The Doctor Who Spinoff I’d Like To See

When Russel Davies returned as show-runner for Doctor Who last year, something he was very open about was wanting to do multiple spinoffs. The vague model was clearly something along the lines of what Marvel or Star Wars have been doing on Disney+, with lots of related shows tying together, and the new co-production arrangement between the BBC, Bad Wolf, Sony, and Disney was clearly in part to support something like that.

Doctor Who seems like the kind of show that should be able to spin off multiple successful child shows, but in practice, this has not been the case. Davies tried this last time he was in charge too, to what we’ll politely call “mixed results.” Partly I think the problem problem is because of the way the show is an un-franchise, but mostly because the appeal is the main character, not the setting or the premise or the world, so you any spinoff has the central problem that the Doctor isn’t in them. (See also why Bond has never had a successful spinoff.)

Other than the one UNIT-vs-Sea Monsters spinoff coming later this year, we’re unlikely to see the explosion of “The Whoniverse” Davies was hoping for a year ago given the lukewarm reception the current iteration of the show has gotten. But, let me tell you about the spinoff I want them to do. This is something I’ve been kicking around for a while, but since I have no way to make it happen myself, I’m putting this out in the universe because I want to see it.

While past spinoffs have centered around well-liked side characters, the Tennant-Tate anniversary specials a year ago suggest an alternate approach: spinoffs with past Doctors. Who has a deep bench of former cast members, nearly all of whom seem willing to come back for a one-off under the right circumstances. In a world where seasons are getting shorter and the gaps between them longer, making “flashback” side-series could be an interesting way to stay on the air more regularly. And you could just do this straight: announce that this fall, Matt Smith or Sylvester McCoy are coming back for a 90 minute special, big press, Radio Times cover, the lot.

However, the nature of the show’s structure makes it uniquely positioned to do something almost nothing else could do: a stealth surprise spinoff.

Check this out.

The fundamental engine that Who runs on is that every week, the Tardis lands in a new somewhere and shenanigans ensue. But, these aren’t places so much as they are genres. Doctor Who doesn’t do “this week a lava planet” so much as it does “this week, an Agatha Christie mystery” or “vampire movie”, or “this week, the 60s Hammer mummy movie.”

The traditional opening of any Who story starts at the place the story is going to take place before the Tardis arrives. It’s not just establishing a location, but establishing what kind of a story it is, what the genre is, and most importantly what the narrative rules in play are. Then someone gets killed, and the Tardis arrives.

Doctor Who also always prefers it if it can spark a couple of different genres together, so maybe you’re doing a riff on a Hammer Horror Mummy movie, but the mummies are robots working for an alien that’s both Lovecraft-adjacent and an ancient astronauts in the In Search Of sense. Or your vampires are attacking a WWII codebreaking base at the same time as it’s being raided by Soviet special forces while both sides are looking for an artifact from norse mythology. Or maybe you’re doing a riff on an Agatha Christie novel where a bunch of people in a manor house are being picked off, and sure, maybe the manor house is in England in the 1920s, or maybe it’s a lighthouse and the killer is a different cthulu-esque alien, or maybe the servants in the manor house are Asimov-style robots and the manor house itself is a mining vehicle on the planet Dune. Or do something a little more idiosyncratic and do an adaptation of JG Ballard’s High Rise, but in space.

And again, the job of the opening several minutes is to lay out what kind of a story it is, and what narrative rules are in play, to let the audience get oriented with what the show is doing this week. If you’re doing a Christie mystery, everyone acts like a character in a Christie mystery, regardless of the other trappings. For this to work properly, the setting has to be close to a fully operational premises on its own, able to work as a movie in its own right. There’s usually even the character that would be the main character if this was a standalone piece. The new show with its shorter runtimes abbreviates this more than the old show did, but most stories open something like The Twilight Zone would, here’s this week’s cast, here’s the premise, here’s what narrative rules are in play. This is probably the person whose gonna crack the mystery or whatever.

(As a comparison, consider that the various Star Treks have to sketch out that week’s mystery/problem, but very few Trek episodes would function as compelling drama on their own if the Enterprise never showed up.)

But right about the point where the standalone piece would have the inciting incident leading into the first act, instead Doctor Who cannonballs a time-travelling space wizard into the mix.

The real transgressive power of the character isn’t that they’re an immortal super-smart space alien or whatever, it’s that they don’t have to follow the narrative rules of that week’s genre, they follow the rules of a Doctor Who story instead. So they get to smash across the narrative in ways that the “local” characters just can’t. (And credit where credit is due, the first place I ever saw this theory of how the Doctor Who works fully enumerated was Elizabeth Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum.)

To summarize: for Doctor Who to function the way it does, it has to sketch out a fairly operarational stand-alone genre show so it can crash the Doctor into it. What I want is a spinoff that puts that off as long as possible. Actually commit to the bit that it’s a stand-alone show, then only crash the Doctor in halfway through the season.

Here’s the pitch. You annouce a new, 6-episode BBC show. It’s one of those shows with a big cast all at a country manor house in the nineteen teens or twenties, Upstairs-Downstairs/Gosford Park/Downton Abbey style. You get a fading aristocracy gloss, with either a “world between the wars” or “twilight of the gilded age,” depending on which decade you choose. Maybe someone lost their fortune on the Titanic. Lots of dead husbands from The War. Lady Chatterton-Bakerfield-Montgomery has gotten really into Spiritualism! She’s trying to contact her dead husband, Colonel Chatterton-Bakerfield-Montgomery, who died under mysterious circumstances along the Belgian frontier. There’s an American financier, a Scottish Banker, a Texan, secrets and plots and wheels within wheels. Countess de Courvoisier-Aquitane has come across the channel for Lady C-B-M’s big seance. Not everyone trusts the Lady’s Spirit Medium, the strange Malcom Xerxes. Ghosts! Murder! Affairs! Secrets! “If anyone found out, I’d be ruined!” Just really melodrama it up. Did they really contact the spirit of the Colonel from the Great Beyond? With whom do the loyalties of Heinrich, the Colonel’s former valet, lay?

Our heroine is probably something along the lines of a Plucky Reporter or Aspiring Writer, youngest child of one of the minor aristocrats, recently returned from her travels, something in that batch of tropes. The sort of person you clock as “oh, it’s Ellen Ripley, but Edwardian.” She’s gonna solve the murder and/or expose the charlatan, and maybe the big twist at the end is that she turns out to be Agatha Christie. You know, the sort of thing that Masterpiece Theatre used to be full of.

You let this cook for two episodes, completely straight.

Meanwhile there’s a new member of the servant staff at the house, a footman or maid, maybe, recently arrived. This character stays out of focus, both literally and figuratively, but they’re always kind of around. They’re always the one out in the hallway near where the Whispered Conversation happened, or near where Professor Xerces keeps their Psychic Crystal they brought back from Foreign Lands. Also, this character spends a lot of time out in the barn back behind the main house where no one else ever goes.

To really tip my cards here, that Mysterious and Possibly Sinister Servant character is played by either Paul McGann or Jodie Whittaker.

Things heat up, bodies start piling up, and our Plucky Lead gets more and more suspicious of Mysterious Servant. Something weird happens at the Big Seance, they’ve summoned a real ghost? The Mysterious Servant leaps into the room, yells “Don’t look at it!”, swipes the medium’s Psychic Crystal off the table, and races out of the house. The Plucky Lead follows them out to the barn, throws open the doors, and… there’s a Police Box parked there. The Mysterious Servant is swapping their servant outfit for their regular Doctor coat, and then The Doctor turns back towards the door and says something like “this is where things get really complicated” or “I’m probably not the doctor you were expecting,” or just a “nice to meet you, I’m the Doctor,” and boom, cliffhanger scream, credits, and you’ve been watching a new Doctor Who this whole time. You hit the floor running the next week.

And, look I get it. I get why you don’t actually want to make a whole-ass TV show and tell everyone it’s a different show. On the other hand, imagine how hard the internet would freak out when they realized a secret new season of Doctor Who was not only coming, but started three weeks ago.

For the rest of time, that show is going to be on BBC iPlayer with the name “Doctor Who and The Spectre of Crimson Manor,” but there’s two weeks there where you can just pretend it’s just “The Spectre of Crimson Manor.” That might be worth doing the one time you could get away with it if for no other reason than to get the PR boost you’d get from having done something no other show could do and no one has ever done before.

You could do this with probably any of the living actors, but I feel like the two I mentioned above—McGann & Whittaker—are at the sweet spot of having been a Doctor but not having that be the thing they’re the most known for in pop culture. Someone like David Tennant would immediately get the reaction of “hey neat, Doctor Who is in this!” and using Gatwa (or whomever the incumbent was at the time) would be too obvious.

This is all brought to you by the fact that I’m currently watching a show that would have been the perfect cover for something like this. I’ll decline to mention the show because I’m genuinely enjoying it on its own, and I don’t want my internet review to be “I wish this was secretly a different show”, because I really don’t, but man. Some shows really do feel like a Doctor Who episode where the Doctor just never shows up, and I keep watching it thinking “you could slip Jodie Whittaker into this scene so easily.”

Anyway, BBC, my consulting rates are very reasonable if you want to hear more!