(courtesy IMDb (c) BBC/Disney+)
When you approach a series that’s been around as long as Doctor Who, which launched in 1963 making it now a grand old dame of TV and streaming programming, you have two options.
If you are a devoted fan of longstanding who knows their Daleks from their Cybermen, can recall just who played which companion and when, and who stuck around during the long lean off-air years of 1989 to 2005 when the series relaunched, you will watch the just-concluded 15th season (or the second if you’re counting from when Disney+ started streaming it) and nod knowingly at the vast raft of Easter eggs bobbing around in the various narratives (this season, like most recent Doctor Who seasons, is composed of standalone episodes that also exists in a wider arc which culminates in the final two episodes).
For fans who’ve been around a while, this kind of reference spotting is a joy and definitely adds to the buzz and thrill of watching episodes which feature a recurrent evil Time Lord known as the Rani (played by both Archie Panjabi and Anita Dobson (bi-generation don’t you know?) and even one of the founders of the Gallifreyans, Omega himself.
It’s a rich pot of Easter eggs into which long-term fans can dive, and like any inside knowledge, adds real narrative and emotional substance to what turned out to be a reasonably strong season.
It helps too, of course, if you know that the Doctor regenerates, a handy series contrivance which gets around the thorny issue of actors moving onto other roles, and at the end of season 15/2 ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- The Fifteenth Doctor does just that and becomes … Billie Piper’s Rose! (She’s the companion who kicked off the 2005 onwards iteration of Doctor Who along with Christopher Eccleston as the titular character himself.)
She’s not credited as the Doctor which makes you wonder who the Doctor has become exactly and for how long, but it certainly set the cat among the Doctor Who regeneration pigeons and makes any upcoming season, whenever it arrives (2026 at the very earliest) a tantalising prospect.
This absolute shocker of an ending and a whole lot more was shoehorned into the frenetic final two episodes, “Wish World” and “The Reality War”, which once again saw the Earth become a play thing of the Time Lords, all in service of bringing back the race who, quite frankly, mostly come across as completely off the charts bizarre and bonkers (and yes, that’s said with real affection and reverence for the show).
If you have followed the Doctor through all kinds of gender and sexuality iterations, you will have a found a great deal in this season, and the final two episodes in particular, to love and adore as the series made merry with old tropes and characters but also charged energetically into a bright new, more progressive future.
What’s been fun with this season though, and it’s a credit to Russell T. Davies, the new/old showrunner who has brought real emotionalism and humanity back to Doctor Who, is how well it has catered to any new fans who have come across the show on Disney+.
If you are one of those new discoverers, and if so, welcome to the Whovian-verse, what you would have seen is a series capable of being every bit as whimsical as it is dark and which springs from stories of robot apocalypses to interstellar song contest which, if you’re a Eurovision fan, will comfort you with the idea that the contest is still around in some 900 years time, with an alacrity that rather commendable for a series as long in the storytelling tooth as this one.
It helps of course that personnel changes happen reasonably regularly, but that aside, season 15/2 is abundant proof that you can be around for decades and still not grow old and stale if you remember that you need to change and grow constantly.
This season has done a supremely good job of not feeling the need to its longstanding tropes and cliches to the point where they stifle new character arcs and narrative possibilities; as noted there are nods to the DNA of the show everywhere you look, but if you’re a newcomer, you can still enjoy the show as a rip-roaring galloping adventure into the darkness and weirdness of a galaxy and the endless expanse of time that anchors it.
Episodes like “The Robot Revolution”, “Lux” and “The Story & the Engine” stand very happily on their own two storytelling feet, taking us into the worlds of characters who in just 45 minutes or so, come alive in fulsome 3D glory and who grabbed our hearts and make us care in an astonishingly short period of time.
It’s always been one of Davies’ great strengths, that even in the darkest of storylines, and pretty much all of the episodes tend more towards the dark than the light, buoyant moments of humour and deep connection aside, that he can find the humanity of the piece and make it shine.
For all of the divergent stories in this season, the great commonality this season which shone through, so powerfully in fact that it was well and truly noticeable in the frenetic pell-mell momentum and emotional intensity of the final episode, is how people of all stripes, sexes and races matter and that the Doctor will fight for them to survive to live and love another day.
It’s always driven Doctor Who as a series – why else would an alien fight so hard for us if there weren’t some redeeming features to being human? – but it came through loud and clear in this season, especially in the concluding episode where the Doctor’s companion, Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu), had a lot to fight for and the Doctor literally gave of himself to help her fight for it.
It’s this battle which provides the emotional core of “The Reality War”, demonstrating why Doctor Who has stuck around so long; there might be action and threats and valiant battles aplenty and they are hugely intense and entertaining to watch, but at the end of the day, it’s the humanity of people that emerges from and centre, evident in every moment of season 15/2 and why the show will go on long into the future, no matter whose faces adore the Doctor we know and love.
Doctor Who screens on the BBC in the UK and on Disney+ worldwide.
And it’s goodbye to Ncuti Gatwa who brough vibrantly out-there queer energy and verve to the role of Doctor Who and who will be greatly missed.