As a lifelong Doctor Who fan, I’ve witnessed the show’s many regenerations, both in narrative and production, with a mix of delight and patience. I’ve remained loyal through its peaks and troughs, always hoping that when the series revisits its past, it does so with reverence. So, when I heard rumours that the Rani and Omega would be returning in Series 15, I was pretty excited. These weren’t just classic villains, they’re foundational figures in the show’s mythology, representing some of its most ambitious storytelling.

However, after watching “Wish World” and “The Reality War”, I wasn’t just disappointed, I felt betrayed. Not because the show brought them back poorly, but because it didn’t truly bring them back at all. It used their names, but not their characters. What we received were new creations wearing old labels, legacy icons stripped of their essence.

The Rani was once a unique presence among the Doctor’s adversaries: cold, hyper-rational, and utterly amoral. She treated humans like lab rats and dismissed concepts of good and evil. She was never a maniacal tyrant or a revenge-obsessed lunatic, she was a scientist, focused on outcomes rather than ideologies. Kate O’Mara’s portrayal imbued her with a steely intelligence that set her apart.

In 2025, however, the Rani returns as a reality-warping fairy-tale villain. She twirls through scenes, delivering cryptic quips and revelling in theatrical flair. Split across two incarnations, Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson) and a new version played by Archie Panjabi, she appears more invested in spectacle and banter than in any kind of scientific purpose. The name may be back, but the character, as we knew her, seems lost.

And then there’s Omega, the “mad god”, the founder of Time Lord civilisation, a tragic figure exiled to a universe of antimatter and driven mad by solitude. In “The Three Doctors”, he was layered, desperate and powerful, a broken visionary who had given everything to a society that ultimately cast him out. He was mythic, poetic, complex.

In his Series 15 return, he’s a giant skeleton, who bursts onto the scene, bellows some threats, eats the Rani, and is blasted back into the Underverse with a glowing cube. Gone in minutes. No conversation with the Doctor. No moral weight. He might as well have been a new monster. Calling this thing Omega is like calling a weather balloon the Eye of Harmony.

What frustrates me most isn’t that these characters were misused, it’s that they were never truly there in the first place. Russell T Davies seems to be trading on the recognisability of old names while discarding what made them worth remembering in the first place. The result is a kind of thematic emptiness. Doctor Who isn’t just bringing back its villains, it’s repackaging them.

It’s not just the villains either. Series 15 didn’t just feature the return of the Rani and Omega, it ended with the return of Billie Piper, seemingly cast as the next incarnation of the Doctor. That’s a seismic twist, but it follows the same logic: take a beloved, familiar name, one that carries instant emotional weight for fans, and drop it into a new context without necessarily grounding it in character logic or continuity.

It’s not that these ideas are bad in themselves, it’s that they’re being used shallowly. RTD clearly knows how powerful the show’s history is, but right now, he’s raiding it for parts rather than telling stories that engage with it. The result is a version of Doctor Who that often feels like it’s playing dress-up with its own mythology. The names are here, Rani, Omega, Rose, but they’re not themselves. They’re marketing devices, flashy moments of fan service that collapse under scrutiny.

What’s especially disheartening is how unnecessary this all is. Doctor Who has proven time and again that it can reinvent classic characters with nuance. The Master as Missy was a masterstroke. Davros in “Journey’s End” was chilling, philosophical, and steeped in pathos. But these weren’t just callbacks, they were evolutions. The show treated its past not as a checklist, but as a living foundation.

When the Rani is a punchline and Omega a growling skeleton, or Rose is now the Doctor (maybe?) that tradition feels broken. We’re not watching legacy characters evolve, we’re watching them be hollowed out.

While I’m glad Doctor Who hasn’t forgotten its past, I want it to honour that past by reviving the characters themselves, not just reusing their names. Because without meaning, a name is just a costume.