While many fans were watching the Doctor Who episode ‘Rogue’ for the Regency Era ‘Oh my Bridgerton’ feel of the episode or seeing just how things would play out between The Doctor and Rogue, there was an important cameo that viewers may have missed in the excitement. Richard E. Grant is not an unfamiliar face to Doctor Who, playing Dr. Walter Simeon, associated with The Great Intelligence, the big bad of Season 7B of Doctor Who. Grant has also lent his voice to the decades-long franchise, and that brings us to the man, who is affectionately nicknamed, The Shalka Doctor.
During the scene where The Doctor is trapped on Rogue (Jonathan Groff)’s ship, he reveals himself, including all of his past faces. And if you thought they’d be in order, to finally have a definitive answer to where Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor sits in canon, that opportunity would not present itself. In a seemingly randomized order, holograms of the Doctor’s previous faces float around him, including Grant’s. But why? For a long time, that incarnation of the Doctor was not considered part of the main canon. Showrunner Russell T. Davies’ answer may surprise you.
“I wrote to [writer] Paul Cornell the night before, saying, ‘Please watch tomorrow because there’s such a treat in store,” Davies tells SFX. Paul Cornell wrote Grant’s Doctor in the 2003 animated series Scream of the Shalka. Davies says he and Cornell are old friends and “it’s really nice when you can do things like that. That was a really nice moment between me and Paul.”
Where Does ‘Scream of The Shalka’ Fit In ‘Doctor Who’ Canon Now?
The biggest issue with fitting the series into the main Doctor Who canon was, as Davies says “we completely replaced [The Shalka Doctor] with Christopher Eccleston as the [Ninth] Doctor.” He goes on to say “how nice [it was] all these years later, to take a little lean back and sort of say, the door’s open now, thanks to ‘The Timeless Child’, and you can come in and own your Doctor again.” This is also not the first time that Davies is reiterating that he will be carrying the threads of Chris Chibnall’s ‘The Timeless Child’ and how it’s changed canon into his second tenure as Doctor Who showrunner.
The animated series aired before the rebooted live-action Doctor Who (2005) began. Cornell wrote Grant’s Doctor intending him to be the Ninth Doctor after Paul McGann’s Eighth’s. The rebooted Doctor Who, as Davies said, effectively erases Grant’s Doctor from the canon, with Christopher Eccleston taking on the designation instead. To keep the two separate, Grant’s is often nicknamed ‘The Shalka Doctor’, referencing the main antagonist of the series. Grant’s Doctor finds himself in 2003 Lancashire and must team up with a barmaid, Alison and The Master (yes that Master) to defeat The Shalka.
“We talked about that many times with [co-writers] Kate [Herron] and Briony [Redman]. Just fun, a joke. It’s funny. It’s that simple. I sat here in this office with them and they just thought ‘an unknown Doctor’ – that’s what the script said because we had to work out who to get and how we could get him.”
So, no, there wasn’t a bigger reason to re-introduce the character, according to Davies, other than “really, it’s not just fun, it’s a nice thing to do.”