The World Finally Caught Up to Davies’ Doctor Who Ambitions. What Now?

Everything outdated is new once more—Russell T. Davies goes to be operating Doctor Who once more for the primary time in over a decade. He’ll make his return in 2023, changing simply the second showrunner to interchange him because the collection returned in 2005.

In the times because the bonkers information that the BBC can be turning again the clock and bringing the person who revitalized Doctor Who again into the fold, Doctor Who followers have speculated wildly about simply what ephemeral RTD “vibe” might return with him. Down-to-earth companions like Rose, Martha, and Donna! Camp! More monsters! More silliness! The checklist goes on and on. But Davies doesn’t appear to be the form of one who would return to Doctor Who merely to both re-litigate or erase what got here earlier than him. After all, the author principally exited style when he left Doctor Who the primary time round—dabbling right here and there with the likes of Wizards vs Aliens or the dystopian near-future that units the stage for Years and Years, however focusing extra on queer drama like the dual collection Cucumber and Banana, the seminal It’s a Sin, or the historic comedy-drama A Very English Scandal.

A return for Davies to Doctor Who is to not essentially stick with it with what he did earlier than—for good or sick, relying on the way you view his tenure in hindsight—however to strive one thing totally new. Hopefully, he’ll be taking what he has discovered within the years since to do what Doctor Who has at all times achieved: develop, change, and evolve our definition of what it may be within the first place. But perhaps there is one factor from Davies’ tenure that the sci-fi collection might do with once more, much less concerning the present itself and extra about it’s place in a TV world that has grown round it since he and the BBC returned to the TARDIS in 2005: Davies’ ambition that there’s extra to Doctor Who than, effectively, Doctor Who.

The TV panorama that Davies’ revival got here into, even because it shot to virtually quick cultural recognition, was extremely completely different from the one we’ve now. Even then, Davies and his workforce had a transparent concept of what a present with Doctor Who’s attain might develop into—an concept that’s principally simply frequent pondering within the style TV we see immediately. From Star Wars to Marvel, from Star Trek to Game of Thrones, among the greatest reveals round are spinoffs branching out of a bigger backbone of tales. The Mandalorian, Lower Decks, What If—in this age of studio-owned streaming, the franchises dominating the area are not solely confined to a theater or TV display screen, however are expanded upon by all completely different codecs (novels, audio collection, comics, films, reveals, video games). That was one thing Davies wished to do all the best way again in 2005.

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“I was in the middle of running an empire, and my god I did that 10 years too soon, didn’t I?,” Davies recently told writer Paul Kirkley. “There should be a Doctor Who channel now. You look at those Disney announcements, of all those new Star Wars and Marvel shows, you think, we should be sitting here announcing The Nyssa Adventures or The Return of Donna Noble, and you should have the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors together in a 10-part series.” It’s hard to state how unprecedented Davies’ shepherding of Doctor Who along its rise to success in those early days was, especially considering the current media environment. Having behind-the-scenes accompaniments like Doctor Who: Confidential, announcements of “mature” spinoffs like Torchwood, or something like The Sarah Jane Adventures—an even more explicitly family-focused riff on Doctor Who—and airing them alongside the continuation of the main series, with characters from each bounding around to show up on them, was practically unheard of at the time. Now? It’s just… what happens on TV.

Davies even knew when enough was enough for Doctor Who, like the scrapped plans for a Billie Piper-led spinoff Rose Tyler: Earth Defence after she exited the series in 2006. Davies was thinking a decade ahead of himself on Doctor Who by expanding its world beyond the remit of a Time Lord in a TARDIS for so long—something the series always prided itself on, whether it was in the beloved New Adventures novels that carried the series on after it first left the airwaves, or the ongoing world of stories told by Big Finish’s Doctor Who audio dramas.

The formula is there now for Doctor Who to build on the ambitions it’s always had—taking the variety, scope, and dreams that have fueled the series under Davies, and in the years since his first exit, and pushing them out into an entire universe of Who. Maybe now that the rest of TV has caught up with them, when the writer returns to the TARDIS console in a few years, it’ll be the first step into a much larger world in time and space than even he could’ve previously imagined.

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