(courtesy BBC)
To commemorate Doctor Who‘s 60th anniversary – the show premiered on 23 November 1963 with William Hartnell in the role of the eponymous Time Lord – the BBC released three specials in late 2023. These specials, “The Star Beast”, “Wild Blue Yonder”, and “The Giggle”, not only brought back David Tennant as the much-loved Tenth Doctor but gave the show a chance to bring Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) back into the fray, a gutsy narrative move since if you recall, if she remembers who the Doctor is and the adventures she had with him, she’ll die. As nostalgia trips for a Diamond Anniversary go, this is a DOOZY, and all three specials work wonderfully well, wrapping up old stories and setting the show up for a host of new ones.
Even better these wonderful specials were followed by a Christmas special, “The Church on Ruby Road”, which brings Ncuti Gatwa (Sex Education) into the titular role and ushers in a new series that begins this coming May on BBC and Disney+ worldwide.
(courtesy BBC)
Saying goodbye to someone is never easy but when the only way for Donna Noble to leave the Doctor and stay alive was to have her memory wiped or die (“Journey’s End”, 5 July 2008), it was the most gut-wrenching, soul-hollowing and saddest of goodbyes this reviewer had ever experienced on a TV show. We loved Donna almost as much as we loved David Tennant as the garrulously cheeky, avuncular, energetically adventurous Tenth Doctor and her departure, as an empty vessel shorn of all her adventures through time and space was desperately, DESPERATELY sad. Brilliant storytelling, absolutely brilliant, but so very sad.
There were quite a few people that didn’t like the way this much-adored character left Doctor Who, but this reviewer also admired the fact that the show managed to resist temptation and leave Donna to her fate, no matter how distressing it might have been. The good news is Doctor Who, now back under the stewardship of the wondrously good Russell T. Davies, who knows not only how to tell a good story but how to pack in the emotions in ways that really matter, has found a way to give Donna her heart and soul back without compromising what happened to her 15 years ago.
———- SPOILERS AHEAD !!!!! ———- The key was bringing back Tennant as the Doctor (he is now the Tenth and Fourteenth Doctors). He has no idea why the regeneration sequencing which normally comes up with an all-new face and personality, has recycled an old one but he figures, even if he doesn’t believe in it, that destiny is bringing Donna and he back together again. He bumps into Donna almost immediately, laden with art supplies for daughter Rose’s (Tasmin Finney) online business, and in quick succession meets Rose and Donna’s husband, Shaun Temple (Karl Collins) and later Donna’s mum, Sylvia (Jacqueline King) who, like Donna’s grandad Wilf (mentioned but not seen), remembers everything that Donna has forgotten. Sylvia is not happy to see the Doctor and even after a spaceship lands in London, triggering a UNIT response (where we meet the marvellous Shirley Bingham, played Ruth Madeley, and get to see her rocket-firing wheelchair in action) and a cute alien called the Meep (voiced by Cecily Fay) enters the family’s life, she fights to stop Donna from remembering ANYTHING.
That’s a tad challenging when Wrarth Warriors, out to capture the seemingly innocent Meep (there’s a twist people, a TWIST!) are shooting up the house you live in and it’s clear that no one, including an increasingly desperate Sylvia, are going to be able to wish all the aliens away. Donna does eventually her moment of reckoning but as you may have figured from her appearance in two subsequent specials, she doesn’t die with her story resolved with a megaton of emotion and some of the most nuanced and emotionally delicate storytelling to emerge from Doctor Who in some time. It’s frankly quite beautiful how Donna gets her full self back, and others like daughter Rose come into their own, and along with Tennant’s return as the wisecracking, clever, and enthusiastic Doctor (such a tonic for the soul!), it marks this special as a standout entry in the Doctor Who and proof that the Doctor is always safest in Davies’ hands and those of longtime collaborators, according to The Hollywood Reporter, like “producers Julie Gardner and Phil Collinson, as well as Jane Tranter, the woman who was instrumental in bringing back Doctor Who in 2005”.
(courtesy BBC)
What better way is there for two people reconnecting after a long period apart to get things sorted, or on their way to being sorted at least, than to stick them on a near empty giant spaceship right on the edge of space and leave them there for a good long while with no possibility of escape? Even better, and yes, clearly this is not an option open to most people, or anyone really bar the Doctor and Donna, than to have an ailing TARDIS, which frankly did NOT cope well with Donna spilling coffee onto its console – when we say “did NOT cope well” we mean, it’s all smoking and fiery and careening haphazardly through time and space which is not optimal for a time travelling machine of any description – zip away because its Hostile Action Displacement System was invoked by a threat aboard the space ship which only the TARDIS could see because Donna and the Doctor had stepped outside to let their time vehicle repair itself in peace.
———- SPOILERS AHEAD !!!!! ———- Being trapped on a ship that seems to have no lifeforms bar the Doctor and Donna’s seems like the perfect opportunity to talk about what happened way back in 2008 but what also what’s happened since. What did that traumatic goodbye do to the two, individually and as besties, and while hurrah Donna did not die when she remembered all of the Doctor’s knowledge and power within herself because it was now split between her and her gorgeous transgender daughter, what can she do with herself now she does remember?
LOTS to muse on and think about, especially after a brief atop-an-apple-tree stop in 1666 caused them to meet Sir Isaac Newton (Nathaniel Curtis) who can’t quite remember one of the key words in Donna’s joke about “the gravity of the situation” and refers to the property as “mavity” which becomes the only word either the Doctor or Donna can remember (which provides a lovely running joke through the episode); another fun result of that meeting is the revelation of the Doctor’s inherent queerness when he agrees with Donna that Sir Isaac was “HOT”, admitting “I guess that’s who I am now” to which Donna says “It was never that far below the surface”. (Yes, the cultural warriors, already furious at the Doctor being a woman, wonderfully and gleefully played by Jodie Whittaker, will hate this but he is a queer figure, if only because of his innate alienness.)
Their getting to know you again chat however gets a little derailed, and more than a little creepy when creatures from the nothingness beyond the edge of the universe, who are pretty angry they weren’t ever a part of the noise and mess of the occupied world and want to start a war – great life goals guys; you finally get access to a spaceship (not theirs and occupied by the cutest, if slowest robot ever but for a good reason as it turns out) – decide to copy you as their means of escape. It leads to a horror-lite dash for survival that almost goes off the rails when the Doctor scoops up the wrong Donna – phew! He realises just in time – and a sort-of spilling of some home truths which never really goes anywhere because what happened then and now is a LOT, you know? It’s a great adventure because it’s full of fun – Donna observes that because they’re in a time machine, the Doctor won’t let her forget she ruined the TARDIS for an eternity! Haha, get it? – and some poignantly sharp moments and a story that cuts to the heart of who these two characters are, right when they really need to get to the crux of it.
(courtesy BBC)
Remember that reference to how hard goodbyes can be? You know, way back in the review for the first of the 2023 specials? Well, that still holds of course because having your heart ripped out never really gets easier, but in the case of this scarily wonderful goodbye/not goodbye to Tennant as the Doctor – bear with us; the ambiguity in that statement will soon be addressed – goodbye actually takes the mother of all warm and cuddly vibes. If it’s possible for the Doctor to have a happy ending of the fairytale kind where everything actually ends well, and he is saved, along with the human race – then “The Giggle” offers it and in spades (and all three other card suits for that matter in a special that is big on terrifying playfulness).
———- SPOILERS AHEAD !!!!! ———- This special marks the return of The Toymaker, a Q-like being (and yes, I did just reference another sci-fi franchise; please, make your peace with this and move on) who first appeared in a battle of wits with the First Doctor way back in 1966. Played with camp intensity and veritable mix of dubiously-executed accents by Neil Patrick Harris, The Toymaker has made himself at home on Earth since 1925, waiting for the moment when all of humanity would be linked together by screens with all able to access the same information at the same time. This should in theory be a good and wonderful thing, but as the Doctor points out for all the brilliance and fantasticness of humanity, there’s also a lot of venality and violence, something The Toymaker harnesses by embedding a psychotically laughing doll into every screen, beginning with John Logie Beard’s creation of television.
The net effect of that laughing doll lurking in every screen is that humanity has had its worst instincts harnessed against it, with The Toymaker making every person believe they are RIGHT. It’s a sage and clever piece of commentary on the weaponisation of opinion that has occurred with social media, which far from uniting people on a universal level – yes, as a social media user of longstanding, this reviewer can attest to its potential for unity, friendship and togetherness but it’s far from a universal thing, sadly – has actually sundered us apart. But by making everyone right, and the winner of their own game, and The Toymaker loves games above else (including morality though he does not cheat so for all his cold brutality, he’s actually hilariously scrupulous), he makes everyone the losers too. It’s a dark and terrible game and it could doom humanity.
But then the Doctor is there, and in a fabulous twist on the same old, same old, this time the generative effect which gives rise to the new face of the Doctor leads to Tennant remaining as the Time Lord while Ncuti Gatwa, in boxers and an undone white business shirt with a queer attitude to boot, emerges as the Fifteenth Doctor. In story twists, the exact outworking of which, should remain the stuff of watching this creepy but highly emotive and entertaining episode, the Fifteenth gets his own TARDIS and sets off on all new adventures while number Fourteen, and yes, Ten, finally settles down with his family. Who are these people you might wonder and how did they become his found family? Why it’s the Temple-Nobles, and after both Fifteen and Donna (mostly Donna) convince Fourteen to stay put and stop running for once, if only to find some of that elusive existential peace he never seems to manage to grab hold of, he settles in a gorgeous house in suburban London with Donna, her husband, daughter, and mother, and excitingly, an old companion in the form of Melanie (Bonnie Langford), who first went travelling through time and space with the Sixth and Seventh Doctors (Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy respectively). It’s a joyous reunion, and it adds to the best possible of all goodbyes and resolutions to the storyline of the Doctor and Donna who are now family just as we always hoped they might be. As endings go, it’s a cracker and seals these three specials as something rather fantastically good and emotionally and narratively perfect that pay home to 60 years of Doctor Who while positioning it perfectly for a new and wonderfully diverse new era …
Christmas Special 2023: “The Church on Ruby Road”
(courtesy BBC/Disney+)
Introducing a new Doctor is always an interesting and frankly challenging exercise. You are essentially doing a pilot within an already existing show, and while many of the aspects of the show remain the same such as the TARDIS, the adventure, the quips, the good vs evil battles and the existential what-ifs, they’re all happening with a new face bringing the stories to life. You either adapt quickly or you don’t to this familiar-but-unfamiliar new reality or you don’t, and it all comes down to the elegantly tight nature of the storytelling and the ability of the titular role’s new incumbent to personify a character that is now 60 years old with a lot of narrative baggage and show cannon behind them. Will they rise or will they fall?
In the case of Ncuti Gatwa, who brings a camp playfulness to a role that has always suggested a reasonable amount of innate queerness, it’s absolutely a success, thanks to a storyline that’s involved enough to engage but so complex that it leaves insufficient time for the new Doctor and companion to get to know each other and for the audience to get to know them. It helps considerably that both Gatwa, who has chosen a retro fab style of dress for his Doctor, the Fifteenth, and Millie Gibson, who impresses as new companion, Ruby Sunday, bring a metric ton of vivacity to their performances. There’s energy fairly bursting off the screen when they’re together, and whether it’s saving a baby from a goblin sailing ship high in the sky – it’s a thing of stunning beauty and speaks to the immaculately imaginative worldbuilding that’s gone into this intro episode – or racing across the rooftops of London, it’s clear that here are two actors having the absolute time of their lives.
While “The Church on Ruby Road” is almost all pell-mell action and intense will-they, won’t-they-succeed moments, it also takes some time to let the characters catch their breath and marvel at the coincidences that have brought them together. That word, “coincidences” is actually quite loaded since it’s one of the trigger words that attracts time-travelling goblins who are initially dismissed by the Doctor until time tinkerers until they go and change a fairly important part of the timeline.
———- SPOILERS AHEAD !!!!! ———- And it is IMPORTANT. On Christmas Eve in 2004, Ruby is left as a newly-born baby on the snowy steps of a church. She’s taken in and adopted by the woman who becomes her mum, Carla Sunday (Michelle Greenidge) and goes on to enjoy a charmed and much-loved life in a cosy family also made up of her irascible but loving grandmother Cherry (Angela Wynter) in London. That is until Christmas 2023 when on the eve of her 19th birthday, she realises that all the bad luck she thinks has been following her is actually causing some very real problems, not least the disappearance of new foster baby Lulubelle who is the object of the goblins’ campaign for some very unsavourily culinary reasons.
The goblins are creepy in their own kind of charming way, but ultimately all their twisted cuteness is overwhelmed by the fact that they mean Lulubelle and Ruby harm and the Doctor especially has to make sure they don’t succeed with their lip-smackingly nefarious plans. In many ways the goblins tale is really told in service to establishing who the new Doctor is – he’s flamboyant, fun, passionate and prone to smile like a fiend – and who Ruby is too because she, as we know, is going to play a key role in the sort of person the Doctor becomes. The relationship between the two is birthed in some fairly intense narrative twists and turns, and some real moments of heartstopping poignancy, and it works so well that you absolutely buy into the fact that these two are meant to be together travelling through space and time.
As intros of new Doctors go, “The Church on Ruby Road” is beautifully, emotively and engagingly done, delivering up a compelling story that has some real stakes to it, and which world-builds expansively in near record time, a new Doctor and companion you know you are going to love, and kicking off to the new series which drops May 2024 on BBC in UK and Disney+ worldwide with a bang, some quiet moments of really affecting emotional beauty and lot of fun which looks like it’s going to be a hallmark of the Fifteenth Doctor’s time in the TARDIS.
All of the specials above are currently streaming on Disney+