u/WinchesterMediaUK

If people haven't been keeping up with online discourse, a growing theory is that all the promotional stuff with online text sequels to each Series 2 episode twenty years after broadcast is to lay the groundwork for this year's Christmas Special being a sequel to Doomsday and a return for David Tennant.

Which definitely seems like something RTD would do but sounds like an absolute disaster. It would be the third time and fifth episode he's used to give himself a lap of honour and redo his greatest hits in three years.

Doomsday was my first full episode so I definitely have a soft spot for it, but Doctor Who is in a perilous position as it is right now, and the last thing we need is to go full Season 22 and make everything about stuff from twenty years ago. Once Upon a Time Lord should been enough of a sign about why that should be avoided.

I'm hoping against hope that it's actually to promote Circuit Breaker but nothing would surprise me at this point.

If people haven't been keeping up with online discourse, a growing theory is that all the promotional stuff with online text sequels to each Series 2 episode twenty years after broadcast is to lay the groundwork for this year's Christmas Special being a sequel to Doomsday and a return for David Tennant.

Which definitely seems like something RTD would do but sounds like an absolute disaster. It would be the third time and fifth episode he's used to give himself a lap of honour and redo his greatest hits in three years.

Doomsday was my first full episode so I definitely have a soft spot for it, but Doctor Who is in a perilous position as it is right now, and the last thing we need is to go full Season 22 and make everything about stuff from twenty years ago. Once Upon a Time Lord should been enough of a sign about why that should be avoided.

I'm hoping against hope that it's actually to promote Circuit Breaker but nothing would surprise me at this point.

Obviously it's all academic at this point, but an interesting thought is when Ncuti Gatwa actually decided to call it quits.

The only concrete date we have is that the Belinda's House reshoots took place in Penarth starting on February the 5th 2025.

All of the studio stuff is harder to nail down because the clapperboards are conspicuously absent from the Unleashed episode, and the datestamps on the released script are clearly fake, but the timeline as we know it gives two possible shooting dates

Gatwa's run of The Importance Of Being Earnest ended on January the 25th, leaving a ten day gap before Penarth. It's definitely possible that some stuff was shot then since it was all reused sets and costumes but cramming all of the non-Penarth stuff into that gap doesn't seem plausible.

At this point, Bonnie Langford was on tour in Les Miserables, which explains why she only appears on a video screen during the reshoots, and the Conrad scene was originally shot during principal photography and re-edited.

So a realistic start for the reshoot filming is late January at the absolute earliest, while there are claims that Billie Piper was cast and filmed separately around early April. So, as poorly shot as the scene was, it suggests that everything else was locked by around the end of March.

The process of actually writing the new scenes and scheduling cast, crew, locations etc makes things harder to pin down since it could have all been done in the almost three months where Gatwa was working full time on Earnest.

Which suggests that Gatwa's decision to leave came in Autumn 2024. Potentially at any point after Season 1 aired but the movie The Roses was already filming at that time and Gatwa's casting in Earnest was announced five days after Season 1 ended, which could suggest otherwise since the official casting announcement through to the end of the run was a seven month contract.

Either way, while Disney were very clearly dragging their feet on the issue, the timeline suggests that Gatwa could have been preparing to leave a lot earlier than previously thought, since he would have been auditioning and negotiating to do Earnest before Season 1 ended, and a decision from Disney was due.

There are still conflicting accounts of why he left Bridgerton after one season, with nothing to really substantiate any of them.

But just five years ago, he had the world at his feet:

* Emmy nomination.

* Guest hosting Saturday Night Live.

* Doing Cbeebies Bedtime Stories (which regularly gets big names like Chris Evans (the Marvel one), Eddie Redmayne and Dolly Parton) twice in six months.

* Tipped to star in a remake of The Saint.

* Various outlets pitching him as the new Doctor Who and James Bond.

Five years later, that remake of The Saint still has yet to materialise, and he has only had a handful of supporting movie roles before finally getting the lead in You, Me, And Tuscany, releasing recently.

It would be unfair to call it a David Caruso situation without knowing the full story (particularly since Covid could be a factor), but the speed and level of his drop-off is still pretty astonishing when you consider that his Bridgerton co-stars Nicola Coughlan and Jonathan Bailey have gone nowhere but up on the back of it, and that his onscreen wife Phoebe Dyneover still returned for five episodes of Season 2.

I also wonder if this phenomenon is something that could affect Ncuti Gatwa moving forward. He has several new projects in the works, but his premature and abrupt departure from Doctor Who last year included a lot of obfuscation and outright lies, particularly from the BBC and production company Bad Wolf.