The latest iteration of Doctor Who has been reluctant to deploy the likes of Daleks, Cybermen and the Weeping Angels. A few thoughts.
This feature contains spoilers for Doctor Who, up to and including The Interstellar Song Contest.
In 2005, when Doctor Who first returned to our screens in the era that’s become ‘NuWho’, showrunner Russell T Davies was well aware he was fighting an uphill battle.
It’s been well told that the ‘first’ series of the revived show was a tricky one to pull together, and on the BBC’s side, there was a great deal of risk too. Would people be lured back to a show that had been allowed to quietly limp off the air over a decade before (even though the stories themselves were more often than not of quality)? Could it attract a broad audience again? Was it worth the time and investment?
Scheduling Doctor Who’s return for a primetime Saturday night TV slot exuded confidence, especially then, but still: Davies was aware he needed to maximise promotional opportunities for the show. Had Doctor Who failed in 2005, it’s hard to see it ever recovering.
Famously, then, Davies held back the Daleks. The Doctor’s most iconic opponents, who’d been absent from our screens in a Doctor Who story since 1988. Davies reasoned that there’d be a burst of publicity when the show returned, but if he held back the Daleks until mid-season – with Robert Shearman’s superb episode, Dalek – then he’d get a second bite at making mainstream noise.
The plan worked a treat, and Davies would mirror that approach as, over subsequent series, he brought back the Cybermen and The Master, too.
What’s been interesting about his return to Doctor Who is he’s altered his tactics. The Second Davies Era began with 2023’s The Star Beast, and since then, the Time Lord has fought robots, singing critters on a space ship, babies, Ange out of EastEnders and an animated character.
Yet it’s increasingly interesting who the Doctor hasn’t fought as much as who he has.
Much has been written about the influx of money into the world of Doctor Who, courtesy of an apparently soon-to-end partnership between the BBC and Disney. What needed to happen for this to be seen as a success, presumably, was to extend the reach of Doctor Who around the world. The UK is the BBC’s market for the show, and Disney was and is looking to grow numbers elsewhere.
I’m not privy to the deal, but I’d imagine for the partnership to be re-inked, the Disney+ numbers were and are the main deal. There’s an argument that stacking episodes with Daleks and such like would have been the safer way forward, and a way to get more eyeballs. Yet – appreciating there’s two episodes left I’ve not seen of this run – the pepperpots and their ilk are notable only by their absence.
I’m detecting, then, just a little bit of that 2005 playbook at work. But also, a much longer, arguably riskier game: three specials and two seasons within playing the hits is on the bold side.
Arguably, there’s story justification. There is, inherently, a problem after all in wheeling out the Doctor’s deadliest foes. As Steven Moffat once said, to badly paraphrase him, the Daleks are the most defeatable enemies in the world. If we’re looking at the other main modern foes – Cybermen, The Master, The Weeping Angels – it’s telling that they’ve been excluded from the latest iteration of the show so far. One or two have been hinted at, and go back to The Giggle, we were left assuming that The Master was coming back in one form or another.
But he and the others are MIA, and it’s being noticed.
It’s not as if Davies isn’t trying to interest the longer-term fans of the show, who need less in the way of recruiting (although trying to keep them on board is obviously of importance). He’s just gone on the niche side of things to do so. I can’t imagine if you asked most fans to write a list five years ago of the classic foes they wanted back that Sutekh would have been on the list, yet the whole of season one of the new revival was apparently building to him (someone following the Doctor for decades, and then dispensed with in a few minutes). A villain plucked from the 1970s who a good chunk of Who fans would have struggled to remember.
The Celestial Toymaker there’s more affection for, and I wonder if we’ve seen the last of him.
Now, we’ve got the return of The Rani, a character who I thought was more a punchline to a ‘who do you really want to return’ gag than a much-loved antagonist. Fair play to the BBC for spinning her as a “legendary Doctor Who villain.” A little bit of a stretch, there.
Accepting that the late Kate O’Mara made much of a not-wonderfully-written-role when she originated the role of another rogue Time Lord, The Rani was notable for being a foe in two of the least regarded Doctor Who stories of the 1980s, and generally being a bit rubbish. A bit panto-y, and stuck in the middle of tales that never troubled the Doctor Who magazine best-of list vote.
This, we’ve got two Ranis rather than one, and fair enough, I’d imagine Russell T Davies can do more with the character than we saw in Mark Of The Rani and Time And The Rani all that time ago. He could stumble, drop his typewriter, and scramble it all back together in a caffeine-fuelled half hour and comfortably walk off with the Best Rani Story trophy. To make her the Big Bad of a full season run is very much on the bold side, but he’s got a lot of ceiling room to work with. The casting looks smart, too.
And I admire that he’s holding his nerve where the classic monsters are concerned, even while fearing he may have overplayed his hand.
It’s little secret, as I keep writing, that the future of Doctor Who in its current form is very much up in the air, with no new episodes filmed or known to be commissioned (outside of the already-shot spin-off miniseries), and Ncuti Gatwa expected to head off to Hollywood. Nothing confirmed of course, outside of Disney said to making a decision based on its own involvement when the ratings have been compiled. It’s hard to think that it wouldn’t have made its decision by now. I fear it’s not great news.
As such, when it comes to a recommissioning conversation, or finding a new financial backer, does the fact that, say, the Daleks have been mothballed work in favour of those conversations? That there’s something in the programme’s back pocket that’s been away for three years?
Or would a dose of Cyber-action or Dalek-spotting have spiked the ratings earlier? I’m no expert on such matters,
Of course, Davies may yet have another rug pull here, and the two-part season finale we’re about to see could bring back a carnival of monsters. Or it could turn The Rani into a hugely interesting character, and a hell of an adversary.
Yet there’s a degree of high stakes game here, even accepting that by metaphorical hook or crook, Doctor Who does tend to find a way to return. Might there be a meeting going on somewhere with a money person, and the argument is that ‘we’ll bring the Daleks back next time’? Will Ncuti Gatwa be the only Doctor to never meet one of the marquee adversaries? We’ll know more shortly. In the meantime, Davies continues to avoid the easier road. It’ll be interesting to see if it all pays off.
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