MSN Entertainment is reporting that David Tennant's final episode as the Tardis-travelin' Time Lord will see a return not only of companions Billie Piper, Freema Agyeman and Catherine Tate but also John Simm's The Master, while Den of Geek are chiming in with the rumor that Jessica Hynes - who played the Doctor's love interest in season three's "Human Nature" two-parter - will also be making a reappearance in the final two-part story that closes both Tennant's and showrunner Russell T. Davies' tenure on the show.

Is it wrong of me to feel kind of depressed by this news? I love a huge guest-star-filled extravaganza as much as the next fanboy - but the sad fact is, we've already had one of those with season four's "This Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End" two-parter, which confused bringing back as many characters as possible with having an actual story... a trick that you can only really get away with once. Especially when that story ends with pretty definitive ends for both Rose Tyler and Donna Noble, making me wonder just how they're going to return for these new episodes without undoing those stories (And in Rose's case, undoing it again; how is anyone supposed to care about what happens to her now, if she's managed to come back from final farewells twice?).

But there's something about these returns that crystalizes one of the problems with the Davies Era; a tendency to repeat itself. We didn't need a Dalek storyline every season, especially considering the quality of some of those storylines, and the number of times they were "permanently" defeated, only to return the next year, just as the series never failed to return to characters and situations from years gone by (Whether the original series' Sontarans, the Master or the Cybermen or more recent creations like the Ood, the Face of Boe or even the farting Slitheen) whenever some audience success seems to be available from doing so. For all that Davies managed to give the show (and he gave a lot, not least of all giving the show a new life that no-one else had managed for years), there was always some strange feeling of comfortable nostalgia about the whole thing almost always.

Perhaps that's as it should be; Doctor Who is, after all, a family-orientated show aimed as much at children as adults, so perhaps being comforting and familiar comes with that territory. Surely, if nothing else, then seeing Donna and Martha and Rose again will bring cheers and gasps of disbelief from the kids, and that's what the show should really be aiming at. It's just that... At its best, Doctor Who is about wonder and discovery and adventure, and none of those things can be found by constantly going back to what you know, especially when you've already done just that very thing. Here's hoping that Steven Moffat brings the new in more than just new lead actors and set when he takes over, and the show stops going in reverse all the time.

Actually, the nice thing about the mid-1970s version of The Survivors (created by Doctor Who writer Terry Nation) was the fact that it was slow and talky, with lots of speeches about what happens after most of the human race is dead due to a mystery plague. A post-apocalyptic world probably would be quite boring, punctuated with bits of terror or rage. There would be an awful lot of repetitive processing of what had happened and what we do now, and nobody would be in the mood to talk about sex, except in the sense of carrying on the species.

But that kind of show probably wouldn't fly today, and the new version will probably be more watchable. This quote from writer-producer Adrian Hodges is promising anyway:

Survivors is about what it means to be human. It asks questions about our nature and confronts us with our deepest fears. When everything else is stripped away, would we band together and find the best in ourselves, or would we fall apart and retreat into barbarism and savagery?

He's describing, pretty much, the perfect formula for post-apocalyptic stories right there.

The main character of The Survivors, Abby Grant, doesn't sound too different from the original version, except that now she's the gorgeous Julie Graham. She's still a bored housewife, but she's no longer rich. She lets her son Peter go on an adventure holiday, and it sounds as though he goes missing. Instead of dying off early on, it looks like her husband David will be a recurring character. (And in the original series, Abby vanishes after the first season. Wondering if that will happen here as well.)

Most of the other characters, however, seem completely new, like handsome playboy Al Sadiq (Philip Rhys), who's stuck being an inadequate single dad to his kid Najid. (I think in the original, there were two kids, John and Lizzie, but they were both orphans.)

And then there's the lesbian doctor, Anya Raczynski (Zoe Tapper), whose girlfriend is stricken by the plague. Doctor Who's Freema Agyeman plays a schoolteacher who risks everything to save the life of her dying housemate Patricia. And Nikki Amuka-Bird (who played an alien sleeper agent on Torchwood) plays a government minister trying to staunch panic at the disaster. Finally, awesome character actor Max Beesley is a ruthless convict who is stuck in his cell as everybody else dies around him.

Actually, it sounds quite promising. I'm down for a bit of post-apocalyptic soap opera.

[Digital Spy and DenOfGeek]

According to the rumors, David Tennant is definitely leaving Doctor Who next year, to be replaced by Robert Carlyle (from Transpotting and The Full Monty.) (This part of the rumor has already been debunked, by Carlyle himself.)

Meanwhile, sources claim Torchwood will look very different in its third season. It'll lose three of its main characters: Captain Jack (John Barrowman), Owen (Burn Gorman) and Tosh (Naoko Mori.) Of those three, Captain Jack may guest star in a few episodes. Meanwhile, Martha (Freema Agyeman), who recently guest-starred on Torchwood, will join the spin-off's cast full-time. And the show will be more family-friendly and air in the same time-slot as Doctor Who. It may also have fewer episodes and serve as a sort of "filler" show for when Who is off the air.[SyFyPortal]