How Doctor Who Season 2 Makes The Familiar Feel Fresh Again
Inverse chatted with Doctor Who’s showrunner and cast about returning faces, Season 2’s big mystery, and news about Season 3.
When Varada Sethu was cast in the 2024 Doctor Who episode “Boom” as hardened soldier Mundy Flynn, series showrunner Russell T Davies felt a surprising emotion: regret. The showrunner, who had recently returned to the show to reboot it for a new era on Disney+, was in the midst of searching for a new Doctor Who companion following the departure of Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday at the end of Season 1. And as he sat in the edit bay for “Boom,” written by fellow former showrunner Steven Moffat, he realized that Doctor Who had already cast the perfect actor for the role — as another character.
“In looking for this new companion, I kept watching ‘Boom,’” Russell T Davies tells Inverse. “Because bear in mind I sit at this desk and I watch 50 edits of ‘Boom.’ I know every single breath, every single semicolon, and every single pixel of the episode. And I used to sit there, time and time again thinking, ‘God, she's so brilliant. What a shame she's gone.’”
But Davies came up with the perfect solution: just cast Sethu as the companion. “There was a holy sound of a choir singing, and I literally just thought, ‘Oh my God, we could use her again,’” Davies says wryly.
Varada Sethu in her first appearance in Doctor Who.
When Davies realized this, it was “a mad scramble to get on the phone” with Sethu. And when Sethu picked up, she couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing.
“I think I said something like, ‘They know I've been in it already, right? Is that allowed?’” Sethu tells Inverse.
The actor was astonished — “Boom” was the first time in her career she had been given a straight offer, with no audition. And here was the same show doing the same thing just a few months later. “[For] my second straight offer of my career, for it to be the companion was like, ‘What? They want me to stay this time?’”
“It was so easy to hit the ground running.”
Ncuti Gatwa, who plays the 15th Doctor, for his part, was ecstatic. “It felt like V was coming home,” he tells Inverse. “It was such a lovely family atmosphere on ‘Boom’ the first time around. We all got on so well, and it was just very exciting that [she was] coming back for a second season and it just felt like, ‘Yes, this will be fun.’”
Adds Sethu, “It's so much responsibility and so much work, as well, to come back as the companion. And that was all made so much easier because we knew each other before and we'd worked with each other before. So it was so easy to hit the ground running.”
From Supporting Player to Companion
Varada Sethu makes her debut as companion Belinda Chandra in Season 2.
Unbeknownst to Sethu, she’s becoming part of one of Doctor Who’s most longstanding traditions. In fact, it’s become almost par for the course for the show to cast actors in multiple roles. And, ever since Peter Purves first appeared 62 years ago a one-off character (with a terrifically over-the-top Southern American accent) before making his debut as 1st Doctor companion Steven Taylor, companions are some of the most frequent double dippers. Davies even notes this to Inverse, counting off the various NuWho companions whom he brought back: Freema Agyeman’s Martha Jones (who first appeared as her cousin Adeola) and Catherine Tate’s Donna Noble.
The tradition continued under Steven Moffat’s era, with Karen Gillan playing Amy Pond after playing a nameless Roman priestess a season earlier and Jenna Coleman appearing twice before debuting as Clara Oswald. But Coleman’s multiple appearances were actually part of the overarching mystery of that season — a trope that it looked like Davies could repeat with Sethu’s new companion, Belinda Chandra. However, Davies shuts down the theory that Belinda is more than she appears to be.
“It was purely by chance” that Belinda and Mundy Flynn share the same face, Davies says. “We always knew Belinda was on her way. And then [when] we finished Season 1, I started casting.”
But there is a season-long mystery that relates to Belinda in some way, one that both Davies and Sethu were tight-lipped on. But Sethu promises its resolution will be satisfying: “I was super-curious about how they were going to weave that in. And he did it beautifully,” Sethu says. “He did such a great job of tying the plot in and it being relevant and it adding an extra layer to the Doctor and Belinda's relationship.”
A Different Dynamic
The Doctor and Belinda don’t get off to the best start.
Refreshingly, the Doctor and Belinda’s dynamic is very different from that of the Doctor and Ruby’s. Right off the bat, Belinda, who makes her debut in the Season 2 premiere, “The Robot Revolution,” is quick to shut down the Doctor’s more whimsical quirks. Or, as Davies says, “she takes the old nonsense off him.” Davies cites a scene in Episode 1, in which the Doctor uses his catchphrase “timey wimey,” to which Belinda responds, “Am I 6?” as a prime example of their dynamic: She doesn’t quite buy into his whole deal.
“She challenges the doctor in ways that he hasn't been challenged before.”
Gatwa, for his part, loved playing that more prickly dynamic with Sethu. “I did enjoy it. I feel like it was so enriching to the relationship,” Gatwa says. “It burns slowly but deeply; the relationship and their mutual respect and appreciation of each other is tenfold. Because firstly, they're on an adventure where they have to figure it out together. The Doctor doesn't have the answers at all, and so there's such an equality amongst them. And then also, Belinda completely understands the weight of life and clocks the Doctor’s life and is like, ‘Well, no. No!’ And that is just such interesting energy to play off… She challenges the doctor in ways that he hasn't been challenged before and that was cool to play.”
But he doesn’t like to compare Ruby Sunday and Belinda Chandra. “They're two different people, two different stages of their life,” Gatwa says.
Millie Gibson returns as Ruby Sunday in Season 2.
Belinda, compared to the 19-year-old Ruby, is a little older — she’s a working nurse who has had a bit more life experience, and as a result, brings a different perspective to the Doctor’s travels. That different perspective plays out, Davies says, in a later episode, when they land in 1952 and she recognizes Rock Hudson not as a movie star, but as a man whom they studied in their HIV training course in medical school. “That's just a different slight on history,” Davies says. “It's a different angle and you feel that cool breath of history at your back at moments like that, which I love.”
But Davies wants to remind viewers that the Season 1 finale wasn’t the last we saw of Ruby Sunday — “Millie crops up in huge significance, particularly in Episode 4, then in the finale,” he says. “And when she gets scenes with Varada, it's absolutely glorious; the two of them together are wonderful.”
But separately, they have quite different experiences on the TARDIS. Unlike Ruby, who happily joined the Doctor on a trip through time and space, Belinda is a bit more unhappily brought on board, for reasons that will be revealed in “The Robot Revolution.” But Davies assures us Belinda wouldn’t spend the whole season hating her trip on the TARDIS. “She very quickly learns the joy of the cosmos and the wonderful things that he shows her,” he says.
Getting Animated
The Doctor and Belinda before they get turned into cartoons.
One thing that Belinda finds a little joy in is the episode in which she and the Doctor transform into cartoons — at least, that’s Sethu’s favorite episode.
“The cartoon thing was so special because I had no idea how we were going to play that out or how they were going to shoot it,” Sethu says. “So we got to really embody the cartoon and we prepped for that by spending the morning watching Scooby-Doo, which was just fun. We just felt like kids.”
“Playing, literally playing,” adds Gatwa.
The upcoming animated episode is a historic first for the show, following the duo as they’re transformed into cartoons by Alan Cumming’s villainous Mr. Ring-A-Ding. It’s a fun new experimental approach that has started to define the show’s new Disney+ era after last season saw the Doctor bursting into song. So I asked Gatwa and Sethu whether they had another genre they’d like to experiment with, and they had a wild answer: an Andor crossover.
A Doctor Who/Andor...crossover?
“The Doctor would not last a day,” Gatwa jokes. Adds Sethu, “Cinta would not like him.”
As for Sethu’s other upcoming role in a galaxy far, far away, she had this to tease about Cinta’s part in Andor Season 2: “The rebellion is getting on its feet now in a much more practical sense. So things like weapons and all of that's coming into play,” she says. “The stakes are even higher. So Cinta's buckling in.”
“It is so epic.”
Speaking of buckling in, I had to ask Gatwa: Is he returning for a third season as the Doctor? And his answer was as coy as expected: “It's ironic that we're on a show about time travel and you can't talk about the future,” Gatwa says dryly. “I have no idea. But this season is very exciting and I only really have space in my head for that at the moment. Because it is so epic.”
