Russell T. Davies Returns to Doctor Who as New Showrunner

Nah what you wrote was fine - I'm just tossing in my two bits.

 

Nature of the beast for tie-ins, and not unprecedented for Doctor Who. After all, the novels and DWM comics had to come to a screeching halt when the show returned in 2005. Big Finish would adapt accordingly were any of their material to be overridden by the show.

That said, I doubt the BF Time War stuff has anything to worry about. RTD has always said he never wanted to depict anything related to the Time War onscreen because it would be too complex to do properly. So he'd likely be fine with leaving that to Big Finish and focusing on other things.

 

That's not how the Doctor Who IP functions.

Nothing that may or may not happen onscreen will ever have any impact on anything that may or may not happen in other arenas because there is no 'superior' source of lore and no official Canon.

 

Interesting he cites Trek so heavily. We know he's a fan and kicked around the idea of a crossover, but Enterprise was dying just as Who was reborn in 2005.

I guess it's still very unlikely given the Disney deal, but you never know. I feel the current Star Trek regime would be more open to it than during the 90s.

There's quite a strong part of me that wants to see Ncuti's Doctor on Pike's Enterprise!

 

Even if a crossover were to happen, and I agree it's highly unlikely, I think the most likely place for it to occur is Lower Decks.

Although, considering the impeding Lower Decks/Strange New Worlds crossover, you might be not that far off with that idea.

 

They don't talk about canon, but at the same time, there are stories that BF has postponed or cancelled planned stories when asked to do so by TPTB at the BBC. I can't remember specific examples offhand, aside from BF apparently curtailing its plan to bring back the Doctor Who Unbound stories, but I'm sure others can. The situation with the Torchwood story guest starring David Tennant is a bit different; it wasn't cancelled for story reasons, but it's still a case of the BBC saying, thank you, we're done with John Barrowman for now and so are you.

In short: Big Finish can't just do any story it wants. Neither can the novels or the comics.

 

You're doing that thing again where you're telling people who have been watching Doctor Who a lot longer than you were how the show works. And you're wrong, as usual.

And what about all those times when a tie-in story was rejected on the grounds that it was story material that the show intended to cover? The commentary section of the DWM comic anthologies are filled with various times when a planned story had to be abandoned either because it didn't get past the approvals stage due to its similarity with a planned episode, or other reasons. DWM comics couldn't do their original plan of starting their Ninth Doctor line with the Eighth Doctor's comic companions due to licensing issues. RTD himself had a short story rejected in 2013 that was supposed to tell the story of the Eighth Doctor's regeneration because Night of the Doctor was already in the works, though this was since published online in 2020 as part of the Lockdown bonus material. A novel in 2015 that was originally going to feature River Song had to be rewritten since River was planned to return to the show, so the novel used Bernice Summerfield instead.

But I'm sure as usual you have some manner of convoluted logic that says you're not wrong in spite of this evidence.

 

I don't see a crossover given Disney and Paramount probably don't have an incentive to do so. But I think it would be fun if the Doctor appeared in a Star Trek like universe! TARDIS materializes on a star ship exploring the final frontier. Lots of potential fun playing with tradition ST tropes from the Doctor's vantage point.

 

It feels like it's come close sometimes, Phase IV seemed whenever one thing was ending another was a week or three away. I suppose its probably a producer's job to have all these things percolating but I hope they aren't getting too far ahead of themselves and are giving the new series it's due. I am always leery when they start discussing these things before the first product has even dropped.

 

The most public instance of this for BF was when they couldn't use the Master for a while. (Which was a problem for one of the Lost Stories... poor "Stream" is never actually unmasked.)

"Rewritten" is a bit strong for a book that was in the outline stage at best when that changed. (And possibly not even that far - Gary Russell isn't clear on whether they ran a full outline by Steven Moffat or just the general concept.)

That worked out well for me, because that book led me to start picking up the Benny audios...

 

RTD did consider turning the Star Trek crossover idea into a sort of Star Trek Lite. The Doctor would end up aboard a starship very similar to a Starfleet ship with the crew being comprised of Star Trek archetypes. IE, Captain, XO, science officer, medical officer, engineer, token alien officer. The Doctor would even express doubt at what he viewed as an "obvious military organization" claiming to be peaceful explorers. I guess it's an idea RTD might theoretically get to these now, though these days it might also be viewed as being too similar to The Orville or whatever Black Mirror's Star Trek parody was.

 

I swear that there was a popular fanfiction that fits this description that circulated in the old fanzines back in the day.

 

I hope Star Trek and Doctor Who never meet on TV, to be perfectly honest. They did crossover in comic form, and its about as good as its ever gonna be.

 

Yep. One print edition of Jean Airey’s “The Doctor and the Enterprise” tried to reduce the risk of a lawsuit by removing all copyrighted names and trying to make it look the story was a parody.

 

Ooh, this interview with Russell isn't going to prove controversial or ruffle any feathers...

“I do a lot of mentoring, and there are voices wanting to be heard — of any gender or ethnicity — who consider themselves invisible. They hate the media that ignores them, and they’re trapped into wanting a job in that medium purely to increase representation. I read their scripts and they’re rubbish. They don’t actually love television, so they don’t know how to write for it.”

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/russell-t-davies-and-mark-gatiss-how-to-save-tv-zlxqf5fhn

 

Perhaps a Doctor Who/Star Wars crossover might be more likely given Disney+'s involvement? The setting of 'a Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away' also gives more freedom in terms of Doctor Who canon than a 'Trek/Who' crossover might.

 

My Star Wars knowledge is not the best but isn't "No time travel!" their one fixed rule regarding the sort of stories they can tell?

 

The Doctor entering the po-faced Star Wars universe would be quite fun.

 

TBH I crossover with the Orville would probably work better for IP reasons.

 

I'm not sure it's a rule per se so much as something that just isn't done. There've been a few times of dancing around the matter, the old Dark Horse comics had a crossover series about a character from the Old Republic era (thousands of years prior to the movies) who ended up frozen in stasis and kept waking up in various eras of Star Wars history. The Prequel era, the period between the Prequel and the OT, the OT, the period after the OT and finally the Legacy era, set over a hundred years after ROTJ with Luke's grandson.

For something canonical, Star Wars Rebels did feature a realm accessible through a Jedi temple which does offer passage to different time periods, though aside from rescuing Ahsoka from her fight against Vader the concept isn't really explored further. A similar idea was used in a joking manner in the Star Wars Lego Holiday Special a few years ago in which Lego Rey visits the various era as part of her Jedi studies.