Doctor Who producer hints at follow-up to Timeless Child reveal in series 13
The Timeless Child revelations will be followed up in Doctor Who series 13, Matt Strevens teases.
Get ready for some fallout, Doctor Who fans! Jodie Whittaker's Doctor will revisit some loose ends from the 'Timeless Child' reveal in the soon-to-launch Doctor Who series 13. Or at least, that's what executive producer Matt Strevens seems to have implied in a new interview shared by the BBC.
Fans of the show will recall the Doctor Who series 12 centrepiece in which Whittaker's Time Lord discovered several big secrets about herself - she was the first Time Lord ever (known as The Timeless Child), the entire Time Lord race was genetically altered using her DNA, and she has lived countless lives that she can't remember.
Although he didn't give much in the way of clues, Strevens said in the new interview that Doctor Who series 13 "picks up on a lot of the things the Doctor learned about herself and her history at the end of series 12."
Viewers will be glad to hear that those huge revelations will have some sort of consequences, and it'll be interesting to see if Jo Martin's Fugitive Doctor - one of those secret regenerations that we just learned about - will reappear with any new insights.
Saying what he is willing to divulge about the new series, Strevens added: "I can honestly say it’s not like the previous two series. It’s huge in its scope and its scale and the jeopardy.
"Also we’ve really tried to go as big as could with the visuals as well, in terms of CGI and in terms of the design of the series, we really tried to pull out all the stops so when you watch the show, whether it’s in five years’ time or whenever, no one will be able to say, 'You made that during a pandemic!' We didn’t want that to impact on the experience for the audience."
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Strevens also explained how the new series, which will run for six episodes, came together during development. He said, "Series 13 evolved quite late in the day, we had a plan for what we wanted to do and then the pandemic hit and what we realised was that there were certain things we wouldn’t be able to do in the normal way, as we had for series 11 and 12.
"So rather than be compromised – as what you want for Doctor Who is for every series to be bigger and better than the last, you don’t want to rest on your laurels - Chris [Chibnall, showrunner] came up with the brilliant idea of going, 'Why don’t we just do something different for our era, wouldn’t it be great if we told one big story?' We knew we wouldn’t be able to do the same number of episodes in the time that we had so he came up with the fantastic idea of this overarching narrative.
"Each episode has the same bang for its buck, each episode has the story of the week, we’ve still gone for that filmic quality for each episode, but much more than the previous two seasons we’ve tied it together with a massive overarching story for the Doctor and huge jeopardy for the Doctor." We look forward to seeing how it plays out for The Timeless Child.
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Doctor Who: Flux begins on BBC One at 6:25pm on Sunday 31st October. For more, check out our dedicated Sci-Fi hub or our full TV Guide.
Authors
Rob Leane is the Gaming Editor at Radio Times, overseeing our coverage of the biggest games on PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, mobile and VR. Rob works across our website, social media accounts and video channels, as well as producing our weekly gaming newsletter. He has previously worked at Den of Geek, Stealth Optional and Dennis Publishing.
