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By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Right now, Doctor Who fans are really going through it. It seemed like we were in for a real franchise revival when Russel T. Davies came back as showrunner, and the BBC partnered with Disney. The guy who brought Doctor Who back after 16 years was returning and teaming up with one of the biggest companies in the world. What could possibly go wrong? Well, everything. The episodes were weak, Disney canceled the partnership, and new Doctor Nucti Gatwa left the show. Our only hope was the upcoming Christmas Special, and Davies later confirmed the show was canceled, we weren’t getting a special, and he had never written anything for it.
That annoyed fans for two reasons. First, the most recent season left us with a ton of unresolved questions; now that the show is canceled, we may never get answers to any of them. Second, Davies previously claimed to have written a script for the Christmas Special, so he was either lying then or he’s lying now. Incredibly, there’s now more fuel for this dramatic fire: there has been a leak allegedly outlining the details of the canceled special. This leak has further divided a fandom that is split between believing that it isn’t real and lamenting that we’ll never see this story onscreen.
The (Final) Day Of The Doctor
The second season of Doctor Who on Disney+ left us with quite a few unresolved plot threads. For example, we had no idea why the Doctor’s granddaughter (someone from literally the very beginning of the franchise) was back and what her story was. We had no idea who the shadowy “boss” character was, even though villains like the Meep had been alluding to this person since 2023. Most importantly, we had no idea why Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor had regenerated to a very familiar face: Billie Piper’s Rose Tyler, the popular Companion who first teamed up with Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor back in 2005.
The plot of this leaked Christmas Special would clear up many of those details. The plot involved the Doctor investigating a frozen human colony that orbits a dying star. Residents start seeing visions of dead loved ones; the colony’s leader doesn’t believe it’s a big problem. However, he interacted with Rose Tyler way back when, so the Doctor’s new face had been chosen to help deal with this specific crisis. The Big Bad turns out to be the star itself, hoping to suck energy out of the Doctor. It had taken on the appearance of Susan, his granddaughter, to try to lure him there.
In Doctor Who fashion, we find out the star isn’t truly evil; it really did want to provide life for the colony, but it had to resort to absorbing energy in order to do so. The Doctor figures out how to give the star all of the energy it needs so that it and the colony will continue to thrive. The star is grateful, revealing that it created the mysterious time hotel and allowing the Doctor to say goodbye to the real Susan. The Doctor speculates that Joy Almondo interfered with the regeneration to help save a fellow star. We get a happy ending, jettisoning past trauma and preparing for new adventures.
A Divided Fandom
The Doctor Who fandom is a bit divided over this leaked Christmas Special outline. The main point of contention is whether it is real or not. This leak originally came from a Discord server dedicated to Doctor Who leaks, and they were right on the money with some of the leaks regarding Russel T. Davies’ latest seasons. It also has some of the quirks that Russel T. Davies is known for, including a line about needing CGI to animate “small cute creatures of some kind” (the man loves weird critters so much he once turned the Doctor into one). The outline also neatly wraps up several different hanging threads.
That’s actually the primary reason that skeptical fans don’t think this is real. Much of the outline reads like a wishlist of things the fandom has been waiting years for the franchise to answer. That could just be a sign that Davies knew he was on the way out and wanted to courteously avoid leaving too many hanging threads for a future showrunner to deal with. But it could also be glorified fanfiction from a fan trying to pass his own theories off as a kind of lost episode. Both theories are valid, though given his recent Instagram post, it doesn’t seem like courtesy is Davies’ highest priority right now!
The Wilderness Years Are Back
Whether the leak is real or not, one thing is for sure: there will be no Doctor Who Christmas Special this year. We won’t see one for many years, as the BBC has put the show out to tender. That means they are looking for someone else willing to produce this overly expensive sci-fi series. That would be difficult under any circumstances, and it’s especially difficult because so few people watched the latest seasons on either Disney+ or the BBC.
For better or for worse, Doctor Who has now entered its second set of “wilderness years.” Things could ultimately work out for the best; last time the show came back from the wilderness, it became a phenomenon that dominated pop culture for two decades. Of course, the first wilderness period lasted for a whopping 16 years. Should the latest wilderness period last that long or even longer, all of us may be a bit more like the main character once Doctor Who returns. That is, we’ll be wearing dramatically different faces and feeling our age like never before!
