Doctor Who overview: The 60th anniversary specials one year on

It’s strange to think that it’s already been close to one year since Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary specials were released. Since then, we’ve already had a full season of Ncuti Gatwa as the Fifteenth Doctor, a season that acted as a fresh starting point for the series while also bringing back a powerful villain for the first time in almost five decades.

But before all of that, we had three special episodes that reunited an incredibly popular pairing. For the first time since 2010, David Tennant and Catherine Tate were back together onscreen as the Doctor and Donna. This time, however, Tennant wasn’t back as the much-loved Tenth Doctor, but as a brand-new incarnation that was revisiting an old face.

It was a bold move for Russell T Davies to bring Tennant back in this way, and yet at the same time, it worked. The last time Tennant came back to the show in The Day of the Doctor, it had only been three years since he left in The End of Time. So he could still believably play the Tenth Doctor, especially one that was so close to the end of his life.

However, ten years after that special and fifteen after his single season with Catherine Tate as Donna, and it was clear that he had aged since then. Aged well, undoubtedly, but still aged. Classic Who usually worked around this issue by simply ignoring it, but to be honest, Classic Who was made at a time when older episodes were difficult to find and rarely repeated, so this was less of an issue.

Russell T Davies bringing Tennant back as a new incarnation was certainly a different way of acknowledging it, but it was a way that worked. Even better, the Doctor revisiting old faces had been strongly hinted at before, most notably with Tom Baker’s mysterious Curator in the 50th.