Supposedly Doctor Who has not been cancelled but put out to tender (was that the phrase? it sounds too much like put out to pasture), i.e. open to offers from new production companies... as far as I understand. Sounds like pretty much no one is coming back from the production side: certainly not the showrunner, Russell T. Davies, not the Bad Wolf production company. Disney is no longer a bankrolling co-producer. Folks are fearing the worst. Will it be another wilderness era? (popularly referring to the interbellum years between classic and new Who, 1989-2005)

Davies (here on out RTD) showran the most recent two seasons, and was the driving force behind Doctor Who's triumphant return in 2005, and he showran for the first several years. He was also behind the more adult spin-off Torchwood (anagram for Doctor Who), the young adult The Sarah Jane Adventures, and the more recent mini-series The War Between the Land and the Sea (sans Doctor, about UNIT and their alterations with the Sea Devils, which I've just remembered I haven't watched yet).

Point is, RTD has been massively important to Doctor Who for the past twenty years. You cannot discount that. It's also entirely valid to be righteously frustrated at the man for building up an absolutely epic if confusticating concept for Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor with literally a pantheon of mysterious and tricksy GODS, of whom we really only got a taste. Disney bankrolled these two seasons and the special effects reflected the inflated budget. It began with the groundbreaking concept that a Time Lord could bigenerate, where they don't just regenerate their body, but split into two new bodies (one of whom, in this instance—let's keep it simple—was David Tennant's Doctor). Weird, but ok. Tennant was definitely a huge audience draw.

But when Ncuti regenerated... (spoilers....): we are introduced to Billie Piper as... the Doctor? wait, wha——WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT. Collective shit was lost, and probably not in the way that was hoped. ConTrOvErSyyyyyyyyy! A Christmas Special was then promised for 2026. It was never even written. Was it even conceptualized.

What we just heard in the past couple days is that RTD (ahem) HAD NO PLANS, NO SCRIPT, NO FRIGGIN IDEA WHAT THE HELL. I mean, what the hell. I am so much more forgiving than most, but man! Don't throw every twist and new idea at the wall without a goddam plan! I get it: you want to drum up all conversation, controversy, excitement. But you have to plan on how you're going to pay it all off and if that pay off is going to be worth it.

Dammit, I like Billie Piper. I was indeed excited to learn what the hell that was all about. Turns out I'm sad because THERE IS NO HELL. There is only... nothing. Void! The Great Nothing is upon us! And... how sad and weird for Billie Piper? Sad and weird also for Carole Ann Ford, who appeared briefly and was teased at as having some role moving forward. She was the Doctor's first companion, all the way back in 1963, of whom the Doctor referred to as grand daughter, something that in itself has never really been explained (not that it ever has to be).

This is one reason I kinda hate fan theories: especially in Doctor Who writers are having fun writing crazy adventures in time and space. Yes, there are threads of an overarching story to pull here and there, let's keep on task, but the logistics are not strict. Anything is possible in Doctor Who, which may be its greatest strength and also its greatest weakness.

Fan theories tend to start with a baseline assumption that the writers of the show are following strict guidelines and know the full on history of the show. But case in point why you shouldn't trust a writer even they know the full on history of the show is good ol' RTD. Loves an obscure nerdy reference, that man, but he is not immune to the haywire; it can go any minute. That baseline is tenuous at best. You should not trust to it. You can interpret shit until the angels come back to Sally Sparrow but in the end, it all comes down to the writers room. All that canon Doctor Who lore? Doesn't matter.

And it never really has mattered. Theorizing can be amazingly good fun, but don't get dogmatic and argumentative about it. In the immortal words of Harrison Ford as quoted by Mark Hamill, kid, it ain't that kind of movie. Suspend your disbeliefs, please and thanks.

There are some fundamental aspects of Doctor Who that pretty much everyone agrees on. Firstly, there's the TARDIS, which enables adventures time and space. There's the Doctor, who saves the day and regenerates into a new body with a new personality every so often, because he's an alien known as a Time Lord, from the planet Gallifrey. The Doctor does not kill people or shoot guns. The Doctor has companions who are often, but not always, pretty young women.

Then you watch classic episodes and there's Jon Pertwee in the 1970s as the Third Doctor blithely vaporizing Ogrons! Zap! gone! DEAD. Vapo—freakin'—rized. The Doctor just murders a couple of these guys. Doctor Who was trying, strangely enough, to compete with James Bond. A neat concept of Pertwee's era was that his predecessor has been banished to Earth by the Time Lords and forced to regenerate. So what that means is that the TARDIS is benched and simply becomes a laboratory while the Doctor makes himself useful at UNIT as a scientific advisor. He and his companions and the core UNIT crew pretty much just stay on Earth, in the present. The Master is the villain in most of these serials.

That might be a neat direction for new Who: strip it down from the exuberant excess of the previous seasons. And for the record, there was much to love about those seasons, not least of which was Ncuti Gatwa's performance as the Doctor. Would that he could have done so much more. Excess on those levels was, in hindsight, gonna be a bizness to uphold. If they could have done it I for one would not have complained.

The Doctor will return eventually. I think it will be time to consider it a third era of the show. The new show lasted for nearly as long as the classic one did, had nearly as many generations of Doctor (or more, depending on which Whos you include).

Remember: those 16 years Doctor Who was off the air were actually a fertile time: New Adventure books were written that continued on from where the show left off. Missing Adventure books were written, with specification of where they take place between the classic TV serials. Many, many of these were written. And not least of all: the Big Finish Audio Adventures! These are phenomenal and there are now a million of them, all starring the actual classic actors! If you're a fan of the show and sad there's not going to be anymore episodes for the foreseeable, please check out the Big Finish Adventures. I understand there will even be an audio series starring Jo Martin as The Fugitive Doctor! There's lots of adventures with Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor, who only got to star onscreen in the American TV movie. Hell, there's a couple marvelous audio series starring the characters Jago and Lightfoot, who only appeared in one serial in the 1970s: The Talons of Weng-Chiang. The audio adventures will more than keep you occupied until Doctor Who comes back onto our screens.

Even if it nevers comes back to air, we still have over half a century's worth of episodes to revisit. Surely that's something to celebrate.

A tear, Sarah Jane? No, don’t cry. While there’s life there’s…

Those were Pertwee's parting words. The parting words of Sylvester McCoy in the last episode of the classic show was one of the series' best little monologues:

There are worlds out there where the sky is burning. And the sea’s asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger. Somewhere there’s injustice. And somewhere else, the tea’s getting cold. Come on, Ace — we’ve got work to do!