The finale of Ncuti Gatwa’s run of Doctor Who had the Gallifreyan Time Lord regenerate into former companion actress Billie Piper, shocking and delighting fans. The BBC announced a new Christmas special despite production and distribution partner Disney+ stepping away from the program. In the time since the announcement, things have not gone well. The BBC cancelled the Christmas special. Russell T. Davies and his Bad Wolf production shingle left the show. Ultimately, Doctor Who’s future was opened up to a competitive tender to determine the next era of timey-wimeyness. Even Billie Piper has been left out in the cold about what her status as the Doctor was. Now, we can only report what it could have been as former Who showrunner Russell T. Davies is doing something British people abhor: spilling the tea.
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In Russell T. Davies’ new memoir The Queerest of Folk, excerpted in The Guardian, the Doctor Who revival creator details his journey with the franchise and how it came to its publicly disastrous end. He also gives audiences their first and only look at what was planned for the 2026 Christmas Special. After regenerating, the Doctor would have matched wits once again with his nemeses, the Daleks. The episode would have had the Doctor travelling to an “olde-world English village with a huge mysterious spaceship.” The village would be celebrating the space festival Winternox and would feature a surprise that even Davies wouldn’t reveal. The BBC had already announced the special for Christmas, but loved the late pitch. However, at the time of the announcement, the wheels were already coming off the car.
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As shot, Gatwa’s original finale as the 15th Doctor has the actor regenerating, but without showing what came next. The Doctor regenerates. A warm golden light fills the screen, and cut. With the production team already aware that Disney wouldn’t be returning to the franchise, Davies realized the ending didn’t feel like a cliffhanger. It felt like Doctor Who itself was ending, not just Gatwa’s era. Months passed while the BBC figured out what it wanted to do next, amid leadership changes that included the exit of Who champion Charlotte Moore. Davies gathered executives on Zoom and explained they needed someone to reveal at the end. Someone to give fans hope. They landed on a friend of the show, Billie Piper. The actress came in and shot the scenes not knowing what was coming next. After the finale aired, public sentiment changed fairly quickly, with fans hopeful for a David Tennant and Billie Piper reunion. Unfortunately, the inspired casting didn’t get secured for the subsequent special.
During the long break between announcing the special and finally getting contracts in front of Russell T. Davies to move forward, Billie Piper took on work on Netflix’s Jenna Ortega-starring hit series Wednesday, making the proposed timeline impossible. Davies himself had gotten tired of waiting as well and went to work on his project, Tip Toe. Piper wasn’t the culmination of a plan; she was the substitution for a plan. And unfortunately, Davies and the BBC didn’t lock her down when they needed to.
For his part, Davies lays a lot of the blame on the glacial pace of the BBC to react to things. The BBC car may have been slow, but Davies didn’t fill it with gas. The showrunner’s lack of a forward-thinking plan for the franchise seems to have created just as much of a bottleneck as the studio’s inability to make a decision. Had Davies treated Piper’s casting with any seriousness outside of not wanting a curt ending, the show might have avoided its current circumstance entirely. Audiences were eating up Piper’s return to the show. But there was no plan for her to move forward. By the time the BBC was ready to move forward in March of 2026, Davies knew they couldn’t make the Christmas date. At the same time, it was becoming known that the special would be Bad Wolf’s last episode of Doctor Who. With the competitive tender process in the works, Davies walked away. Telling the BBC to scrap the project in May. The writer said, “Let’s face it, we weren’t going to come back for a third time! Also, I thought quietly to myself: I’ll spend a year working on this, but it’ll all be leaked before it gets on air.”
Davies’ account points to a lot of BBC foot-dragging as the problem, but his lack of something for the executives to quicken their pace over never came into being. Whether that was a tactic to force a fresh start or just the bureaucratic process of the BBC will forever remain up for debate. Would the final Christmas special have been a heartwarming goodbye to an era of Doctor Who or a rushed mess while the BBC continued to pivot? Would they have a new Doctor ready in time to set up another regeneration, or would they be forced to punt again, causing more problems? Whovians will now forever have new questions to ask at Gallifrey One.
