Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: Bad Wolf, billie piper, christopher eccleston

Doctor Who: Looking Back at "Bad Wolf" – The New Show's First Meme

In the Doctor Who Universe, "Bad Wolf" has impacted both sides of the camera - from modern-era mystery to meme to production studio name.

It's odd to realize that it's been nearly twenty years since Russell T. Davies revived Doctor Who in its current post-Buffy, very online and meme-able form. Some fans haven't seen that first season with Christopher Eccleston and Billy Piper. Most of them discovered the series with David Tennant, who's still considered the most popular modern era Doctor. The biggest mystery that hooked viewers, including new fans, back in 2005 was the season-long arc: The Mystery of the Bad Wolf. "Bad Wolf" also became the modern series' first meme in an era before social media became big, and the series depended on word-of-mouth on the internet with the social media accounts that have become ubiquitous (and may have helped destroy democracy, but that's another topic).

Throughout the first series of the new Doctor Who in 2005, the Doctor and Rose keep encountering references to "bad wolf" no matter where and when they travelled to. Who or what was the Bad Wolf? It set viewers speculating all season long about who the bad wolf could be. It was a reference to the Big Bad Wolf of fairy tales and suggested an enemy was stalking them through Space and Time. New viewers didn't think it could be another Time Lord since the Doctor said at the start of the series that he was the last surviving Time Lord in a Time War.

In the season finale, the Bad Wolf turned out to be Rose herself. When the Doctor sacrificed himself to save her from the Daleks, she collaborated with the TARDIS and absorbed the Eye of Harmony, the cosmic power source at its core, and went all Dark Phoenix because Davies grew up on X-Men and Alan Moore comics. Rose scattered the clues to Bad Wolf throughout Time in retrospect, in an attempt to warn herself and The Doctor of the coming battle. Now they've reached the present and the endpoint of the Bad Wolf, where she has saved The Doctor, but the power is killing her, so the Doctor sacrifices himself one last time to absorb the power from her, triggering his regeneration, the first regeneration to a new persona in the modern series.

Bad Wolf was a simple puzzle arc to bring mystery to that first new series of Doctor Who and it worked because it paid off. The Bad Wolf ended up killing The Doctor after all in an ironic full circle – Rose's attempt to save him ended up saving and killing him, resulting in him changing into David Tennant because Eccleston decided to leave the series due to problems with the producers and the BBC. The Doctor dies and lives again, even though a second series wasn't guaranteed until the new series turned out to be a huge hit. Davies and his successors introduced season-long mystery arcs along the same lines, including most recently in the Disney+ era, where Davies tried another parallel with Susan Twist's character popping up all over Space and Time while Sutekh also lurked throughout the season with his ominous growl, but fans have found it less satisfying and a bit repetitive now.

Bad Wolf has been so significant, responsible for the success of the first new series of the show that when Jane Tranter, the former head of the BBC, and Julie Gardner, the series producer, left to form their own production company, they named it Bad Wolf Productions. After all, Bad Wolf Productions is the house that Doctor Who and the first Bad Wolf built. Since then, Bad Wolf has become a producing powerhouse in the TV industry responsible for series like His Dark Materials, A Discovery of Witches, and the latest HBO hit Industry, and home to a massive studio facility bringing jobs and money to Wales, ensuring that Bad Wolf went from meme to reality and is here to stay.

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