For Shearman, it’s not just the lack of a season 16 renewal, but an established successor to Gatwa’s Doctor that makes the franchise feel so directionless. Not just in terms of the flagship series but also the ancillary materials that surround it, such as the novels and audio dramas that expand the world of the story.
“After 1989, we had, for years, a current Doctor. Now, everything that is ever going to be produced in Doctor Who terms is going to feel retrogressive,” he said “At least with the New Adventures and then the BBC Books, you thought, ‘It’s the current Doctor – McCoy or McGann’. No one’s going to start writing Doctor Who books with a Billie Piper Doctor, because no one knows what that means. In a funny way, the closing moments of ‘The Reality War’ seem to put a full stop on things. We didn’t have that before.”
To be fair, Shearman’s view regarding the show’s future is certainly one of the most negative we’ve seen since the finale aired earlier this year. And the BBC itself has pushed back against such catastrophizing, insisting that the broadcaster is firmly committed to the series, with or without Disney’s involvement. But it’s definitely uncomfortable for fans to read such dire predictions, many of which insist we’re about to endure another indeterminate hiatus like that which followed the Seventh Doctor episode “Survival” rather than the outright cancellation that followed the poorly received Eighth Doctor movie.
And while we still don’t know any actual facts about the series’s status — or plan to return — it’s hard to fully ignore such worries. But since its inception, Doctor Who has always been a franchise grounded in hope. It seems a mistake to abandon that philosophy now.