You don’t have to be a fan of hard science fiction to feel a tingle down your spine when you hear the word “TARDIS.” The blue phone booth that travels through space-time is an icon worldwide thanks to Doctor Who, a British series that began in 1963, ended in 1989, and was revived in 2005 (with a brief hiatus in 1996 for a terrible, terrible movie). You might think it has a lot of episodes, and that’s true: although many of them are lost and considered lost media, there are a total of 861. You don’t need to binge-watch, but if you’re curious, you can now watch them… on no streaming platform.
Trust me, I’m the Doctor!
Disney+ surprised both fans and newcomers by acquiring the format of Doctor Who after the era of Jodie Whitaker, the first female Doctor, to bring another novelty: Ncuti Gatwa would be the first African American Doctor. However, the platform has decided that, no matter how much Gatwa is the fifteenth Doctor, there are many people who know nothing about the character and they need to try to attract them from scratch. With a series that has 41 seasons and continuously references past plots and enemies? Good luck.
If you look closely, on Disney these last two batches of episodes are marked as “season 1” and “season 2,” leaving aside and not uploading the classic (and not so classic) seasons. If you wanted to start from Christopher Eccleston, or get to know the legendary Doctor played by David Tennant, or even see what was special about the series when it was filmed in black and white… Tough luck. You can opt for the DVDs (where the original series was compiled, including reconstructions of the lost episodes) or watch some kind of compilation on YouTube.
Why not give a nod to the fans and show that the purchase of Doctor Who is more than just a shot in the dark to see how far the money from the fandom can go? What is the reason for not buying the rest of the seasons from BBC or, at least, the modern ones, where the series was rebooted more or less from scratch? It’s a mystery, and a shame: reportedly, the performance of these two installments has not been the best, Disney wants to pull out its investment and leave the poor Doctor spinning in his TARDIS forever. Or maybe there is salvation?
Come with me if you want to live!
In an era of franchises, sequels, and remakes, I don’t think Doctor Who took long to recover in some way: it is such a mythical product and honored in hundreds of series, movies, and video games that it is absolutely impossible to forget in the collective imagination… Although the end of season 3, which introduces the return of a character that has been overused for years, has led many fans to wish for its cancellation (I was going to say “premature,” but that’s not true) due to the lack of creative ideas.
Perhaps what the good Doctor needs is simply other voices to guide him through space. Just as Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat managed to give a twist to the mythology and the type of stories that could be told within the series, why not bring in someone with a lot of voice and a lot of creative – or destructive, depending on how you look at it – power to steer the TARDIS once again? Before throwing in the towel and losing the very lucrative merchandising business, it is certainly not a bad option.
If the worst happens, and neither Disney+ nor BBC are able to revive interest in a time-traveling traveler who solves mysteries (perhaps the best synopsis in history), then his moment will come. At least, until a new generation, in a few decades, decides to bring him back. After all, he won’t be dead: just regenerating one last time.
