Doctor Who season 12 is coming. Jodie Whittaker is back as the Doctor for her sophomore season, and all eyes are on her and showrunner Chris Chibnall to see how they can up the ante on Whittaker’s successful debut.
Whittaker, Chibnall, and other members of the Doctor Who cast and crew tease season 12 in a new video from BBC America. Have a watch!
“What this season is about is the individual characters going on their own journey—and, particularly for the Doctor, it’s a series about self discovery,” Whittaker said. Tosin Cole ( Ryan Sinclair) also teased big things ahead for the show’s millennia-old main character: “I think this is the first time we kind of really see her, as the new Doctor, really unsure and really trying to make decisions, and the pressure is getting to her, and how that affects her relationship with the group.”
Season 12 kicks off with a two-part episode called “Spyfall” on New Year’s Day. As you can see in that video, the show will pull out the big guns for the event, drafting heavy hitters like Stephen Fry — who somehow had never appeared in Doctor Who before this — to be guest stars. Also dropping by will be comedian and actor Sir Lenny Henry, who’s been a fan of Doctor Who since childhood. “It’s really bizarre being in Doctor Who, I must say, because the things that you hid behind the sofa from when you were little, are there on the set with you,” he told Digital Spy and other members of the press. “And it was so freaky to be on the set, being frightened in real time. I don’t think I’ll ever recover, really. But it was really exciting.”
"It didn’t feel like – well, it was work, but it didn’t feel like work, because these guys have established a family and a way of being where you just fit in straight away, with cups of tea and biscuits, sitting around, talking, and playing The Chase for some reason. It was really good fun, and I felt almost immediately, with everybody, part of the team. We just wanted it to be good and wow, my mind is blown."
Let’s hope that easy camaraderie comes across when the episode airs next week!
LONDON, ENGLAND – MAY 12: Lenny Henry in the Press Room at the Virgin TV BAFTA Television Award at The Royal Festival Hall on May 12, 2019 in London, England. (Photo by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images)
The Doctor Who team is already laying the groundwork for what comes after season 12. Talking to Radio Times, Chibnall seemed interested in revisiting a kind of episode the show hasn’t done since the ’60s, absent a one-off here and there: the pure historical episode, where the only sci-fi element is the fact that the Doctor and her team are present.
“I thought ‘Rosa’ was really really close to a pure historical – there’s just the one sci-fi guy with a vortex manipulator,” Chibnall said. “I was interested to see how that went down, because that felt like probably the purest historical – in terms of the priority component historical – probably since the show came back, I would say. I’d happily . I mean we haven’t done it yet. But there’s no rule against it…”
The historical episodes tend to be my favorites. Last season, I really liked “Rosa,” “Demons of the Punjab,” and “The Witchfinders,” and I would be totally down for stripping the sci-fi elements back even further and just focusing on history.
Chibnall seems to agree, suggesting that historical episodes can be “really resonant” in this day and age. “Maybe it’s because we’re living at such a time of flux that historicals seem to have an even greater resonance at the moment, in different and very surprising ways that you can’t really predict,” he said. “So, yeah, I’m very open for any writers to come along and go ‘Here’s your pure historical’.”
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h/t Gizmodo