Doctor Who needs a break
Twenty years on from its spectacular revival it looks like Doctor Who might not be returning to our screens again in the immediate future. I haven't actually watched Doctor Who for a long time, but because I wrote an awful lot of it for years – on TV, but also books, comics, radio plays, yogurt pot labels, you name it – people always ask me what I think should become of it. My answer? I'd cancel it and flee for the hills.
Twenty years is an incredible run, almost equalling its original marathon from 1963 to 1989. In TV parlance, it needs to be 'rested'.
Stepping back from a thing enables you to see it from the outside, which has been quite a jolt. I've seen Doctor Who whizzing by from the corner of my eye for years now, the way others see it.
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Irish Independent
2 hours ago
- Irish Independent
Fascinating to speak to Doctor Who stars for Unleashed special, says host
The episode, which includes interviews with past Doctors and companions, celebrates 20 years since the sci-fi show's revival and explores the programme's impact on Wales, which is where the series was revived by showrunner Russell T Davies in 2005. Taking part is Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill, who played Amy Pond and Rory Williams in the Matt Smith era of Doctor Who, as well as Tennant, Ncuti Gatwa and Jodie Whittaker, who have all played the time-travelling alien. Piper, 42, played the ninth and 10th's Doctor's companion, and appears now to have replaced Gatwa in the role of the Doctor. Powell said: 'It's always great seeing some of the iconic faces from the past, right? We talk to some of the most famous companions of recent years, like Billie Piper, Mandip Gill and Karen Gillan, and some Doctors as well – Jodie Whittaker, David Tennant and, of course, Ncuti Gatwa. 'To see them back and talking so passionately about their experience on Doctor Who is fascinating. 'Getting their take on it, because I think you do reflect differently all these years after doing something, is really cool.' He added: 'Fans can expect to hear from the people who made all of the magic happen, straight from the horse's mouth – the executives who brought Doctor Who back, why they did it, the challenges they faced, the directors who helped to make the programme work, and fascinatingly for me as well, the production design team who were there designing what the revival of Doctor Who looked like. 'At the time of the revival, there wasn't that much sci-fi really on the telly compared to now, and so everyone was really breaking new ground.' During the finale of Gatwa's second season, which aired on Saturday, he regenerated and appeared to be replaced with Piper who played Rose Tyler, the Doctor's first companion when the series was rebooted. The finale also saw Whittaker, the 13th doctor, make a guest appearance while Gatwa's Doctor appeared to be travelling through alternate universes. The credit at the end of the programme said: 'Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor. Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor. And introducing Billie Piper.' Piper previously played the physical interface of a sentient doomsday weapon called the Moment during the 50th anniversary special, The Day Of The Doctor. Gatwa played the Time Lord across two series after fellow Scottish actor Tennant bi-generated in 2023. Doctor Who has filmed in locations across Wales since its revival in 2005 and Powell said this will be explored in the new episode of Unleashed. Powell said: 'I think Doctor Who has had a massive impact on Cardiff and Wales. We explore that in the Unleashed special, and people like Russell T Davies (showrunner) and Julie Gardner (executive producer) talk about it in the episode. 'Some of the Welsh people who were given opportunities to work in television, thanks to Doctor Who, have gone on to do brilliant and beautiful things all over the world – and all of that was because Doctor Who came to Cardiff. 'Some of those people are now plying their trade all over the world on some of the most influential programmes out there, and a lot of the tricks of the trade they learned from Doctor Who. 'That infrastructure and industry wouldn't necessarily be what it is today if they hadn't made that decision to bring Doctor Who to Cardiff all those years ago. It's really fascinating to delve into.' The special hour-long episode of Doctor Who: Unleashed will land on Saturday June 7 at 6am on BBC iPlayer, and air on BBC One Wales and BBC Three later that day.
Gizmodo
3 hours ago
- Gizmodo
‘Doctor Who' Utterly Wasted Belinda Chandra
Varada Sethu's addition to the TARDIS was a jolt of energy 'Doctor Who' needed—but it bafflingly transformed her into the modern era's most squandered companion. When the latest season of Doctor Who kicked off, the most exciting thing about it wasn't even its premiere story, or what was being set up to lead towards the season's grand finale: it was the arrival of Varada Sethu as Belinda Chandra, promising to shake up the Doctor/companion dynamic in a way it hadn't been in years. But now that the season is over, and Doctor Who lies amid a litany of narrative and production messes lurching towards an uncertain future, one of its biggest of all is just how it completely and utterly wasted Belinda's character. A young nurse balancing the rigorous demands of her career with the sudden tumult of being thrust into a suitably ludicrous Doctor Who narrative—abducted by giant robots and whisked off into space to become a planetary ruler and forcibly thrust into a horrific arranged marriage—Belinda's arrival in 'The Robot Revolution' immediately bucked the trends of most Doctor Who companion debuts, especially in the modern era. After initial moments of fear and hesitation, life in the Doctor's orbit is, more often than not, too mesmerizing to resist: 45 minutes to an hour later everyone from Rose Tyler to Ruby Sunday is ready to step inside the TARDIS, remark on its interior's size, and run straight forward into adventures in time and space. And yet, while Belinda ends up in the blue box just like the rest of them, she challenges the Doctor, both from his own perspective and that of the audience, every step of the way. The Belinda of 'The Robot Revolution' isn't obstinate for the sake of it or anything, but she rightfully pushes the Doctor's assumption that his way, his default of being the person that everyone in the room should listen to unquestionably, isn't the only way. It made for a remarkable chemistry between the Doctor and Belinda, and not just for Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu's own sparkling charisma (the latter certainly cannot be blamed for the narrative choices the show makes with her character), but because you really see them feel out each other over the course of the episode, figuring out where lines are drawn between them—and it's Belinda drawing the lines. The Doctor's charm offensive, which has by and large driven so many of those initial sparks in the companion/Doctor relationship, simply does not work on Belinda. It all culminates in a brilliant final moment in that debut episode to set the tone going forward: calling him out for invading her privacy, for not thinking to ask people consent, for brazenly trying to dazzle her in the same way he'd clearly dazzled many people before her. There is clearly some part of Belinda that likes the Doctor; she's not actively horrified or disdainful of him, but she makes it clear he crosses lines, and the world he operates in (or rather worlds) are dangerous. She wants home, and the only thing that stops that is the fact that they can't get there—the adventures along the way aren't her signing up for this dazzling new life, but a necessity to get what she wants. It's a shame then, that this version of Belinda by and large stops existing halfway through her season of Doctor Who. Of course, she was always going to soften in her appraisal of the Doctor the longer she spent with him, but the show plays an awkward balancing act where both Belinda moves on from this challenging almost inorganically—arguably she is totally fine with traveling with the Doctor by the end of the second episode, 'Lux,' but even after the darkness of 'The Well' an episode later she is truly into the default companion mode—and because the season then also starts suddenly having to balance in dedicating its limited runtime to episodes about Ruby like 'Lucky Day,' or 'The Story and the Engine,' where Belinda is barely part of the narrative. For many of the other thorny narrative issues it has, by the time the season is heading into its endgame in 'The Interstellar Song Contest,' the version of Belinda we get there, where her reaction to the Doctor crossing a distinct moral line in aggressively torturing his 'foe' in Kid, is far from the woman who called him out for scanning her without asking her in 'The Robot Revolution,' willing to effectively rubber-stamp the Doctor's actions as a moment of duress. Which would be disappointing, but fine if Doctor Who replaced that initial skeptical archetype with anything, but instead Belinda is pushed into a void, a generic 'companion.' We don't learn anything about her, really, other than the fact that she wants to get home. But all that is before the real injustice comes in the two-part season finale. In its first part, 'Wish World', Belinda is transformed by the reality imposed by Conrad—the asshole villain weirdo who stalked Ruby in 'Lucky Day'—onto the earth into the Doctor's matronly wife. The reality is presented by the text as aberrant and dystopian, a world where every woman exists to be a good daughter, a good wife to her husband, and then a willing mother dutifully raising the next generation of daughters to follow in that exact same mold. In 'Wish World,' Belinda's one-note definition as mother to her and the Doctor's child, Poppy, is reflective of Conrad's retrograde views about women, filing them down into a single trait that is subservient to a traditionalist, conservative patriarchal power balance. The fact that Belinda, Poppy's mom, is not Belinda, the Doctor's companion that we've followed over the course of this season, is meant to be disturbing, to be something we want her to break free of and recognise the trap she, the Doctor, and the rest of the world in. 'The Reality War' instead decides that reducing Belinda to this singular trait—altered reality or otherwise—is Good, Actually. The second Belinda is freed from Conrad's world, her sole dramatic trait is reminding us that she is Poppy's mother and that that is all that she cares about, regardless of the chaos beginning to unfold around her on the Doctor, to the point that she literally tells him that she can't help him in his fight against the Rani. The episode metaphorically and literally shoves her in a box so Ruby can take on the primary companion role, safeguarding her and Poppy from any reversions to the original reality that might render the latter erased as quickly as she was wished into being. She's only allowed out the box when the day is saved, and again, she reverts to this matriarchal character, both when it initially seems like she, the Doctor, and Poppy might travel together, and then when Poppy vanishes from reality and the Doctor choses to sacrifice his life to bring her back. There is a lot of 'Reality War' that is an absolute mess, but little of it feels quite as insulting as what it does to Belinda's character. Having a character for whom motherhood is important is not the issue here; there is plenty that could've been done with a companion that's a mother (we certainly got a particularly involved version of that with Amy's arc in the Steven Moffat era!). It's that Doctor Who essentially took the Belinda it had—who, by episode count and other narrative decisions, had already been losing her sense of an arc—wiped her clean, and then metaphorically stamped 'mom' on her forehead, and left her like that for the episode's final act. An act that is now our farewell to the character, one that even attempts to retroactively 'reveal' that Belinda's arc was always about returning home to Poppy via a series of flashbacks to prior scenes from the season altered to now have Belinda add 'for Poppy' to the end of every mention of her desire to get back to Earth. That's not an actual character arc, or even an interesting recontextualization that reframes what the audience had already seen in new light. It's a literal re-write of what the audience already saw! After telling us the week prior that it was wrong for Conrad to impose, without consent, a patriarchal gender role on Belinda, Doctor Who itself has the Doctor do exactly that to Belinda, re-write all of reality to make her into a single mom. The Belinda Chandra we met in 'The Robot Revolution' doesn't exist any more, not just because the show whittled down her character into nothingness, but because the show concludes her arc by rewriting her existence so that that Belinda never existed in the first place. There's even a dark mirror in the final moments of that arc, when the Doctor does exactly to Poppy what he did to Belinda in the climax of 'The Robot Revolution': medically scan her with his alien technology without a single thought to ask if he was allowed to first. It's just that this time not only does Belinda not challenge him, she doesn't react at all. She is 'just' Poppy's mother now, with no thought or feeling given to her beyond that description. Again, a having a female character to whom being a parent is important is not the issue with what Doctor Who did with Belinda. There were so many ways the series could've given this ending to her storyline and actually organically laid out a path to it across the season. Perhaps have her slowly realize over time that something, someone is missing from her memories of her life on Earth, to struggle with the feeling that she has to get back to Earth as soon as possible while not fully grasping why, to eventually play with the reality manipulation that the finale hangs its dramatic stakes on. Instead, the show started with a completely different idea and dynamic for her—one brimming with potential it almost immediately decided not to capitalize on—before slowly but surely pushing her further and further to the fringes of its priorities over the course of the season. Belinda was never given the chance to grow and change over her time in the TARDIS, to challenge, and to be challenged by, life at the Doctor's side. Her final ending was just the last nail in a coffin Doctor Who had been building for Belinda's character as we'd known her in that first episode for a while, whether that was its narrative intent or otherwise—and ultimately just one extra failure to add to the season's list of many.
Glasgow Times
3 hours ago
- Glasgow Times
Fascinating to speak to Doctor Who stars for Unleashed special, says host
The episode, which includes interviews with past Doctors and companions, celebrates 20 years since the sci-fi show's revival and explores the programme's impact on Wales, which is where the series was revived by showrunner Russell T Davies in 2005. Taking part is Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill, who played Amy Pond and Rory Williams in the Matt Smith era of Doctor Who, as well as Tennant, Ncuti Gatwa and Jodie Whittaker, who have all played the time-travelling alien. Ncuti Gatwa and Steffan Powell (BBC Studios/Bad Wolf/PA) Piper, 42, played the ninth and 10th's Doctor's companion, and appears now to have replaced Gatwa in the role of the Doctor. Powell said: 'It's always great seeing some of the iconic faces from the past, right? We talk to some of the most famous companions of recent years, like Billie Piper, Mandip Gill and Karen Gillan, and some Doctors as well – Jodie Whittaker, David Tennant and, of course, Ncuti Gatwa. 'To see them back and talking so passionately about their experience on Doctor Who is fascinating. 'Getting their take on it, because I think you do reflect differently all these years after doing something, is really cool.' He added: 'Fans can expect to hear from the people who made all of the magic happen, straight from the horse's mouth – the executives who brought Doctor Who back, why they did it, the challenges they faced, the directors who helped to make the programme work, and fascinatingly for me as well, the production design team who were there designing what the revival of Doctor Who looked like. Varada Sethu and Steffan Powell (BBC Studios/Bad Wolf/James Pardon/PA) 'At the time of the revival, there wasn't that much sci-fi really on the telly compared to now, and so everyone was really breaking new ground.' During the finale of Gatwa's second season, which aired on Saturday, he regenerated and appeared to be replaced with Piper who played Rose Tyler, the Doctor's first companion when the series was rebooted. The finale also saw Whittaker, the 13th doctor, make a guest appearance while Gatwa's Doctor appeared to be travelling through alternate universes. The credit at the end of the programme said: 'Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor. Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor. And introducing Billie Piper.' Piper previously played the physical interface of a sentient doomsday weapon called the Moment during the 50th anniversary special, The Day Of The Doctor. Gatwa played the Time Lord across two series after fellow Scottish actor Tennant bi-generated in 2023. Varada Sethu and Millie Gibson, who played Ncuti Gatwa's companions as the Doctor (Ian West/PA) Doctor Who has filmed in locations across Wales since its revival in 2005 and Powell said this will be explored in the new episode of Unleashed. Powell said: 'I think Doctor Who has had a massive impact on Cardiff and Wales. We explore that in the Unleashed special, and people like Russell T Davies (showrunner) and Julie Gardner (executive producer) talk about it in the episode. 'Some of the Welsh people who were given opportunities to work in television, thanks to Doctor Who, have gone on to do brilliant and beautiful things all over the world – and all of that was because Doctor Who came to Cardiff. 'Some of those people are now plying their trade all over the world on some of the most influential programmes out there, and a lot of the tricks of the trade they learned from Doctor Who. 'That infrastructure and industry wouldn't necessarily be what it is today if they hadn't made that decision to bring Doctor Who to Cardiff all those years ago. It's really fascinating to delve into.' The special hour-long episode of Doctor Who: Unleashed will land on Saturday June 7 at 6am on BBC iPlayer, and air on BBC One Wales and BBC Three later that day.
