Doctor Who Showrunner Says the Show Should Be as Big as Marvel

Warning: Full spoilers follow for the first two episodes of Doctor Who Season 14.

Russell T Davies wants Doctor Who to be as big as Marvel – or at least as big as Star Trek. In a sit-down with IGN, the past and present showrunner of the longest-running science fiction series in the world is remarkably open about his aspirations for the show’s new era, which is being dubbed “Season 1” in marketing materials despite the fact that it’s actually the 14th season of the modern era and the 40th season overall. At a certain point, it’s easier to measure the wholesome and heartfelt British time travel series by the number of years since the franchise first started: 61. By that number alone, the show already has Star Trek beat.

Davies has already ushered Doctor Who into a new era once, in 2005 when he captained the show’s return to the air after some time away. While future showrunners veered more towards serialized storytelling and serious drama, Davies’ first “NuWho” run was characterized by its playful approach to a fictional world that is objectively ridiculous (in a good way). After revamping the series about a benevolent, time-and-space hopping Time Lord into a worldwide favorite, Davies left Doctor Who in 2009, and the show just kept growing. A major deal announced in 2022 brought the series to Disney+ in the U.S., where it’s so far dropped three bridge episodes and a Christmas special introducing the new Doctor: Ncuti Gatwa, whose work on teen comedy Sex Education Davies says he’d studied closely before casting the Rwandan-Scottish actor.

The Next Marvel, Star Wars or Star Trek

This massive Disney+ rebrand is also where Davies officially came back into the mix. “I think all the showrunners since are now looking at me in horror,” he jokes in a conversation over Zoom. “They thought they'd escaped, and I've set this terrible precedent that they might be needed once more.” When it comes to why he decided to throw his hat back in the ring after so much time away, Davies is clear: It all comes down to the scale he’ll be able to work with thanks to the show’s new home. “The reason I came back was that I absolutely agreed with the BBC and Disney+'s ambition of the show to make it a big worldwide streamer, and to put it up there with all the big Marvel shows and the Star Wars shows and the Star Trek shows,” Davies explains.

In particular, Davies hones in on Star Trek as the type of success story he’d love to see Doctor Who replicate. “I've particularly watched the rebirth of the Star Trek empire from Star Trek: Discovery onwards,” Davies says, noting that he’s a fan of everything from Picard to Strange New Worlds. “I've always watched Star Trek. I've never quite loved it,” he admits, but the show’s new life on Paramount+ changed that. “I'm now a complete and utter fan, and watched all [of it]… I really watched [those] thinking that is where Doctor Who should be as well.” Of course, Davies isn’t just returning to everybody’s favorite Time Lord as a hopeful hitmaker, but as a lifelong fan. “The truth is I've never stopped thinking about Doctor Who,” he tells us. “I never will. Ever since childhood I've been full of stories and ideas for it, so it was just lovely to go and join in again and be part of the fun, and with ambitions to take it places as well.”

The Long Lost Character: the Doctor’s Granddaughter

Those places Davies wants to take us have so far involved a space station full of babies, Abbey Road Recording Studios, and the temporarily cursed world of Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), the latest companion to the Doctor whose adoption origin story seems poised to provide some of the latest season’s overarching plot. In one of the new episodes, Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor connects with Ruby by sharing a bit of his own family story, referencing a character fans haven’t heard about in years in the process: Susan Foreman, the Doctor’s granddaughter, who travelled with the very First Doctor all those decades ago. Davies says he’s curious to see how both British fans of the series and newbies joining for the Disney+ era will respond to the name-drop, and he seems open to digging into more of the Doctor’s backstory if given the time.

“I put that in quite tentatively, thinking if there's a great big block opinion saying you're excluding new viewers here, then I would've backtracked on it because that's the last thing I want to do,” he explained. He says both Disney+ and the BBC have a “passionate interest” in Susan’s story, and while it seems to be too soon to tell whether or not the long lost Who character’s plot will get room to grow, he’s optimistic. “It's early days because we have no audience reaction to that yet at all,” Davies says, “but I think it's lovely, so I hope we can do that.”

For all the talk of not alienating new fans (he says he wants six-year-olds to be able to approach the show), the showrunner explains that he thinks audiences, no matter how invested they are in a series, have a very good instinctive understanding of the difference between new mythology and old series continuity. “We're presenting Susan as a legend,” he explains, without elaborating on exactly what that legend may entail. “It's very legendary in the way she's done.”

The One Doctor Who Rule Davies Would Never Change

Whether the Susan Foreman reference turns out to be a hint at what’s to come or a moment of unusually open-hearted exposition during a transitional period, it’s clear that the Davies 2.0 era will be one of major changes for the series. In Gatwa’s interview with IGN last December, he said he read the script for his first episode and immediately knew that “things are going to be done differently from now on.” It’s a sentiment Davies echoes throughout our discussion. “There's no point coming back to repeat myself,” he says at one point. “I've never done that in all my life, but I knew I had places to take this and I knew that'd be an adventure.”

In just six episodes, Davies has already made major changes to Doctor Who lore, introducing the concept of bi-generation (which allowed for fan-favorite Doctor David Tennant to not have to die in order for Fifteen to live) and teasing a Pantheon of deities who are built more of the stuff of fantasy than sci-fi. The latter change seems to have been explained easily enough with a single line from Tennant in one of last year’s bridge episodes: “I invoked a superstition at the edge of the universe, where the walls are thin and all things possible.” That invocation has apparently led to lasting effects for Fifteen and Ruby, and though Davies is careful not to spoil upcoming episodes, he’s open about his general approach to the rules of the world.

When asked outright which golden rules of Doctor Who he’s careful not to break, he has just one: “I think the only rule I would ever keep intact is the TARDIS,” he confesses, noting that the show would lose energy and strength without its iconic traveling blue Police Box. “That's the only thing I would protect, actually.”

A New Generation of Fans

During the course of our discussion, Davies talks more about new generations of viewers who might be tuning into the show for the first time than about longtime fans. He clearly has love for folks who have been with the show for the long haul, at one point even joking that they’re like football fans, happiest when they have something to argue about, like the wonky numbering system for the seasons. Yet the showrunner returns again and again to the idea of the young TV-watcher approaching Doctor Who for the first time, an image that makes sense given that plenty of fans of his original run have kids of their own by now. Part of what makes Gatwa’s episodes feel so new, he says, is the fact that he’s a more emotionally open, Gen Z take on the Doctor.

“I think you've got a generation now that is learning to open up,” Davies says. “And I don't just mean the sad stuff. I mean actually their joy on TikTok dancing about a chicken wing. I think that's brilliant. We encourage them to express their humor and their joy as much as we do their sadness.” The showrunner says he “wanted a Doctor who would chime with that, who would correspond to that, even before we cast Ncuti.” A previous series he wrote, the highly acclaimed AIDS epidemic drama It’s a Sin, gave him the confidence to cast younger actors in the latest iteration of Who. “It kind of gave me faith to say, ‘Well, we don't need to… offer the Doctor to an elder statesman. I don't need a great big BAFTA-winning, Oscar-winning actor to do that. We can call the young talent.’”

Once Gatwa was cast, Davies says he began writing the latter part of the new season with him in mind, but he notes that even these early episodes allow the actor’s obvious talent to shine through. “It's like once you script Ncuti, you get the Ncuti version, and that's what you want. It's glorious. … [He’s] so emotive, so raw, so skilled, so funny, so subtle, and so big all at the same time,” Davies says, and he’s right: The actor dazzles at every turn in the new season, showing an incredible emotional range often within the course of a single scene.

The Episode That Took Over 10 Years to Get Made

Fans who still aren’t quite on board with the show’s most recent overhaul needn’t worry: there are plenty of surprises coming down the pipeline, from a Steven Moffat-penned episode to an idea that Davies has been holding onto for well over a decade. “When I lived in Los Angeles in 2010, [then-showrunner] Stephen Moffat came across to launch Matt Smith and Karen Gillan in the new season,” says, explaining that Moffatt asked Davies over lunch one day if he had any ideas for upcoming storylines. “Well, there's this one idea," Davies recalls saying, sitting beside Gillan at a restaurant near Venice Beach. He then launched into what he calls an idea that “was just too expensive for any production house on Earth to have established at the time.

“When you see [the episode], it possibly has more effect shots than any other episode ever,” Davies teases, adding that it’s a subtler visual effect than fans might be expecting. “Even if we'd had 10 million quid back in 2010, we couldn't have done it.” Like so many aspects of the most recent version of Doctor Who, from its casual inclusion of queer characters to its Gen Z-inspired exploration of the Doctor’s complex past, it seems as if this episode wouldn’t have worked at any other time in the show’s historic run.

“It's been brewing for a long time and I think it was worth the wait,” Davies says. “Actually, it’s waited for the right time to appear. It's in its right moment now.”

Doctor Who Season 14, or Season 1 if you like, is available now on Disney+ and BBC One. For more on the show, be sure to check out our Doctor Who: Season 1, Episodes 1 & 2 review!