Doctor Who is BBC’s most famous show, about a wacky time traveler. It ran from 1962-89, and came back better than ever in 2005. Over its past several seasons, though, it’s grown sorta sucky, and the show is officially in hibernation now. It’s not cancelled, but there are no plans for new episodes.

You can’t stop the fans, though. Here’s a new episode put together by amateurs who love Doctor Who. It’s called “The Curse of Kilmorag,” and it’s at least as good as anything from the real show in the 2020s.

Which doesn’t mean it’s particularly good, but it’s not particularly bad. Semi-kudos to Thomas Vittlowe, who maybe made it, depending on your definition of ‘made’.

Vittlowe assembled this with AI, and the result looks OK. The effects are TV-quality. The ‘real’ scenes look slightly dull to me, but if you didn’t know it’s not an episode of Doctor Who, you’d assume it was.

A Doctor Who story made by BBC would list a hundred workers or more in the credits — art director, storyboard artist, set decorator, location manager, script editor, musicians, lighting, casting, wardrobe assistant, props, special effects, etc. For whatever this is, other than the cast, only five people and “my Patreon supporters” are credited, along with seven software companies.

The Doctor is played by John Warr, in a performance neither good nor bad, and I’m fairly certain Warr is an algorithm, not an actor — no IMDB page exists for him, if he’s a him. His sidekick is played by Eliza Walton, who similarly doesn’t seem to exist outside of these 55 minutes. They both look alive, though. Each has five fingers per hand, with no obvious glitches or gremlins. Nobody else in the ‘cast’ is credited at all.

Apparently, then, five people made this, working with seven companies’ programs. The result is not premium television, but it isn’t awful, and doesn’t look amateur.

Which means lights, camera, action, and the entertainment industry as we’ve known it is sunk.

What’s the point of Paramount Pictures, or ABC NBC CBS & the BBC, if some guy and a few friends can make a passable TV episode for a few grand on the weekends, without even expecting a paycheck?

Soon or already, many millions of people will have access to AI as advanced as this, or better. They’ll input what they want, and blam, AI will spit it out. It won’t look awful, and it’ll be done without corporate overlords or big-money backers. You could argue that’s a good thing, and maybe you’d be right. I dunno. I’m old.

Most likely, the giant corporations won’t allow such fake-homemade entertainment to reach a wide audience. Same as they’ve taken over the internet, they’ll take over everything AI, so even if amateurs ‘create’ countless comedies and dramas and musicals to lifelike AI standards, most of the audience will watch only 5-6 channels of excrement plus ads. And even that excrement will be AI, put together by a staff of several, not hundreds.

No need for art directors, storyboard artists, set decorators, location managers, script editors, musicians, lighting, casting, wardrobe assistants, props, special effects, etc. We have a button for that now, so those people will be mopping floors or flipping burgers, or whatever work they can find, if there are still jobs in the AI era.

As for “The Curse of Kilmorag,” it’s a hobbyist’s passion, and I respect that. But I don’t like it.

Vittlowe has publicly insisted that he wrote the script, without AI help. I’ll take him at his word. The script is the strongest element here, but the story is only half-told. The audience is expected to fill plot gaps via their understanding of well-known tropes, but a lot of TV and movies are like that.

Nearly every shot is a slow zoom, with the ‘camera’ (were cameras used?) coming closer and closer to someone’s face, but that’s probably Vittlowe’s choice, not the AI.

The theme song, written long ago by humans named Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire, has been rearranged quick and quiet instead of rousing, but again, there’s a switch controlling that, and it can be easily corrected.

This is the debut of a fan-made series, a whole bunch of episodes output by Tom Vittlowe and friends with their newfangled software. It’s not good enough to bring me back for a second installment, but it is good enough that any network could hire Vittlowe or someone like him to make ‘real’ television, and almost nobody would notice the difference.

On the bright side, between climate change, AI killing millions or billions of humans, and the looming World War Trump, western civilization is very nearly over. After the collapse, whoever survives will eventually stage small plays in their caves. That’ll be the new show biz, and any of those productions will feel more human and more creative than the slop I just watched.

9/14/2026

itsdougholland.com
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