Everything We Know About Doctor Who Season 3

6. Season 3 Was Intended For Ncuti Gatwa

Doctor Who The Reality War Ncuti Gatwa Fifteenth Doctor
BBC Studios

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.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!