Warning! The following contains spoilers for the Doctor Who episode "The Robot Revolution." Stream it with a Disney+ subscription and read at your own risk!
Doctor Who is back on Disney+, and while we know there will be more with the Pantheon in the upcoming season, the "timey-wimeyness" of the latest season premiere still had me wondering what was happening. Sure enough, Varada Sethu and Ncuti Gatwa confirmed there's a lot of weird timeline stuff taking place in these upcoming episodes, to the point where even they sometimes had issues keeping it all together.
The actors were gracious enough to take time with CinemaBlend ahead of the premiere of Doctor Who and get honest about how they had to get on the same page about what was happening in the story at times. When I asked about that, Sethu talked about a tactic she typically uses when working, that was a lot more difficult to do on the show:
When I'm working, I draw out a timeline for my character, especially if you're given the story arc over a season? I write it down so that when we're filming, it's like, 'oh, that's where she is in that timeline.' But this was like, you can't stick to this timeline. You're zooming in and zooming out and zooming in and zooming out, and this thing's from the past and this thing's gonna affect the [other thing]. Oh my God. We had several sit downs, and we'd have days where one of us would have no idea and the other one's just leading them by the hand.
If any viewers were scratching their heads and wondering about those random moments where The Doctor appeared out of sequence, rest assured the actors felt the exact same way. It sounds like this season will have some time jumps and random moments similar to Doctor Who: Flux, and that it won't all come together and make sense until we see the full scope of the story.
So, what is going on with this season? Is The Doctor trapped in a storybook? Is this a parallel universe? Is this all a dream? Ncuti Gatwa, who is rumored to be exiting the series at the end of the season, hilariously called out showrunner Russell T. Davies for not being much help:
It was hard for us to get our head around because sometimes you ask Russell and he'll be like, ‘I don't know. I just wrote this.’
If any Doctor Who fans are reading this and alarm bells are going off in their heads, I wouldn't be too concerned. I get the impression that Gatwa was being facetious in saying RTD literally didn't know what was going on, considering he's confirmed this season will directly address big mysteries like what's happening with Mrs. Flood. That said, if he did get a little confused trying to work on all of these scripts and merge them, I can't say I would blame him for it.
Varada Sethu also clarified that when you're an actor, it can usually be hard to follow the story as you're filming. While the audience gets to see every scene as it appears in order, filming does not happen that way, and actors could go from filming a scene from the finale directly into doing something for the season premiere. Even so, she confessed that had they gone that route, it still might not have done them much good:
I think the thing with filming is, generally speaking, it can be confusing anyway because you don't shoot things in a chronological order. On this job, it's like you could be shooting it in chronological order, and it can still be timey-wimey. So it was like an added challenge. Like alongside as an actor, not just as Belinda, to be like, 'How do we make this work? So, does she know this thing has happened yet? No, she doesn't, but it could be great.' It was such a fun challenge.
It's a fun challenge, and hopefully, it brought out the best in each actor as the Doctor/Companion duo dive headfirst into a timey-wimey adventure. While it's unclear if it was known when they were filming, it seems there's a lot of pressure on this season to perform as rumors persist the series is at risk of cancellation.
The BBC has refuted outright cancellation rumors, though after confirming both the network and Disney+ will be tracking viewership before deciding on the next season's renewal, it's hard to imagine the series won't at least have a gap year where we don't get a season.
It's fortunate Doctor Who fans have a potentially complex story to distract them and draw in lapsed fans interested in the wild story elements. Plus, Alan Cumming is back in the series again, what's not to love about that?
Catch new episodes of Doctor Who on Disney+ on Saturdays at 3:00 a.m. ET. Get pumped for these new episodes by watching the prior season, which has some incredible adventures worth watching for those who missed out.
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