[COLUMN] This Season, Doctor Who Faced Its Greatest Threat: Continuity | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

This weekend’s season finale of Doctor Who saw the return of Sutekh (Gabriel Woolf).

Don’t worry if that name doesn’t sound familiar. Sutekh is an obscure villain even by the standards of Doctor Who. He is not as iconic as the Daleks, the Cybermen or the Master. He doesn’t even rank with the Silurians, the Sontarans or the Ice Warriors. Sutekh has only ever appeared in one classic Doctor Who story, “Pyramids of Mars” from 1975. Sutekh is having a moment. It’s wild to hear popstar Cyndi Lauper declare “Sutekh, oh yeah!” on The One Show.

Of course, Sutekh is beloved by classic Doctor Who fans.  “Pyramids of Mars” tends to rank highly in fandom polls, finishing in the top ten in both the “Mighty 200” poll to mark the 200th televised story and the poll for the show’s 50th anniversary. Ironically, it dropped out of the top ten for last year’s 60th anniversary poll. Still, Sutekh remains a beloved figure among fans, the subject of charming DVD extras like “Oh, Mummy!”, charting his post-Doctor Who career.

Showrunner Russell T. Davies is particularly fond of Sutekh. Before relaunching the show in 2005, he signed off a column with a loving illustration of the villain. He included a cameo from Sutekh in his slice of life dramedy Queer as Folk. During his initial stretch overseeing Doctor Who, he brought back Gabriel Woolf to voice the devil in “The Satan Pit.” He has admitted his greatest regret of that tenure was never doing “a great big proper sequel to a classic story.”

As such, Sutekh’s return could be written off as “showrunner service”, an extremely heightened sort of fan service. Davies’ interviews certainly support such a reading. He has acknowledged wanting to write a sequel to “Pyramids of Mars” since he first saw the serial at the age of twelve. However, watching “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” and “Empire of Death”, it does feel like there is something more interesting happening beneath the surface.

Davies has argued that he isn’t writing Doctor Who for the established fans. He has explained that one reason he returned to the show was because he “wanted to make it younger.” He sees himself writing for “a brand new audience.” He has acknowledged being cautious about making reference to classic continuity for fear of “excluding new viewers.” As such, Sutekh is definitely a weirder choice for the season’s big bad than the Daleks.

Still, there is a point to this. Davies' return to Doctor Who has seen something of a tug-of-war between continuity and novelty. This was obvious from the outset. Stepping into the position of showrunner at a point where the show’s future seemed precarious, Davies returned to Doctor Who for the show’s 60th anniversary as a result of enthusiasm from previous stars Catherine Tate and David Tennant. Davies’ second tenure started by looking backwards.

Davies rebranded the show so that this season was no longer the 14th or the 40th, but was instead “Season One.” He cast a younger lead in Ncuti Gatwa, a veteran from the Netflix streaming show Sex Education. He struck a deal with Disney+ to co-finance production, which also transformed Doctor Who from a television show into a streaming show. It would no longer premiere on BBC One, it would instead launch on Disney+ in American prime time and at midnight on the BBC iPlayer.

There was also a renewed emphasis on the show’s history, often involving reinventing classic concepts for a new audience. The anniversary specials offered new takes on classic villains Davros (Julian Bleach) and the Toymaker (Neil Patrick Harris). Davies launched an anthology show, Tales of the TARDIS, featuring past stars of the series introducing classic episodes. Benjamin Cook even edited down the classic serial “The Daleks” into a feature-length (and colorized) adventure.

Watching Davies’ return to Doctor Who, the past was present. This is arguably just how pop culture works now, particularly in the streaming age. Franchise shows on streaming inevitably tend to become insular and backwards-looking, engaging in nostalgia for its own sake, reminding viewers of things that they already love. It is a process that is common in comic book continuity, with writer Grant Morrison discussing how such books had often “turned inwards and gone septic like a toenail.”

Doctor Who has never really had a firm sense of continuity. In some ways, this makes sense. Doctor Who is a show about time travel. As showrunner Steven Moffat would often boast, “Time can be rewritten.” The show’s internal history is riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies. Sometimes the Doctor is a Time Lord, other times he is “half-human on [his] mother’s side.” Sometimes the Doctor spent the 1970s stranded on Earth, other times those stories were set in the 1980s.

As these franchises lean more heavily on invested fanbases, as they shift from broad appeal to narrowcasting, fans tend to obsess over the minutiae of continuity. One of the bigger recent controversies in Star Wars fandoms centers around the date of birth given for Jedi Master Ki-Adi-Mundi (Silas Carson) on a tie-in CD-ROM and trading card. This is not a meaningful debate within any franchise that claims to have mass appeal. It’s a trap.

And so it seems quite deliberate that Davies’ fixation on continuity in Doctor Who has tended to involve distorting it and warping it. The first of the anniversary specials, “The Star Beast”, was a loose adaptation of a classic comic strip. In the final of the anniversary specials, the Toymaker boasted about how he “made a jigsaw puzzle out of [the Doctor’s] history.” Many of Davies’ celebrations of the past have also involved modernizing those elements, updating them for a new world.

There have also been fairly dramatic changes to the Doctor’s own internal continuity. In “Rogue”, a holographic parade of the Doctor’s previous faces included Richard E. Grant. Grant had played two prior non-canonical iterations of the character, but he is apparently now part of the show’s official history. While the Doctor has talked in the past about being a father, apparently he is now going to be a father in the future.

Much of the mystery of this first season concerns the parentage of the Doctor’s current companion, Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson). This is almost immediately something of a continuity red flag. Thanks to Star Wars, the expectation is that any unknown parent will inevitably be revealed to be some major character from franchise lore. Luke (Mark Hamill) is the son of Vader (David Prowse, James Earl Jones). Rey (Daisy Ridley) is the granddaughter of Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid).

Throughout the season, Ruby has been able to make it snow – an image tied to her discovery as an abandoned child on Christmas. In “The Legend of Ruby Sunday”, that imagery is tied to analogue video technology. The Doctor digs into old security footage from that Christmas. The “snow” is both the weather in the churchyard and the static on the old cassette. “We can feed the time window using massive information from the VHS - actual positions of the snowflakes,” the Doctor boasts.This is how fans used to watch Doctor Who.

A lot of “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” is essentially metatext about the act of watching Doctor Who; the episode’s promotional image was all screens and images. Noticing that an old woman (Susan Twist) has been showing up on his adventures, the Doctor journeys to U.N.I.T. in search of an explanation. Consulting with a panel of experts, the Doctor engages in forensic - and fannish - analysis. Davies has talked about this as “internet-age storytelling.”

They identify the woman as Susan Triad. With an enthusiasm that would make Reddit blush, they deduce that S. Triad is an anagram of “TARDIS.” This feels like an allusion to Davies’ tendency to hide references and anagrams in the show to tease fans. They study screens, combing for clues. The Doctor wonders if this Susan might be his own granddaughter Susan (Carole Ann Ford), one of the franchise’s oldest abandoned continuity threads.

This season of Doctor Who is aware that it is a television show. It is bookended by episodes in which Ruby’s neighbor, Mrs. Flood (Anita Dobson), addresses the audience through the camera. The anniversary specials opened with Tennant speaking to the viewer. In “The Devil’s Chord”, the Doctor is shocked to discover the episode’s music is not “non-diegetic”, implying that he can hear his own theme music. The Doctor has even winked at the viewer.

Of course, Doctor Who has always been somewhat self-aware, but it is rare to get so many references so tightly concentrated. In “Empire of Death”, the Doctor and Ruby flee into “the Memory TARDIS” which is inside the Time Window which is reconstructing that VHS tape. It reveals itself to be the set from Tales of the TARDIS, populated with screens broadcasting earlier Doctor Who adventures; an image nested within an image nested within an image.

It's in this context that Sutekh emerges. He has been clinging to the outside of the TARDIS since “Pyramid of Mars”, planting doppelgangers of Susan Triad on every planet the Doctor has visited over the past fifty years of television continuity. Over time, those doppelgangers built to critical mass like some sort of lore bomb. “Each time the TARDIS would land, the idea of that woman would get stronger and stronger,” the Doctor tells Ruby. “By 2024, she was Susan Triad, this monumental figure.” Small details add up over time. Continuity accrues.

In “Empire of Death”, Sutekh isn’t just the God of Death. He is the manifestation of continuity. He entrenches himself in U.N.I.T. headquarters, sitting atop the TARDIS like a continuity guard dog. His inside woman at U.N.I.T. is Harriet Arbinger (Genesis Lynea), “Head of the Archive”, the organization’s continuity expert. Sutekh tracks the Doctor through Melanie Bush (Bonnie Langford), a classic series companion and so another embodiment of continuity. The villain lures the Doctor into his trap with the promise of continuity: a reveal about Susan.

Sutekh spreads through the character’s past like a cancer, reducing the universe to dust. If everything is known, nothing can live or change. Doctor Who becomes a museum. However, Sutekh doesn’t just weaponize continuity, he is beholden to it. He is obsessed with the one detail he doesn’t know: the identity of Ruby’s birth mother. Meanwhile, the Doctor powers the Memory TARDIS through Ruby, who was born in Christmas 2004, shortly before Davies’ revival of Doctor Who. The Time Window lights up at her touch; she is literally a new viewer.

Indeed, the Doctor and Ruby ultimately defeat Sutekh by turning continuity into a weapon. Ruby claims to be horrified and confused by the identity of her mother. She sells it hard. “I don’t understand,” she gasps. “But maybe you can.” Sutekh practically salivates at the potential reveal of this one last mystery box. “Bring the name to me,” he demands, with the glee of a Wikipedia editor. Could it be the Master or the Toymaker or Davros or some other continuity pay-off?

However, Ruby ultimately smashes the tablet containing the name. She tethers Sutekh to the Memory TARDIS and the Doctor drags his old enemy across time and space, like a dog on a leash, scattering him across the universe. It’s an interesting way of approaching the very idea of continuity as a concept, understanding that it often makes these fictional universes smaller rather than larger, that it can alienate outsiders and that these franchises need new ideas to survive.

It's ultimately revealed that Ruby’s biological mother is Louise Alison Miller (Faye McKeever), a perfectly ordinary person who has no ties whatsoever to larger Doctor Who continuity. Indeed, a single mother who lived in a household with a stepfather who was “a real piece of work”, she arguably feels more anchored in the world of soap operas than epic fantasy. It’s a choice that prioritizes real human drama ahead of cheap continuity references. It makes Doctor Who bigger.

Indeed, the Doctor argues that Louise is more important than any continuity reference or in-joke. “She was important because we think she's important,” he tells Ruby about her mother. “We invest things with significance.” This is what stories are, after all. They are statements about what is important. In this version of Doctor Who, the human relationship between Ruby and Louise is “more powerful than Time Lords and gods.”

This is perhaps Davies’ big statement on “the Timeless Child”, a mess of continuity that the showrunner inherited from his predecessor, Chris Chibnall. “The Timeless Child” was a massive rewriting of the Doctor’s backstory, based on the classic serial “The Brain of Morbius”, which coincidentally aired in the same season as “Pyramids of Mars.” It revealed that the Doctor was an abandoned child, and the first of the Time Lords. While fans protested that this revelation of the Doctor’s secret past broke continuity, in reality it actually tried to impose continuity on a character whose history had previously been a blank slate.

Davies has largely ignored the continuity of the reveal to focus on the emotional core of the idea. “I’m not quite sure where I am when I’m talking about the history of the legend of the Timeless Child,” Davies confessed. “That actually doesn’t mean much to me. But if you say to me, ‘The Doctor is a foundling’ — an orphan who doesn’t know who his parents are — that sells it to me.” Ruby’s entire story serves as a metaphor for that. That decision to prioritize emotional storytelling over lore and continuity is core to Davies’ vision of the show. It is also, interestingly enough, Davies’ reaction to The Rise of Skywalker’s rejection of The Last Jedi.

In some ways, this season of Doctor Who has been about Davies exploring what it means to write Doctor Who in the different television landscape of 2024. This is reflected internally with the focus on social media in “Dot and Bubble” or the references to Bridgerton and cosplay in “Rogue.” It’s reflected externally in Davies’ acknowledgement that a large part of the motivation for his deal with Disney was the understanding that the BBC is facing what he feels to be certain death.

Doctor Who has to become a new type of television show. Davies first season as returning show runner has been about the form that this new show must take. One thing seems certain: while the show is engaged with its own past, it cannot be trapped by its own past.