Doctor Who: The 60th Anniversary Specials Pregame

It’s been a year since new episodes of DOCTOR WHO appeared on broadcast screens, but the long wait is almost over. Less than a month remains now until the first of three Anniversary Specials, The Star Beast, is released on Saturday, November 25, with the remaining two rolled out weekly thereafter. In the meantime, the promotional push is certainly on, not just for the return of the show but in celebration of its 60th year anniversary. Already, there’s news of pretty much the entire DOCTOR WHO back-catalogue (with a few notable and complicated exceptions) being released on the BBC iPlayer, specials devoted to both the history of the show and the career of returning showrunner Russell T. Davies, new wraparounds featuring Doctors and companions of old bookending classic stories in Tales From The TARDIS, and a colorized and re-edited version of the first Dalek serial from 1963 about to be broadcast. So after a long drought for material, suddenly it’s an embarrassment of riches.

More crucially, DOCTOR WHO is being rolled out across its largest global platform yet, being aired exclusively on Disney+ around the world apart from the UK (where it will remain a staple of the BBC, naturally.) This does have the potential to introduce the show to a wide variety of new viewers who’ve never sampled it, and should be a good thing. Additionally, Disney has invested in the program, increasing the show’s budget a considerable amount. One need only look at the trailer that’s been released to see the difference. It’s about as polished and professional and contemporary as DOCTOR WHO has ever looked.

But the point of these Pregame pieces is to talk about what I want and what my expectations are. And it’s a little bit difficult this time, because I’ve heard things, all rumors, but I’m pretty good at separating fan nonsense from actual leaks and spoilers, and in the same way I felt like perhaps one of the few people in the U.S. who were utterly unsurprised when Jodie Whittaker regenerated not into upcoming Doctor Ncuti Gatwa but rather David Tennant, I’ve got a pretty good idea of the broad strokes of what is to come. Some of which sounds very good and some of which sounds a bit horrifying, if I’m completely honest. By that same token, I think it’s worth keeping in mind what everybody’s reaction was to the reveal ten years ago that the Doctor had a secret regeneration in-between Paul McGann and Christopher Eccleston. That seemed like a terrible notion, one that was destructive to canon, and yet the result was one of the finest outings in the show’s entire history. So it isn’t always about the ideas per se so much as how expertly they are exectuted.

And Russell T. Davies is an expert when it comes to execution. He’s not without his occasional missteps, to be sure, but he’s so broadly sure-footed when it comes to having an understanding of the show and why it connects with audiences in the 21st Century that his presence alone as the head writer and returning showrunner is cause for an overall feeling of confidence. And the difference is palatable even just from that trailer. With no knock against the past few years under Chris Chibnall, this immediately looks and sounds and feels like DOCTOR WHO again in a way that the show really hasn’t in a very long time. (Honestly, simply having Murray Gold back as the head composer for the show makes a dramatic difference, as his auditory environments are at once familiar and welcoming.)

I do have what I think of as the standard concerns about these Specials, none of which are about content per see but rather about how the show is going to be able to connect with viewers who’ll be coming to it for the first time. Because that trailer certainly draws a lot of its emotional pull from the stories of the past, from Davies’ own final season which is now 14 years in the past. And I do wonder if it might not have been a better, simpler option to begin the roll-out on Disney+ with the first Ncuti Gatwa episode rather that three specials that revolve around the return of a beloved acting team and which build directly on the events of stories told a decade and a half ago. That all said, I do trust in Russell to understand how to walk that line for viewers on both sides of that divide, and it’s not as though David Tennant and Catherine Tate don’t have their fans and supporters on this side of the Atlantic as well.

Otherwise, though, it’s going to take a lot for these to misfire for me. Already I’m seeing more beats, more moments that land in the manner of the DOCTOR WHO of the past than in recent memory. It all just feels right in some way, you know? Nostalgic and familiar but also fresh and new and vibrant thanks to the greater resources it has to draw upon. And that image of Ncuti Gatwa opening up his eyes just lands, doesn’t it? He hasn’t said a word (apart from one line in the teaser a year ago) and already he’s the Doctor, isn’t he?

So we’ll all see. But in a change from my typical outlook, I’m quietly optimistic about what is going to come. And in the tradition of this page, I’ll write up my impressions as we go, as the Specials are released, so that we can all see together how well it all worked for me.

Did I mention that the first Special is largely an adaptation of a story that first appeared in the Marvel UK published DOCTOR WHO WEEKLY back in the 1970s, as written by Pat Mills and John Wagner and illustrated by WATCHMEN’s Dave Gibbons? No? Well, consider that corrected then. Stan Lee even presented it–though I’m sure his name will be absent for the episode itself.