Running a popular sci-fi or fantasy show can be a bit of a paradox: they’re trying to provide a great story whose twists and turns shock and thrill, but they’ve also got legions of hungry fans dissecting every inch of trailers, teasers, screenshots and press releases to peer far enough behind the curtain to suss out elusive plot points.
Not to mention sometimes a show or movie’s parent company can go against the wishes of the creators and take things into its own hands, like when the BBC decided to spoil Doctor Who’s Series 10 twist that the Saxon!Master was returning in an early advance trailer, to which then-showrunner Stephen Moffat was allegedly seeing blood-red.
So in today’s media landscape, how the hell did Doctor Who manage to pull off that final scene in The Power Of The Doctor unbesmirched by leaks or nosy rumours?
Today it’s a bit of a shorter trip – in fact a bit of a challenge to myself, to see if I can slam this fun-size piece out in a few minutes while I push back my next article a little closer to Christmas. (You’ll see why when it comes out.) We’re taking a look at how with the eye of the geekosphere and pop-culture worlds trained on it, Doctor Who used promotional misdirection to pull off that whammy that had the entire fanbase screaming.
Obviously huge spoilers for Doctor Who from this point out, but let’s be real, if you missed the episode on its airdate you were probably screwed – the twist was on CNN and other major news sites the next morning, for cripessakes.
First off, the Doctor Who promo machine told us exactly what was happening: the buzz was that David Tennant was returning.
Now, I’m not 100% sure whether this was announced first or leaked first and then the BBC did nothing to deny it, and that’s the sterling, professional level of deep research we continue to aspire to here at the Looking Glass, but however it originated, the news was in the wind.
Of course we were excited and our minds ran away with it. Given the nature of previous Doctor-actors returning on this show, most of us naturally assumed that this would be another instance of Ten being plucked from his timestream and going on an adventure with whoever would come after Thirteen. This news was germinating for so long that I remember speculating about if Ten would have a role to play in the then-upcoming Series Thirteen and the Flux event, which didn’t end up being the case.
Then the BBC rolled out the ultimate misdirect: they announced the “next” Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa. I’m sure he’s going to be a great Doctor, though I’ve never seen anything he’s done prior to this.
So The Power Of The Doctor aired on October 23rd, 2022, and even before the whammy at the end, it was already my favourite regeneration episode of all time. Between Flux and Power, if you’d told me in 2018 that Chibnall’s run would end up being this epic, I wouldn’t have disbelieved you but there definitely would have been a sense of relief after he started his run with a whole season that didn’t have an arc.
And as fatal wounds that demand regeneration go, “creamed by Harbinger-style ground sweep laser from a celestial entity that borders on eldritch abomination” is certainly up there. The Doctor takes in one last look out at the world in her current body – this time regenerating outside of her TARDIS. A smart move – I know it’s been established that the TARDIS is the Doctor’s place of safety when they’re most vulnerable at the moment of regeneration, but these increasingly explosive regenerations have caused the TARDIS control room to explode the last three times they’ve done it. Which is a useful trick on the writers’ part to get a new TARDIS control room for each new regeneration, but in-universe, you have to imagine the Doc’s a bit over having her living room explode each time.
Then Thirteen lets herself go. “Doctor Whoever I’m about to be – tag. You’re it.”
We were all expecting Ncuti Gatwa right up until the regeneration finished, and then – HOLY SHIT. BRO. BRUH.
They let us know exactly what was happening, let the fanosphere handily recontextualize it by what we’ve come to expect (“So it’ll probably be a special where Ten gets plucked from his timestream and meets the next regeneration from Whittaker, yeah?”), then took the fairly unprecedented step of formally doing promo for the next regeneration after Fourteen to really throw us off the scent.
This feels like a bit of a different approach from, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which found out a while back that it can throw off fans just by straight-up faking it in the trailers, inventing fake scenes or heavily editing scenes to avoid revealing plot details – everything from the number of infinity stones Thanos had in a given scene in Infinity War to editing out the multiversal Spideys in No Way Home.
Speaking of the MCU, Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness provided a nice play on this: they hid the true villain of the film in plain sight, but edited the trailers in such a way that it was strongly implied that the villain would be a multiversal version of Strange himself – potentially even the Darktor Strange we got to see in the What If? miniseries. I was genuinely surprised when I watched the film and found out who the real villain was. Well played.
Yet even with Marvel’s scorched-earth strategy of “say very little, hard swerve or just lie”, I sussed out the whole plot of Avengers Endgame the moment behind-the-scenes footage was leaked (I didn’t seek it out, Youtube decided to throw it in my face) of several lead actors in Ant-Man-esque quantum suits in what looked like a replica of the New York battle from the first Avengers. That, combined with the context given in the trailers, pretty much outlined things for me prior to release.
Mind you, that didn’t stop Endgame from being great, and nothing like that could have stopped the Infinity duology from being arguably the biggest Moment in epic blockbuster cinema since The Lord Of The Rings, but it goes to show you how all it takes is one loose thread when the entire world is looming over your shoulder for pre-release information.
Compared to that leak, Doctor Who had an easier job hiding this regeneration scene from prying eyes, given it takes place on a secluded cliffside rather than in a city.
One last thing about this – as much as this twist happily got us, it actually is not without foreshadowing – recall The Day Of The Doctor, when the enigmatic Curator, played by Tom Baker – whose scene really only makes sense if we read it that he is in fact a far-future regeneration of the Doctor – explains that one day, the Doctor will start regenerating into previous faces, “but just the old favourites”. We just didn’t expect it to start happening right now.
So at the end of the day, the most important thing is to tell a great story, whether or not people suss out a twist or development beforehand. But by the same token, there’s absolutely no substitute for “that” moment when you’re completely blindsided by a twist or plot development in real time, celebrating your own stupefaction with other fans and just generally being there for this. It’s a mood. And to that, all I can say is – allons’y!