David Tennant returns! Ncuti Gatwa debuts! Doctor Who turns 60!

2023 marks the 60th anniversary of the BBC’s DOCTOR WHO. What its creators conceived as a kidvid series that would teach lessons about history introduced the Daleks in the second serial and began its transition into a science fiction series that would be one of the Beeb’s most successful brands. To celebrate we got three special the past couple of months to mark the transition from Jodie Whittaker to new Doctor Ncuti Gatwa, followed by the Christmas special. Fair warning, there are spoilers for The Giggle included.

At the end of Whittaker’s run she regenerates into David Tennant, something which baffles the Doctor as he’s never before regenerated into an older self (of course, the Chibnall run established they’ve had hundreds of forgotten regenerations, so who knows?). In the first special, The Star Beast (based on an old Doctor Who Weekly comic strip story), Tennant reunites with Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) who had to forget him completely at the end of their adventures. Now her daughter has taken in a helpless little alien pursued by more belligerent aliens — can the Doctor help?

I wasn’t a fan of Tennant’s Eleventh Doctor — I much preferred Eccleston, and Tennant’s era suffered from being elevated (much like Batman in the comics) into someone of almost godlike power. That said, he’s really good here and Tate as Noble is delightful. There’s the series’ first trans character and UNIT’s current science adviser (apparently the specials are laying the groundwork for a UNIT spinoff) in a wheelchair; on the downside, the big twist is incredibly obvious. “I don’t believe in destiny but if destiny exists, it’s heading for Donna Noble right now.”

The second special, Wild Blue Yonder, is very much in the mode of the Horror In Enclosed Spaces stories Tom Baker did, such as Horror of Fang Rock: the Doctor and Donna end up on an isolated, abandoned spaceship at the edge of the universe with a mysterious robot … and duplicates of themselves very eager to kill and replace them. Extremely effective. “There’s something on this ship so bad the TARDIS ran away — so let’s go kick its ass!”

The Giggle has Neal Patrick Harris return as the Toymaker (from the lost Hartnell serial The Celestial Toymaker); where the original (Michael Gough) dressed in a Chinese Mandarin’s robe, Harris fakes a bad German accent. The point being he cosplays nationalities, which gets us away from the yellowface “sinister oriental” aspect of the original (but doesn’t excuse it). He’s set in motion a plan to fill everyone in 2023 with a blind, absolute confidence in being right about everything (why yes, I do believe this was social commentary). Harris is a hoot and it’s 45 minutes pitting the Doctor against a foe way out of his weight class …

And then the Toymaker kills him so he can play against the regenerated fifteenth Doctor. Only instead of regenerating, the Doctor “bigenerates,” splitting off Ncuti Gatwa without erasing Tennant. At this point Russell T. Davies apparently decided the Toymaker was done so he has him eliminated way too easily, then Gatwa heads off while Tennant retires to live with Donna and her family. It feels very much like when Tennant split in two so he and Rose could have a happy ending, and it didn’t work for me at all — at least Tenant Two settled into another universe rather than hanging around in this one. Plus there’s an awful lot of seeding for the future, like the Toymaker hinting that even he wouldn’t dare play against Someone Not To Be Named. “I gambled with God and made him into a jack-in-the-box.”

Gatwa didn’t have much chance to shine in The Giggle but he proved absolutely amazing in The Church on Ruby Road. Here we meet the new companion, Ruby (Millie Gibson), a nineteen-year-old foundling seeking the family who abandoned her at the eponymous church (from which she gets her name). It turns out a string of bad luck surrounding Ruby relates to goblins who feed off coincidence and bad luck — and plan to eat the foundling baby an adoption agency just fostered with Ruby’s foster mom Carla (Michelle Greenidge).

The goblins were more silly than anything else, though Christmas episodes aren’t usually heavy drama — Davies has been quoted saying they’re designed for people who are feeling comfortable and laid back after Christmas dinner. The Doctor is great, obviously psyched for adventure; Ruby feels like another iteration of Rose, a pretty blonde who’s more than she seems (i.e., I presume it’s significant that given the chance to identify her mother, the Doctor doesn’t do so). I’m looking forward to next season. “Because I’m constantly hanging off things, I invented these.”

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