Coming into 2025, Doctor Who felt like it was bursting with potential. Ncuti Gatwa, fresh off an excellent turn across his debut season and his second holiday special, was about to be joined by a buzzy new name in Andor‘s Varada Sethu, boarding the TARDIS as the latest companion. Plans for the show’s future weren’t just bright but growing, with the planned arrival of the first Doctor Who spinoff series in years, The War Between the Land and the Sea. The show’s place, as well as its flashy partnership with Disney, felt certain.
Little did anyone know that, behind the scenes, the picture was very different. By February 2025, Bad Wolf Studios was host to reshoots of the finale episode of the upcoming season, setting the stage for a shock regeneration, in part due to inaction from Disney to indicate its partnership with the BBC would continue. By the time things became public, it was already a mess—the 2025 season of the show had come and gone and was of a decidedly uneven quality even before its disastrous final episode—and would only continue to get messier until the bandage was finally ripped off: despite the writing being on the wall since the start of the year internally, by the end of October, the BBC and Disney had officially had their own parting of the ways.
Doctor Who has cheated death many times before, even beyond that concept being inherent to its very premise and its enduring longevity. While certainly not always in its classic era, especially as it drew to its end, public awareness of those conversations and discussions about the show’s survival was largely confined to the likes of the occasional charity pop single. In 2025, the awareness was everywhere, for months on end, as the buck kept getting passed back and forth.
The signs of Doctor Who‘s decaying health were reflected on and off screen in 2025. The show’s unfortunate handling of Sethu’s character, Belinda Chandra, took one of the show’s most promising ideas for a companion in years—a skeptic forced to travel with the Doctor by circumstance, one willing to challenge their attitude and their charms instead of immediately becoming enamored by them—and, well before the season’s end, whittled her down to a motherhood plot thrust upon her from nowhere, seemingly having no idea where to take her beyond that initial, exciting friction.
The episodes vacillated in quality, consistently mired in a vagueness of what they wanted to say about the world and mean beyond their surface—interesting ideas left to die on the vine, because they could never quite reach the potential beyond being gestured towards, sometimes creating simple disappointment, sometimes leaving Doctor Who with some shockingly retrograde streaks, whether it had the intent for them to be read as such. For the first time in a very long time, Doctor Who felt like it struggled to actually have something to say full-throatedly, its messages lost in poor execution or an unwillingness to commit. It felt aimless, even before Doctor Who became aimless itself, with the news that, for the first time in 20 years, the show had concluded a season without the guarantee of another on the way.
And, as it would eventually be revealed, that aimlessness was playing out behind the scenes as well. While fans, commentators, and creatives alike all awaited the future of the show, report after report painted a picture of a production that struggled with Disney’s unwillingness to commit beyond the initial terms of its deal—especially at a time when, with a show that was struggling to find an audience and costing more and more to make, the studio already had enough to deal with on its in-house productions—and, if anything, an unwillingness to deal with a show that wanted to have a voice and a message at all, no matter how muddled.
Even after that deal came to an end, the unwillingness continued to play out publicly, as we’re seeing now, with the UK broadcast of The War Between the Land and Sea coming separate from, and well before, its delayed international airing through Disney+.
An unwillingness to commit choked Doctor Who on screen, and it almost choked it off screen as well. But again, it is, more often than not, a mistake to assume the certain death of Doctor Who, a show that has endured by its ability to cheat it time and time again. The BBC’s decision to formally announce the end of its deal with Disney on its own terms bought the series time but also brought a potential for the series and its fans to hope again. Whatever comes after 2026’s Christmas special, it has to be better than this… because few alternatives would actually be worse for the show than what it went through this year.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Read the full article here
