Doctor Who

[ZariusTwo]

Even Jo Martin finally admits her TV writing was a bit s*it

https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi...ve-newsupdate/

[Autbot_Benz]

Originally Posted by ZariusTwo

Even Jo Martin finally admits her TV writing was a bit s*it

https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi...ve-newsupdate/

She was still a better doctor than Jodie

[member_removed]

Originally Posted by Autbot_Benz

She was still a better doctor than Jodie

I feel Jodie just watched a bunch of Tennent and Smith episodes and thought, that's how it's done.

[Roseangelo]

I liked the concept and potential of the Fugitive Doctor as she was introduced. Less so what she became.

[ZariusTwo]

According to Richard Osman's podcast "The Rest Is Entertainment", the show was going to be paused straight after the Christmas special anyway and put out to tender in 2028/2029, so we weren't going to get anymore Doctor Who for the remainder of the decade. They pushed the tender process up and ditched the special due to a shift in leadership at the drama department.

[Autbot_Benz]

Originally Posted by member_removed

I feel Jodie just watched a bunch of Tennent and Smith episodes and thought, that's how it's done.

For the first season Chibnall told her not to watch previous doctors

[ZariusTwo]

Some real characters are trying to crowd-fund their A.I generated Doctor Who fanfilms. Just saw a GoFundme for a 60x Christmas Special that'll cost around 20K. WTH are those people thinking?

I'm in favour of A.I fanfilms more so than all of reddit and bluesky, but I'd never crowd-fund like this for any project I worked on for fun.

[ZariusTwo]

BBC Studios intend on pitching for the tender

https://deadline.com/2026/07/doctor-...ll-1236981740/

[member_removed]

So "F"ing stupid, allowing themselves to compete with others to produce their own show. Just keep it on house.

Otherwise, you end up with Bad Robot/Secret Hideout" levels of piss weak Star Trek.

[ZariusTwo]

TARDIS and Daleks briefly appear in this video

[ZariusTwo]

[ZariusTwo]

[ZariusTwo]

[ZariusTwo]

[ZariusTwo]

Dominic Minns named as the creative director of the upcoming Doctor Who animated series for pre-schoolers



https://www.televisual.com/news/blue...who-animation/

[ZariusTwo]

It's all A.I, but it's a full 55 minutes!

I enjoyed it on an 'achievement' level, the A.I is really good and other than a few drifts here and there, holds together in all the places where it NEEDS to stay coherant to pass as an overall expereiance. As for the writing, the pacing is a little sluggish and there needs to be more urgency in the acting in places, but later on that appears to be covered well and there's some bursts of emotion here and there. The story is engaging but it's resolution is far too wrapped up in NuWho gimmicks and theatrics to come across as a satisfactory conclusion. Very rushed.

I'd give it a 6/10.

Seems a lot of people really liked it, praise across the board in the YT video comments, with only a few people protesting.

[ZariusTwo]

Not too surprising, the content creator behind the A.I fan film has been receiving death threats from the Luddite scumbags

An AI-assisted Doctor Who fan episode has attracted hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube just days after release, while its use of generative AI has sparked controversy among fans.

The 55-minute episode, titled The Curse of Kilmorag, was released by fan project The Unmade Season and presents its own unofficial continuation of Doctor Who.


At the time of writing, the video is closing in on 400,000 views, a sizeable audience for an unofficial fan production of almost television-episode length.

The opening briefly recreates David Tennant’s facial likeness and voice, depicting his Doctor immediately before regenerating into a new incarnation.

In The Unmade Season’s own trailer, the creator introduces the new Doctor as someone “we’re calling John Warr”. Searches have not turned up an acting profile connecting a real John Warr to the production, while the episode description says most of its footage was generated locally using AI video-generation models LTX 2.5 and MiniMax.


The episode itself was hand-written by screenwriter Thomas Vittlowe and produced and edited over two months, according to its description.


The episode has proved controversial among some Doctor Who fans because of its use of generative AI, particularly its synthetic performances and the recreation of Tennant’s likeness and voice.

On Digital Spy forums, some viewers have praised the episode’s writing and ambition, with one calling it “fantastic”. Others have questioned the synthetic performances and how AI productions compare with traditional acting and filmmaking.


Reaction on Reddit has been more heated. Some fans have criticised the use of actors’ likenesses, while others argue that the project deserves to be judged differently from low-effort AI clips because of the impressive writing, editing and production involved.

Some viewers who remain sceptical about generative AI have nevertheless said they enjoyed the finished episode.

In a video responding to the attention, Vittlowe said he had been “overwhelmed” by the positive reaction but claimed he had also received multiple threats against his life by email.


He said one message threatened to “string you up for creating AI slop” and said he intends to report the threats to police.

Vittlowe also alleged that some of those contacting him claimed they had been directed towards his channel by other Doctor Who YouTubers. Those allegations have not been independently verified.

He denied suggestions that he is profiting from the project, saying creating the AI-generated visuals is expensive and that financial support goes towards the credits required to produce them.

Vittlowe said people were free to disagree with the use of generative AI, but called for criticism to remain respectful.

Despite the backlash, he says he intends to continue producing his stories.

Fan-made Doctor Who films have existed for decades, but generative video tools are allowing individual creators to attempt projects on a very different scale.

Whether viewers see The Curse of Kilmorag as an impressive fan experiment or an uncomfortable glimpse of where generative AI is heading, its rapidly growing audience suggests plenty are curious enough to watch for themselves while Doctor Who remains off the air.

https://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/doctor...-ai-107380.htm

[ZariusTwo]

Article in the Telegraph on the A.I episode.

Paywalled, but I did manage to copy/paste it when the paywall glitched

David Tennant is back where he belongs at the controls of the Tardis in a new Doctor Who episode that has kicked up a storm on the internet.

“Here we go again,” says the Doctor as his trusty time machine is jostled by dastardly cosmic forces. The BBC’s most famous creation then undergoes one of his trademark regenerations, his eyes glowing, waves of energy shooting from his fingers at the start of a 55-minute instalment that has clocked up more than half a million views in just a few days.

But not all Whovians are waving their sonic screwdrivers in joy at the unexpected return of one of the more popular incarnations of the Doctor. That’s because this new Doctor Who – titled The Unmade Season – is a wholly unauthorised fan project, made for a fraction of the cost of the BBC’s last series and looking almost as good. It has been created using artificial intelligence (AI) and without the permission of the BBC or Tennant, whose likeness features in that opening before he is replaced by a new and entirely original Doctor, whom the project credits to the fictional actor “John Warr”.


“I’m a Doctor Who fan, and someone that has been trying to break into the television industry for years,” says the Scottish filmmaker Thomas Vittlowe, the creator of this project, who dismisses internet theories that his name is a front for a collective in the style of the hacking group known as Anonymous (“I am primarily one individual supported by a few other creatives,” Vittlowe says). “But the real fire in my belly came from the de facto cancellation of the show, and rather than just complain about it, I wanted to create my own fan film, consciously catering a story more towards smaller BBC budgets,” he says, referring to the Doctor’s current hiatus and the surprise jettisoning of a Christmas special previously announced by the BBC.


However, his efforts have split the fandom. “Doctor Who literally teaches you to love humanity, and AI is actually killing anything that stems from it, feeding on it and regurgitating it out,” raged one devotee on social media. “The Doctor would not be happy his image was used for this; he’d try to stop this and return the water and heat generated to create it back to some good use,” said another, referring to the high environmental cost of AI.

Despite that, AI film-making is now a viable option for budding directors, and a project like this could be seen as a marker along the road towards an increased reliance on the technology for a cash-strapped TV industry, which has recently seen both Channel 4 and the BBC shed jobs. Dr Dominic Lees, associate professor in filmmaking at the University of Reading and an expert on the use of generative AI in film and television, tells me: “This is more than a harbinger of things to come. This is the here and now. The advances in high-quality generative AI have already created a whole new branch of film culture, with original AI film – mostly short-form – becoming well established, celebrated in AI film festivals across the world, including one in Cannes. Alongside this, the AI Doctor Who content on YouTube demonstrates how AI tools that fans can easily access provide so much potential for them to creatively engage in the shows they adore. The Unmade Season is hugely respectful of the TV legend that inspires it.”

Vittlowe, who is utilising the Patreon platform to fund the project, recently posted to The Doctorverse Discord community, explaining that the technology used to create his production – AI video-generation models LTX 2.5 and MiniMax – costs about £50 a minute. “It’s really expensive,” he wrote, “but I have been sponsored by the AI platform for my first two episodes that have reduced the costs massively for me – but of course I’ve still incurred a large cost… For me, it’s worth it, because it’s incredibly creatively rewarding to get my ideas out there.” (For comparison, the average cost of an episode in Ncuti Gatwa’s two Disney-produced seasons was between £6 million and £8 million.)

Today, he tells me: “I want to be clear that I do not support the use of AI in replacing creatives on professional/official productions. I do believe, however, as a proof of concept, it is democratising the creative space for those who want to get their voices heard in a very crowded space, where, typically, only creatives of one very specific world view seem to get heard.”

The use of AI is obviously new when it comes to Doctor Who. However, its followers have long created their own original Whovian content, whether by writing stories or making unauthorised films. “There’s always been that kind of drive from fans, whether it was on TV or not,” says Tom Spilsbury, a former editor of Doctor Who Magazine and lifelong Whovian, citing a host of amateur-led VHS productions that came out in the 1990s after the original series’s cancellation in 1989. “In this pause that we’re in, the fans have maybe been more motivated to fill that gap.”

Many Whovians have been delighted to have the Doctor back on screen at a time when the future of the franchise is up in the air. “The best Doctor Who since the end of Capaldi,” wrote one viewer on YouTube, referring to the Scottish actor who played the titular Time Lord from 2014 to 2017. “Wow, this is incredible, one of the best Doctor Who shows ever. Wake up, BBC and smell the roses. It’s time to have a good series again,” enthused another.

It is true that, in places, The Unmade Season suffers from that telltale “AI slop” gloss that is a feature of AI on the screen. But its story about a secret military base in coastal Scotland is both great fun and, crucially, a lot easier to follow than much of the recent Doctor Who. Moreover, many will simply be glad that the series is no longer wagging a finger and lecturing them – a charge directed at both Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who (which encompassed the Jodie Whittaker years) and his successor, Russell T Davies, who said he had “no time” for “online warriors” and their “toxic” world view.


“The show has failed fans in recent years, with producers far more interested in lecturing and talking down to their audiences,” says Vittlowe via email. “It has created a sanitised version built entirely around ‘vibes’, and used it as a sandbox for their politics. The show’s creators actually told fans who didn’t like that direction to ‘go and touch grass’ in their arrogance. And they did, in their… millions. How embarrassing? And also telling.”

He isn’t opposed to Doctor Who delivering a message of tolerance, but feels that audiences will instinctively tune out where they suspect they are being subjected to a sermon. “There are so many ways to convey equivalent anti-discriminatory messages – which, by the way, I absolutely support. My fan film includes it, too,” he says, referring to a menagerie of scary aliens who turn out to be kind and decent allies of the Doctor. But he rues that in recent years, the TV series has felt more akin to a “mandatory HR DEI training course”.

Some commentators have expressed surprise that neither the BBC nor Tennant have gone to YouTube to have the episode taken down. But Vittlowe feels that he is on firm legal ground as he isn’t profiting from the episode: it’s a labour of love that involved months of work (he is currently toiling on a second, “more horror-oriented”, episode that he hopes to finish by the end of the year).

New fan productions are filling the gap after the BBC put the show on pause following the Ncuti Gatwa years
New fan productions are filling the gap after the BBC put the show on pause following the Ncuti Gatwa years Credit: BBC Studios/Bad Wolf/James Pardon
“For the full episode, I did open with 30 seconds of a synthesised likeness with a similar appearance to [Tennant’s Doctor], with his regeneration. Purely to bridge fans of his era of the show to the iteration I am presenting… That 30 seconds is the only time I will use [Tennant] moving forward,” he says.

“If the BBC want me to clip out the Doctor’s regeneration at the start of the episode, they can get in touch and I will do that out of goodwill. I do not want to upset anyone, least of all any actors. I hope they realise it is out of love and admiration. I did not invent this technology. However, I do want to add that I am adhering to existing legal guidelines. None of my content is or will be for profit. It is a fan film. Many fan film creators actually use copyrighted material, in addition to likenesses. I see no difference here.”

The response to Doctor Who: The Unmade Season has clearly surprised Vittlowe, who reveals that he has received death threats – with one Whovian promising to “string him up”. He is encouraged, however, to hear from other fans who appreciate his work for what it is: an homage to Doctor Who and a reminder of how much the Doctor is beloved across the cosmos.

“It has been a loud minority, but of course when you get a vile email, that’s going to be what you hyper-fixate over, isn’t it?” he says. “But I’ve been reminded to step back and look at the enormous quantity of positive messages… It’s a sea of ‘this is what Doctor Who should be!’”

Doctor Who: The Unmade Season is on YouTube

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2026/...as-we-know-it/

[Autbot_Benz]

I wonder how David Tennant feels about his likeness and voice being used without his consent for ai garbage

[ToTheNines]

Shouldn’t this show be called Doctor When?