The BBC has released another cryptic trailer foreshadowing the returning series of Doctor Who which will premiere, outside of the U.K., on Disney+.
Like the previous trailer, it is backwards (Bad Wolf Archives have kindly reversed it for us.), chaotically short, and peppered with binary code which can be translated into English. Unlike the previous trailer, which featured the return of comic strip villain Beep the Meep, this one seems to focus on Neil Patrick Harris’ new big bad.
Long suspected to be the return of enigmatic 60s antagonist The Celestial Toymaker, this trailer does much to support the speculation. The Toymaker is an extraordinarily powerful being who captured The First Doctor (William Hartnell) with his companions and forced them to play children’s games but with life or death consequences. The new trailer has an unnamed voice-over explaining, “These are the rules of the game,” and some of the translated binary references the Toymaker’s playing-card-themed henchman with “long diamond. short heart.”
While this is all still speculation, a few interesting issues crop up with the return of The Celestial Toymaker. First, and most significant is the racism built into the character: “celestial” being a slur for people of Chinese descent and the fact that the original Toymaker (Michael Gough) was a white British man dressed in stereotypical Chinese robes. The second issue is that it is impossible to actually see the entirety of the originally televised story: only one of its four episodes still survives in any form.
We can see from this trailer that Harris is dressing more as a magician than any sort of racist trope; so if he IS the Toymaker, they have likely excised any reference to Chinese culture.
Even more puzzling, other binary in the trailer translates to “HA HA PIANO HA HA HA.”
Whatever is going on, it’s fascinating.
Doctor Who returns with David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor, followed by Ncuti Gatwa as the Fifteenth Doctor, in November on the BBC in the U.K. and Disney+ everywhere else.
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times
