Doctor Who Needs to Be More Careful With its Legacy Villains

The fate of televised Doctor Who hasn’t been this unclear in decades. We don’t know when the series will be coming back to our screens – or even if it will, though it seems highly unlikely that one of the BBC’s most profitable shows will be left to wither on the vine. We certainly don’t know what form it will take, or how the behind-the-scenes production details will shake out.

But it’s not just the logistics of distribution deals that make this particular hiatus feel so fraught. The most recent season made some divisive storytelling choices, and the finale saw the surprise (and, to many fans, premature) exit of Ncuti Gatwa, as well as his apparent replacement by series icon Billie Piper – though again, the exact nature of Piper’s involvement remains a mystery.

Basically, whatever angle you happen to be coming from, it all feels very messy. But there is one particular angle that, while it may seem like small potatoes when set against a possible Wilderness Years 2: Wilderness Boogaloo, is in many ways emblematic of the issues facing Doctor Who at this strange juncture.

Let’s talk about legacy villains.

A Rich History of Villainy 

In the age of IP, where it’s borderline impossible to get something made without existing brand recognition, a show like Doctor Who has certain inbuilt advantages. No matter how many times it regenerates, it still has a rich 60-year history to delve into, with numerous heroes, villains, and concepts that can be taken off the shelf and dusted down for a new era. 

Not only are these returning characters good for some publicity, but they come with a certain symbolic weight – a sense of deep lore, a vast and complex mythos spanning decades of real-world time and countless centuries of in-universe time. They’re part of the trusty scaffolding that can, in an ideal world, support new stories, characters, and approaches.

When the revival series started in 2005, then-current (now former and also current) showrunner Russell T Davies was understandably careful about which elements of Doctor Who’s history he brought back, and how. The Autons were an effective threat in the first episode, “Rose,” because they were recognisable enough to mark the show as being “proper Doctor Who” without being so iconic that they overshadowed the introduction of the new Doctor and his companion. 

Davies would be equally careful with the far more iconic Daleks, the Cybermen, and later the Master, trying – with admittedly varying degrees of success – to update these classic foes to suit the type of show that Doctor Who had become. The Master was a particularly interesting example. While the three-part finale in which he appeared remains divisive, John Simm’s portrayal of a sadistic, Joker-like mirror of David Tennant’s Doctor was invigorating, and opened up entirely new dramatic possibilities. Without Simm’s Master, it’s hard to imagine that we would have got gender-swapped incarnation Missy, created by Steven Moffat – arguably the most complex and successful take on a legacy villain in modern Who, and a textbook example of how to make a character with decades of baggage feel fresh and vital again.

But just as history can be a benefit, it can also be an albatross.

Diminishing Returns of Legacy Characters

One of the problems with long-running franchises like Doctor Who is that when handled carelessly, those rich legacies can easily start to have diminishing returns, dragging the show down and sucking the air out of the room. And this, unfortunately, is where we found ourselves with the most recent seasons of Doctor Who. The Sacha Dhawan incarnation of the Master, masterminded by Chris Chibnall, was something of a harbinger in that respect, a take on an old villain that felt retrograde, with all the mania and sadism of John Simm’s portrayal dialed up to 11, but to no particular end.

While most fans likely hoped that the return of Russell T Davies would mean more considered interpretations of older characters, the returning villains across Ncuti Gatwa’s brief tenure as Doctor have been, while not necessarily disastrous, arguably underwhelming. Sutekh, the Rani, and Omega were all major antagonists from the classic series, and their returns were given a lot of pomp and circumstance. The Rani (Ranis, eventually) was first teased in 2023’s “The Church on Ruby Road” before being fully revealed in 2025’s “The Interstellar Song Contest.” Sutekh was built up throughout season 14, and Omega was a surprise extra villain dropped as a supposedly seismic cliffhanger in the penultimate episode of season 15.

But despite the show’s best efforts, these reveals all fell varying degrees of flat. This is partly because Doctor Who had already brought back all its most iconic villains, with the Rani, Sutekh, and Omega not carrying anywhere near the same level of name recognition as the Daleks, the Cybermen, or even The Master. As a result, it couldn’t help but feel a little desperate to have them announce themselves dramatically, as if the mere fact of them being classic characters was cause for applause.

This wouldn’t have been such an issue if the show had proceeded to do something fresh and exciting with these villains. But there was a pronounced sense of “will this do,” as if these old standards were being dutifully shuffled on screen so that older fans could say “oh yeah I remember them” and baffled new fans could be pointed towards the relevant classic episodes on BBC iPlayer. It never felt like Russell T Davies had much of a take on any of them, which was a surprise, considering how careful he had been previously – including his very effective use of the Celestial Toymaker in the 2023 anniversary specials. 

Where there were potentially interesting ideas at play – the bigenerated Rani’s new characterisation as a sort of Time Lord genetic supremacist, ancient Time Lord Omega’s reimagining as an eldritch Lovecraftian horror – none of them were explored in enough detail to make them feel satisfying. Nor did they reflect the themes of their respective seasons, or the personal journeys of the Doctor and his companion.

They felt empty, disposable, and fundamentally backwards-looking, making the show seem smaller. This is a real problem when your entire mission statement is that you can go anywhere, at any time, and see anything.

Quality Over Quantity 

Contrary to what you may be thinking, this is not a call for Doctor Who to abandon its history and stop bringing back legacy villains. Purely from a pragmatic production standpoint, that would be absurd. But equally, there is value in bringing back a familiar face. It just needs to be done carefully.

If and when the show does return, it would be interesting to see it abandon the current model of dropping cryptic hints throughout a season, leading to a big reveal of a returning villain. Not only has it been done to death at this point, but it means that far too much weight is put on that reveal, so if it doesn’t hit, it retroactively cheapens the entire season, making all the buildup and speculation feel like a waste of time.

And if a classic villain is to return, please can we have a fresh take? “This villain is important because they’re important to the metatext of Doctor Who and have a big entry on the wiki” simply doesn’t cut it anymore. Why did this villain work the first time? Why has their memory lingered? What about them is especially compelling, exciting, threatening, terrifying? And how can those elements be updated, twisted, subverted, made new? This is a show that constantly reinvents itself, so surely that philosophy should apply to everything.

There also needs to be some effort made for the villain to feel integral to the show’s current era. How is the return of this foe the worst possible thing to happen to this Doctor at this specific time? How does their shared past illuminate the present – and threaten the future? What are the thematic implications, the personal repercussions? What makes this villain right for this moment in the show’s history, and what makes them effective in a way that no other returning foe could be? 

The Master was the only choice for the season 3 finale. Missy was the only choice to go up against Peter Capaldi in season 8. But Sutekh’s role in season 14 could have been played by any of a dozen sinister god-like figures from the show’s deep past. Omega’s too. It didn’t need to be them. It just was, because… because.

Not every experiment works, of course. That’s the nature of Doctor Who. You roll the dice, and – to really torture our sporting metaphors – for every home run there’s a gutter ball. 

But that’s part of the joy of the show. It’s what makes it exciting. It’s what will keep it alive for another 60 years.