“Doctor-lite” has become a contemporary buzzword doctor who—An episode that was born out of the schedule or general strict requirements of the lead actor’s TV season. almost all, all the time, one episode in which the Doctor is largely absent. But Ncuti Gatwa’s first season as the Doctor was almost nothing… until his other TV shows make this necessary.
When Gatwa was officially cast as the new Doctor, the actor was still wrapping up the final season of Netflix’s The Doctor. sex education, in which he played the groundbreaking queer character Eric Effiong. “Casting Ncuti meant casting before he was done. Sex education. It’s a risk we take, but it’s absolutely the right risk,” Showrunner Russell T. Davis Said in the latest column Doctor Who Magazine (via radio times), “because it means we’re getting the best doctors we could hope for in 2024.”
But in taking that risk, Davis found himself needing to address Gatwa’s availability—which brought him back to the idea that he couldn’t agree with the doctor/peer team, but if the doctor were there, The role of this team will be stronger. Episode 4 of this season“73 yards.”
“I loved the ‘Doctor-lite’ episode. But let’s face it, if Ncuti had been available, we would never have done a Doctor-lite episode in season one,” Davis continued. “The wonderful thing is, I’ve had this idea for a long time, where the Doctor and his companions step out of the TARDIS and see someone in the distance. But I could never get the two of them to work together. So when it became Doctor-lite – when When it was just Ruby, we were able to follow her throughout her life – it was liberating.
In a way, it provides Gatwa and the also-new Millie Gibson with a series of interesting episodes in the middle of the first season. “Boom” is an episode that relies heavily on putting Gatwa under the spotlight–The Doctor accidentally steps on a landmine and is unable to get out of the car–then Gibson’s lead turn in “73 Yards,” and then “dots and bubbles,” the two only appear in person in the episode’s climactic scene and otherwise perform on screen for the rest of the episode.
Given that “73 Yards” and “Boom” were arguably Gatwa and Gibson’s best episodes of the show’s first season, it’s definitely a risk worth taking.
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