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More excerpts from RTD's memoir revealed:

“It’s such a shame we never got to make Series Three, though. Three scripts were fully written for it, and it breaks my heart they won’t be seen.”

“We had a brilliant story set during the Great Fire of London, written by the powerhouse team of Laurence Clark and Jack Thorne, and we should have had the budget to do it properly, with the flames and panic and everything.”

“And we had a brutal horror story, written by the brilliant Lydia Adetunji, set on a NASA-type space station, all about trypophobia – look it up, it’ll make you shiver!”

“There was a really lovely episode set on a council estate in the middle of Manchester. That would have been the ultimate place to bring the Doctor; I would have just loved to see that. It was written by Sharma Angel-Walfall, who’s lived that life. It was like Doctor Who meets the film Rocks.”

“I was talking to a lot of other writers as well, and I wanted to bring Juno Dawson back for another story after her amazing Eurovision episode.”

“I was also talking to the writers Kate Herron and Briony Redman about bringing Jonathan Groff back as Rogue, which would have been glorious. That sequel was forever getting postponed. It didn’t appear in Series Two, but I would have tried for it in Series Three. We were talking about Rogue in an eighties story, maybe set in Blackpool with video arcades at its centre.”

“So we had a lot of fabulous ideas, some fully fleshed out, with a Dalek four-part epic to end the series. We were ready to go.”

As I'm way outside the areas this screened, I was waiting for this particular shoe to drop...

Bryan Fuller posted this on Instagram as a birthday greeting to Laurence Fishburne, back on July 30.

So apparently Fuller had intended to carry over the Hannibal cast into Discovery in various parts — and this was how he'd imagined Fishburne in Klingon prosthetics. It also suggests that the much maligned Disco Klingon designs were decided upon after Fuller left as (preliminary) show runner.

ETA: Here is a rundown of the casting plans he had in mind, originally revealed on the D-con chamber podcast. I would have watched Gillian Anderson as a starship captain.

We've published an invitation to tender for the production of Doctor Who. The contract is for a multi-episodic series (including specials) for transmission in 2028/29, with an option to extend the contract at BBC’s discretion to produce a second series. It's offered on a work for hire basis with the BBC continuing to broadcast the programme and retaining all rights.

The production will need to qualify as a regional production under two of the three Ofcom Regional criteria and the successful bidder will be expected to establish a production base in the agreed region. The BBC has a preference for a Wales qualification.

The deadline for initial submissions is 2pm on 2 October 2026.

This was the rundown of the show's development in January:

The original logline released at Comic-Con 2024 said the show is about “Federation outsiders serving a gleaming resort planet find out their day-to-day exploits are being broadcast to the entire quadrant.” Newsome has previously clarified that the resort isn’t Risa, noting “I think it’s going to answer some questions about what non-Federation [worlds] look like.” Last year, Newsome told TrekMovie the concept had evolved since then but confirmed she would star in the show (as a new character), and the comedy series would be set in the early 25th century, following the events of Star Trek: Picard.

I dunno, Newsome has been one of the breakout talents of the latest Trek generation. She was solid on LDS, and her contributions to SFA were standouts in season 1 I think.

I would've loved to see what she had to offer as writer/lead on a live action comedy. She wasn't exactly confident the show would be picked up when the article was written, though:

“The conversations that I have had is, ‘Hey, we finished writing it,’ and everyone said, ‘Yep, we love it.’ And then we turned it in, and then it was Christmas…. The business is in an interesting place right now… Who knows?”

Seeing how there is no Trek in current production and Secret Hideout seems to be out, things are even more up in the air by all accounts 😕

It only took forever (well, from May until now) for this vinyl to become available in my local b&m record store... But holy hell, is it worth the wait! 🤘🤩

https://neurosis.bandcamp.com/album/an-undying-love-for-a-burning-world

Chris Chibnall:

“I think the biggest thing you can say about all of that is it’s very easy to miss the point ‒ that this is primarily about money.”

“It’s not really about all of the things that everybody is banging on about and moaning about or what or getting emotional about.”

When I click an external link from inside the app, Blorp replicates appears to open a new instance of my default browser, including all of its current tabs. It's slightly confusing because closing the tab I opened from some thread means I now have two identical browsers open, but one of them is Blorp 😉

I realise I'm just supposed to hit the back button to be returned to the app UI, but I'm new to Blorp and very familiar with my browser. You see how habits win out over what I rationally know I should do...

Did I miss some setting to open links in an internal, single tab browser instead?

Carole Ann Ford, who played the Doctor's granddaughter Susan in the early seasons of the show, and cameoed again in the most recent series, offers her thoughts on the current hiatus.

She's a cheerful lady, but it's hard not to read some disappointment between the lines that her historical return to the show was all but cut, with slim chances for a do-over. Ford turned 86 on 16 June.

BBC director-general Matt Brittin has announced that 550 of the planned 1,800 to 2,000 job cuts at the corporation will be taken from BBC News and TV and radio-related roles.

The 57-year-old has also announced the BBC is to axe programmes and cut content spending by £80 million, and added it would “review our broadcast TV channels and radio network portfolio” as more of its audience moves online, while attempting to sustain “output” and “audience value and impact”.

The BBC has not indicated which programmes would be axed under the plans.

[…]

In response to the announcement, head of media and entertainment union, Bectu, Philippa Childs, said it is “far from ideal” that the cuts are taking place at the same time as the BBC’s charter renewal.

She said: “I’m not sure how you can make informed decisions about the long-term future of the organisation when it will be in a substantially diminished place at the end of the process than the beginning.

[…]

“The charter renewal must put the BBC’s funding on a secure, long-term pathway or it risks death by a thousand cuts.”

So that's fairly dire for anybody hoping the BBC can shoulder a show like Doctor Who without substantial external funding.

Big caveat up front, I have no illusion that this was ever planned out, or that it's ever going to be made. I just connected some dots from Eccleston's season to our current mess. I do think that if the BBC had Pete McTighe make a 15 minute special along these lines and put it on Youtube, the fans could rest easier and the next production team might start on a blank slate.

To summarise, the last couple of seasons had a convoluted arc concerning a companion's parent issues. She was saved as a baby through time travel intervention, but not without a lot of temporal disturbance in the process. In fact, babies have been a throughline in both Ncuti Gatwa's seasons, a pattern that culminates in the Doctor rupturing the Time Vortex in order to save one child's existence. For just a probable moment there, that child is his own. Succeeding in his mission, the Doctor is then replaced by somebody looking suspiciously like Rose Tyler.

• Church.
• Baby.
• Rose.
• Temporal paradox.
• On what could be considered the Doctor's Father's Day.

Bring on the Time Reapers to sterilise the wound in time! That's why the Doctor regenerated into this face, à la 12 looking like Caecilius from "The fires of Pompeii". She needs to channel Rose as a catalyst to heal the reset 15 did to save Poppy. Besides, where Pete sacrificed himself to sort the timestream out, this time around the Reapers are attacking the Doctor and their police box. And the Doctor's current face has a very special relation to the TARDIS' living heart.

To be fair, the rest of the story doesn't really matter, this is only meant to resolve the Billie Piper twist of "The reality war". It doesn't fix fan quibbles over the Timeless Child or the Doctor being half human on their mother's side for a hot minute in 1996. Pretty much everything other than that latest regeneration cliffhanger can be ignored or picked up upon by future writers. So end this minisode on a regeneration without showing what happens next, or just leave it open ended.

Now, would I love for Susan to pop up for no other reason than to ease her "grandfather" into the credits crawl, and a future season where neither actress are seen again? Maybe an exchange to echo the Seventh's exit monologue to Ace at the end of "Survival"? Absolutely, but this could well be a one hander between Piper, some 2005 archive footage, and the janky old low-poly CGI monsters from back then.

[made a few edits for clarity(?)]