After recently telling Radio Times that he thinks Doctor Who should take a break, and that he believes the upcoming tender process for the show ‘quietly won’t happen’, writer and actor Mark Gatiss has now explained how he thinks the show, when it does return, should deal with its current cliffhanger.
To recap, the latest episode of Doctor Who, The Reality War, ended with Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor regenerating into a character played by Billie Piper, who previously played the Ninth and Tenth Doctor’s companion, Rose Tyler.
It was not made clear whether Piper was actually playing a new incarnation of the Doctor and, recently addressing the cliffhanger, Piper herself said she is “not the next Doctor,” but instead she is “Rose Tyler in hiatus”.
Now, speaking on the Half the Picture podcast, Gatiss reiterated his suggestion that the show should take a long break, and added that when it does return it should “start again and shrug it all off”, not leaning too heavily into lore or continuity.
Explaining how the show should deal with its current cliffhanger, Gatiss referred to another classic series, Dallas, which originally ran from 1978 to 1991, before returning with a retcon in the 1996 reunion movie, Dallas: JR Returns.
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Gatiss said: “When Dallas came back, to use a strange example… the last episode of Dallas, Larry Hagman is visited by a strange man, played by Joel Grey, who turns out to be the devil. It’s like a strange version of It’s a Wonderful Life, where he shows him life without him, where Cliff becomes president and all these things.
“And then he turns out to be the Devil at the end, and it ends with the bang of JR shooting himself. That’s the end of Dallas. It came back 15, 20 years later and JR says: ‘I saw a lot of crazy s*** that night.’ Because he’d been drinking.
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“So in the future, if someone wants to explain why The Doctor turns into Billie Piper, it’s easy. But equally easy is not to bother because it doesn’t really matter. Of course, it doesn’t. There’s always an explanation. I’ve already thought of 18 of them.
“But the crucial thing, and the reason why the (1996) TV movie stumbles immediately, is they try and make it for all the audiences at once. Whereas the crucial audience was the brand-new audience. If you start an episode of Doctor Who inside the TARDIS, talking about the Master and the Daleks, lost – why would you not be?”
Recently, there has been plenty of discussion surrounding the upcoming tender process, with Prime Video’s Oliver Jones, senior commissioner, UK scripted at Prime Video, saying that platform would “welcome any conversations” regarding its future, while Anne Mensah, VP of Content at Netflix UK, said that while she loves the show, it “belongs on the BBC”.
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