Doctor Who writer Robert Shearman - who penned the beloved season 1 episode "Dalek" - doesn't seem particularly optimistic about the show's future. "The show is probably as dead as we've ever known it," he observed in the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine.
To be fair to Shearman, he probably didn't mean the comments to sound quite so downbeat. He certainly won't have expected them to go viral in the Doctor Who fandom; Doctor Who was canceled once in the past, and the fans have never quite gotten over it.
But is he right?
Why Doctor Who Didn't "Die" In 1989
Doctor Who struggled through the 1980s, with dropping viewing figures in the Colin Baker era. Senior figures within the BBC (primarily Michael Grade) didn't really care for science-fiction, believing it outside the public broadcaster's remit, and looked upon Doctor Who with distaste.
"I hated Doctor Who," Grade remembered in a 2019 interview with The Evening Standard. "I said to the producer, ‘Do you go to the cinema much? Have you seen Star Wars or ET?’ He said yes. I said, ‘I’ve got news for you; so has our audience. What we were serving up as science fiction was garbage.'”
He finally got his way in 1989, pulling the plug on Doctor Who and bringing Sylvester McCoy's tenure as the Seventh Doctor to an unsatisfying end. But Doctor Who simply moved to a different medium, flourishing in a series of novels published by Virgin. Some of the biggest names from the show continued writing these stories.
The New Adventures gradually became more mature even as the writers realized their audience was growing up. No longer aimed at children, this incarnation of Doctor Who was darker and even sexualized; Sophie Aldred's Ace left the TARDIS for a time, returning in a catsuit (Aldred even did a photoshoot).
To the outside world, Doctor Who seemed to be dead. To the fandom, the story was ongoing.
The Paul McGann Movie Didn't Kill Doctor Who, Either
Doctor Who returned to live-action in 1996, in a failed TV movie starring Paul McGann. The brainchild of producer Philip Segal, this story lacked a clear sense of audience and featured an amnesiac narrative that made it hard for McGann to own the role. The story was bogged down in continuity, failing to appeal to new viewers.
But even this wasn't enough to kill Doctor Who. Spurred on by fresh interest in the franchise, the BBC regained the publishing license from Virgin and began publishing their own series of novels. Meanwhile, Big Finish began producing audiobooks in 1999. The Doctor's adventures were able to continue.
The BBC's Eighth Doctor range literally began in the aftermath of the TV movie, in a story written by the legendary Terrence Dicks. Like the Virgin books, they wasted little time developing the character, and they were most certainly aimed at a more mature audience. These stories were still being published six years later, in 2005, when Doctor Who returned to the small screen.
This Doctor Who Hiatus Is Harder To Navigate
By now, you may have seen the pattern running through all this; Doctor Who was canceled in 1989, and failed to return in 1996, but there was still a forward momentum. To be sure, there were still "Missing Adventures" of past Doctors, but the core really lay in the Doctor's ongoing adventures.
Doctor Who may have left the small screen, but it was far from dead.
The end of Doctor Who season 15 is a little different, though. It's true that Doctor Who hasn't been canceled, but nobody quite knows when season 16 will happen; perhaps hoping to add pressure, showrunner Russell T. Davies ended the story with a shock regeneration in which the Doctor apparently regenerated into Billie Piper.
Here's the problem; if Doctor Who does return to the small screen (and hopefully it will), then it will inevitably need to address the strange decision to bring back Billie Piper. Until then, as Shearman explained, "No one's going to start writing Doctor Who books with a Billie Piper Doctor, because no one knows what that means."
We didn't even know if Billie Piper is playing the Doctor, or if the Doctor has somehow been swapped through time and space with his former companion Rose Tyler; the credits deliberately avoided saying Piper was playing the Doctor, making it even more uncertain.
Robert Shearman is right about Doctor Who. The franchise isn't quite dead, but that finale brings it as close to dead as it's ever been. There can now be no forward momentum, meaning any stories must tell tales of past Doctors, not the present. In a strange way, that perhaps-regeneration leaves Doctor Who oddly dormant.
Will Doctor Who return yet again? Unfortunately, as the Doctor himself put it, "Time will tell. It always does."
Doctor Who
- Release Date
- May 11, 2024
- Network
- BBC One
- Directors
- Alex Pillai, Peter Hoar, Ben Chessell, Julie Anne Robinson, Jamie Donoughue, Amanda Brotchie, Dylan Holmes Williams
- Writers
- Steven Moffat, Pete McTighe, Kate Herron, Inua Ellams, Juno Dawson
- Franchise(s)
- Doctor Who / Whoniverse
Cast
-
The Doctor -
Millie GibsonRuby Sunday
- Creator(s)
- Donald Wilson, Sydney Newman
