How long will the Doctor be separated from the TARDIS? It’s a fair question, given that, on Christmas Day after Peter Capaldi’s Doctor regenerated, blasting the interior apart with a now customary geyser of glowy energy, we saw Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor tumbling out of TARDIS which disappeared from sight as the Doctor plummeted to Earth.
The crash and explosion are nothing new – it seems like every recent incarnation winds up dosing the TARDIS in a baptism of fire or crashing it shortly after or both – it makes you wonder why the Doctor doesn’t simply park it somewhere safe or why the Time Lord’s didn’t make them more robust to regeneration energy or simply warn others to try not dying in their ships. Neither is the idea that the Doctor could become stranded on Earth, the Time Lords effectively clamped Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor for a large part of his tenure.
Combining these two points, fans online have been speculating on a new ‘grounded’ take on the Doctor which, if rumours purported by the Radio Times have any weight, would see the Thirteenth Doctor stuck on Earth for at least the beginning of Series 11.

It would certainly work well as a reintroduction to the character guiding any potential new viewer through this earthbound perspective on the Doctor by making the Thirteenth Doctor the focal point of the series, if only for a limited amount of time – could the Doctor, a wanderer in the fourth dimension, really be able to cope being stuck in one place? Conversely, you wonder if you’ll lose something from the character if they can’t wow their new companions with a quick trip through time and space.
As the Radio Times points out, there’s very little evidence to support this plot other than Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor has lost the TARDIS but as there has been so little information on the new series so far, you can’t ignore it either.
If there are historical episodes to come could the Doctor travel through time without the TARDIS much like Captain Jack and his vortex manipulator? (“Cheap and nasty time travel, very bad for you”) Could the lost TARDIS plot simply be a mini-arch in the overall plot of Series 11? Or, more likely, will Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor simply be separated from the TARDIS for one episode before a triumphant reunion complete with a redesign ala Matt Smith’s first full episode, The Eleventh Hour?
We’ll know the truth when Doctor Who returns to our screens in the Autumn.