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Did Russell T Davies Quietly End "Doctor Who" and We Missed It?

Did showrunner Russell T Davies secretly end or pause Doctor Who with that regeneration into Billie Piper? One series writer believes so.


That surprise final scene in the most recent series of Doctor Who has turned out to be more divisive and controversial than anyone could have thought. By now, we're well past spoiler warnings since it's all over the internet and social media with endless debates. In case you were living under a rock – and why would you be reading this if you didn't care about the show? – Ncuti Gatwa) regenerated at the end of the second series of the show's Disney+ era and turned into… Billie Piper.

You might think it opens up new possibilities and questions. Or you might think the show has hit a creative dead end.

Doctor Who
Image: BBC / Disney+

Fandom has been in full hand-wringing denial mode, resisting the idea that Piper could possibly be the next Doctor just because she previously played companion Rose Tyler. Somehow, they conveniently forgot that she also played a mischievous but compassionate talking bomb in "The Day of the Doctor". It's not as if Time Lords can't take the faces of people they'd met. In the latest Doctor Who Magazine, writer Robert Shearman, a writer of Big Finish audios and the 2005 episode "Dalek" which reintroduced the pepperpot menaces to the show and new viewers of Doctor Who, was ask what he thought about the regeneration, and he said he felt that showrunner Russell T Davies have quietly ended the show, or at least put it to rest with that controversial regeneration.

"At the moment I'm in a 'pull' phase. It's weird because the show is probably as dead as we've ever known it," Shearman said. "After 1989, we had, for years, a current Doctor. Now, everything that is ever going to be produced in Doctor Who terms is going to feel retrogressive. At least with the New Adventures and then the BBC Books [original novels published in the nineties] you thought, 'It's the current Doctor – McCoy or McGann'. No one's going to start writing Doctor Who books with a Billie Piper Doctor, because no one knows what that means. In a funny way, the closing moments of The Reality War seem to put a full stop on things. We didn't have that before."

"I don't know that it matters," Shearman added, saying he now feels happy to buy the remastered Blu-rays of classic episodes to revisit the series. "But it's a strange thing: it's made me want to embrace it, because the whole of Doctor Who feels like it's in its own bubble."

Shearman had to clarify this week on his social media account (cough!Facebook!Cough!) that his comments to weren't meant to be pessimistic. He just wanted to say that the ambiguity over whether Billie Piper is really the new Doctor means that all extended media, ie, novels, audio dramas, will be retrospective for the time being, featuring any and every past Doctor except her because there's no official confirmation that she is in fact the new model. He stated that, despite the current uncertainty, he's looking forward to seeing more Doctor Who on television in the future.

Why can't Piper be the Sixteenth Doctor? After all, she came out of the regeneration. This attitude seems to come from fans' refusal to accept that she could possibly be the Doctor for very biased reasons. Stay tuned!


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Adi TantimedhAbout Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh is a filmmaker, screenwriter and novelist. He wrote radio plays for the BBC Radio, “JLA: Age of Wonder” for DC Comics, “Blackshirt” for Moonstone Books, and “La Muse” for Big Head Press. Most recently, he wrote “Her Nightly Embrace”, “Her Beautiful Monster” and “Her Fugitive Heart”, a trilogy of novels featuring a British-Indian private eye published by Atria Books, a division Simon & Schuster.
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