DOCTOR WHO EXCLUSIVE
New Time Lord Ncuti Gatwa kicks off his first full Doctor Who series with a two-episode launch this May — and while this run is being rebranded as “season one” around the world (despite the show’s recent 60th birthday), fans apparently shouldn’t expect massive changes.
“It’s the same old Doctor Who in many ways,” series boss Russell T Davies tells RT. “I’m not here to reinvent the wheel — I’m just going to make it spin better.
“It’s going to and fro in history — we’re going to the 60s, and there’s an episode in 1813 and others on modern-day Earth, which are always my favourites. And there are gorgeous alien planets, which we have an increased budget to show on a bigger scale.”
And as ever, the series will be stuffed with aliens, villains and monsters, kicking off with the “Bogeyman” stalking a creepy space station (pictured) in the series’ first episode — “a good old-fashioned scary Doctor Who monster,” Davies says — followed by a music-based baddie called Maestro in the second story (played by Jinkx Monsoon, inset top right).
“She’s part of this pantheon of gods with enormous powers,” Davies says. “I think Doctor Who is all the more exciting when the enemy is impossible to beat, and this is someone changing all of time and space around them.”
And that’s just for starters. In a later episode, “There’s a race of bird creatures,” Davies says. “The
