Doctor Who: How the ending of one era foreshadowed the next

There’s a bitter irony in the fact that, when the Classic Series of Doctor Who was cancelled thirty years ago, it was moving to something close to the New Series in style. Particularly its final story, Survival.

We’re just weeks away from the latest series of Doctor Who. With plenty of details being revealed and some extremely promising trailers being released, the hype is really building up to Series 12. And it’s hardly surprising: when opening story Spyfall broadcasts, it’ll be exactly one year since the previous episode. For some fans, that year gap has been agonizing.

But not for all fans. In fact, for some of us, a year is hardly long to wait at all. Especially when compared to the Wilderness Years – sixteen years without any series of Doctor Who on television, just a movie and a couple of charity specials.

This month has helped to be a huge reminder of that dark time. December 6th marked thirty years since the broadcast of the final episode of Doctor Who – Survival: Part Three. After twenty-six seasons, the show was very quietly brought to an end. Which is pretty ironic, because it was essentially foreshadowing the New Series anyway.

The Seventh Doctor’s relationship with Ace was, in some ways, a natural prelude to what we later saw with Rose and other companions in the New Series.

(Image Courtesy BBC Studios, BritBox)

Exploring the companion’s background

When I say “foreshadowing”, I don’t mean in terms of mythology. There are no hints of a looming Time War or anything like that. (Or looms, come to think of it.) Instead, I’m referring to the style of the series. It’s ironic that in the final seasons of the show, it was close to something that Russell T Davies would end up taking further when the show finally came back.

This was particularly clear with the companion Ace. Companions had often been important in Doctor Who, but Ace was different. With her character, we got to see a lot of development over time on-screen. Development that many other companions hadn’t been given.

More important than that: we got to explore her home life and where she came from. Something that we didn’t get to see at all with most other companions. They’d be written well and fleshed out, and we’d hear mentions of their family and friends. But we never got to see that.

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The final season of the Classic Series changed all that. Three out of the four serials explored Ace’s roots in three separate ways. Ghost Light took her back to her home of Perivale, albeit to a time long before she had even been born. During that story, we learned about a house that she had been absolutely terrified of as a child. (So naturally, the Doctor decides it’d be fun to take her back there!)

The Curse of Fenric featured major revelations for the character. We got to meet her family (but, being set during the Second World War, she had no idea about that), and we found out why the Doctor had wanted to travel with her in the first place. This is a story that answers several major questions that had been building since her first appearance, thus giving us an arc with the companion at the center of it – something the New Series has done many times.

A grounded final story

But it’s Survival, the final story of the Classic Series, that feels the closest to the New Series. It’s not just set firmly in modern-day, but it’s also surprisingly grounded. In other modern-day set stories of the Classic Series, the focus would be on the military, the scientists, or even just the Doctor and his companions.

But in Survival, we explore a world that feels much more ordinary and familiar. We see the places Ace went to with her mates. We meet some of those mates (some in Perivale, some very, very far away). We’re presented with a world that feels familiar to us and yet completely alien to Doctor Who, at least at the time.

This would be a world that Russell T Davies would often explore in his episodes, particularly with Rose and her family. It’s really not hard to see why, either. When the world is more grounded and more believable, it makes the regular, sci-fi elements that much more extraordinary, even more magical. It’s no surprise that Rona Munro, who wrote this story, would return almost three decades later to write The Eaters of Light for Peter Capaldi’s final series as the Twelfth Doctor.

It’s definitely ironic that, just as Doctor Who was starting to feel more modern and up to date than it had felt in years, it’s brought to a rather sudden end. But at least we have the show back now. And, after over a decade of the New Series and with considerable hype for Jodie Whittaker’s second series, I doubt it’s going anywhere.

Are you a fan of the Seventh Doctor’s era? Do you think it was a strong update for the series? Do you think the series should have gone further, or did it instead end at the right time? Let us know in the comments below.