I love you. Get out!

“I’d like to see a butterfly fit into a chrysalis case after it’s spread its wings.” —Second Doctor, shortly after beginning to exist (1966)

They’re restarting NuWho – I told you so. When Russell T. Davies was announced as returning showrunner in 2021, it only made sense that his role was to echo what he achieved in 2005. Start the show again. Yeah, there are other motives behind resetting the season number to 1; the BBC was bent on packaging the show to an international streaming partner, delivering it to a new world. And yet…as we’re now seeing, the change is deeper than skin. Age is more than a number. This is a TV show craving a break with its cultural detritus, a chance to feel genuinely unfamiliar once more.

The familiarity had become rot, and the rot had become horror. What perhaps seemed quaintly outdated by 2017 had become an unbearable, insular parasite by 2020. Not merely because it’d do something as churlish as throw up Morbius Doctors (which I can picture RTD doing with as much indulgence as Chibnall), but because it had become so hooked on the taste of eating itself that it brandished its swollen entrails to the whole nation: a hideous knot of fandom complexes wherein Reference, Continuity and Mythos chug round and around, as people’s lives go all but forgotten in the gaps. The dessicated state of the programme’s human element was amply evidenced by the disinterest it showed in its leads’ inner lives toward the end. The Doctor’s adoptive mother(!) was revealed and eliminated without consequence. The Doctor’s companion fell in love with her, was fobbed off, and never spoke of it again. Meanwhile it was helpfully clarified that Cybermen developed resistance to gold bullets, a weakness few remembered and fewer cared about.

How will you ever convince people to re-engage with this lifeless landscape?
A promise that things will not be as they were before, a shock infusion of the radical and the relevant, would certainly be a place to start. Already in the teaser for 2023 Christmas special The Church On Ruby Road, we see the new Doctor living in a way he never has, moving and simply being in a way that’s far removed from Who’s Victoriana yet also ripped straight from reality, from the true cultural life of joy. Everything else more-or-less unspools and explains itself from that image. There’s your reboot, located firmly in people rather than legacy.

When you have a new start this clearly defined, you could say wrapping up what came before is optional. The show’s used to moving on without fuss. Should one make the fuss, though, the result will not only colour everything behind it but teach us how to think about what comes next. This is where RTD’s little 60th anniversary mini-series, a bridge between Who (2005-2022) and Who (2023-), comes in. These three episodes form something of an intervention, a last outing for Who-II before Who-III begins in earnest.

You could argue it needed one. Or deserved it. Or more pragmatically, the reboot will benefit from a final act of healing performed on the crash site of its predecessor – bring viewers from II to III with a lot more than promises and faith.
The meta-plot had become as scarcely-salvageable as the human element; the Doctor’s home planet had been casually blown back up while you weren’t looking, any semblance of emotional stakes or an arc was spaffed out the window, and by the end the show was giving mixed messages about whether it had just obliterated the entire universe, or at least whether anyone noticed. An unenviable wreck. As if spurred by both its implosion and its inability to go anywhere that mattered, RTD now rushes in to bring that meta-plot to a full stop. It’s his first project upon returning, like an emergency manoeuvre disguised as an anniversary celebration.

For what we’re about to receive isn’t just the usual soft-reboot that accompanies each new Doctor. This one needs to be hard enough to cover, like, a decade’s worth of lost time. (Capaldi’s tenure is my favourite, but I can still admit we’re playing catch-up.) So mere newness may not be enough – something calls for an actual separation, the way the 2005 revival was distanced from everything it followed. And Davies can’t manufacture 16 years off-the-air out of thin air. The break must be narratively driven.

Thus he comes up with something quintessentially RTD, steeped in his own bizarre, mythical dream-logic…yet as direct a symbol of show-rebirth as anyone could imagine.

And some fans aren’t prepared to accept the story that’s just been told. Many are simply lying to themselves about it. So let’s cut through the bullshit first – then we can talk about opinions.

(If it wasn’t obvious – big, big, BIG spoilers for all of the 60th anniversary specials, right below the cut!)

The Children of Fenric

War makes people into puppets. Figures whose worth is in the space they take up, the orders they follow, interchangeably. They are a resource spent as simple flesh; the damage to their unique lives and minds is just an inefficient transfer of energy in the relocation of the flesh marionettes.

One of the biggest obstacles to this profligate handling of life is that mending people after they’re damaged, a delicate but necessary process, costs so much labour time. A solution is speculated at in Doctor Who’s The Empty Child (2005), wherein the Doctor encounters nanogenes – floating swarms of imperceptibly tiny robots, designed to identify and patch up injuries. The story’s climax reveals that a crashed warship from an alien world has leaked its own variant of nanogene, a type specifically for use in a battlefield ambulance; mending soldiers in an instant so that they might go straight back to war. Rapid, airborne transmission of the genes enables such a war to be fought on an inconceivable scale. Thus a facility that nominally exists to save lives, even care for them, is in practice one that cheapens life by cheapening the act of repair: matters of life and death ascribed to an inanimate, autonomous computer programme, left to its own devices.

Unfolding across the story is the horror of what happens when that technology fails to self-correct. It contains a template of the alien warrior it’s meant to rebuild, but knows nothing of mankind. It assumes its own crude programming will apply to everyone. Diligently following their own logic to its conclusion and then repeating, the nanogenes begin editing human beings into illogical abominations. They’re unaware of the harm they wreak; they’re physically incapable of independent interpretation, imagination, or evaluation, because their ignorant data set is their entire existence. As a result, the human victims of this ‘treatment’ undergo a reduction of everything they are. Because they did not factor in the creation of this data, but are nonetheless abandoned to its system, they are rendered subhuman – ’empty’.

Thassion of the Chris

On the last-minute martyring of fandom’s favourite Chibnall Who couple.

Thasmin was the soul of Chib Who. For better or worse.

In the absence of rich potential directions for any of its characters, a romantic attachment between the thirteenth Doctor and Yasmin Khan (who was always at a remove from the Graham-Ryan drama of Series 11, and also seemed to lack drives or motives beyond liking the Doctor a whole lot) filled itself in as a de facto candidate for the Whittaker era’s emotional centre. It was a no-brainer. Who could fault fans for wanting love – between two women on the TARDIS, no less – in an otherwise rather barren cosmos?
Having textually raised the idea himself as early on as his fourth episode, showrunner Chris Chibnall guaranteed that people would be constantly searching, scanning, hoping, waiting…every passing minute with no development on this front became a problem. In a situation where our first glimpse of Yaz’s past and interiority came near the end of her second season (Can You Hear Me?), the possibility of Thasmin became the last hope for the show having real characters in it at all. If the two of them were girlfriends, that would at least mean something had been happening all this while; that the first female Doctor wasn’t consigned to a spiritually empty nightmare of a run, where her immediate predecessors each traversed their own agony and ecstasy. Essentially, no Thasmin would mean no soul.

So in spite of it being very, very, very late, Chibnall’s decision to finally confront Yaz’s feelings for the Doctor head-on in Eve of the Daleks was greeted with rapture. At long last, Thasmin is indisputably canon.

Except that it’s Chibnall’s version of Thasmin. And in this strange, sudden, short streak of specials just before it all vanishes from us utterly, his Doctor Who bares its soul like never before.

Bent Sent

On resolving the schism within the Capaldi era’s most famous duology.

Show Pieces

Nothing will come of nothing; speak again.

— King Lear, demanding empty words for their own sake. It doesn’t end well for him.

What’s the Flux?

The name suggests continual change, warping into the unexpected and unpredictable. In practice, we see that what it actually does (most of the time) is reduce stuff to particles. People, spaceships, buildings, planets, all kinds of large and complex structures broken down into the smallest possible units – homogenous motes of dust. It’s a blob subsuming everything else into its indistinct mass.

Refusing to be outdone, the Flux even manages to atomise itself; the after-effects we see it leave in episodes 3 and 4 – barren, post-collapse wastelands – don’t seem consistent with its planet-dissolving behaviour in The Halloween Apocalypse. Disconnected ideas of its role float around, as dots, rather than forming part of a larger whole. It’s in this manner that the Flux achieves its greatest conquest: disintegrating the show it’s a part of. We can view this as a model for the entirety of Flux as a season.

Reversion to draft?

In which I make a damning, obsequious climb-down from all my earlier rhetoric about NuWho being dead in light of the exciting, somewhat surreal new showrunner appointment…well, not exactly.

Because the possibility of someone interesting taking over the show always existed. The issue is really that whoever they are, they’d sort of need to start from scratch – not in continuity terms, that’s irrelevant; just in terms of assembling ingredients that make a fresh case for anyone bothering to watch. A well of yet-untapped possibility. NuWho 2, for real this time.

The original well’s been tainted by a couple years of unpleasant evidence that if you just keep playing the notes without the song – the notes here being the basics established by RTD’s 2005 revival – you leave open a gap which proves a fertile bed for the absolute worst fetishistic tendencies of cultural institutions (and indeed of consumer fiction). A Doctor Who that wields its social currency like a bludgeon. The embarrassing uncle at the get-together that people tolerate out of familial piety, even when he descends into an uninterrupted several-minute monologue at dinner expositing on the origins of the Time Lords, or interrupts them mid-sentence to insist on the canonicity of the Morbius Doctors.
This Doctor Who has transcended merely being uncool and become something far worse. When all interest or insight in life outside, beyond its own knotted continuity and near-meaningless rituals, has become a mere afterthought…its persistent hanging around becomes a continual symbol of imprisonment. A constant reminder of our inability to escape, to break patterns even when they are doing us no good; of the infinite vortex of impotent pointlessness threatening to emerge beneath every story, and ultimately just beneath every human mind. A putrefied cultural memory, a rotting culture reflecting a rotting society, an undead world.
And all because it’s resorted to coasting on the wisp of a memory of what was working for RTD at one point, blithely assuming people will love it provided you “just make that, really“. Still somehow inhabiting the cultural space painstakingly carved out for NuWho over a decade ago, despite barely possessing enough of its own voice to cast an echo in that vast hall.

There’s such a thing as violating a trust, burning a bridge. So many millions of people piled in to catch the debut of the first woman to play the Doctor, so many still stuck around another week to be rewarded with The Ghost Monument. It wouldn’t have taken much, really – any character, even just one, possessing what felt like their own identity or a bit of charm to inject into our lives, would probably have done the trick. Instead we got, you know, Series 11. And instead of rectifying…that, Series 12 began throwing return after hollow return at the screen, breathlessly hyping up the cataclysmic portents of a story arc with (as it quickly turned out) no tangible emotional stakes. On nearly all fronts, this era – the fact it was even permitted to transmit – provided a clanging signal to the millions that Doctor Who wasn’t just something they’d personally lost interest in; it was something that scorned their interest, that was satisfied with pre-programmed, ritualised worship regardless of its content. Send her victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us… ♪

We have to escape. We have to get far, far away – keep driving until the very notion of a show that gives 1/10th of a fuck about Morbius Doctors is no longer even a speck in the rearview mirror. Not that anyone will remember a bad series finale from 2020 before very long, of course…especially given how relatively few people even watched it…but everything about this iteration of Who lingers amid the culture-in-general like an eggy funk, the dark corner you don’t want to look at, the knowledge that it’s still out there and forestalling the existence of something better. (Its desertion of Christmas, which already features enough unpleasant relatives, is probably a mercy.) The next iteration has to clear the air. Redeem a tainted idea. Restore faith that something, anything at all, is possible. Follow death with rebirth.