The Incomplete Guide to Doctor Who in 2025
In which Doctor Who peaks and fails in the same year and Vanessa remembers the good old days of 2008
Doctor Who: Series 15/Season 2
By Elliot Wengler
An Adventure in Time and Clickbait
Doctor Who continues to be the oddest of beasts. It’s too important for the BBC to even consider cancelling again, but now seems to be in a state of such inconsistency about its quality and popularity that no one knows what to do with it. Even its fans are accepting that it might be time for it to rest again. Even its own (former) writers are openly saying that something is wrong with it.
But first, a defence of series 15/season 2, or whatever we’re calling the Ncuti Gatwa years: it has been some of the best Doctor Who ever. If we decide that Joy to the World, the Christmas special penned by Steven Moffat and guest-starring Nicola Coughlan, is part of series 15 rather than series 14, then my lord, what a run of episodes. It sees Gatwa firing on all cylinders, and a properly fun time travel-induced mystery, and serves as an indirect lashing out of anger about the way that COVID-19 was treated in the UK.
Series 15 introduces us to a great companion in Belinda. Varada Sethu is dynamite casting. Concerns that casting a previously seen actor, playing a supporting character the Doctor had met in the future, would lead to another Clara-style ‘impossible girl’ mystery, are instantly shrugged off when she tells the Doctor she doesn’t care to be “one of [his] mysteries”. In the classic series, the idea of a reluctant companion was explored several times to mixed results; here it’s a mission statement: Belinda just wants to go home. That’s it. The resulting bickering and tension between the pair feels natural. They’re still fun, but with a conflict that’s been refreshing and less irksome than 12/Clara and less unpleasant than 6/Peri.
The Robot Revolution is bolshy, pulpy sci-fi fun, with retro futuristic designs and a rip-roaringly good time had by all. Then one of the most ambitious and crazy episodes ever, Lux, has Alan Cumming’s sinister cartoon-come-to-life. Jaw-dropping stuff. The scope and ambition of the season is something to behold. The Rose Ayling-Elis-focused adventure, The Well, in which an invisible monster kills anything that goes behind her throws, is a surprise throw-back to the scariest episode in Doctor Who history, Midnight.
This show continues to highlight up-and-coming actors. While he’s had his Hollywood moment in The Little Mermaid already, we get a great, surprising, villainous turn from Jonah Haur-King as Conrad Clark, an incel and scheming grifter who tricks our precious Ruby Sunday in Lucky Day. The ending coda of the episode, in which the Doctor confronts Conrad, calling him out on his pathetic noise of conspiracies, should be submitted for both actors’ awards showreels this year.
Russell T Davies’ mission statement with ‘Nu-Who’ in 2005 was to make it more grounded. He excelled in his first showrunner era by putting together a big cast of Earth-bound family members and friends of companions. This second go-around is a little different when it pivots away from the Doctor. The Story and the Engine is a strange and surreal instalment, deconstructing the power of stories, but the villain is underwhelming. This is followed by the spectacular Eurovision-themed The Interstellar Song Contest, which is an absolute riot. Here you can forgive the lacking villain because we also get Rylan and Graham Norton playing themselves but with aliens. It’s dumb, but again fun.
Then we get the post-credits scene revelation: Anita Dobson’s recurring sinister character, Mrs Flood, is The Rani. What a shame. Kate O’Mara of Dynasty fame played The Rani enigmatically in two 1980s serials, The Mark of the Rani and Time and the Rani, as well as the silly 1993 charity sketch, Dimensions in Time. She’s hardly a legacy villain comparable to the Daleks or The Master. A friend pointed out to me that most Doctor Who villains were quite hackneyed and deserved a fair chance to be reborn with modernisation, conceptually and visually, so fair enough, let’s see if The Rani can be made interesting in future. She stands a good chance with the bi-generated version played by The Good Wife’s Archie Panjabi.
A phenomenon with a lot of modern television, particularly action adventure shows with a big bad built towards throughout a season, is that they live and die by their finales. This might be unfair, when entire seasons are forgotten, but finales are memorable, and the parts of the story that are full of big reveals and conclusions.
However, if those reveals or answers to the questions aren’t satisfying, it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, especially in a show like Doctor Who, which insists on trickling clues and story arcs throughout whole seasons. The first series finale of nu-Who, The Parting of the Ways, is magnificent in terms of scope and emotional resonance, but its reveal that Rose seeded Bad Wolf through time because she saw it in that moment still makes no sense today.
This series finale, Wish World and The Reality War, is a crushing disappointment. In Part One, Wish World, the Doctor awakes in an alternate reality, forced into being by The Rani’s acquisition of Desiderium, the god of wishes, and Conrad. The subsequent WandaVision-esque tribute act features many characters oppressed by The Rani and Conrad, but doesn’t do much with them. Sethu’s charm and commanding presence are wasted on a hypnotised trad-wife, and she lacks her edge throughout the finale, The Reality War. As ever with modern Doctor Who, a lot of the runtime is taken up by the Doctor reuniting with the huge number of supporting characters, rather than, you know, doing something. Joy to the World’s delightful day-player, Anita (Steph de Whalley), returns to restore time, then stands in the corner.
Return of the Something
The whole thing was supposedly building towards The Rani breaking the walls of reality to revive Omega, the original and feared evil time lord, as seen in The Three Doctors and Arc of Infinity during the programme’s 10th and 20th anniversary seasons. All of this build-up led to a skeleton dinosaur eating The Rani within minutes and Omega being lasered back to hell within seconds. It was utterly vapid and felt like a whole load of nothing.
This would all be fine for a bloated finale with some bombastic action sequences, but we know that this finale was remade and reshot. On Disney+, a promotional image for the episode depicts a party that we never see.
Various leaks imply that the ending, in which the Doctor uses regeneration energy to restore a child, Poppy, from an alternate reality, was a last-minute addition in reshoots to facilitate Gatwa regenerating. Underwhelming, after a mere 19 episodes in the role. Three of those were Doctor-lite episodes, and I’m including The Giggle, where he bi-generated out of David Tennant 20 minutes-earlier-into-episode than a new Doctor normally would. There were reshoots in February this year, this much is certain.
The rumours, built entirely on leaks, are that, because Disney+ took so long to decide if renewing their Doctor Who deal was worth their time or not, Gatwa started receiving Hollywood and theatre opportunities - last winter, he was in the National Theatre’s The Importance of Being Earnest and this summer/autumn, he appears in the West End in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Born Without Teeth - so asked to leave than remain in limbo.
When Russell T Davies, and crucially Julie Gardener, Jane Tranter, and Phil Collinson, came back to produce and lead Doctor Who into a new golden age with Disney backing, fans rejoiced. The world came back to watch David Tennant and Catherine Tate deliver ratings smashes in the 60th anniversary specials. However, the ratings for series 14 and 15 were incredibly low, to the point that publications are celebrating a paltry 3.4m hit for the finale.
One of the saddest things is that Gatwa is my most charismatic lead since Christopher Eccleston in 2005. He attracts the camera. My mum, who now watched the show again for the first time in a decade, couldn’t get enough of him. He had momentous moments, and was trusted to succeed the seemingly irreplaceable David Tennant. I thought half the point of the show having shorter runs of episodes and casting a much younger man was that he would stick around many, many years, as his incarnation promised in The Legend of Ruby Sunday.
Yet, off he goes. Not into a big final battle, not saving the universe, but sacrificing himself to save an alternate timeline’s child from erasure. Bye bye Ncuti Gatwa, and it seems, Millie Gibson and Varada Sethu, just as we were getting to know their characters.
Some things about this era have been great beyond the show itself. Colourisations of classic serials in the vein of the remastering in the Star Wars special editions have been a joy, in fact, having almost the entire classic run on iPlayer is an aspect that’s not gotten enough praise.There’s a whole spin-off show yet to come as part of Disney’s 26-episode-order, The War Between the Land and the Sea.
However, all of this points to the past. Ncuti Gatwa’s explosion into Billie Piper doesn’t speak to a confidence in the future of Doctor Who, but a desperation to return to past glories, unsure how to get there.
Doctor Who is on BBC iPlayer in the UK, and on Disney+ around the world (episodes prior to the 60th specials are on HBO MAX).
An Incomplete List of nu-Who companions
As Vanessa only was introduced to this British export in 2011, when she came to the UK for university, her on-boarding by Elliot was focused on nu-Who, with Christopher Eccleston. The modern series have cast contemporary companions mostly, but with a breadth of personalities. Here are some of Vanessa’s favourites, in no particular order.
Donna Noble
One of my irritations with the post-Eccleston run was that everyone fell in love with the Doctor, without exception. But then Donna came along, and confirmed she was very disinterested in a (potentially one-sided) romance with the interdimensional alien. Donna’s confidence despite disorienting circumstances makes her a role model, and I’m glad that she had fantastic moments in this second RTD run, reminding us of her strength and determination.
Captain Jack Harkness
One of those characters too intriguing to let go, Captain Jack earned his own spin-off show, Torchwood. Jack’s perceived carefree queerness paved the path for later characters, like the Doctor himself, as performed by Gatwa. Yet, he also seemed to possess an unexplored melancholic past, which Torchwood offered more of a chance to explore. His man-out-of-time act offers both classic swashbuckling and futuristic quirks - Face of Boe, anyone?
Rory Williams
I don’t know whether my appreciation of Rory is merely based on my opinion that he was severely underappreciated by his fiancee-then-wife, Amy. Amy was one of those companions who seemingly couldn’t travel with the Doctor without attributing the adrenaline shot to him instead of the adventure. Rory, in an echo of Rose Tyler’s (and then Martha Jones’) Mickey Smith, joins with concerns, but becomes a strength to the team with his rational thinking.
Bill Potts
Queer Bill was never going to be interested in a male Doctor, but the significant age difference clearly helps to establish a mentoring relationship not present with any of the aforementioned companions. It was such a shame that her time in the TARDIS was cut short through her death-averting transformations, as the Doctor’s other companions at the time were not brave enough to challenge his decision-making in comparison.
Rose Tyler
I want to be very specific about Rose being a great companion to the ninth Doctor (classic count, no War Doctor shenanigans here). I’m no fan of the tenth Doctor’s will-they-won’t-they romance; instead her working class sass opposite Christopher Eccleston’s northern sass appealed to me incredibly. Their final moments including a kiss feels more like agape - selfless love - to me, which is another great way to relate to another person.