Feature: Russell T Davies’ Vision of the 14th Doctor
Feature article by guest contributor Zachary Schulman.
“How will [RTD] evolve that show? I mean, he is a man with a vision, for sure.” – Piers Wenger
When I texted my friend that Russell T. Davies is the next showrunner, and that he’s doing the 60th, she told me that she too thought it was a joke until she saw it was being reported everywhere and that it wasn’t April Fool’s Day. That’s how surreal this stunning turn is: are you serious? Is this possible? To say that the writing of Russell T. Davies positively impacted my youth is an understatement. My first impression of this mythos was with the Tenth Doctor, and I didn’t know that there was a number—he was just Doctor Who. Ever since, this BBC programme has had me by the heartstrings. Maybe RTD was meant to return. In Series 4’s “Journey’s End” Donna says it best: “-you’re talking, like, destiny. But there’s no such thing, is there?”
While Russell T. Davies has been quite busy since leaving the show with his other creations, the former showrunner has delighted fans with new Doctor Who stories that were released (in part) to relieve the woes of the first year of pandemic lockdown with fantastical escapism. In the story “The Secret of Novice Hame,” the Tenth Doctor visits our favorite nurse cat as part of his pre-regeneration farewell tour (unseen in “The End of Time Part 2”). Anna Hope and David Tennant return to their roles for this 2020 remote production: “I have heard so many stories about him over the years—his hundreds of faces and forms. The men and women and animals who have taken that name. And yet the one who comes for me is so familiar. This one is mine.” Though “The Timeless Children” revelation has assured audiences that there may be endless incarnations of the Doctor both backwards and forwards in time, all of what remains unknown (beyond the identities of the unseen incarnations) are the plots that will stage these characters.
Though not employed by the BBC, in typical cliffhanger fashion, the prodigal showrunner has teased that there’s more to his idea of New Earth than we have yet seen in the programme; storytelling material he may soon return to. Novice Hame continues to narrate:
“Did you never think, Doctor, how strange it is that New Earth exists? By what coincidence it has exactly the same diameter, and air, and orbit of the original Earth? Because it drew us here, across the stars: every man and woman and cat and dog and bird and beast and spider-kind. The planet called us home, and we thought it a blessing! But as the years passed, I began to think, what if this happened by design? And that thought led to another. What if this world is not a home? What if it’s a trap? A long, slow, careful trap of infinite complexity? So I began to investigate. I looked beneath the surface of this world, and do you know what I found, Doctor? Do you know what I discovered?”
Sadly, it is revealed that the good Novice died and all of this was spoken by a ghost; that the Tenth Doctor did not hear any of it. Hame concludes, “And this is my final realization: that the secret will have to wait, for other times, other cats, other Doctors.” In my previous article, “The Revelations of Gallifrey” I suggest that both Earth’s and Gallifrey’s fates are more familial than they are alien (as oft portrayed in the show). It seems reasonable to predict that Russell T. Davies would very likely return to the year 5 billion setting that he catapulted into canon, in his second showrunner era.
Before the pandemic, hard copy retellings of already screened stories made their ways to the book stands. In the novelization of “Rose,” RTD adds new incarnations of the Doctor with the Thirteenth Doctor in hindsight:
“Rose saw a photo of a man with a fantastic jaw, dressed in a tweed jacket and bow tie. Then Clive kept the sequence going; an older, angry man in a brown caretaker’s coat, holding a mop; a blonde woman in braces running away from a giant frog in front of Buckingham Palace; a tall, bald black woman wielding a flaming sword; a young girl or boy in a hi-tech wheelchair with what looked like a robot dog at their side…”
Evidently, the two future versions of the Infinite Doctor continue to honor the rainbow flag that has accompanied the Thirteenth Doctor’s time, with a non-white female lead and a non-binary alternately-abled hero who gets a K-9! Keep in mind, it was Russell T. Davies who had a hand in the creation of Captain Jack Harness in Series 1, and that the (Ninth) Doctor’s first televised serial onscreen kiss would be with another man in “The Parting of the Ways.” While the Chris Chibnall era has overtly broached Doctor Who’s expanding ally audience with the glass ceiling teaser trailer, we must remember that the rainbows started in the 1980s with John Nathan Turner’s era, and that the rainbows shone again with the revival by Julie Gardner and RTD. The most flamboyantly dressed Doctor of all, the glorious old Sixie, practically wears the rainbow flag as his costume. I find it to be no small coincidence that RTD returned to canon first with Big Finish to write the Sixth Doctor lost story “The Mind of the Hodiac,” which I am tremendously excited for.
Speaking of Big Finish, one of my favorites of their publications (which is saying quite a bit) is The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield, which features the Unbound Doctor in his third incarnation. A “What If… The Third Doctor landed in 1997 instead of 1970?” parallel universe that is canon. Just as the Marvel multiverse is taking off, decades after the DC Comics multiverse that preceded it came into being by publication fallacies, and having seen the Twelfth Doctor in the Lego Dimensions multiverse, will our new Doctors become players in the show’s long anticipated ‘out of this universe’ territory? There is precedent for RTD to work off of.
In the Big Finish production, The War Master: Anti-Genesis “Shockwave,” it is revealed by the Unbound Master (Mark Gatiss) that our canon Gallifrey was being ravaged by a time tsunami (“which is a lot less interesting than it sounds”), creating over 600 timelines in this episode of the Time War alone. Are parallel timelines parallel universes, and who’s to say which one is the real one?
Furthermore, in “Revenge of the Nestene” Davies invokes multiple timelines that I read to be a multiverse, as was portrayed in his tenure during Series 2 (2006) starting with “Rise of the Cybermen.” Concerning the motivations of the Nestene consciousness in Series 1 episode 1, these plastic beings came from:
“A battleground beyond comprehension. A tumble of planets fell out of a rip in space like stray bullets from some epic offstage gunfight. Copies of planets stolen from different seconds of their existence: a hundred orange worlds known as Gallifrey; a thousand black cinders once called Skaro; a dozen small, blue and green planets which the Nestene recognized from an old campaign—Earth. A rolling, tumbling, spinning, bouncing cosmic destruction unfurled. The food planets smashed by many Skaros; the crown world pulverized by various Gallifreys; the maternity reefs crushed by fifty-seven Earths.”
We’ve seen parallel versions of Earth being destroyed before, including RTD’s own “Turn Left” in Series 4. The Thirteenth Doctor herself and fam visited a parallel universe version of Earth in Series 12 with “Orphan 55,” and one wonders how many episodes or plotlines could be retroactively categorized as parallel universes competing for canon.
Now, regarding where we are left as an audience in the present limbo just before Series 13, I must confess that my deepest qualm with Series 12 as seen in “Spyfall, Part 2” concerns Gallifrey’s destruction. After everything former showrunner Steven Moffat went through to bring back this planet from certain death, all of those lives are once again thrown away. Furthermore, the corpses of the Gallifreyan’s are revealed to have been hoarded by the psychotic Spy Master; emphasizing that no one survived or even got away from his massacre. It is my sincere hope, that for all those innocent Shobogans, and the 2.47 billion children on Gallifrey (“The Day of the Doctor”) that a time tsunami will inevitably ravage our canon and restore all of those lives lost in some spectacular special episode. In Series 12, “Fugitive of the Judoon,” the Thirteenth Doctor herself detected that time was twisting back to her: “Time is swirling around me. The Master, Captain Jack Harkness, Ruth. Something’s coming for me. I can feel it.”
Finally, in “The End of Time Part 1” the Tenth Doctor realizes in his conversation with Wilf that the strands of destiny are still binding the two of them together, well after “The Stolen Earth” plot had concluded. Perhaps this very destiny transcends the time between Series 4 and Series 14 of the two Russell T. Davies eras. After all, the Metacrisis Doctor prophesizes “Oh, we’ve been blind. Something’s been drawing us together for such a long time…. It’s still not finished. Like the pattern’s not complete, the strands are still drawing together. But headed for what?” Far in our future, perhaps for the 100th Anniversary special, an old Curator will say “Who knows? Who… knows?”
