I am glad Doctor Who is Dead.
The collapse of reality was inevitable.
Originally written in November 2023, and edited to improve the style. This is quite a heavy email, so it may be truncated in your email client. Come check it out for free on realphillipcarter.substack.com to get the full experience.
Original title was ‘Evil Wheelchair Users from Outer Space’ and you shall see why very shortly.
2026 edit: Most points now outdated. But I am posting this because I think past Phillip (who will be born in two days) raised some interesting points about destroying the ‘canon’ of Who, and how that destabilised the show beyond repair.
Because some of us saw this ending coming.
Additional note: I am doing GEEK FAYRE at the Manchester Pendulum Hotel (between Oxford road and Piccadilly stations) on 13th and 14th June 2026. Come say hi! I will be signing books and selling tickets to my Sci-Fi comedy shows.
I’m glad Dr Who is dead.
[But was it already a zombie by the time it was diagnosed with dead?]
[Back in 2023,] Doctor Who published a short ‘minisode’ thing for Children In Need1. In it, the 14th Doctor, played again by David Tennant because the BBC only has seven actors, does some time paradox stuff and accidentally names the Daleks, as well as replacing their pincers with a plunger.
All this is pretty funny for reasons too lore-complex to get into, but the general gist is that Dr Who is back, and that this episode felt like a non-canon advert. It looked good, it sounded good, and the dialogue was pretty decent too.
But it showed a pretty major change.
Davros is outside his transport unit.
Nice to know he has trousers on the bottom. I always imagined he’d have his Kaled nuts out in that thing, like he was in a zoom meeting for his inappropriate behaviour at work and was moments away from another offence.
But this minisode was not simply a non-canon piece just for Children In Need. Showrunner Russel T Davies has since stated that this minisode is setting up some real lore for the main show.
The robo-wheelchair beneath Davros is dissolving much like Roald Dahl’s literature2, paved over by a new, more polite society, or something.
So it’s not as simple as a prequel to Davros, this is a solid rewrite of the show’s lore, which has some people upset. I’ve done my fair share of doomscrolling and from my perspective, about half the people talking about this don’t think Davros was ever really a wheelchair user in the first place.
To them, the difference is between a wheelchair and a small tank.
I’ll let Jeremy Clarkson worry about the finer details there.
I have to say, I think the second person makes a point. Why can’t Dr Who stories do that? It’s a shame RTD took the time to respond in the way he did, because ignoring this comment would have somehow felt less ignorant. Now it just looks like RTD picks and chooses what things to care about each morning [edit: perhaps depending on what’s popular].
The death of continuity
Retroactively editing huge, important main players in what little shreds of solid canon3 we have left feels like the easier solution to a widening problem.
[at first, but you later realise this just makes more holes]
As a writer, I’d have left Davros well alone, and written in some characters who are good guys [in wheelchair-like devices]. You could do it in interesting ways.
What if we ventured to a parallel reality where Davros had a change of heart? This could provide an interesting concept episode for devoted fans, and show those handful of [imaginary] idiots who base their entire worldview off sci-fi shows that disabled people can be nice as well. You could even tie it to the parallel universe Rose Tyler is stuck in, the one which is not accessible unless the writers need it to be. You know the one. It had those paradox-eating bat things which never turned up to eat any of the numerous, larger paradoxes during Moffat’s run.
[The show even got meta with the cracks in time from Matt Smith’s Doctor]
The show’s internal logic is rupturing…
Anyway.
Imagine if the Doctor found himself with a long-term companion in a wheelchair who was nice and not evil. How might that play out? This has been on people’s minds since at least 2005, when Laurence Clark wrote,
“But wouldn't it be good to have some disabled actors playing actual disabled characters in the new series? […] It'd be a welcome change from us being embittered, vengeful, evil, cured, alien or exterminated by Daleks!”4
I agree. It would be fantastic to have disabled people play disabled people, rather than weird Sci-Fi caricatures, which is part of the deeper issue here.
Retcons
When interviewed in Doctor Who Unleashed5, Russell T Davies said Davros’ old look isn’t coming back at all, as it “associated disability with evil”.6
RTD isn’t the only person on board who has this issue with the wheelchair rep[resentation] in Dr Who:
"We had long conversations about bringing Davros back because he's a fantastic character," Davies began, but added that "time, society, culture and taste has moved on, and there's a problem with Davros of old, in that he's a wheelchair user, who is evil."
Continuing, Davies said: "I had problems with that, and a lot of people on the production team had problems with that; associating disability with evil – and trust me, there's a very long tradition of this.
"The world changes, and when the world changes, Doctor Who has to change as well."
Tropes can indeed sneak into media. Here is ‘bad man with face scar’ #489.
It’s also interesting to note that in the same film this character is from, Avatar, the protagonist Jake Sully is in a wheelchair due to a spinal injury. He can’t afford the surgery for this, but the military is perfectly happy wrapping him up and sending him across the galaxy in a spaceship to have his soul downloaded into an empty clone body of a blue fella from the magic floating rock planet. This, apparently, was easier than finding a surgeon.
I’m in the UK and I’ve waited for NHS appointments before, I get it.
[I like this, it’s going in my comedy show]
Keeping up with the times
In the Dr Who Unleashed interview, Davies said:
‘I’m not blaming people in the past at all, but the world changes. And when the world changes, Doctor Who has to change as well. So we made the choice to bring back Davros without the facial scarring7 and without the wheelchair – or his support unit, which functions as a wheelchair.
‘I say, this is how we see Davros now. This is what he looks like. This is 2023. This is our lens. This is our eye. Things used to be black and white; they’re not anymore. Davros used to look like that, and now he looks like this. We are absolutely standing by that.’
And yet, making Davros able-bodied [plus these statements about it] makes the story even more black and white than before. Now, we know there will be NO MEAN PEOPLE IN WHEELCHAIRS.
What about all those aspiring disabled evil scientists?
[Edit: I have a friend who is evil, and he is in a wheelchair. I love him]
We could have just abandoned Davros.
[Edit: but then Dr Who would need to rely on something other than nostalgia, but it knows nostalgia prints money (noting any parallels with publishing?)]
A comedian’s perspective
Back in 2005, the BBC published the article “Retardis: Doctor Who and disability” by Laurence Clarke, a comedian who uses a wheelchair.
“The first ever disabled character to appear in the series was Dortmun, the stereotypical 'crippled scientist' who helped the resistance during The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Feeling that he was slowing his comrades down, and armed with just a couple of small bombs, Dortmun stupidly cast aside his wheelchair and walking stick to take on a few Daleks single-handed. Needless to say, the bloody fool got exterminated within seconds. Whilst this may have appeared noble and brave to a sixties audience, today it just seems staggeringly stupid!”
“In the past, it's fair to say that a lot of Doctor Who's portrayals of disability were less than positive. A large number of so-called 'monsters' were portrayed as evil because they looked different.”
[I am very glad I am remaking this article, because Laurence Clarke’s article just jumped to the top of my reading list]
Later in the article, it references a Daily Mirror interview, where Russell T Davies said, “It's very difficult to employ persons of restricted growth when, as our producer Phil Collinson says, 'Bloody Gringotts and the Chocolate Factory are filming at the same time”.
Canon-friendly representation
I think, rather than changing the past, we could have even had an anti-Davros, someone who used the very same technology, perhaps a Thal escaping the Thal-Kaled conflict, who then travels the universe trying to make it a little better. There are enough gaps in the Dr Who lore to make space for this without effecting the existing canon, which is a fragile and battle-scarred thing already.
The universe is massive, it is entirely possible that we missed an anti-Davros all these years.
[Though, knowing current Dr Who writing quality, she would no doubt be called Sorvad, and the Doctor would spend an inordinate amount of time discovering this is Davros, but backwards]
Davies also made a pretty decent point about the purpose of this minisode8.
"Because it's Children In Need night... where issues of disability and otherness come right to the front of the conversation."9
Can’t disagree with that. If it has to be changed, that’s a good time to do it.
Whilst we’re on the subject, one could argue that the Dalek’s plunger-arm is reinforcing harmful stereotypes.10
Can you break a broken canon?
But Doctor Who, like Rick and Morty, is one of those sci-fi canons which has had so many tangents and cowriters that it doesn’t really have a canon.
It is, essentially, a fan-fiction of itself.
Time paradoxes do or do not matter depending on who is writing it11, entire swathes of lore can be rewritten, and death is almost totally irrelevant unless for timey wimey reasons, [or an actor leaves] it is suddenly permanent.
Jokes aside
I do have one genuine issue with the minisode, however.
The Tardis does the entry Vwoorping before crashing, and that sound is not altered by it coming in close to the camera. There should have been some noticeable doppler effect and there wasn’t.
Do better, RTD.
[unless of course, in years hence a timey wimey excuse may be made]
Ultimately, I think the usual complaint of 'breaking the lore' doesn't apply to Doctor Who, as its lore changes with each new writer. Remember when time paradoxes were important? Remember when character deaths carried meaning? All that's gone now. It has zero narrative stakes. Every episode is universe-ending so there's no more drama to be mined from that idea. Ultimately, I think this was the easy way out for the writers. The harder, better choice would be to write in a new character who uses a wheelchair who maybe isn't genocidal.
[the following added 2026]
I am glad Doctor Who is Dead.
Now, even though I was once a huge fan, I am glad Dr Who is dead.
It last died before my time, and was revived when I was entering my teenage years. My first experience was with the non-canon (for no good reason) Daleks Invasion Earth, which I still adore, and the revival was awe-inspiring for this little sci-fi geek. But the show had its cracks for a while. It suffered from the constant regenerations of its writers, each of whom either promised to stick to canon and didn’t, or promise to move beyond old canon and then relied on old canon for viewing numbers. Broadly I think a show like this needs either a singular writer, or a story bible within which which new writers must operate. It’s not that retconning12 the lore of the show would necessarily break it, but that the last few writers have not done a good job of it. Huge swathes of lore, like the Doctor’s own origins, purpose, evolutionary history, personality, and past regenerations, have become playthings for writers unaware of just how in love with those stories their audiences were, and still are. These writers have taken the crystallised idea of THE DOCTOR from their audience’s heads, and said NO, YOU ARE WRONG ABOUT THIS, AND THAT, AND ALSO THIS BIT OVER HERE.
And it is jarring. Not because the audience are immovable but because the justification is not enough. Why keep messing with the old story when you could instead write new ones… The obvious answer is that the show is constantly regurgitating its own nostalgia back at itself. I fear that NewNewWhoWho will just be the Doctor addressing the audience directly, saying “Do you remember the Slitheen? Do you remember Daleks? Do you remember when the toys didn’t cost £900? Do you remember proper stories?” like a shit Peter Kay13 parody.
Ultimately, the New Who writers did not earn their audience, they inherited them, and that holds a disconnect which I think should be considered. There is no penalty for writing a shit Doctor Who episode. Perhaps there should be.
Just give us some more remote controlled daleks and stop writing for a while. Let us have our fan fiction. We were pretty good at it.
I might post some of my own, soon. David Bowie shows up.
Because of course he does.
If you like time travel and Bowie references, check out WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? - I wrote it, but other people who are not me think it is pretty good. It’s got time travel, jokes, logically consistent canon, and stories you can navigate in almost any order. I’ll be signing some later today actually, at that Geek Fayre I mentioned (though you can also grab signed ones on TikTok shop, and unsigned ones basically everywhere).
[and our time machine takes us back to the distant year, 2023]
And now, I leave you with this horrendous AI image, and a parody of Simon and Garfunkle’s sounds of silence.
Hello Davros my old friend
I’ve come to retcon you again,
Because a Dalek softly beeping
Exterminated me while I was sleeping
And the vision, that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound, of Tardis
Not dead. Into the long grass for a spell. Time to recover from the awful hangover.
Bring back Doctor Who! I want my Doctor Who! Forget the bad episodes; just bring it back! WAAAHHH!