The original post: /r/television by /u/WinchesterMediaUK on 2025-10-25 16:11:43.
TL;DR - The Season 2 alternate ending is real, the reshoots filmed a year after principal photography changed everything, and the BBC, Bad Wolf Productions, and lead actor Ncuti Gatwa have been lying about the whole thing since Season 2 ended in June. Doctor Who is in trouble.
At a recent convention, the show’s original lead actress Carole Ann Ford (who guest starred in Season 2) has confirmed that the rumoured alternate ending to the Season 2 finale The Reality War is real, which would have ended on a cliffhanger establishing that the Doctor’s alternate reality daughter Poppy from that episode was her character Susan’s mother, answering a decades old question about how Susan was the Doctor’s granddaughter.
This confirms the fan analysis that the last 20 minutes of The Reality War (Everything after the scene where reality is restored and Poppy fades out of existence) were reshoots, that Poppy was not supposed to be human as in the broadcast episode, and that current leads Ncuti Gatwa (The Doctor) and Varada Sethu (Belinda) were going to stay on for Season 3 instead of being written out.
Before, all we had to go on was an image of the original scene accidentally released by Disney that didn’t show Ford, and Sienna and Robyn Mavanga-Phipps’ (Poppy) mother liking a TikTok post describing it in detail. But now we have confirmation from Ford along with her saying that she knows why the ending was changed but won’t talk about it.
In short, panic is now fully justified. The term “Chaos in Cardiff” was bandied about by fans in the early 2020s before Disney’s involvement, but it seems that is now very much the reality. The BBC are trying (and failing) to cover the whole mess up by making statements about how the broadcast episode and Ncuti Gatwa leaving after eighteen months in the role was the original plan despite all evidence to the contrary, but Doctor Who’s future has never been more precarious.
The reshoots changed absolutely everything, and mean that we currently have no long-term Doctor (new Doctor Billie Piper was cast less than two months before broadcast), no Companion, and that the planned story arc for Season 3 is gone since Poppy was retconned as being human and Belinda’s daughter instead of a Time Lord and Susan’s mother.
On top of that, we’re headed for the first year with no new episodes in the revival’s history despite big talk from showrunner Russell T. Davies that filming Seasons 1 & 2 back-to-back well ahead of broadcast would avoid that, and for the first time since 2005, there is no guarantee about when it will be recomissioned or who will be producing it since Disney are dragging their feet on deciding on whether or not to renew their co-production deal with the BBC.
Writer Robert Shearman also made the very valid point that the franchise as a whole is effectively trapped in limbo until Billie Piper’s casting is clarified, since the Expanded Universe material can’t do anything set after Season 2 until her character is established.
I get that some people don’t like naysaying or negativity within the fandom, and that it can be draining, but the situation is looking increasingly bleak.
Right now, the only thing confirmed is five-part spin-off The War Between The Land And The Sea. And all we have of that is a 48 second teaser and an Amazon listing for the Steelbook release but still no broadcast date.
I don’t know what comes next but personally I’ve made my peace with the fact that show is up on bricks for now, and may not come back at all.
Time will tell. It always does.