[COLUMN] The Lost and Found Children of Russell T. Davies' Doctor Who | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the recent season of Doctor Who, including its final moments. So consider yourself warned.

At the end of “The Reality War”, the fifteenth season finale of the revival of Doctor Who, the Fifteenth Doctor’s (Ncuti Gatwa) journey concluded how it began, with the character saving a lost child and reconnecting them with their family.

Returning showrunner Russell T. Davies has been preoccupied with the idea of lost and found children. The first episode fully built around the Fifteenth Doctor, “The Church on Ruby Road”, found the character confronting a horde of goblins snatching and devouring abandoned children. These goblins eat the baby version of the Doctor’s companion Ruby (Millie Gibson), leading to a dystopian alternate world where Ruby is never found and fostered by her mother Carla (Michell Greenidge).

This theme carried through into the season that followed. In “Space Babies”, the Doctor and Ruby encounter a bunch of children abandoned by their parents in a “baby farm.” In “The Devil’s Chord”, the Doctor and Ruby face the Maestro (Jinkx Monsoon), the abandoned child of the Toymaker (Neil Patrick Harris), the last foe vanquished by the Fourteenth Doctor (David Tennant). In “Boom”, Splice (Caoilinn Springall) wanders a warzone looking for her dead father (Joe Anderson).

This idea of abandoned and neglected children forms a thematic throughline that spans the season. That season builds to a reunion and reconciliation between the abandoned Ruby and her biological mother (Faye McKeever) at the very end of the finale, “Empire of Death”, in which Ruby agrees to meet her father. The next time that Ruby appears, in “Lucky Day”, she has embraced a big and broad unconventional family unit. She is a child who has been found.

This theme carries over into the season that follows. In “Lux”, the Doctor and his new companion Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) are drawn into the central mystery by a mother (Lucy Thackeray) who is looking for her son (Cassius Hackforth), who disappeared during a screening at the local cinema. In “The Story & the Engine”, the goddess Abena (Michelle Asante) plots to avenge herself on her father Anansi, who tried to sell her off into marriage. “The Reality War” ends with Carla fostering the lost God of Wishes, a baby snatched from their home by the villainous Rani (Archie Panjabi) and pulled across space and time.

The villain of “The Interstellar Song Contest” is a young Hellion named Kid (Freddie Fox), an orphan created by a genocide. Belinda is surprised by the name. “As in... baby goat?” she asks. Cora (Miriam-Teak Lee), another survivor of the genocide, replies, “As in his mother was shot before anyone asked her his name.” In “The Well”, the pair discover that Aliss Fenly (Rose Ayling-Ellis) is the lone survivor of a horrific massacre. “Can you take me home?” Aliss begs the Doctor. “I have a daughter.”

Throughout the season, Belinda has urgently been telling the Doctor that she needs to get home. There is a clear desperation to her pleas and insistence. In “The Story & the Engine”, Belinda finds herself confronted by a vision of a young girl named Poppy (Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps). The Doctor and Ruby had encountered a version of Poppy in the distant future of “Space Babies”, just as they had encountered a version of Belinda in the distant future of “Boom.”

In the season finale, “The Reality War”, it is revealed that Belinda is a single mother and that the reason that she has been so insistent on getting home is to be reunited with her daughter, Poppy. The reason that Poppy was never mentioned before was because of the aftershocks of the rewriting of reality at the end of “The Reality War”, with Poppy retroactively written out of existence by the same forces that shifted the borders of Norway and Sweden 7km or resurrected Ernest Borgnine.

The Fifteenth Doctor ultimately sacrifices his life to bring Poppy back into existence and to reconnect mother and daughter. In the grand scheme of Doctor Who and even in the bombastic context of “The Reality War”, this is a relatively intimate character beat. It is essentially Davies revisiting the regeneration of the Tenth Doctor (Tennant) in “The End of Time, Part II”, where the character survives a threat to the fabric of reality, only to sacrifice himself to save one man (Bernard Cribbins).

The Fifteenth Doctor dies to save a child that he has never met. Indeed, he only gets to meet the real Belinda and Poppy in the final moments before he regenerates. It is a truly selfless gesture, this version of the character giving up his life to make sure that a parent and a child can be reunited. It also feels like a cohesive encapsulation of the larger themes of this era of the show. Davies’ return to Doctor Who is very much about the Doctor’s relationship to children, especially abandoned ones.

To a certain extent, Davies inherited this theme from his predecessor, Chris Chibnall. Chibnall radically rewrote the continuity of Doctor Who with “The Timeless Children”, which revealed that the Doctor was themselves an abandoned child found on the planet Gallifrey and whose genetic code ended up serving as the basis for the entirety of Time Lord society. It was a very strange and clumsy beat, heavy on lore and continuity and effectively transforming the Doctor into a “Chosen One.”

Davies’ return to Doctor Who has largely been a rejection of the idea of lore and continuity, treating attempts to codify mythology as inherently suffocating. Indeed, despite Ncuti Gatwa’s stated desperation to face the iconic foes, the Fifteenth Doctor will notably be the first Doctor to regenerate having never faced the Daleks, the Master or the Cybermen on screen. As such, Davies has shown little interest in the lore of “the Timeless Child”, ignoring characters like Tecteun (Barbara Flynn).

While it would have been easy for Davies to ignore the radical reworking of the show’s continuity by Chibnall, the returning showrunner has been extremely gracious to his predecessor, taking pains to fold his contributions into the show’s larger mythology. “The Story & the Engine” featured a cameo from Chibnall’s secret iteration of the Doctor, the Fugitive Doctor (Jo Martin). In “The Reality War”, the Thirteenth Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) helps guide her successor through his regeneration.

Instead, Davies has focused on what “the Timeless Child” was really about. Chibnall has spoken about how the story was about his own experience as an adopted child, even though that emotional core of the arc was lost in all the mythology about Gallifrey and Time Lords. In “The Church on Ruby Road”, the Fifteenth Doctor immediately recontextualizes that revelation as something personal rather than cosmic, telling Ruby, “I'm adopted.” He explains, “I was abandoned.”

It is interesting that the Fifteenth Doctor’s era has grappled with one of the longstanding continuity muddles in the history of Doctor Who. In the 1960s, the Doctor (William Hartnell) was introduced travelling with his granddaughter Susan (Carole Ann Ford). In “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, the Doctor left Susan on a future version of Earth. “One day, I shall come back,” he promised. “Yes, I shall come back.” Outside of anniversary specials like “The Five Doctors”, he never did.

There is a very obvious reason why the show has avoided directly dealing with the character of Susan, outside of sly references and nods. The idea of the Doctor as a father or a grandfather is hard to reconcile with all the continuity that followed, concepts like Time Lords and regeneration and Gallifrey. Susan was introduced before all those concepts solidified into a mythology, and so it is impossible to make her fit comfortably alongside so much of what followed.

However, Davies has made a point to bring Susan back into consideration. In “The Devil’s Chord”, the Doctor looks out over the skyline of 1963 London and tells Ruby, “In the past, right now, I live in a place called Totter's Lane. 1963, I park the Tardis in a junkyard and live there with my granddaughter, Susan.” He brushes over the question of whether he has children, telling Ruby, “I did have. I will have.” In “The Interstellar Song Contest”, the Doctor is haunted by visions of Susan.

This interest in the Doctor’s offspring feels pointed in the context of the first canonically queer iteration of the character. The Fourteenth Doctor alluded to being attracted to men, but the Fifteenth Doctor is openly queer. He has a same-sex romance with Rogue (Jonathan Groff) in “Rogue.” He plays with gender norms, wearing a kilt costume designer Pam Downe described as “a skirt”, embracing a wardrobe of what Gatwa described as “all kinds of gender-pushing, societal-pushing outfits.”

This gets at an important thing about the emphasis on children in Davies’ second tenure. While the show is about children, it is careful to avoid embracing heteronormative visions of family. Belinda is a mother, but “The Reality War” is populated by companions who are not defined by motherhood. Mel Bush (Bonnie Langford) has no family. Kate Stewart (Jenna Redgrave) is in a relationship, but has no children. Ruby is single and childless. The show is clear that there are varied models of femininity.

More to the point, the season finale pits the Doctor and Belinda against the Rani, a mad scientist and eugenicist who is obsessed with genetic purity and the resurrection of Time Lord Society. In the first part of the finale, “Wish World”, the Doctor and Belinda are trapped in an oppressive fantasy constructed by the reactionary Conrad (Jonah Hauer-King), in which they are forced to be a married couple to raise Poppy.

“Wish World” rightly presents this as grotesque. Belinda was established in “The Robot Revolution” as the survivor of an abusive relationship who objected to patriarchal terms like “Miss.” The Doctor is a man who loves men. The show understands that forcing these characters into a heteronormative nuclear family to satisfy some conservative fantasy of domestic bliss is an act of violence. However, the show is not rejecting the idea of family itself, just such a narrow understanding of it.

Indeed, for an extended portion of “The Reality War”, Davies misleads the audience by setting up the idea that Poppy might be the Doctor’s daughter, his biological child. This sets up the idea that Poppy matters because of her centrality to the show’s lore. The implication is that she is the Doctor’s biological daughter and Susan’s biological mother and so therefore “important.” However, the show cleverly rejects this. She is Belinda’s biological child, not the Doctor’s, but she still matters.

“The Reality War” recontextualizes the Time Lord process of “bigeneration” – the form of regeneration that spawned the Fifteenth Doctor from the Fourteenth Doctor in “The Giggle” – as a new means of procreation for the Time Lords, a species that the Rani describes as “sterile” and “barren.” There is a conscious queering of the Time Lords in “The Reality War”, with the revelation that it is impossible for the Time Lords to reproduce conventionally or sexually.

When Mrs. Flood (Anita Dobson) bigenerates, splitting the Rani off from herself, she suggests that the Rani is “[her] child, in a manner of speaking”, who “sprang from [her] loins.” The Rani, obsessed with purity and heteronormativity, rejects this idea of single-gender progenation as “the most disgusting thing [she] ever heard” while arming a set of bombs that look decidedly phallic in “the bone palace.” If the Rani is the child of Mrs. Flood, then perhaps the Fifteenth Doctor is the child of the Fourteenth Doctor. Maybe, in the end, the Fifteenth Doctor found his father.

At the climax of “The Reality War”, having acknowledged that he is biologically incapable of having a child, various characters comfort the Fifteenth Doctor by arguing that he is their family. Family need not be based on blood or genetics. Family need not conform to heteronormative ideal of the nuclear model. Belinda does not need a husband to be a mother. The Doctor does not need to be fertile to be a father. Susan can be the Doctor’s granddaughter unburdened by having to fit with the continuity of the Time Lords or Gallifrey.

There is something surprisingly elegant in the way that Davies ties this central theme into the era’s larger rejection of canon and continuity through the idea of Susan. Davies suggests that attempts to explain or delineate or account for the Doctor’s relationship to Susan by insisting on a biological connection and to fit it within larger continuity is to police the idea of family. Susan is the Doctor’s granddaughter. It is no more or less complicated than that.

There are broader debates to be had about the show’s preoccupation with children. Davies is an openly queer man, and there are debates about the relationship that queer communities have to what is termed “reproductive futurism.” However, Doctor Who is a time travel show for children, and so it makes sense for the show to explore the main characters’ relationship to children, particularly in the context of what might be termed “unconventional” family units.

Throughout his second tenure as showrunner, Davies argues that families might easily get lost, but they can also be found again.