'Doctor Who' Sets 'Boom' Watchalong For Franchise Anniversary
#ThoughtsAndPrayers for everyone!
Doctor Who is officially bringing more than deleted scenes to its 61st anniversary party. The long-running British sci-fi franchise has announced a watchalong on YouTube for “Boom”, the third episode of Fifteenth Doctor Ncuti Gatwa and companion Ruby Sunday played by Millie Gibson, on Saturday, November 23, commemorating the show’s 1963 debut. It is happening at 7 PM GMT, which means in the contiguous States it’s at 2 PM Eastern all the way back to 11 AM Pacific.
Strangely, despite taking place on YouTube, where there could be an available live chat, the invitation features a hashtag #ThoughtsAndPrayers, which means there’s also a Twitter component to the event. There’s no official presence on Bluesky yet. This harkens back to the lockdown tweetalongs orchestrated by Emily Cook, who has recently made the Bluesky jump, where “Day of the Doctor” had #SavetheDay, “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End” had #SubwaveNetwork, and “The Fires of Pompeii” had #VolcanoDay. Writer Steven Moffat, who returned to the show 7 years after stepping down as showrunner to write “Boom” will be joining the festivities, saying “I'll be tweeting along with this on Saturday from 7pm. I will explain the plot (which totally makes sense), all the jokes (which ARE funny actually), and why I'm so clever and handsome. Be there or, you know, don't be - it's a free country”. Notably, as technically not free cable channels like BBC America are, it’s still proportionally cheaper as part of cable than Disney+, where “Boom” and all of last season aired exclusively. This event brings an episode of last season in front of that Disney+ paywall for the first time. The episode was directed by Julie Anne Robinson.
Frankly, doing an event like this with this episode makes perfect sense. Everything about it comes together as a celebration of the show and its future. A lockdown tweetalong of “The Runaway Bride” during the pandemic kindled showrunner Russell T. Davies’s return to the show, as well as David Tennant and Catherine Tate, who did so for last year's anniversary specials. Both he and Moffat wrote followups and other stories which served as fresh material when very little was being made. Moffat participated in some of the tweetalongs as well. He also created the arms megacorp Villengard back when he wrote the Ninth Doctor story “The Doctor Dances”, which had their first major reappearance in this episodes This year’s Christmas special “Joy to the World” features them again. “Boom” is also the only story from last season to feature next season’s entire TARDIS team. That is because Varada Sethu first appears here as Mundy Flynn before becoming Belinda Chandra next season as Fifteen’s second companion. But before that, we have this “Boom” tweetalong on November 23 at 2 PM Eastern/11 PM Pacific, and “Joy to the World” premieres Christmas Day simultaneously on BBC in the UK and on Disney+ everywhere else. A time has not been confirmed, but it could very well be the same time, if not an hour earlier.
