Latest news with #BelindaChandra
Gizmodo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
The ‘Doctor Who' Comic-Con Pop-Up Offers a Fun Peek at UNIT's ‘Black Archive'
Across the street from the San Diego Convention Center, there's a secret trove of artifacts from some of the biggest clashes across time and space. Well, it's not so secret: there's a TARDIS photo op right in front to help you find it. Doctor Who's future isn't yet known—even the identity of the next Doctor isn't certain—but the show's SDCC pop-up ties into the show's past as well as its upcoming spin-off, The War Between the Land and the Sea. The 'Black Archive'—inspired by the 2013 50th anniversary special 'The Day of the Doctor'—takes you inside UNIT's classified stash of alien findings and other oddities, including old-school homages and several items recognizable from Ncuti Gatwa's recent stint as the Doctor. When you enter, you're granted top-secret clearance by hosts in character as UNIT agents. You're allowed to closely examine the displays, which are marked with handwritten tags in a room filled with a mysterious fog. We spotted this scaly egg dated '2025,' likely a nod to The War Between the Land and Sea—a literal Easter egg, perhaps? Here's a gallery featuring more images; recent archive entries appear to be Belinda Chandra's notorious star certificate, a reel of film from Mr. Ring-a-Ding himself, Time Hotel files, and a display of yellow mugs from the Fifteenth Doctor's reality-bending final episodes. Remember: the Twelfth Doctor hates pears! If you stop by the Black Archive in the evenings (July 24-26, 6-8 p.m.), you can undertake a 'mission,' rounding up clues hidden among the exhibits to assist the Doctor. The missions will change each night, and if you get stuck, those helpful UNIT agents can point you in the right direction. Otherwise, the space—located at the Harbor Club in the Gaslamp District, 100 E. Harbor Dr., San Diego—is open as an exhibit; if you're at SDCC, you can visit July 24-26 from 10am-8pm, or July 27 from 10am-5pm. Because it's Comic-Con, there's also a merch area; if you're not in San Diego this week, you can check out the offerings online at the BBC Shop. There's also an online component to the exhibit: 'UNIT HQ,' which you can access here. And if you really want to go all out, the Comic-Con Museum in nearby Balboa Park is also hosting an exhibit titled 'Doctor Who Worlds of Wonder: Where Science Meets Fiction,' featuring even more props from the show as well as costumes. Learn more about that here. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Gizmodo
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
‘Doctor Who' Utterly Wasted Belinda Chandra
Varada Sethu's addition to the TARDIS was a jolt of energy 'Doctor Who' needed—but it bafflingly transformed her into the modern era's most squandered companion. When the latest season of Doctor Who kicked off, the most exciting thing about it wasn't even its premiere story, or what was being set up to lead towards the season's grand finale: it was the arrival of Varada Sethu as Belinda Chandra, promising to shake up the Doctor/companion dynamic in a way it hadn't been in years. But now that the season is over, and Doctor Who lies amid a litany of narrative and production messes lurching towards an uncertain future, one of its biggest of all is just how it completely and utterly wasted Belinda's character. A young nurse balancing the rigorous demands of her career with the sudden tumult of being thrust into a suitably ludicrous Doctor Who narrative—abducted by giant robots and whisked off into space to become a planetary ruler and forcibly thrust into a horrific arranged marriage—Belinda's arrival in 'The Robot Revolution' immediately bucked the trends of most Doctor Who companion debuts, especially in the modern era. After initial moments of fear and hesitation, life in the Doctor's orbit is, more often than not, too mesmerizing to resist: 45 minutes to an hour later everyone from Rose Tyler to Ruby Sunday is ready to step inside the TARDIS, remark on its interior's size, and run straight forward into adventures in time and space. And yet, while Belinda ends up in the blue box just like the rest of them, she challenges the Doctor, both from his own perspective and that of the audience, every step of the way. The Belinda of 'The Robot Revolution' isn't obstinate for the sake of it or anything, but she rightfully pushes the Doctor's assumption that his way, his default of being the person that everyone in the room should listen to unquestionably, isn't the only way. It made for a remarkable chemistry between the Doctor and Belinda, and not just for Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu's own sparkling charisma (the latter certainly cannot be blamed for the narrative choices the show makes with her character), but because you really see them feel out each other over the course of the episode, figuring out where lines are drawn between them—and it's Belinda drawing the lines. The Doctor's charm offensive, which has by and large driven so many of those initial sparks in the companion/Doctor relationship, simply does not work on Belinda. It all culminates in a brilliant final moment in that debut episode to set the tone going forward: calling him out for invading her privacy, for not thinking to ask people consent, for brazenly trying to dazzle her in the same way he'd clearly dazzled many people before her. There is clearly some part of Belinda that likes the Doctor; she's not actively horrified or disdainful of him, but she makes it clear he crosses lines, and the world he operates in (or rather worlds) are dangerous. She wants home, and the only thing that stops that is the fact that they can't get there—the adventures along the way aren't her signing up for this dazzling new life, but a necessity to get what she wants. It's a shame then, that this version of Belinda by and large stops existing halfway through her season of Doctor Who. Of course, she was always going to soften in her appraisal of the Doctor the longer she spent with him, but the show plays an awkward balancing act where both Belinda moves on from this challenging almost inorganically—arguably she is totally fine with traveling with the Doctor by the end of the second episode, 'Lux,' but even after the darkness of 'The Well' an episode later she is truly into the default companion mode—and because the season then also starts suddenly having to balance in dedicating its limited runtime to episodes about Ruby like 'Lucky Day,' or 'The Story and the Engine,' where Belinda is barely part of the narrative. For many of the other thorny narrative issues it has, by the time the season is heading into its endgame in 'The Interstellar Song Contest,' the version of Belinda we get there, where her reaction to the Doctor crossing a distinct moral line in aggressively torturing his 'foe' in Kid, is far from the woman who called him out for scanning her without asking her in 'The Robot Revolution,' willing to effectively rubber-stamp the Doctor's actions as a moment of duress. Which would be disappointing, but fine if Doctor Who replaced that initial skeptical archetype with anything, but instead Belinda is pushed into a void, a generic 'companion.' We don't learn anything about her, really, other than the fact that she wants to get home. But all that is before the real injustice comes in the two-part season finale. In its first part, 'Wish World', Belinda is transformed by the reality imposed by Conrad—the asshole villain weirdo who stalked Ruby in 'Lucky Day'—onto the earth into the Doctor's matronly wife. The reality is presented by the text as aberrant and dystopian, a world where every woman exists to be a good daughter, a good wife to her husband, and then a willing mother dutifully raising the next generation of daughters to follow in that exact same mold. In 'Wish World,' Belinda's one-note definition as mother to her and the Doctor's child, Poppy, is reflective of Conrad's retrograde views about women, filing them down into a single trait that is subservient to a traditionalist, conservative patriarchal power balance. The fact that Belinda, Poppy's mom, is not Belinda, the Doctor's companion that we've followed over the course of this season, is meant to be disturbing, to be something we want her to break free of and recognise the trap she, the Doctor, and the rest of the world in. 'The Reality War' instead decides that reducing Belinda to this singular trait—altered reality or otherwise—is Good, Actually. The second Belinda is freed from Conrad's world, her sole dramatic trait is reminding us that she is Poppy's mother and that that is all that she cares about, regardless of the chaos beginning to unfold around her on the Doctor, to the point that she literally tells him that she can't help him in his fight against the Rani. The episode metaphorically and literally shoves her in a box so Ruby can take on the primary companion role, safeguarding her and Poppy from any reversions to the original reality that might render the latter erased as quickly as she was wished into being. She's only allowed out the box when the day is saved, and again, she reverts to this matriarchal character, both when it initially seems like she, the Doctor, and Poppy might travel together, and then when Poppy vanishes from reality and the Doctor choses to sacrifice his life to bring her back. There is a lot of 'Reality War' that is an absolute mess, but little of it feels quite as insulting as what it does to Belinda's character. Having a character for whom motherhood is important is not the issue here; there is plenty that could've been done with a companion that's a mother (we certainly got a particularly involved version of that with Amy's arc in the Steven Moffat era!). It's that Doctor Who essentially took the Belinda it had—who, by episode count and other narrative decisions, had already been losing her sense of an arc—wiped her clean, and then metaphorically stamped 'mom' on her forehead, and left her like that for the episode's final act. An act that is now our farewell to the character, one that even attempts to retroactively 'reveal' that Belinda's arc was always about returning home to Poppy via a series of flashbacks to prior scenes from the season altered to now have Belinda add 'for Poppy' to the end of every mention of her desire to get back to Earth. That's not an actual character arc, or even an interesting recontextualization that reframes what the audience had already seen in new light. It's a literal re-write of what the audience already saw! After telling us the week prior that it was wrong for Conrad to impose, without consent, a patriarchal gender role on Belinda, Doctor Who itself has the Doctor do exactly that to Belinda, re-write all of reality to make her into a single mom. The Belinda Chandra we met in 'The Robot Revolution' doesn't exist any more, not just because the show whittled down her character into nothingness, but because the show concludes her arc by rewriting her existence so that that Belinda never existed in the first place. There's even a dark mirror in the final moments of that arc, when the Doctor does exactly to Poppy what he did to Belinda in the climax of 'The Robot Revolution': medically scan her with his alien technology without a single thought to ask if he was allowed to first. It's just that this time not only does Belinda not challenge him, she doesn't react at all. She is 'just' Poppy's mother now, with no thought or feeling given to her beyond that description. Again, a having a female character to whom being a parent is important is not the issue with what Doctor Who did with Belinda. There were so many ways the series could've given this ending to her storyline and actually organically laid out a path to it across the season. Perhaps have her slowly realize over time that something, someone is missing from her memories of her life on Earth, to struggle with the feeling that she has to get back to Earth as soon as possible while not fully grasping why, to eventually play with the reality manipulation that the finale hangs its dramatic stakes on. Instead, the show started with a completely different idea and dynamic for her—one brimming with potential it almost immediately decided not to capitalize on—before slowly but surely pushing her further and further to the fringes of its priorities over the course of the season. Belinda was never given the chance to grow and change over her time in the TARDIS, to challenge, and to be challenged by, life at the Doctor's side. Her final ending was just the last nail in a coffin Doctor Who had been building for Belinda's character as we'd known her in that first episode for a while, whether that was its narrative intent or otherwise—and ultimately just one extra failure to add to the season's list of many.
Metro
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa issues heartfelt message to fans after shock exit
Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa has shared a sweet statement on social media after exiting the Tardis. The 32-year-old actor gutted (and surprised) fans after regenerating into returning star Billie Piper at the end of his season two finale on Saturday night after a dramatic conclusion to his and Belinda's eight-episode arc. This meant that after only two seasons, much to the dismay of Whovians everywhere, we had to say goodbye to his Doctor after only 16 episodes and two-and-a-half specials. Especially since his exit from the show was not announced beforehand – as is usually the case when one Doctor is set to leave – it made it even more of a plot twist. In an official Instagram post he shared images with his two companions Ruby Sunday and Belinda Chandra (Millie Gibson and Varada Sehtu) Wake up to find news on your TV shows in your inbox every morning with Metro's TV Newsletter. Sign up to our newsletter and then select your show in the link we'll send you so we can get TV news tailored to you. He wrote: 'Three queens of the sky… 'Twas an experience like no other and thank God we were by eachothers side. There aren't quite the words for how much you both mean to me but I am so grateful I got the opportunity to work, learn from and laugh with you both everyday. You're both just simply incredible and it has been nothing short of a blessing to share this journey with both of you. Ruby Sunday and Belinda Chandra will live in mine and the Whoniverse hearts forever. Also shout out to the CAPTAIN of all 15's companions. Captain Poppy. Ultimate top dog of this season! (lil Sienna brought so much life and magic to us all on set ) I love you guys. We did it After the official BBC Doctor Who actor uploaded a picture of Gatwa as the Doctor in the Tardis with the caption of two broken hearts (as a nod to the Time Lord's unique physiology) and a fire emoji, the Sex Education star reposted it on his Instagram story. He added the caption: 'Thank you for it all, 15,' with a rocket emoji. The episode also involved his former companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) who shared her own farewell message on Instagram of the image of the two of them across their shared episodes. 'Nothing can put into words the experience we've shared. I am forever grateful to have been a part of it and watched you bloom into the fabulous Doctor the world has got to know and adore. You have made this incredible character even more special with who you are and how good you wear clothes. 'You're my forever friend and doctor and I'll be here cheering you on watching you on your further successes with every new companion you meet along the way ;) More Trending 'Thank you for taking me to the stars. Love, Ruby roo,' she wrote. Gatwa also reposted this, saying: 'My Ruby Roo.' Elsewhere in the heartbreaking finale, he shared a scene with 13th Doctor Jodie Whittaker adding that it 'was beyond a flipping honour and joy to work with legendary Jodie'. In an official BBC statement Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. View More » MORE: Doctor Who fans notice glaring issue with Billie Piper's shock return MORE: 7 best shows to binge if you're already missing Doctor Who after finale MORE: Is Ncuti Gatwa leaving? Our Doctor Who experts know who should take over
South Wales Argus
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South Wales Argus
Doctor Who finale 'leak' leaves fans scared and shocked
This series has treated viewers to Ncuti Gatwa's 15th Doctor trying to get new companion Belinda Chandra (Verada Sethu) back home to Earth. The future of the series beyond this one remains up in the air, with no confirmation of a new series yet. However, a supposed 'leak' ahead of the series finale is gaining traction online, with fans shocked. Doctor Who finale 'leak' leaves fans 'scared' and 'shocked' Newsquest will not reveal the details of the alleged 'leak' going around as not to spoil the show. There is also no confirmation that any of it is true. However, fans have taken to social media to air their thoughts over the 'leak'. One said: "Okay I've seen the leak I assume everybody is talking about with Doctor Who. "I won't say anything on the tl, but my general thoughts: it's sitting with me in less than fun way." Another said: "I just woke up and opened Twitter and I'm hearing talk about a big doctor who leak what's going on I'm scared." A third posted a short video showing Freema Agyeman's former Doctor Who character Martha Jones saying: "Oh my god!" One doubted the rumours, though, saying: "Read the Doctor Who leaks and while some of them line up with what's happened so far, I really don't believe a certain few of them. "Feels like the leaker maybe threw in some red herrings as to not let the BBC catch on to the leak until recently." The BBC declined to comment on the Doctor Who rumours when approached for comment. When is the Doctor Who finale? How to watch amid schedule change The final episode of this series of Doctor Who, The Reality War, will be shown on BBC One and BBC iPlayer at 7.10pm on Saturday, May 31. It is the second part of a two-part finale, following Wish World from the week before. Set your watches for a global simulcast of the epic Season 2 finale! ⌚️ THE REALITY WAR will premiere on 31st May on @BBCOne, @BBCiPlayer and cinemas in the UK, and simultaneously on @DisneyPlus where available. — Doctor Who (@bbcdoctorwho) May 12, 2025 The two-part finale - Wish World and The Reality War - will be shown in cinemas across the UK. A schedule change for the finale has also been announced, with the finale airing at the same time across the UK. Recommended reading: Throughout the series, new episodes have been available at 8am on BBC iPlayer, however, this is not the case for the last episode. Teasing the finale, Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies, said: 'The Doctor is doomed, Belinda is lost, Ruby is trapped, UNIT is powerless, the Unholy Trinity rule supreme and the Underverse is rising. "And now we can all experience this devastating climax together, all at the same time, with a unique worldwide premiere. I can promise shocks, scares and revelations off the scale. Come and have fun!"
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Doctor Who fans left 'scared' and shocked after 'leak' ahead of series finale
Doctor Who fans have been left "scared" and shocked after an alleged 'leak' ahead of the series finale. This series has treated viewers to Ncuti Gatwa's 15th Doctor trying to get new companion Belinda Chandra (Verada Sethu) back home to Earth. The future of the series beyond this one remains up in the air, with no confirmation of a new series yet. However, a supposed 'leak' ahead of the series finale is gaining traction online, with fans shocked. Newsquest will not reveal the details of the alleged 'leak' going around as not to spoil the show. There is also no confirmation that any of it is true. However, fans have taken to social media to air their thoughts over the 'leak'. One said: "Okay I've seen the leak I assume everybody is talking about with Doctor Who. "I won't say anything on the tl, but my general thoughts: it's sitting with me in less than fun way." Another said: "I just woke up and opened Twitter and I'm hearing talk about a big doctor who leak what's going on I'm scared." A third posted a short video showing Freema Agyeman's former Doctor Who character Martha Jones saying: "Oh my god!" One doubted the rumours, though, saying: "Read the Doctor Who leaks and while some of them line up with what's happened so far, I really don't believe a certain few of them. "Feels like the leaker maybe threw in some red herrings as to not let the BBC catch on to the leak until recently." The BBC declined to comment on the Doctor Who rumours when approached for comment. The final episode of this series of Doctor Who, The Reality War, will be shown on BBC One and BBC iPlayer at 7.10pm on Saturday, May 31. It is the second part of a two-part finale, following Wish World from the week before. Set your watches for a global simulcast of the epic Season 2 finale! ⌚️ THE REALITY WAR will premiere on 31st May on @BBCOne, @BBCiPlayer and cinemas in the UK, and simultaneously on @DisneyPlus where available. — Doctor Who (@bbcdoctorwho) May 12, 2025 The two-part finale - Wish World and The Reality War - will be shown in cinemas across the UK. A schedule change for the finale has also been announced, with the finale airing at the same time across the UK. Recommended reading: 'Off the scale' Doctor Who finale set for schedule shake up in 'unique' launch How to watch all the Doctor Who episodes in order from 1963 to the present day Calling all Doctor Who fans - see the 12 most popular filming locations to visit Throughout the series, new episodes have been available at 8am on BBC iPlayer, however, this is not the case for the last episode. Teasing the finale, Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies, said: 'The Doctor is doomed, Belinda is lost, Ruby is trapped, UNIT is powerless, the Unholy Trinity rule supreme and the Underverse is rising. "And now we can all experience this devastating climax together, all at the same time, with a unique worldwide premiere. I can promise shocks, scares and revelations off the scale. Come and have fun!"
