Wednesday 8 November 2023

Countdown to 60: Full Circle


The Doctor Falls
ended not with a regeneration as planned, but with two imminent regenerations - as we were to see culminate a few weeks later in Twice Upon A Time
Series 10 ended with a regenerating Doctor refusing to die. He's in a frozen, icy landscape and someone approaches through the mist - none other than his first incarnation. We'll then discover that this is Antarctica, December 1986, and we're seeing the current Doctor interact with his predecessor immediately prior to his own regeneration. Neither Doctors wish to go through with it - the current because he hasn't lived long enough and is getting a bit fed up with these relatively short incarnations, and the First because it's his first time, and he's basically a stubborn old goat in this incarnation.

If the series' opener - The Pilot - was supposed to be jumping-on point for new viewers, then you could argue that Twice Upon A Time was an ideal jumping-off point for those who might be resistant to the changes which were afoot from Chris Chibnall (and there were many).
The current Doctor meeting the First Doctor does offer the opportunity to close the series, as it turns full circle.
I suspect that quite a few people stop their DVD / Blu-ray just at the point when the regeneration takes place and elect to draw a line under the series.
Whether they've left for good, or if they'll start their discs back up again with the moment David Tennant emerges from the shiny yellow CGI effect for the second time, who knows...

Twice before we've had 'natural' endings to the series - points where you could allow it to end in a fairly satisfactory manner. The first would be when we all thought it genuinely was the ending - the Doctor and Ace wandering off into the distance at the close of Survival. The other was the Doctor setting off for adventures new at the end of the 1996 TV movie.
In both cases, the series is left open-ended, so it can be picked up again at some future time (which is exactly what did happen).
Maybe because we knew there would be another season in a few months' time (because a BBC continuity announcer told us so) previous season endings didn't have quite the same potential for finality about them.

For me, who sat through The Twin Dilemma, Timelash, The Tsuranga Conundrum and Orphan 55, there never will be a jumping-off point. I take the programme good or bad. No change of lead actor or showrunner will deter me from following the series. The thing about it is that it is forever changing. If it hits a bad patch, just be patient and something different will come along before too long. I've already heard rumours that Ncuti Gatwa might only want to play the Doctor for a couple of years, and he's already lining up future work. People take the rush to film two whole series before he's even debuted as proof of this. I suspect that, because he's such an in-demand actor at the moment, they simply want to have a series in the can for when he wants to take time off to do a theatre run and thus avoid a gap year - something RTD2 has promised won't happen.
We're promised at least two full seasons, plus spin-offs, so I think the future looks secure for now.
No need to jump ship.

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