While David Tennant will play the Fourteenth Doctor in three Doctor Who specials heading our way in late November/early December, 2023 is also going to see the release of a Christmas episode featuring Ncuti Gatwa's debut as the Fifteenth Doctor.
Now, thanks to Disney+, we can confirm it will premiere on Christmas Day (on the streaming platform in the U.S. and BBC in the UK). It's also been revealed that the episode will be titled "The Church on Ruby Road," likely a nod to the Doctor's new companion, Millie Gibson's Ruby Sunday.
On a more literal note, we can't discount that it's possibly a nod to the real-life Ruby Road in London.
The Christmas special will be followed by an eight-episode season 1 in 2024 which will put Gatwa and Gibson front and centre. While "The Church on Ruby Road" will be the former's first full-blown episode as the Doctor, we're expecting his regeneration to take place in the final of those 60th-anniversary episodes.
The three specials, titled "The Star Beast" (November 25), "Wild Blue Yonder" (December 2) and "The Giggle "(December 9) will reunite the Fourteenth Doctor (David Tennant) and Donna Temple-Noble (Catherine Tate) as they come face-to-face with their most terrifying villain yet: the Toymaker (played by Neil Patrick Harris in his Doctor Who debut).
Other confirmed cast members include Yasmin Finney as Rose Temple-Noble, Miriam Margolyes as the voice of the Meep and Ruth Madeley as Shirley Anne Bingham, as well as returning characters Jacqueline King as Sylvia Noble, Karl Collins as Shaun Temple, and Jemma Redgrave as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart.
Doctor Who is the longest-running action-adventure television series in the world spanning 60 years and winning over 100 awards. This quintessentially British show has a massive global following, with 9.6m fans across social platforms/channels and 100m video views on YouTube in the last year alone.
The 60th-anniversary specials are written by Russell T. Davies and directed by Rachel Talalay, Tom Kingsley, and Chanya Button, respectively. BBC Studios is handling global distribution.
A new poster for those upcoming specials has also just been released and you can take a closer look at that below.