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shivverThere's a YouTube video out now about what probably happened to "The Reality War", and it confirms a lot of what I conjectured in my previous post, though note that all of this is still fan speculation based on facts and clues gleaned from many different sources.
The second season of the Fifteenth's Doctor run started filming in 2023, before the 60th anniversary episodes were aired. Note that that shows that the overall story for the Fifteenth Doctor had been planned out way in advance, with the second season being designed and fully written before the first season had started airing. Filming for the second season concluded in May 2024, before even half of Ruby's episodes were broadcast.
The third season was supposed to start filming at the beginning of 2025. However, in February of 2025, the actors were called back in for another round of filming for the second seson, though it was never publicly revealed what it was for. The thought is that Ncuti Gatwa decided to leave the show at a very late date, and so RTD had to rework "The Reality War" so that it no longer continued the Fifteenth Doctor's story and so that it became a regeneration episode.
The video mentioned other clues. There had been publicity shots of Carole Ann Ford in a different costume from the one she wore in "The Interstellar Song Contest", but she didn't appear in "The Reality War". Some of the actors appeared different between the first half of the episode and the second: Poppy in particular was older and larger, but also Ruby sported bangs in the second half, unlike her longer, parted hair in the front in the first half. On Disney+, when it displayed the "next episode" banner after the end of "Wish World", it showed a still of the Doctor and Belinda dancing together at a party (in a night club-like setting, not a 50s wish world setting), which didn't happen in "The Reality War".
So, the conclusion that the video came to was that originally, the episode had meant to establish Poppy as the Doctor's daughter and probably Susan's mother, but because it now had to be a regeneration episode, that entire plot was thrown out and rewritten so that Poppy was given a reason for existing and so that the Doctor died for a reason. And, in my opinion, he regenerated alone and into a non-Doctor character so that if the show is canceled for now, they didn't have to choose and sign on a new actor for the Doctor who might not get to actually play the Doctor for years, they didn't shackle Varada Sethu to the show for an unknown amount of time, and the new showrunner isn't saddled with a Doctor and companion they may not want.
The video did state that they believed that only the Poppy part of the story was altered -- that the original episode had the Omega/Rani story end exactly as we saw and that only the part after that was rewritten -- but I don't think that makes much sense. I don't think that RTD originally brought Omega back just to have him be an insane voracious CGI monster, and I don't think he created two excellent Rani characters and their contentious relationship just to have one get eaten and the other one run away.
In my opinion, the original storyline was much more complex than the video maker assumed, with the Poppy and Susan backstory and relationship coming out during the Doctor's confrontation with the Rani and Omega, and so they couldn't just extricate Poppy and Susan from it all. They had to cut everything dealing with Omega, and so they turned him into a CGI monster and his story became Open Portal, Eat Rani, Shoot with Gun, Done.
Of course, we'll never get the real story, because they will never explain What Should Have Been. I think the thing that hurts the most is that if Disney really is on the fence about renewing the DW contract, the way this episode played out probably pushed them over towards no. And same with the BBC. Ah well.
The second season of the Fifteenth's Doctor run started filming in 2023, before the 60th anniversary episodes were aired. Note that that shows that the overall story for the Fifteenth Doctor had been planned out way in advance, with the second season being designed and fully written before the first season had started airing. Filming for the second season concluded in May 2024, before even half of Ruby's episodes were broadcast.
The third season was supposed to start filming at the beginning of 2025. However, in February of 2025, the actors were called back in for another round of filming for the second seson, though it was never publicly revealed what it was for. The thought is that Ncuti Gatwa decided to leave the show at a very late date, and so RTD had to rework "The Reality War" so that it no longer continued the Fifteenth Doctor's story and so that it became a regeneration episode.
The video mentioned other clues. There had been publicity shots of Carole Ann Ford in a different costume from the one she wore in "The Interstellar Song Contest", but she didn't appear in "The Reality War". Some of the actors appeared different between the first half of the episode and the second: Poppy in particular was older and larger, but also Ruby sported bangs in the second half, unlike her longer, parted hair in the front in the first half. On Disney+, when it displayed the "next episode" banner after the end of "Wish World", it showed a still of the Doctor and Belinda dancing together at a party (in a night club-like setting, not a 50s wish world setting), which didn't happen in "The Reality War".
So, the conclusion that the video came to was that originally, the episode had meant to establish Poppy as the Doctor's daughter and probably Susan's mother, but because it now had to be a regeneration episode, that entire plot was thrown out and rewritten so that Poppy was given a reason for existing and so that the Doctor died for a reason. And, in my opinion, he regenerated alone and into a non-Doctor character so that if the show is canceled for now, they didn't have to choose and sign on a new actor for the Doctor who might not get to actually play the Doctor for years, they didn't shackle Varada Sethu to the show for an unknown amount of time, and the new showrunner isn't saddled with a Doctor and companion they may not want.
The video did state that they believed that only the Poppy part of the story was altered -- that the original episode had the Omega/Rani story end exactly as we saw and that only the part after that was rewritten -- but I don't think that makes much sense. I don't think that RTD originally brought Omega back just to have him be an insane voracious CGI monster, and I don't think he created two excellent Rani characters and their contentious relationship just to have one get eaten and the other one run away.
In my opinion, the original storyline was much more complex than the video maker assumed, with the Poppy and Susan backstory and relationship coming out during the Doctor's confrontation with the Rani and Omega, and so they couldn't just extricate Poppy and Susan from it all. They had to cut everything dealing with Omega, and so they turned him into a CGI monster and his story became Open Portal, Eat Rani, Shoot with Gun, Done.
Of course, we'll never get the real story, because they will never explain What Should Have Been. I think the thing that hurts the most is that if Disney really is on the fence about renewing the DW contract, the way this episode played out probably pushed them over towards no. And same with the BBC. Ah well.
