Alan Cumming To Oppose The Doctor In An Upcoming Doctor Who Episode
by Erik Amaya
Former Nightcrawler Alan Cumming is the first name in what will be a long lost of people to oppose the Thirteenth Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) when she makes her full debut on Doctor Who this Fall.
According to Entertainment Weekly, the actor revealed his role on the show during an episode of the Homo Sapiens podcast. “[I’m] like a nice baddie,” Cumming said the part. “I’m [King] James I, so I’m kind of like a dandy, foppy sort of coward who comes all right in the end. They said he might come back.”
Sparring with King James would not be The Doctor’s first encounter with the British monarchy. The Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) got himself barred from the realm after being flip with Queen Victoria. He subsequently learned he was also the mortal enemy of Queen Elizabeth I (James’s predecessor) for reasons that were unknown to him as he’d never met her in his own personal timeline. Thanks to a bit of timey-wimey nonsense, he would subsequently (from his point of view) marry her to ensure a Zygon invasion hundreds of years after her time would not go as planned. And then in the far-flung future, the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) would befriend Liz X, the British monarch while the kingdom traveled the stars on the back of a space whale.
And since James reigned during the 17th Century, it seems the Doctor will be reunited with her TARDIS — which ejected her at the end of the 2017 Christmas special — sooner rather than later.
Besides Whittaker, the new season of Doctor Who will feature Mandip Gill, Tosin Cole, and Bradley Walsh as a trio of companions for the regenerated Time Lord; echoing the number of TARDIS inhabitants during the programs initial season in 1963.
Doctor Who returns in the Fall.