Everything We Know About Doctor Who Season 3

This is an important factor to point out, as it will obviously affect how long Season 3 takes to produce, and also the stories it ends up telling.

Russell T Davies' revelation that Season 3 scripts were being planned as far back as 2023 obviously means that those scripts were intended for the Fifteenth Doctor. But with Ncuti Gatwa's decision to leave the show, any existing scripts would need to be heavily reworked, or even scrapped altogether, to accommodate what comes next.

This also affects the Susan of it all. With Susan being set up for a role in Season 3, you have to assume that she was part of the planned scripts, but with that aforementioned Susan cliffhanger no longer being used… will she still be involved? If not, that's another element of the story that would need to be reworked.

We should also mention the Billie Piper in the room, as any existing scripts might now simply be tweaked to fit whatever character she ends up playing, or they might even be punted to the next proper Doctor – assuming that Piper is playing the Bad Wolf Entity or something, or only sticks around for a special or two.

Perhaps whatever was planned with Susan could be consolidated into some Billie Piper event specials to wrap up this era of the show with a bang, before a soft reboot leading into Doctor Sixteen. Honestly, the mental gymnastics going on in Russell T Davies' mind right now must be worthy of a gold medal – that is, if he’s even still the showrunner for the next phase of Doctor Who.