Doctor Who's New Era Could End Sooner Than We Thought
Who will likely never end. But, an offscreen regeneration —of sorts — might be coming.
As Doctor Who prepares to return for a new season on April 12, fans are already wondering what’s in store for both the incumbent Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, but also, reigning showrunner Russell T Davies. In a recent interview on March 11 on David Tennant’s podcast, Davies said that when he eventually leaves the show, he “won’t go back a third time.” Tennant also asked Davies if he was already thinking about a successor, and the answer was a tentative yes. “There's thinking about that, there's conversations about that, but it's hard. It's a tricky one,” Davies added.
In fairness, Davies was talking to his old pal Tennant about eventually leaving Who, not imminently. And yet, as of now, there is no official announcement about a third new Who season under Davies. So, with Davies talking about a replacement showrunner, is the new Who era ending already?
When it was announced in 2022 that Russell T Davies would return as the showrunner of Doctor Who, a profound sense of euphoria swept over the fandom. In terms of beloved writers coming back to a big sci-fi franchise, the idea of a 2.0 Davies Who run was without precedent. Since the debut of the new “Season 1” in 2024, reactions to the new era of Who have been mixed. While star Ncuti Gatwa has been generally praised as the 15th Doctor, his first season with Davies at the helm was fairly short, and found the star not really present for at least two episodes, mostly due to scheduling conflicts.
On top of that, the 2024 Who season was a mixed bag: While being touted as a kind of new era, designed to shake things up and attract new viewers, the finale was more reliant on creaky, fairly obscure 1970s canon than anyone could have predicted. And while the Davies-penned episode “73 Yards” was an instant classic, it’s hard to say, yet, if the second coming of RTD Doctor Who will be regarded as well as the first.
Davies, is, of course, keeping busy. And, it bears mentioning that during the recent podcast chat with Tennant, he says that the upcoming Doctor Who spinoff, The War Between the Land and the Sea, is currently filming. Again, it feels like history is repeating itself a bit. While Davies was the showrunner of Who 2005 to 2010, he also produced two spinoffs, Torchwood and The Sarah Adventures, both of which had installments that aired well after Davies had left Who itself. In fact, technically speaking, Davies’ last writing in the Whoinverse prior to his 2024 return was the 2011 miniseries Torchwood: Miracle Day, which aired the same year as Doctor Who Season 6, Steven Moffat’s second year as showrunner. (We all know which batch of episodes is better remembered.)
The point is, despite his brilliance, exuberance, and knowledge of Who, RTD’s Whoniverse writing validates between utterly classic and totally forgettable. This was true of his first tenure, and 2024’s Season 1 was an utter microcosm of that same pattern: We’ll be talking about “73 Yards” forever, but nobody will ever mention “Space Babies” as a favorite episode, just like we don’t talk about “Love and Monsters” or again, any of Torchwood: Miracle Day.
So if Davies is planning on departing the rebooted TARDIS after just two-ish years, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. If he’s putting his creative energy into The War Between the Land and the Sea, who knows, it could become a classic on par with Torchwood: Children of Earth.
And, if he’s planning on leaving the new era of Who so soon, maybe that means the upcoming season is packed with the best of his creativity and zeal. As all Who fans know, to love the show is to understand that the show constantly needs to change. We’ll happily enjoy RTD running things for several seasons to come if that’s what the future holds. But if he is regenerating into a new showrunner before next year, that will be just fine, too.
