What Really Happened in “The Reality War” Original Ending?

Posted in: BBC, Current News, Disney+, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: doctor who

For the Doctor Who fans who want to know the original ending of “The Reality War” but haven’t found it, here’s a recap of what we know…

Every fan of Doctor Who knows by now that the finale of the second Disney+ season, “The Reality War”, originally had a different ending planned and shot. Most online fans have now read about the original ending from various sources, which was altered due to Ncuti Gatwa’s departure from the show and Disney’s decision not to renew the series for a new season. However, we discovered that not all fans are aware of the original ending and have been asking, so we thought we would recount it here so they can find out.

BBC / Disney+

Susan originally showed up in a telepathic burst when the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) was trapped in space during “The Interstellar Song Contest,” imploring him to wake up before he froze to death. Eagle-eyed viewers would have noticed that Ford was filmed in the TARDIS set. She popped up again on a TV set in “Wish World” trying to alert the Doctor that he was under the Rani’s spell in an alternate reality. Things come in threes in Screenwriting 101, and viewers might have expected her to show up in the finale to pay off the teases of her first two cameos, but that didn’t happen. However, she did film that third appearance for “The Reality War” as a kind of cliffhanger to tease the third-season arc that Russell T. Davies was originally planning. A still from the original ending, showing The Doctor and Belinda (Varada Sethu) at a party, possibly to celebrate the restoration of reality and the world’s salvation, was even released and ended up on the Disney+ landing page, as if they couldn’t even be bothered to hide that the finale had been altered. That party scene is not in the broadcast version.

BBC / Disney+

“You didn’t see the episode which was to sort of introduce my coming back,” Ford told Katy Manning. “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 [were] 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. 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?'”

That original ending would have set up the search for Susan in season 3 (if Disney had greenlit it) to pay off the longest-running dangling plot thread in Doctor Who: what happened to Susan and what has she been up to for over fifty years? Alas, with Gatwa gone, it was not to be. “Anyway, that was unfortunately not to be — for reasons I know and will not disclose,” she said, shutting down further discussion.

Our own Rich Johnston had an opportunity to see the storyboards for that original ending (for he gets everywhere), and pointed out something that no other journalist or pundit ever brought up:

“There was gossip that had Susan departing the scene with Poppy, with Susan calling Poppy her mother. But that was a concoction. Rather, in storyboards I have seen for that scene, we have Susan, as played by Carol Ann Ford, looking on at the party, lit from below in the fashion one might associate with The Big Bad. Certainly teasing that she is a threat to The Doctor. In the 1966 season, after defeating an invasion by the Daleks, Susan was left on a mid-twenty-second-century post-apocalyptic Earth by the Doctor, with her boyfriend of a few weeks, David. The Doctor refused to allow her back in the TARDIS and told her that her future was with David, not with him, but that one day he would come back. One day. But he never did. The 2024 season of Doctor Who repeatedly teased the return of Susan, and the 2025 season saw her on screen, memories or visions surfacing in the Doctor’s mind as he was frozen in space. It does seem that her return was originally to pave the way for a Season Three in 2026 or 2027 with The Doctor Versus Susan. Revenge for having been abandoned by her grandfather so long ago?”

The Rani pointed out during the episode that Gallifreyans are an evolutionary dead end – they can’t bear children, and Rich added, “It may also be worth noting, that we were also told that Susan was his granddaughter, but he hasn’t had children yet, time travellers, they do things out of order.” So how the Doctor could have a granddaughter remains the biggest mystery of all in Doctor Who lore. That she could become his bitter enemy would have made for an interesting tragedy.

The last two seasons of Doctor Who are on Disney+.

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