last week’s excellent “The Haunting of Villa Diodati,” showing the Doctor and Team TARDIS landing in a far-future where the remnants of humanity are barely holding on after a universe-devastating Cybermen war. And without the Doctor’s help, humanity could be extinguished altogether. But as the Doctor and Team TARDIS jump to action in what is the most blockbuster sci-fi episode of the Jodie Whittaker era, Doctor Who is not against introducing several more baffling, head-scratching mysteries. Next week’s season finale has a lot to answer to.
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It turns out lightning can strike twice with Doctor Who, which makes an electric return to form with “The Haunting of Villa Diodati.” Last week saw Season 12’s hot streak of episodes come to an end, but Doctor Who resuscitated its high-quality run with a perfect old-fashioned ghost story that pitted Frankenstein’s author against a modern Prometheus of Doctor Who‘s own making.
Doctor Who has long delighted in doing on-the-nose tributes to famous literary figures, which range from the good (Charles Dickens meeting ghosts in “The Unquiet Dead,” Shakespeare battling witches in “The Shakespeare Code”) to the amusingly bad (Agatha Christie solves a whodunit in “The Unicorn and the Wasp”). “The Haunting of Villa Diodati” falls in the good category — dare I say, one of the greats — thanks to its healthy dose of mood and atmosphere and its sinister reimagining of one of Doctor Who‘s oldest villains. You either love or hate The Cybermen, but you can’t deny that they’ve been overused nearly as much as the Daleks in the past 15 years. Though their last outing was decently horrific, “The Haunting of Villa Diodati” does for Cybermen what the season 1 episode “Dalek” did for Daleks: make them feel like a real, terrifying threat.
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Chris Chibnall the overcompensating writer is back with “Can You Hear Me?” — a bloated Doctor Who episode that fumbles its message on mental illness with retro callbacks and far too many mysteries.
The seventh episode of season 12 ends the hot streak that Doctor Who had been on lately, due to showrunner Chibnall, who co-writes the episode with Charlene James, reverting to his worst tendencies: overstuffing and overcomplicating a promising premise. “Can You Hear Me?” is about dreams, but’s also about mental illness, but it’s also about mythic figures tapping into our primal fears. In the end, the story is about none of these grand ideas and we’re left with a jumbled mess of an episode.
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Doctor Who is inherently a cheesy and sentimental show — despite its sci-fi label, it’s about as far from the hard science and technological imaginings that the genre offers. The series has always been about a quirky time traveler who saves the day with compassion. Doctor Who is often at its best when its leaning into its big, overwrought emotions and delivering a humanist vision of sci-fi and, yes, when it lets the Doctor save the day with love.
“Praxeus” is an explosive, big-budget episode that feels like Doctor Who is firing on all cylinders in both action and emotion. But once the globe-trotting excesses fade away, a potent ecological message shines through.
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Cool Posts From Around the Web:
The Morning Watch is a recurring feature that highlights a handful of noteworthy videos from around the web. They could be video essays, fanmade productions, featurettes, short films, hilarious sketches, or just anything that has to do with our favorite movies and TV shows.
In this edition, Rocketman production designer Marcus Rowland explained how he turned part of London into a 1970s Los Angeles setting for the Elton John biopic. Plus, Doctor Who star Jodie Whittaker answers questions from fans on Twitter about the TARDIS and more. And finally, Pixar shows you how to make your own bao from the Pixar short film Bao. Read More »
