The future of Doctor Who remains murky at best and is even being debated amongst series insiders. That doesn’t exactly fill us with a ton of hope, but Doctor Who is a resilient series, and it will likely come back swinging. With Ncuti Gatwa’s time as the Doctor officially over though, more and more details have come to light regarding the end of his Doctor’s story, and now a beloved Doctor Who Companion has confirmed a huge theory about that missing scene and the cancelled plans for his finale episode.
It turns out that his final episode originally had a different ending, and while it was teased with details and even screenshots, fans still had questions. Now, actress Carole Ann Force, who plays the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan, has not only confirmed that original ending, but has gone into detail on what the scene was and why it was being filmed, and it heavily hints that Gatwa was at one point moving ahead with a third season as the Doctor. In an interview with Katy Manning at Club Parramatta (via Cultbox), Ford was asked about her Doctor Who character, and that’s when Ford revealed the scene she filmed with Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps, who plays Belinda and the Doctor’s daughter Poppy.
“You didn’t see the episode which was to sort of introduce my coming back, where I was holding hands with a little — beautiful little tiny black child, three years old. And we were watching through the window somewhere where the audience wasn’t supposed to know where we supposed to be. And we were watching by newly-embodied grandfather, who was now Ncuti [Gatwa], and watching him have a wonderful time singing and dancing in a party in a shop opposite where we were,” Ford said.
Ford continued, saying, “And obviously I, my character Susan, was longing to just go there and fling her arms around her grandfather and say, ‘Grandfather, how lovely to see you after all this time and how did you survive your floating about in space… and why have you changed?’”
The party scene featuring Gatwa was one of the early indicators that scenes were missing from the final version of the finale, and as for why things were reshot and changed, Ford said, “Anyway, that was unfortunately not to be — for reasons I know and will not disclose.”
This does imply a much different plan than the one we saw play out on the screen, and with Gatwa no longer playing the Doctor and the status of a new season very much in flux as a whole, it may be a while before we see how things play out from here. The scene being cut could be part of that shift from a third Gatwa-led season, but for now, we’ll just have to theorize why plans ultimately changed.
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