By While the Chris Chibnall-produced era of “Doctor Who” has been contentious over its Timeless Child saga, current showrunner Russell T. Davies isn’t letting those threads lie fallow.
The recent first season of Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor saw a mix of callbacks to various eras of ‘Who’, but one of the biggest surprises came in the Regency-era episode “Rogue” which acknowledged Richard E. Grant’s version from the “Doctor Who” webcast – “Scream of the Shalka”.
Grant played a pre-Christopher Eccleston version of the Ninth Doctor in the Paul Cornell-penned six-episode animated web series produced before Davies rebooted the program in 2005 and seemingly rendered Grant’s story non-canon.
Not any more. Speaking with SFX Magazine, Davies was asked about the inclusion and he explains:
“I wrote to [writer] Paul Cornell the night before, saying, ‘Please watch tomorrow because there’s such a treat in store… it’s really nice when you can do things like that. That was a really nice moment between me and Paul, we’re old friends going back decades.
t was lovely. A little bit of payment there because he created the Ninth Doctor with the Shalka and we completely replaced him with Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor. So, how nice all these years later, to take a little lean back and sort of say, the door’s open now, thanks to ‘The Timeless Child’, and you can come in and own your Doctor again. Really, it’s not just fun, it’s a nice thing to do.”
He adds that while the “door is open now,” the inclusion isn’t heralding some major story thread or big reveal. Rather the inclusion was all a bit of fun:
“We talked about that many times with [co-writers] Kate [Herron] and Briony [Redman]. Just fun, a joke. It’s funny. It’s that simple. I sat here in this office with them and they just thought ‘an unknown Doctor’ – that’s what the script said because we had to work out who to get and how we could get him.”
The full first season of Gatwa’s “Doctor Who” is currently available on Disney+ worldwide aside from the UK where it’s on BBC iPlayer.
The post “Who” Showrunner On Shalka Doctor Cameo appeared first on Dark Horizons.
