Doctor Who Cancellation Accidentally Gives The Series A Perfect Ending

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 2 seconds ago

It’s been a bad year for Doctor Who fans. First, Disney declined to renew their deal with the BBC, meaning that no new seasons featuring Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor. Originally, fans still had a Christmas Special to look forward to, but the BBC revealed this week that the special was canceled and they had parted ways with showrunner Russell T. Davies and his production company. That means the show will be off the air for years as the BBC tries to find a new showrunner, a new lead actor, and (most importantly) a new production company that could finance a relatively expensive, effects-heavy show like Doctor Who. 

Understandably, the fandom is upset that we’ll be without new Doctor Who for several long years. Fans are also angry because the cancellation of the show and the Christmas Special means we won’t get a follow-up to the big reveal at the end of the most recent season. That last episode showed Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor somehow regenerating into Billie Piper’s Rose character. Now, we may never figure out what was up with that or another major cliffhanger involving the Doctor’s granddaughter. There may be a silver lining to the show’s cancellation, though: thanks to some parallel dialogue involving a favorite Companion, the show begins and ends on perfect notes!

War Of The Roses

Why are fans so angry that we won’t be getting new Doctor Who anytime soon? The main source of annoyance is that the most recent season laid out some huge mysteries that will likely never pay off. For instance, Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, appeared and told the Doctor to find her. This is a character that hadn’t appeared onscreen in decades, so her reappearance made for a tantalizing mystery. Additionally, Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor regenerated into the body of Rose (played by Billie Piper). It’s not explained why this happened or whether she is really the Doctor or not. That’s yet another mystery likely to go forever unsolved.

However, thanks to the untimely cancellation of the 2005 Doctor Who series, the show accidentally has the perfect beginning and ending. In the debut episode “Rose,” the titular character has the very first line, saying “Bye!” to her mother. And in the final episode, “The Reality War,” the Doctor regenerates into Rose’s body, and she gets the final word of an entire era: “Hello!” Obviously, there’s some weird parallelism between the episodes, with the same character bidding goodbye to someone she knows in the very beginning and saying hello to everyone she doesn’t know at the end. Given that Russell T. Davies was the showrunner for both these episodes, the similarities are likely intentional.

What’s It All Mean?

What could the similarities mean, though? Maybe the parallel dialogue is a hint that we are seeing the reappearance of her Bad Wolf form. Alternatively, the dialogue may be symbolic of the character’s journey. In “Rose,” she was all too happy to leave her mundane life behind to go on cosmic adventures with the Doctor. Bidding goodbye to her mother may symbolize her departure from normie life into an adulthood that spans all of time and space. Later, Rose embraced a normal life with a normal copy of the Doctor in a parallel universe. Maybe her older self’s “hello!” symbolizes her willingness to embrace timey-wimey adventures yet again.

Or, it could just be a coincidence. “Hello” and “goodbye” are very mundane words, and they may have been written simply to represent Rose’s comings and goings. Still, “The Reality War” helps create a perfect bookend for the 2005 era of Doctor Who. With the same character possibly talking to herself across the decades, the parallelism between this script and “Rose” means that Doctor Who has a perfect beginning and ending. Plus, mundane dialogue aside, each episode has a secret weapon: the sudden appearance of Billie Piper, one of the sexiest women in sci-fi history. Bad dialogue? Forget about it. When she’s onscreen, they can let this lovely lady say whatever she wants!