Doctor Who – The Fourteenth Doctor Specials: Doctor In Duplication

The story so far: Chris Chibnall presided over one of the most woefully misconceived eras Doctor Who has ever offered up on television, ruining the run of the first female Doctor. As ratings spiralled downwards and the fanbase began losing all hope, suddenly a beam of light shot down from Heaven, and a giant Welsh man some twelve feet tall descended to Earth hand in hand with Mickey Mouse to save Doctor Who yet again. Yes, Russell T. Davies had come back to act as showrunner, with his production company Bad Wolf co-producing the show with the BBC and Disney stepping up handle international distribution. If Missy comes back, she’ll now be a Disney princess!

The Doctor’s fresh off his latest encounter with the Daleks, and has arrived in London. A chance encounter with Donna in the street, along with her daughter Rose (Yasmin Finney), prompts the Doctor to remember the difficult circumstances of Donna’s departure in Journey’s End. The Doctor should really keep away for the preservation of Donna’s life, lest her memories of her time as the DoctorDonna come rushing back and kill her. Fortunately, there’s something for the Doctor to distract himself with – an alien ship that crashed nearby. When its inhabitant, the Meep (Miriam Margoyles), shows up in Rose’s crafting shed, the Doctor is left with no choice but to come back into Donna’s life – mere minutes before UNIT and the terrifying Wrarth Warriors invade Donna’s street…

This is a mashup of three distinct ideas. The first concept is a fairly direct adaptation of The Star Beast – originally a Fourth Doctor comic by Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine. The second is to provide a televised debut adventure for the Fourteenth Doctor (RTD, remember, is treating Liberation of the Daleks as canon on a par with the televised stories), who spends the story trying to puzzle out why he’s regenerated into an approximation of the Tenth Doctor. The third idea is to offer a reintroduction to Donna, a catch-up with how she and her family are doing, and introduce Rose, who is trans (and by the end of the episode appears to have realised she is also nonbinary).

This latter element gives RTD the opportunity to directly tackle trans rights in an unambiguously supportive way, which coming from the BBC mere months after the Prime Minister and Home Secretary spent the Tory conference lambasting trans rights is just what was wanted. It does verge close to being exotifying, or implying that trans status is special space magic, mind, but in a political moment rife with unabashed bigotry a hearty and unambiguously well-intentioned and benign message like this going out is badly needed.

Doctor Who Comics: Liberation of the Daleks

It’s seconds after the end of The Power of the Doctor. The Doctor has just regenerated from her Thirteenth to his Fourteenth form, which looks a lot like his Tenth incarnation. Still, she was sensible enough this time to land the TARDIS safely and step outside before regenerating, so he can simply step inside and take the trusty old time machine for a spin as he gets used to his new body. Suddenly, he picks up a distress signal, and follows it to source – apparently, someone’s summoned his aid at the 1966 World Cup final at Wembley. Well, perhaps that’s for the best, due to the massive Dalek invasion force that’s shown up.

Is that the real problem, though? These Daleks seem surprisingly rubbish – when they corner the Doctor and decide to EX-TER-MIN-ATE him, their death rays seem totally harmless. And there’s alien tourists watching events unfold and getting selfies taken against global armageddon. As the Doctor investigates further, he discovers the astonishing truth: he is in one of many simulated realities provided at the Dalek Dome, a tourist trap which creates virtual environments where visitors can go and have their very own Exciting Adventure With the Daleks. One of the park’s staff is Lt. Georgette Gold, and she sent the signal in order to seek the Doctor’s input, since she’s working her way towards a doctorate in Dalek Studies and he’d be great to interview.

Initially, the Doctor is just offended at the idea of turning the atrocities of the Daleks into cheesy entertainment – but it gets worse. The simulations are not mere holograms – they’re formed from psychoplasm, the stuff that dreams are made of, shaped by the dreams of captured Dalek specimens. (That would be why military personnel are stationed in the park – it’s how the military monetises their Dalek recoveries.) Even more disturbingly, every time someone enters a simulation the park captures a model of them to use as an NPC – so Georgy, the doppelganger of Georgette that the Doctor met at the World Cup, is a simulacrum of Georgette who exists solely to be EX-TER-MIN-ATE-d over and over again in whatever scenario she gets deployed in.

And what’s worst of all, the Doctor began to infer that the simulated worlds weren’t real when he was still inside the World Cup scenario, and he may have mentioned that to the Dalek Supreme – with the result that the captive Daleks are beginning to question their reality. Disaster may strike if they find the means of bridging the dream-world and the waking world – and in the form of TARDIS, which can go anywhere, and Georgy, who is linked to Georgette, they have possibilities to hand…