It’s been over a year and a half since Doctor Who Season 12 wrapped up, and 10 months since we last spent time with Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor and her cohorts. Well, the wait for a reunion is almost over, as Doctor Who Season 13, a.k.a. Doctor Who: Flux, premieres at the end of the month. The six-episode season marks the beginning of the end for Whittaker’s incarnation of The Doctor, and a new trailer had dropped revealing that she’ll be running into some familiar faces over the course of her next adventure.
As with any new season of Doctor Who, Flux will introduce a swarm of new monsters, one of which is named the Karvanista. But for those of you on the lookout for Doctor Who adversaries who’ve been fan-favorites for years, the new trailer reveals we’ll be crossing paths with the Sontarans, Weeping Angels, Cybermen, and the Ood again.
To be fair, it hasn’t been that long since we last spent time with the Weeping Angels, Ood and the Cybermen. The former two briefly popped up in the last New Year’s special, “Revolution of the Daleks,” while the Cybermen were present in the final chunk of Season 12, as they were once again entangled in a storyline involving The Master. The Sontarans, on the other hand, have been absent from the Doctor Who TV space for some time, and they haven’t been a main threat on the series since the 2008 two-parter “The Sontaran Stratagem” and “The Poison Sky.” It’s also interesting to note that the Sontaran shown in the Doctor Who: Flux trailer (you can get another look at them below) looks more like how these creatures were designed in the classic Doctor Who years, as opposed to the revamped kind, like the Paternoster Gang’s Strax.
As for Doctor Who: Flux’s plot, this trailer doesn’t really clear anything up in the way of specifics, other than like every Doctor Who season, it’ll involve the title protagonist and their companions traveling to strange planets and both historical and futuristic time periods. Following the departures of Bradley Walsh’s Graham O’Brien and Tosin Cole’s Ryan Sinclair in “Revolution of the Daleks,” 13 and Mandip Gill’s Yasmin Khan will be accompanied in the TARDIS this season by Dan Lewis, played by Jacob Bishop, and Game of Thrones’ Jacob Anderson will recur as Vinder. Doctor Who Season 13 will also stand out by telling one complete storyline, which hasn’t been done since 1986’s “The Trial of a Time Lord.”
It’s worth remembering that while Doctor Who Season 13 marks both Jodie Whittaker and showrunner Chris Chibnall’s final season on the series, their Doctor Who journeys will stretch on a little longer. Three specials are set to air in 2022, paving the way for a new Doctor to take center stage in Season 14 and Russel T. Davies to return as showrunner. Nevertheless, Doctor Who: Flux looks to be an exciting ride to close out the year and give fans of the Thirteenth Doctor one last full season featuring the character.
Doctor Who Season 13 premieres Sunday, October 31 on BBC America. Look through our fall 2021 TV premiere schedule to learn when your other favorite shows are airing.
